The Heroine with 1001 Faces

by Maria Tatar

  The writing assignment coincides with Sally’s project of facing up to the hard truths of Ed’s likely infidelities. Ed may not sport a beard but he has one quite obviously encrypted in his nickname—Sally’s nickname for him is “Edward Bear.” Ed’s “inner world” becomes a kind of secret chamber, a space that Sally is unable to penetrate, for it is not as transparent as she once had thought. Soon we realize that the story has many hidden chambers—from the broken-down shed at the end of Sally’s yard and the “cramped, darkened room” that is Ed’s medical examination space to the anatomical cavities of the human heart and Sally’s newly purchased keyhole desk—and they all present potential brushes with infidelity. Sally’s growing suspicions are corroborated when she sees Ed pressed “too close” against her friend Marylynn and notes that “Marylynn does not move away.” It dawns on her that she has made the mistake of using the wrong fairy tales to decode Ed’s “inner world.” The man she had once thought of as the “third son,” “a brainless beast,” and a “Sleeping Beauty” is in fact a master of calculation and duplicity who has dictated the terms of their marriage and her subservient role in it.

  Atwood unsettles the traditional story of “Bluebeard,” showing how the old tale (in its French version) repeats itself down through the ages. But her story of “Bluebeard’s Egg” proposes an alternative version, one that is closer to old wives’ tales. Sally must produce a story that is “set in the present and cast in the realistic mode.” “Explore your inner world,” the instructor urges her students. In many ways, Sally will be following a set of instructions that define just how we, as listeners and readers, should process fairy tales. When she bombards herself with questions—“What would she put in the forbidden room?” “How can there be a story from the egg’s point of view?” “Why an egg?”—she is enacting exactly what the stories are designed to do: provoke us with their magic, entangle us in their surreal complications, and inspire us to rethink the story and understand its relevance to our own lives.69

  Sally’s struggle with the terms of “Fitcher’s Bird” leads to powerful revelations about her own life. Atwood’s metafictional exercise (a story about storytelling) suggests that the process of internalizing and retelling can open your eyes to realities that—however disruptive, painful, and disturbing—are not without a liberating potential. Just as the telling of stories in fairy tales leads to discovery and disclosure, so the rewriting of the story can lead to some kind of liberating rebirth. Hence, Atwood’s story ends with the image of Sally in bed with her eyes shut, dreaming of an egg “glowing softly, as though there’s something red and hot inside it.” One day that egg will hatch: “But what will come out of it?” Something pulsing with life, at the least, which is exactly what has been missing from Sally’s depleted existence, full of self-consuming acts of sacrifice. As the title of Atwood’s story suggests, Bluebeard has been displaced by the Egg, and what hatches from it will become the new leading figure in the story—a heroine in her own right.70

  “Bluebeard’s Egg” gives us a metamyth, a tale that recycles bits and pieces from the Great Cauldron of Story to create a new, personal mythology that is about the power of myth. Fairy tales have much the same cultural force as myths from ancient times, and in many ways they are no different from them. Each is just recruited for different social rituals. It was Italo Calvino who once wrote: “Through the forest of fairy tale, the vibrancy of myth passes like a shudder of wind.”71 Atwood tells us how stories from times past challenge us to reengineer our own lives, not following the old scripts but rather creating new narratives in which women can become heroines rather than resign themselves to playing supporting roles.

  Few writers understood the social capital of folklore as well as Toni Morrison, who looked with a benevolent eye on stories that captured ancestral lore. In an interview published as “The Art of Fiction,” Ralph Ellison had called attention to how folklore “preserves mainly those situations which have repeated themselves again and again in the history of any given group” and how it “embodies those values by which the group lives and dies.”72 For Morrison, folklore is the living embodiment of the ancestor. And in fiction written by African Americans, Morrison noted that the absence of that ancestral wisdom is experienced as a devastating loss: “It caused huge destruction and disarray in the work itself.”73 Morrison likely had Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God in mind when she wrote that sentence. In Hurston’s novel, Nanny tells her granddaughter Janie, “Us colored folks is branches without roots and that makes things come round in queer ways.”74

  Morrison may have had another work in mind, one in which the sheer excess of “destruction” and “disarray” is unnerving: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. After a brush with death in a paint factory, the protagonist is hospitalized. How is he treated? He is subjected to shock therapy, and, in the aftermath of those jolts, his doctor displays a series of cards. WHO WAS YOUR MOTHER? one asks, in an effort to determine whether his autobiographical memory is intact. Another card bears the inscription: BOY, WHO WAS BRER RABBIT? In this case, it is Invisible Man’s cultural memory that is put to the test, but in a way that demeans the narrator and disparages the folkloric character. Mystified, he asks, “Did they think I was a child?” But ironically it is the crash course in cultural memory that galvanizes Invisible Man into action, making him determined to be, like his folkloric antecedent, “sly” and “alert.”75

  The doctor in Invisible Man might just as well have held up a card asking WHO IS TAR BABY? and Toni Morrison more or less gave an answer to that question in her 1981 novel Tar Baby. What Morrison does is to breathe new life into the folktale, repurposing the story as one about “how masks come to life, take life over, exercise the tensions between itself and what it covers.”76 More than that, the story of Brer Rabbit and his encounter with a sticky snare becomes an allegory of entrapment, and Tar Baby restages the tale in mysteriously complicated new ways. The two protagonists of the novel—one glamorous, privileged, and nomadic and the other strong-willed, penniless, and rooted—enact a conflicted attitude toward African American race consciousness. Jadine, Morrison’s heroine, has measured success by the standards of white culture, all the while internalizing its values. An orphan in social terms, she is also unanchored in cultural terms. Son, by contrast, the man who challenges Jadine’s success story, orients himself toward the past, reverting to home and to a cultural heritage that refuses to accept conventional markers of success. It is he who must remind Jadine of the Tar Baby story.77

  Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby were never really on life support, but Ellison and Morrison resurrect those stories in ways that make them relevant to the lives of African Americans today. Committed to the need for ancestral lore, the two writers—often at political odds with each other—go back and retrieve the wisdom of voices from the past. In The Grey Album, the poet and essayist Kevin Young described his ambition to engage in a project of reclamation, of the need to “rescue aspects of black culture abandoned even by black folks, whether it is the blues or home cookin’ or broader forms of not just survival but triumph.”78 Reclaiming a heritage means building a foundation that is the ancestor, in its literal and literary meanings—a foundation that provides a cultural legacy on which to construct personal identity.79

  Anne Sexton, Angela Carter, Margaret Atwood, and Toni Morrison as a literary quartet reclaimed stories that provided a “vital connection” with the resilient imaginations of their ancestors. Anne Sexton implemented a powerful strategy of reappropriation when she took stories from a book for children and renewed the oracular power of the oral for adults, identifying with and embodying the characters in her verse renditions of fairy tales. Angela Carter, who had heard the story of “Little Red Riding Hood” from her grandmother—in an unforgiving French version that ends with the girl in the belly of the wolf—understood the stories as ways of demythifying the timeless truths that have led to the subordination of women. Margaret Atwood challenged us to go back and pick up
the pieces, assembling them in new ways that reanimate and remythify as they transform. And Toni Morrison, in daring high-wire acts, revealed the importance of ancestors—of stories and histories that built a foundation on which to create something akin to the novel of manners (as she described it tongue in cheek). They are our guides on how to manage, even if never resolve, cultural conflicts. The title of one of Morrison’s essays, “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation,” speaks volumes.

  Fairy tales belong to the domestic arts, and the recipes for putting them together vary endlessly. “Who first invented meatballs?” Carter asks. “Is there a definitive recipe for potato soup?” All four women writers considered here channel oral traditions, reminding us that modern-day notions of intertextuality (the understanding of all writing as part of a web connected through acts of borrowing, theft, plagiarism, piracy, and appropriation) mirror the techniques our ancestors used to create myths. Claude Lévi-Strauss famously called mythmakers bricoleurs—experts in the art of tinkering, mending, and using what is close at hand to make something new. Angela Carter’s description of tellers of tales applies also to writers of fiction: “The chances are, the story was put together in the form we have it . . . out of all sorts of bits of other stories long ago and far away, and it has been tinkered with, had bits added to it, lost other bits, got mixed up with other stories.” And then, depending on the audience (“children, or drunks at a wedding, or bawdy old ladies, or mourners at a wake”), it is trimmed and tailored until it becomes just the right garment for the occasion.80

  “I was talking to a friend this weekend & I mentioned your name & she said she didn’t go in much for hero worship but you were her heroine.” That’s what Lennie Goodings, who worked at Virago Press for over forty years, as publicist, publisher, and editor, wrote to Angela Carter shortly before the writer’s death from lung cancer. “I guess that’s another way of saying what I feel too,” she added. “Except that heroes are usually distant & cool, until you get too close to them & then they have lead feet.”81 Carter had anything but feet of lead, or clay. Her brilliant irreverence, spirited talent, and heartfelt generosity turned her into a heroine for her time, a writer who shared the honors with the other courageous women included in these pages, along with the many others who renewed and revitalized old wives’ tales from times past.

  CHAPTER 4

  WONDER GIRLS

  Curious Writers and Caring Detectives

  Please do not think I am unduly curious. It’s not idle curiosity that is driving me. I too, am on—not a pilgrimage—but what I should call a mission.

  —AGATHA CHRISTIE, Nemesis

  The only reason people do not know much is because they do not care to know. They are incurious. Incuriosity is the oddest and most foolish failing there is.

  —STEPHEN FRY, The Fry Chronicles

  NOT LONG after the American psychiatrist Fredric Wertham was worrying about the seduction of the innocent (that was the title of his 1954 book) through comics, I was, like many girls in my generation, immersed in the world of Wonder Woman. Wertham had asserted that juvenile delinquents, or JDs as they were then known, were more or less the product of the morbid themes and violent images in comic books. After all, 95 percent of the children in what was then called reform school read comics, he argued, with impeccably flawed logic. As for Wonder Woman, she is, gasp! not a homemaker and she does not raise a family. At the time, that was a winning combination in my book. What was not to like about a female superhero who was an omniglot with a golden lasso and bulletproof bracelets, along with heightened empathy bestowed on her by Artemis? For girls who read comic books, she was a real heroine, even if she dressed in a bathing suit that looked as if it had been stitched together from a flag.

  Wonder Woman was the first female action figure in the Marvel Universe of comic-book superheroes. Although she was wildly successful in commercial terms, it took Hollywood seventy-five years to bring her to the big screen. Superhero films had been oriented toward audiences of teenage boys, and it was not until Jennifer Lawrence’s success as Katniss Everdeen in the Hunger Games franchise that DC Films was moved at last to make Wonder Woman. The film, released in 2017, depicts the Amazon princess Diana facing the challenge of ending World War I.

  “Look at the images of the male. They are always doing something, they’re always representing something: they are in action,” Joseph Campbell remarked when talking about the art of the Paleolithic era. By contrast the female figures of that same era are “simply standing female nudes.” “Their power is in their body,” he added, and “their being and their presence.” He worried about the “very important problems” that emerge when women believe that their value lies in achievement rather than simply “being.”1

  Joseph Campbell would surely have recoiled at the idea of female overachievers like Wonder Woman, who was being developed as a superheroine by a man named William Marston living not far away from him, in Rye, New York. Just when Campbell was busy writing The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Marston was dreaming up Wonder Woman. “Not even girls want to be girls,” Marston complained, “so long as our feminine archetype lacks force, strength, and power.” And for him, the obvious antidote to a culture that devalues girls is the creation of a “feminine character with all the traits of Superman plus all the allure of a good and beautiful woman.”2

  Most of the literary heroines in this chapter live by their wits. Innately curious, they are also seen as curiosities in their fictional worlds. They could all become honorary members of the Justice Society formed by DC Comics, for each is on some kind of mission, with a calling driven by progressive ideas. From Jo March in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women to Starr Carter in Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give, these girls—and most of the figures I will discuss are just that—set out on journeys that may not require them to leave home but rather confront them with challenges that remove them from the domestic arena. I will have more to say about Wonder Woman in the next chapter. For now, as we look at girl wonders who are writers and detectives, it is important to remember that Wonder Woman remained for many decades firmly anchored in the cultural world of girls. It took her cinematic incarnation to finally give her purchase in the world of entertainment for adults. She may be more action than words (though she is that too), and she also deviates somewhat from many other heroines, who are, for the most part, wedded to the word. But the girls and women in what follows are all united by a trait that has been seen, ever since Eve succumbed to it in the Garden of Eden, as the quintessential failing of women: curiosity.

  Curiosity and Its Discontents

  Curiosity is in our DNA, and it turns us into extraordinary learning machines, from the day we are born. In a book entitled A Curious Mind (2015), the screenwriter Brian Grazer credits curiosity for his professional success, reminding us that Einstein did not feel that he had special gifts—he was just “passionately curious.” “No matter how much battering your curiosity has taken, it’s standing by, ready to be awakened,” Grazer tells his readers in a book designed for those committed to self-improvement. He guarantees a “bigger life” as a reward for cultivating curiosity.3

  Today we live in a culture that claims to value curiosity, promotes it, and even professes a rage for it. But that has not always been the case, especially when the trait was associated with grown women, those sexually adventurous ladies who, in the nineteenth century, almost single-handedly created a new genre, the novel of adultery. Tellingly, Benito Pérez Galdós’s Fortunata and Jacinta (1887) is probably the only canonical nineteenth-century novel of adultery that gives us a male philanderer.4

  Simone de Beauvoir confirms what was noted in an earlier chapter, that for a woman, securing liberty means engaging in infidelity: “It is only through lies and adultery that she can prove that she is nobody’s thing.” The French philosopher found that, by 1900, adultery had become “the theme of all literature,” with cheaters like Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Flaubert’s Emma Bovary, and Fontane’s Effi Briest feeli
ng imprisoned by their marriages and longing for something beyond the confines of house and home.5 By contrast, the heroes from that time and in that literary genre are often courageous adventurers, swashbuckling, fearless, spirited, and smart. Think here of all the voyagers, explorers, and revolutionaries in works such as Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon (1865), Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo (1844), Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities (1859), and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851).

  The nineteenth century gave us the novel of adultery, but it also witnessed the flourishing of the coming-of-age story, adapted by Louisa May Alcott to show that girls possess as much, and possibly more, imaginative energy, investigative drive, and social concern as their male counterparts. Since it might not be safe to write about bold, ambitious women, why not engage in a stealth maneuver and construct heroic girls and portray all the forms of care and concern that constitute their larger social mission? Who better to lead the charge than Jo March, the girl who writes to make her own way in the world?