Signs of a New Beginning for Little Red Riding Hood

A review of Roz Rozen’s “Little Red Riding Hood” in Deaf Culture Fairy Tales (Savory Words, 2017)

By Derek Newman-Stille
 
In ”Little Red Riding Hood”, Deaf storyteller Roz Rosen recasts Red Riding Hood as CODA (Child of Deaf Adult), and as a “GODA” (Grandchild of Deaf Adult). Rosen envisions her as someone who has grown up bilingual, speaking English and Sign Language, and someone who takes pride in her bilingual status and ability to communicate in two different modalities.
 
When this Little Red Riding Hood encounters the Big Bad Wolf, she recognizes him as part of Deaf culture, an individual who has more in common with the Deaf community than he does with hearing wolves. This is a huge discovery for the Wolf himself, who hasn’t encountered Deaf culture or a Deaf community before. But, just as he is communicating with Little Red and her Grandmother, the hearing Woodsman appears and tries to assert his authority over the situation.
 
Rosen’s tale is one about Deaf community and a resistance to the attempts by hearing people to impose their ideas over that community. This is a tale of “Nothing About Us Without Us” and a reminder of the history of hearing people trying to impose their ideas and perceptions of situations onto Deaf people.
 
Rosen’s “Little Red Riding Hood” invites a happily ever after of Deaf people making decisions for their own community. It is a tale of communication and the power of communication to forge communities.

To discover more about Deaf Culture Fairy Tales, visit Savory Words’ website at http://www.savorywords.com/dcft-by-roz-rosen-2/ 

One Drop at a Time

A review of Sarah Pinborough’s Beauty (Titan Books, 2015)

By Derek Newman-Stille 

In Beauty, Sarah Pinborough draws on the dark ink of multiple fairy tales, pulling them together into a cauldron to remake them into a new tale with a twist. She draws together resonances between traditional stories, looking for those murky edges where they can connect together, weaving a tapestry between Sleeping Beauty, Beauty and the Beast, Rapunzel, Red Ridinghood, and Rumplestiltskin and pulling together their grim possibilities. 

Pinborough twists these tales, leaving threads of familiarity for her readers, but weaving them into a new, uneasy tale.

Pinborough challenges some of the characteristics that people frequently associate with fairy tales, using the voice of her Little Red Ridinghood character to call attention to the difference between peasant narratives and those of nobles, drawing attention to the problematic ideas of consent around the kissing of a Sleeping Beauty, pointing out the dangerous nature of love-at-first-sight and its relationship to ideas of control. Beauty invites questions about wishes and the danger associated with getting the things you ask for. It points out the dangers of privilege. It plays with the allure of magic and the complications that come with power. Beauty is a tale of warnings and an invitation to constantly ask questions, particularly when things seem to come far to easily. 
To discover more about Sarah Pinborough, visit https://sarahpinborough.com/

My, What Big Oppressions You Have

My, What Big Oppressions You HaveA review of Seanan McGuire’s “In The Desert Like A Bone” in The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales (ed. Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe, Saga, 2016)

By Derek Newman-Stille

Red RidingHood stands as a tale of warnings for girls about the threat of straying off of the path and into the deep woods, yet Seanan McGuire’s “In The Desert Like A Bone” recognizes that most violence against women happens in the home. Her Red RidingHood figure, Fox, stands in opposition to the traditional Red RidingHood tale. She has escaped from the violence of her father at home into the deep desert, where she has a sense of freedom and can explore herself and learn techniques for living from and with the land. This is a Cowgirl Red RidingHood with a wide-brimmed hat that takes on a russet tone who recognizes the power of becoming a predator, a fox, rather than prey. She sets out across the desert with Coyote, who teaches her while providing space for her to develop into her own person, recognizing that she needs to find her own voice and take her own actions rather than be a passive fairy tale heroine. 

McGuire’s Red RidingHood tale is one of female empowerment, exploring the power of a girl to move from being treated as property, as someone else’s tale to tell, to becoming her own person, owning herself, and creating her own tale free of confines or limits. McGuire plays with the line between fairy tales and gossip, exploring “prairie harpies” and “respectable housewives” who try to shape Fox’s tale as one of loss rather than one of freedom. 

Growing up being forced to be silent, Fox does not suddenly become talkative, rather she makes her silence work for her, learning to move on silent feet and speak only when she needs to to make her points more powerful. This isn’t a tale of sudden, magical changes, but, rather, one of subtle changes, recognizing that there is a process to overcoming abuse and that there isn’t a fairy tale transformation that happens instantaneously. Fox recognizes that she can learn, change, and grow over time as she hones her own skills and strengths. 

Fox resists the Red RidingHood of myth, becoming an empowered being who copes with her wolf. 

To discover more about The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales, visit http://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Starlit-Wood/Dominik-Parisien/9781481456128
To find out more about the work of Seanan McGuire, visit http://www.seananmcguire.com/ 

Redemption?

Redemption?

A review of Jen Calonita’s “Flunked” (Sourcebooks Jabberwocky, 2015)

By Derek Newman-Stille

What would we do with fairy tales if they didn’t have villains? Fairy Tale villains are so delightfully exciting and they inject that needed bit of challenge and excitement into a tale. They have so much potential for complexity and depth. Jen Calonita’s “Flunked” is a tale that brings together fairy tale villains from narratives like Snow White, Cinderella, The Little Mermaid, Red Ridinghood, Sleeping Beauty, and Rapunzel in a tale of redemption and relapse into villainy.

When Cinderella’s evil stepmother Flora recognized that she was living in a society that rejected her for her villainous path, she sought to redeem herself in the eyes of her fellow citizens by creating a school devoted to the reformation of villains and those who show signs of wandering toward villainous paths. She created the Fairy Tale Reform School, devoted to turning villains into heroes and giving them the skills that would allow them to be successful. Employing the Evil Queen from Snow White, the Big Bad Wolf from Red Ridinghood, and the Sea Witch from The Little Mermaid, this school is a rogues gallery of fairy tale villains and it makes for an interesting, if terrifying, experience.

Gilly has had to become a thief in order to keep her family fed since Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother started wholesale manufacturing the glass slippers that Gilly’s father invented and the boot-maker became poor, barely able to keep his family fed and their boot home safe and cozy. But, when Gilly gets caught stealing to provide for her family her parents and the police in their fairy tale community send her to Fairy Tale Reform School to find out how to be a hero and what she finds there are mysteries, friendship, her own desire to make the world a better place… and a lot of near-death experiences.

Even though Calonita’s “Flunked” is a fun and playful story, it is also filled with social questions and critiques. Calonita raises questions about poverty and social inequality, illustrating what Gilly has to do in order to keep her family fed and raising questions about the morality of theft. She creates a connection to figures like Robin Hood by portraying Gilly stealing from the wealthy to provide for her family.

Calonita uses the figure of the princess and the almost-worship they receive in order to ask questions about celebrity culture and ponder why so many people envy the wealthy and popular even when their policies may hurt those who are impoverished. Yet Calonita also questions social stigma and abjection, exploring the way that those who have been judged to be villainous have to constantly strive to escape from the stigma attached to them. The creation of the Fairy Tale Reform School is as much about finding a safe space for former villains as it is about creating a space where people can acquire new skills and find the hero within them. With a Sea Witch who keeps forgetting everything she is doing and a spell to erase memory, the theme of erasing the past is a key one in “Flunked”, pointing to the way that one’s history continues to haunt one. Calonita asks questions about the boundary between hero and villain and challenges the easy morality of most fairy tales by complicating her characters.

Gilly is uniquely suited to solving the world’s issues because she recognizes that villains have unique skills that others don’t and that sometimes a villain has to do what a hero isn’t capable of doing.

To find out more about “Flunked”, and discover more about Jen Calonita, visit http://www.jencalonitaonline.com/MG_Flunked.html