The Heroine with 1001 Faces

by Maria Tatar

  If we look at the Russian “How a Husband Weaned His Wife from Fairy Tales,” a story of exemplary conciseness, it quickly becomes evident that efforts to get in a word edgewise, as it were, to disrupt, interrupt, and improvise—in short, to be part of the conversation and part of the story-making process—are discouraged. In this story, recorded in the mid-nineteenth century by Alexander Afanasev (the Russian answer to the Brothers Grimm), the pleasures of telling and listening to tales are short-circuited, producing a horror story more than anything else, a chilling account of a need to deprive women of the pleasures of narratives that formed an antidote to the repetitive labors of daily life.

  There was once an innkeeper whose wife loved fairy tales above all else and accepted as lodgers only those who could tell stories. Of course the husband suffered loss because of this, and he wondered how he could wean his wife away from fairy tales. One night in winter, at a late hour, an old man shivering with cold asked him for shelter. The husband ran out and said, “Can you tell stories? My wife does not allow me to let in anyone who cannot tell stories.” The old man saw that he had no choice; he was almost frozen to death. He said, “I can tell stories.” “And will you tell them for a long time?” “All night.”

  So far, so good. They let the old man in. The husband said, “Wife, this peasant has promised to tell stories all night long, but only if you do not argue with him or interrupt him.” The old man said: “Yes, there must be no interruptions, or I will not tell any stories.” They ate supper and went to bed. Then the old man began: “An owl flew into a garden, sat on a tree trunk, and drank some water. An owl flew into a garden, sat on a tree trunk, and drank some water.” He kept on saying again and again: “An owl flew into a garden, sat on a tree trunk, and drank some water.” The wife listened and listened and then said: “What kind of story is this? He keeps repeating the same thing over and over!” “Why are you interrupting me? I told you not to argue with me! That was only the beginning; it was going to change later.” The husband, upon hearing this—and it was exactly what he wanted to hear—jumped down from his bed and began to berate his wife: “You were not supposed to argue, and now you have not let him finish his story!” And he thrashed her and thrashed her, so that she began to hate stories and from that time on forswore listening to them.

  This tight allegory juxtaposes improvisation and renewal with the deadening effects of rote repetition, with a clear victory for the latter. The wife’s understanding of how words can create communal contact zones and animate speaker and listeners alike—but only when the teller is creative, inventive, and collaborative—is challenged by the old man’s insistence on the same old story and the husband’s validation of repeating a story ad infinitum and ad nauseam. The conflict between the living spirit and the dead letter has rarely been captured so vividly and compactly. Here, as in “Tongue Meat,” the activity of storytelling is appropriated by men, but it is also controlled and orchestrated by them in ways that end up punishing women’s desire not just to tell but also to listen and to be part of storytelling as an embodied presence.

  In Japan, the tale of the tongue-cut sparrow is widely disseminated. It tells of a woman who hacks off the tongue of a bird (recall that Procne and Philomela were turned into a swallow and a nightingale) and is then punished for shutting down song and its beauty. Here is “The Tongue-Cut Sparrow” in a version recorded in the early twentieth century:

  In a village in Japan an old man lived with his wife in a cottage.

  One morning the old woman saw on her doorstep a poor little sparrow. She picked him up and fed him. Then she held him in the bright morning sunshine until the cold dew on his wings dried off. She let him go so that he could fly back home to his nest, but he stayed awhile and thanked her with his songs.

  Each morning, the sparrow perched on the roof of the house and sang out his joy. The old man and woman thanked the sparrow, for they liked to be up early and at work. But near them there lived a cross old woman who did not like to be awakened so early. Finally she became so angry that she caught the sparrow and cut his tongue. Then the poor little sparrow flew away to his home, but he could never sing again.

  When the kind woman found out what had happened, she was very sad. She said to her husband, “Let us go and find our poor little sparrow.” So they started together, and asked each bird, “Do you know where the tongue-cut sparrow lives?”

  At last they saw a bat hanging head downward, taking his daytime nap. “Oh, friend bat, do you know where the tongue-cut sparrow went?” they asked.

  “Yes. Over the bridge and up the mountain,” said the bat.

  At last the man and woman reached the home of their little friend. When the sparrow saw them coming, he was very happy indeed. He and his wife and children all came and bowed their heads down to the ground to show their respect. Then the sparrow rose and led the old man and the old woman into his house, while his wife and children hastened to bring them boiled rice, fish, cress, and saké.

  When the sun began to sink, the old man and woman started for home. The sparrow brought out two baskets. “I would like to give you one of these,” he said. “Which will you take?” One basket was large and looked very full, while the other one seemed very small and light.

  The old people decided not to take the large basket, for that might have all the sparrow’s treasure in it, so they said, “The way is long and we are very old, so please let us take the smaller one.”

