The Heroine with 1001 Faces

by Maria Tatar

  50.Consiglieri Pedroso, ed., Portuguese Folk-Tales, trans. Miss Henriqueta Monteiro (London: Folklore Society, 1882), 63–66.

  51.Francis James Childs, ed., The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1894), V:42–58.

  52.Marie Campbell, Tales from the Cloud Walking Country (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000), 45–47.

  53.“Nourie Hadig,” in 100 Armenian Tales and Their Folkloristic Relevance, ed. Susie Hoogasian Villa (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1966), 84–91.

  54.Richard M. Dorson, ed., Folktales Told around the World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 238–42.

  55.Atiq Rahimi, The Patience Stone, trans. Polly McLean (New York: Other Press, 2008), 3.

  56.Rahimi’s novel was made into a film in 2012, with the writer as director. Quotes are from Rahimi, The Patience Stone, x, 79.

  57.Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2012), 23.

  58.Jill Lepore, “The Rise of the Victims’-Rights Movement,” New Yorker, May 21, 2018.

  59.Maria Tatar, The Fairest of Them All: Snow White and Twenty-One Tales about Mothers and Daughters (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020), 88.

  60.Rebecca Solnit, “Silence and Powerlessness Go Hand in Hand—Women’s Voices Must Be Heard,” Guardian, March 8, 2017.

  61.Ronan Farrow, Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators (New York: Little, Brown, 2019), 242, 318.

  62.Chanel Miller, Know My Name: A Memoir (New York: Viking, 2019), 327.

  63.Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement (New York: Penguin, 2020), 53, 54.

  64.Joan Didion, The White Album (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979), 11.

  65.Gaston Maspero, Popular Stories of Ancient Egypt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 1–16.

  66.“Tongue Meat,” in Myths and Legends of the Swahili, ed. Jan Knappert (Nairobi: Heinemann, 1970), 132–33. The story was lightly edited by Angela Carter for her Book of Fairy Tales (London: Virago, 1992), 223–24.

  67.Adam Ganz, “New Brothers Grimm Fairytale Written by Artificial Intelligence Robot,” Independent, June 13, 2018.

  68.Teresa Peirce Williston, Japanese Fairy Tales (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1904), 56–64.

  CHAPTER 3: RESISTANCE AND REVELATION

  1.Katie J. M. Baker, “Here’s the Powerful Letter the Stanford Victim Read to Her Attacker,” BuzzFeed News, June 3, 2016. Chanel Miller, Know My Name: A Memoir (New York: Viking, 2019), 329, 333.

  2.Gretchen Cherington, Poetic License: A Memoir (Berkeley, CA: She Writes Press, 2020), 169.

  3.Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, 4th ed., ed. Deborah Lutz (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016), 35.

  4.Elizabeth Rigby, “Review of Vanity Fair and Jane Eyre,” Quarterly Review 84 (1848): 184.

  5.Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), in Novels and Stories (New York: New American Library, 1995), 178.

  6.Recalling growing up in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in the 1950s and 1960s, Trudier Harris writes: “In the absence of television and air-conditioning, my relatives and neighbors routinely gathered on porches, and those sites became some of the primary stages for interactive storytelling, for the passing and receiving of oral tradition.” See The Power of the Porch: The Storyteller’s Craft in Zora Neale Hurston, Gloria Naylor, and Randall Kenan (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), xii.

  7.Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

  8.Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God, 208, 279–80, 180.

  9.On autobiography as a political strategy, see Laura J. Beard, Acts of Narrative Resistance: Women’s Autobiographical Writings in the Americas (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009).

  10.W. H. Auden, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” in Another Time (New York: Random House, 1940), 93–94.

  11.William Bascom, “The Talking Skull Refuses to Talk,” in African Tales in the New World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 17–39.

  12.Leo Frobenius, African Genesis: The Folk Tales and Legends of the North African Berbers, the Sudanese, and the Southern Rhodesians (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1966), 161–62.

  13.Danielle L. McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance—a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (New York: Vintage Books, 2010), 16–17.

  14.For additional variants, see Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Maria Tatar, eds., The Annotated African American Folktales (New York: Liveright, 2018), 113–32.

  15.Zora Neale Hurston, The Skull Talks Back and Other Haunting Tales, ed. Joyce Carol Thomas (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 27.

  16.“The Princess in the Suit of Leather,” in Arab Folktales, trans. and ed. Inea Bushnaq (New York: Pantheon, 1986), 193–200.

  17.Plato, Gorgias, ed. E. R. Dodds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), 527a4.

  18.Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), 14.

  19.Giambattista Basile, The Tale of Tales, ed. Nancy Canepa (New York: Penguin, 2016), 10.

  20.A. W. Cardinall, Tales Told in Togoland (London: Oxford University Press, 1931), 213.

  21.Cited by Max Lüthi, Märchen, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1964), 45.

  22.Lewis Seifert, Fairy Tales, Sexuality, and Gender in France, 1690–1715 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

  23.Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde, 19.

  24.Angela Carter’s Book of Fairy Tales, xiii.

  25.Basile, Tale of Tales, 5.

  26.Cited by Sandy Bardsley, Venomous Tongues: Speech and Gender in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 1.

  27.Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde, 17.

  28.Manfred Kuehn, Kant: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

  29.Clare Carlisle, Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), 107.

  30.Karen Adkins, Gossip, Epistemology, and Power: Knowledge Underground (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 31.

  31.George Steiner: A Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 378.

  32.George Steiner, 378.

  33.Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 60.

  34.F. G. Bailey, ed., “Gifts and Poison,” in Gifts and Poison: The Politics of Reputation (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1971), 1.

  35.Audre Lorde, The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House (New York: Penguin, 1984).

  36.Jörg R. Bergmann, Discreet Indiscretions: The Social Organization of Gossip, trans. John Bednarz Jr. (New York: de Gruyter, 1993), 60. “Good gossip approximates art,” one critic chimes in to underscore the fact that all of us resort to some form of artifice or to the time-honored strategy of lying to make a story better. Rachel M. Brownstein, Becoming a Heroine (New York: Viking, 1982), 7.

  37.Roger D. Abrahams, Everyday Life: A Poetics of Vernacular Practices (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 28.

  38.Abrahams, Everyday Life, 28.

  39.Melville Jean Herskovits and Frances Shapiro Herskovits, Trinidad Village (New York: Knopf, 1947), 275.

  40.Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 450–51.

  41.Angela Carter writes with affection (“so much joy” in those stories from all over the world) about the anthologies compiled by Lang—“the Red, Blue, Violet, Green, Olive Fairy Books, and so on, through the spectrum.” See Angela Carter’s Book of Fairy Tales, xvi. On the actual division of labor between Andrew Lang and Nora Lang, see “‘Almost Wholly the Work of Mrs. Lang’: Nora Lang, Literary Labour, and the Fairy B
ooks,” Women’s Writing 26 (1977): 400–420.

  42.Giambattista Basile, “Penta with the Chopped-Off Hands,” in Tale of Tales, 214–24.

  43.Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype (New York: Ballantine Books, 1996), 388.

  44.George Peele, The Old Wives’ Tale (London: John Danter, 1595), lines 19–20.

  45.The translation of “Fitchers Vogel” from the third edition of the Grimms’ Kinder-und Hausmärchen is my own.

  46.Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 97.

  47.André Jolles, Einfache Formen: Legende, Sage, Mythe, Rätsel, Spruch, Kasus, Memorabile, Märchen, Witz (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2006), 241.

  48.Lauren Martin, “Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and Alice Walker’s Speech at the National Book Award Ceremony Will Make You Cry,” Words of Women (blog), November 22, 2017.

  49.Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1957), 101.

  50.Frances Burney, Evelina (New York: Oxford, 2002), 5. Mary Wollstonecraft, “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects,” in D. L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf, eds., The Vindications (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2001), 330. George Eliot, “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,” in Solveig C. Robinson, ed., A Serious Occupation: Literary Criticism by Victorian Women Writers (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2003), 88–115. Sylvia Townsend Warner, “Women as Writers,” in Feminist Literary Theory and Criticism: A Norton Reader, ed. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 161.

  51.Franz Boas, “Introduction,” in James Teit, Traditions of the Thompson River Indians of British Columbia, Memoirs of the American Folklore Society, VI (1898), 18.

  52.Mary Lefkowitz, Women in Greek Myth, 2nd ed. (1986; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), xv. On the point about how myth is a form of speech that appears to be “natural” rather than historically determined, see Roland Barthes, Mythologies (London: Vintage, 1993).

  53.Kurt Vonnegut Jr., “Introduction,” in Anne Sexton, Transformations (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1971), vii.

  54.Linda Gray Sexton, Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother (New York: Little, Brown, 1994), 154.

  55.Diane Middlebrook, Anne Sexton: A Biography (New York: Vintage, 1992), 338.

  56.Sexton, Transformations, 1.

  57.Angela Carter, Shaking a Leg: Collected Writings by Angela Carter (London: Virago, 1998), 452–53.

  58.Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (New York: Penguin, 2015), 68. Additional quotations are from pages 56, 20, 118, 67, 112, 36.

  59.Edmund Gordon, The Invention of Angela Carter: A Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 268.

  60.Angela Carter, interview by Kerryn Goldsworthy, Meanjin 44, no. 1 (1985): 10.

  61.Carter, The Bloody Chamber, 20.

  62.Carter, The Bloody Chamber, 39.

  63.Anna Katsavos, “A Conversation with Angela Carter,” Review of Contemporary Fiction 143, no. 3 (1994), https://www.dalkeyarchive.com/a-conversation-with-angela-carter-by-anna-katsavos/.

  64.Ingri d’Aulaire and Edgar Parin d’Aulaire, Book of Greek Myths (New York: Doubleday, 1967), 115. I cite the d’Aulaires’ volume precisely because it now has the imprint of Random House Children’s Books and has become the most prominent source of knowledge in the United States about Greek mythology.

  65.Carter, The Bloody Chamber, 117, 126, 118.

  66.Sharon R. Wilson, Margaret Atwood’s Fairy-Tale Sexual Politics (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993), 11–12.

  67.Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 178.

  68.Margaret Atwood, “Bluebeard’s Egg,” in Bluebeard’s Egg and Other Stories (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986), 131–64.

  69.Atwood, “Bluebeard’s Egg,” 156.

  70.Atwood, 164.

  71.Italo Calvino, The Uses of Literature (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1986), 16.

  72.Ralph Ellison, “The Art of Fiction: An Interview,” Paris Review (Spring 1955): 53–55.

  73.Toni Morrison, “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation,” in Black Women Writers (1950–1980), ed. Mari Evans (New York: Anchor, 1984), 343.

  74.Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978), 31.

  75.Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage, 1995), 141, 142.

  76.Toni Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature,” Michigan Quarterly Review 28 (1989): 30.

  77.Toni Morrison, Tar Baby (New York: Knopf, 1981).

  78.Kevin Young, The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2012), 15.

  79.See Sandra Pouchet Paquet, “The Ancestor as Foundation in Their Eyes Were Watching God and Tar Baby,” Callaloo 13 (1990): 499–515.

  80.Angela Carter’s Book of Fairy Tales, x.

  81.Lennie Goodings, A Bite of the Apple: A Life with Books, Writers and Virago (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 168.

  CHAPTER 4: WONDER GIRLS

  1.Phil Cousineau, The Hero’s Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2003), 120.

  2.William Moulton Marston, “Why 100,000,000 Americans Read Comics,” American Scholar 13 (1943–1944).

  3.Brian Grazer, A Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015), 38.

  4.Robert Gottlieb, “Harold Bloom Is Dead. But His ‘Rage for Reading’ Is Undiminished,” New York Times, January 23, 2021.

  5.Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Vintage, 2011), 205–6.

  6.See Joanne Hayle, Lord Byron and Lady Caroline Lamb: Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know. The Passionate and Public Affair That Scandalised Regency England (self-pub., CreateSpace, 2016).

  7.Michel Foucault, “The Masked Philosopher,” interview with Christian Delacampagne, April 6, 1980, in Foucault Live: Interviews, 1961–84 (Cambridge, MA: Semiotext(e), 1996), 302–7.

  8.Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008), 235–44.

  9.Alberto Manguel explores the double meaning of curiosity and notes that the Spanish lexicographer Covarrubias found that curiosity has “both a positive and a negative sense.” “Positive, because the curious person treats things diligently; and negative, because the person labors to scrutinize things that are most hidden and reserved, and do not matter.” See Curiosity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 13.

  10.Aristotle, