THERE seems to have been a revival in the pocketbook for particular genes of publishing. I have come across several recently, i.e. Dava Sobel's Longitude, or Leonard Nathan's Diary of a Left Handed Birdwatcher. In these publications the first impression is of a beautifully produced book. Now comes another such volume, but with a quite different subject Emma Donoghue's Kissing the witch, a daring, woman identified revisitation of fairytale land.
In thirteen short stories the author rewrites the traditional fairytales as allegorical feminist parables, linking them together in a chain of women's personal stories. The ending of each fairytale departs from its precursor because of the newly raised consciousness of the heroines, and the stories wind like a silken skein from woman to woman.
Cinderella discards her slipper and goes off with the fairy godmother, and in her own story the fairy godmother flies from the prison of traditional marriage like the bird she nurses back to health and releases from a high window. . The wicked stepmother repents her cruelty and begs Snow White to return to the castle, which she dies. The prince cannot see the princess through the grime and the rags and returns disconsolate to his castle; and so on, until the final tale when the witch falls in love with the maiden who casually kisses her.
These stories are all in the European tradition of fairytales, and are impeccably true to the language and ambience of their prototypes. There are kings, queens, princesses and princes, castles and forests, servants, horses, witches and hares. Many of the animals have been human in a previous existence; however, the heroines revolt against a culture that varies them only for their youth, beauty, and fertility, or, failing these attributes, for their ability to cope with the dirtwork.
These stories are not derivatives of a model; they are the original point of view, out of another experience. It is a book to be read for its language, for an altered perception, given as a gilt between lovers.
Kissing the witch hasn't got the raw vitality of Angela Carter's The Company Of Witches but the language is more lyrical. Emma Donoghue is a poet, and each paragraph is the distilled essence of a situation. There are delightfully incongruous similes: lips "as soft as rabbit's whiskers"; a family as poor as tallow; and imagery as vivid as Cinderella's "onion eyed" sisters; a "prince with very clean fingernails and the pallor of true royalty" or "I wrapped my arms round my ribs like pet snakes".
From the virtually sexless love (or affection) between women in Kissing the Witch, we come to What Sappho Would Have Said and modern lesbian poems of today which, in Emma Donoghue's words, "head straight for the crotch". On the way, through four centuries of poetry by women about passionate relationships between women before we reach those outspoken classes, there were "romantic friendships", "loyal, affectionate friendships" and "Boston marriages".
The editor traces the development of this woman oriented poetry, and in the earlier, flowery word confections, she finds meanings consciously or unconsciously buried. "We begin," she writes, "to get a sense of women's love as disembodied, and of literature as a space in which women met. But sometimes, I think, the love was admiration for the other's talent, dressed up in the hyperbole of the time.
Take, for instance, Dora Greenwell's ode to Elizabeth Barrett Browning after meeting her once: "I lose myself within thy mind from room to goodly room thou leadest me"; or EBB's sonnets to George Sand eight years before they met, which praise her genius in words too outrageous for a 20th century word processor.
In "Friendship", Katherine Mansfield refers to her youthful love affair with Ida Baker as a "charming kitten/with tiny velvet toes". In later life Mansfield rejected Baker's undying passion. But who could resist the transformation of cat to tiger: "Its eyes are jets of flame/Its claws are gleaming daggers", whatever about: "Take it away I'm frightened . . . "