  They took it and walked home over the mountain and across the bridge, happy and contented. When they reached home they decided to open the basket and see what the sparrow had given them. They found many rolls of silk and piles of gold, enough to make them rich.

  The cross old woman who had cut the sparrow’s tongue was peering in through the screen when they opened their basket. She saw the rolls of silk and the piles of gold and planned how she might get some for herself.

  The next morning she went to the kind woman and said, “I am so sorry that I cut the tongue of your sparrow. Please tell me the way to his home so that I may tell him I am sorry.”

  The kind woman told her the way and she set out. She went across the bridge, over the mountain, and through the woods. At last she came to the home of the little sparrow. He was not so glad to see this old woman, yet he was very kind and made her feel welcome. When she started home, the sparrow brought out two baskets as before. Of course the woman chose the large basket. It was very heavy, and caught on the trees as she was going through the woods. When at last she reached home she was half dead, but she pulled the screens shut so that no one could look in. Then she opened her treasure.

  Treasure indeed! A whole swarm of horrible creatures burst from the basket the moment she opened it. They stung her and bit her, they pushed her and pulled her, they scratched her and laughed at her screams. At last she crawled to the edge of the room and slid aside the screen to get away from the pests. The moment the door was opened they swooped down upon her, picked her up, and flew away with her. Since then nothing has ever been heard of the old woman.68

  “Nothing has ever been heard of the old woman.” The sparrow is silenced when the old woman cuts its tongue, and the woman too is silenced when “horrible creatures” assault her and carry her off. The last sentence in the story silences the woman as powerfully as the cutting of the sparrow’s tongue, and it seems almost perverse that it is an old woman, living on her own, who is demonized as the enemy of song and beauty.

  Is this some kind of phantasmagoric reshuffling of the tropes that appear in Ovid’s story of Procne and Philomela, reconfigured in ways that mark women as agents of violence? Or is it some kind of strange denial of how women are silenced, a reproach to all old wives, accusing them of severing tongues and shutting down song? The fate of the sparrow, as we see from our three suggestively characteristic folktales about songs, stories, and silencing, is emblematic of how words, while circulating freely in social circles where women’s work was carried out, were also stifled and checke
d in multiple ways. In this allegory of silencing, a woman becomes the agent rather than the victim of speech cut off. Recall that language, speech, and plots were among the few instruments of challenge and change available to women in times past. Recognition of their authority and discovery of their audacity could come not just in fables of empowerment but also in the form of stories—often written down by male collectors—that discouraged idle chatter, improvisation, and argument while at the same time projecting onto women cruel actions designed to silence the beauty of song and story.

  The #MeToo movement revealed our culture’s deep investment in silencing women, preventing them from talking to each other and speaking out in public spaces. Confidentiality agreements, nondisclosure agreements, and so on—these were part of a larger legal strategy used to make sure victims of sexual harassment, trapped by shame and guilt, kept quiet. The chapters that follow document the history of women’s speech, and it is one marked by efforts to devalue, discredit, and dismiss. When Julia Louis-Dreyfus spoke at the Democratic Convention of 2020, she made an important statement about our legal system when she asserted: “I have a gut feeling about fairness and what’s right,” suggesting that our institutions are not always attuned to women’s voices and that now may be the time to correct the flaws in them by paying attention to them. In the past decade, we have discovered a truth universally acknowledged in fairy tales—that there are times when our instinctive sense of what is right or wrong can and should prevail and that the legal system should invest its efforts (challenging as it may be to undertake that project) in investigating how to embed that straightforward premise into its practices in ways that are just and impartial rather than in crafting lucrative agreements that cover up criminal behavior.

  CHAPTER 3

  RESISTANCE AND REVELATION

  Storytelling and the Unsung Heroines of Fairy Tales

  I thought all the stirring tales of courage and adventure were opening a door into my own future, though a few years later—ten, eleven years old, perhaps—the world began to close in around me and I realized the songs belonged to my brothers, not me.

  —PAT BARKER, The Silence of the Girls

  The story might sound like common gossip when told by another person, but in the mouth of a storyteller, gossip was art.

  —BARBARA NEELY, Blanche on the Lam

  Speaking Out: Resistance and Revelation

  When Chanel Miller published her victim impact statement in BuzzFeed in 2016, she used the pseudonym Emily Doe. “Here’s the Powerful Letter the Stanford Victim Read to Her Attacker” was the headline for the account of her sexual assault. Almost instantly the story went viral, viewed by eleven million people in just a few days. Anonymity, as Miller later wrote, had been her “golden shield,” protecting her from humiliation, retaliation, online threats, and other forms of harassment. Silence meant safety, she later wrote in an essay for Time magazine. But speaking out and telling her story in public became, as she discovered, an exercise in reconstituting her identity: “No more fragmentation, all my pieces aligning. I had put my voice back inside my body.” And before long, she could say, “I felt my own authority.”1

  “Speaking out” may sound like a cliché, or an all-too-easy alternative to political action, particularly in a culture that enables us to express narcissistic injury, personal anguish, and virtue-signaling outrage through social media outlets. But talk has always gotten us somewhere, as we know from the profound silence surrounding matters ranging from child abuse (it took Oprah Winfrey’s talk show, rather than the courts, to challenge and change that) to sexual assault (there, change came from women talking to each other and not from legal teams). It quickly becomes evident that our understanding of heroism must be shaped by talk, plain and simple, as much as by legal or political action, by words as much as by deeds. “Deeply buried secrets only prolonged my suffering,” Gretchen Cherington wrote in Poetic License (2020), a memoir about growing up in a household with a father who was a distinguished poet and an abusive parent. “Silence is isolation, as bad as the abuse itself.”2

  The refusal to remain silent becomes the hallmark of today’s new heroines, in art as in life. Speech in the form of contradiction becomes their tool, the way to reveal that timeless truths are in fact nothing but socially constructed and historically contingent fictions. Think here of Jane Eyre, heroine of Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 novel of that title, a girl who shows us the power of language to speak fresh truths to elder power, to talk back, to undermine authority, and to make a new world by claiming agency through storytelling. Hers is among the first passionate outbursts by a girl in a novel, and it displays the power of words to resist subordination. This is the young Jane speaking—not the “older and wiser,” socialized version of Jane who emerges later in her account. It is no coincidence that Jane herself has been seen as a fairy-tale amalgam, a young woman who is part Cinderella, part Donkeyskin, and part Bluebeard’s wife. Here is Jane’s full-throated outburst when she challenges the authority of her cruel guardian, Mrs. Reed:

  F. H. Townsend, illustration for Jane Eyre, 1847

  If anyone asks me how I liked you, and how you treated me, I will say the very thought of you makes me sick, and that you treated me with miserable cruelty. . . . I shall remember how you thrust me back—roughly and violently thrust me back—into the red-room, and locked me up there, to my dying day; though I was in agony; though I cried out, while suffocating with distress, “Have mercy! Have mercy, aunt Reed!” And that punishment you made me suffer because your wicked boy struck me—knocked me down for nothing. I will tell anybody who asks me questions, this exact tale. People think you a good woman, but you are bad; hard-hearted. You are deceitful!3

  Accused of “deceit,” Jane denies the charge and engages in a reversal of values, repeating to Mrs. Reed, “You are the deceitful one.” That Jane picks up a book, “some Arabian tales,” after this surge of emotion, is no mere coincidence. She and Scheherazade are linked—through tale-telling and the transmission of stories—in closer kinship than seems at first evident. That contemporary reviewers were shocked by Jane’s behavior is a reminder of just how daring it was to have a girl speak up and talk back. As Elizabeth Rigby wrote in the Quarterly Review in 1848, “the tone of mind and thought which has overthrown authority and violated every code human and divine abroad, and fostered Chartism and rebellion at home is the same which has also written Jane Eyre.”4 Reading Rigby’s reaction today, we can only cheer Jane on.

  There are other strategies for claiming agency and authority, and Zora Neale Hurston gives her character, coincidentally named Janie, a different path. Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) takes up matters of love, courtship, and marriage, and it also reveals just how the drive to tell a story is entangled with gossip. Janie Crawford is a woman who knows that she has been the object of local gossip: “They got me up in they mouth now.”5 On her front porch, the traditional gathering place for storytelling in postbellum Black communities, she sits with her neighbor Pheoby and takes control of the narrative by telling it herself.6 And that tale becomes the volume in the reader’s hands, the proverbial “talking book” of African American writing.7 Using the vernacular, the speech forms of everyday life, Janie breaks out of her isolation and silence and, in a double irony, takes gossip and transforms it into a form of truth-telling that in turn is a fictional account authored by a woman writer named Zora Neale Hurston.

  Janie is a woman accustomed to being silenced. She is twice married, and each of her two husbands worked hard to limit her speech and movement, treating her like property. Her second husband, a store owner who rose to the position of mayor, humiliates her in public when he declares at the store, “Mah wife don’t know nothin’ ’bout no speech-makin’. Ah never married her for nothin’ lak dat. She’s uh woman and her place is in de home.” It is just there, at home, on the front porch, that threshold space betwixt and between, that Janie begins her story: “If they wants to see and know, why they don’t come kiss and be ki
ssed? Ah could then sit down and tell ’em things. Ah been a delegate to de big ’ssociation of life. Yessuh! De Grand Lodge, de big convention of livin’ is just where Ah been dis year and a half y’all ain’t seen me.” And there, huddled together with Pheoby on the porch, Janie does what women have been doing through the ages, telling her version of the story: “They sat there in the fresh young darkness close together. Pheoby eager to feel and do through Janie, but hating to show her zest for fear it might be thought mere curiosity. Janie full of that oldest human longing—self-revelation.”8