Rewriting fairy tales: Transformation as feminist practice in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

Whether as subtext or intertext, the fairy tale appears consistently throughout the cultural productions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Feminist criticism of the fairy tale contributes to understanding the control and victimization of female figures as a function of a patriarchal bias that proclaims its ahistoricity in order to justify the scripting of women's lives. In Jane Eyre (1847) Charlotte Bronte attacks the "bourgeoisified" literary fairy tale primarily because it serves as a restrictive model for the romantic novel. Despite Bronte's bold attempt to introduce a more active heroine into her novel, however, Jane ultimately conforms to the traditional Victorian heroine paradigm. In the twentieth century, feminist writers have reworked the old stories and have released aspects of feminine power previously curbed or suppressed. The tales inscribed in Anne Sexton's Transformations (1971), Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber (1979), and Margaret Atwood's Bluebeard's Egg (1983) seize upon the polymorphism of the fairy tale both to reflect and to critique ideologies of late capitalism and to revise myths of patriarchy. I examine how these nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers (1) confront the stereotypes and sexism embedded in the fairy tales of their particular historical period and (2) appropriate the fairy tale to reflect the experiences and desires of women's invention, rather than those of patriarchal invention. The feminist rewrite invokes "old" forms in order to reestablish a tradition of female storytelling particular to its historical and cultural context.