I am currently waiting (very impatiently) for my copy of Malinda Lo’s new book, Ash. Ash is a retelling of Cinderella in which a girl named Aisling, (‘Ash’ for short) ends up, not with the prince, but with a completely different (and female!) character.
Some of my favourite pieces of writing are retellings of classic stories. Chief among them is Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, in which she reinvents Beauty and the Beast, Little Red Riding Hood, and other fairy tales, making them far more interesting in the process. Then there is Gregory Maguire’s Wicked — a biography of The Wicked Witch of the East from L Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz. Wicked was made into a successful Broadway musical, but for my money Maguire’s best work is Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, told from the perspective of one of Cinderella’s sisters.
Neil Gaiman’s short story Snow, Glass, Apples tells the story of Snow White’s evil stepmother, who is revealed to be the innocent victim, and Snow White herself a horrifying, vampire-like creature. The prince who rescues her doesn’t come off too well either; he turns out to be something of a misogynist, with some rather bizarre sexual preferences.
Retellings work because the reader is familiar with the original text. We’ve read fairy tales as children; we know that heroines are beautiful, kind to small animals, do all the housework without complaining, and that they eventually meet attractive men of the royal family and live happily ever-after. We also know that
heroes are generally poor peasants who often have to prove themselves by being virtuous and are given a princess as a reward, possibly after slaying a dragon.
We know that villains (and villainesses) are unattractive (a bigger crime in women than in men), lazy, and in all ways less than perfect. They are also likely to have big feet. Most heroes and heroines, I suspect, would make me sick were I to encounter them in real life. I’m pretty sure I’m closer to the villains.
When these stories are retold, they draw our attention to these ideas and cause us to question them. This is why Shrek was such a great movie.
Here was a world in which the princess could be green and ‘ugly’ (that she remained so at the end of the movie was possibly the best thing about it), dragons could fall in love, princes could be annoying, and the hero was unattractive, bad tempered, and occasionally cruel. It was amazing, but it would be much less so if we hadn’t read our fairy tales and known that things weren’t supposed to be this way.
And that, perhaps, is the greatest thing about retellings — they teach us to read. They make us go back to the originals and think about them, notice how stories and meanings and ideas are constructed, and remind us that there’s always more than one perspective. These are important ideas, and I’m glad this new Cinderella story exists to remind us of them once more.
— The writer is a student of
English literature and a compulsive book buyer. She blogs at
http://bluelullaby.blogspot.com
bluelullaby@gmail.com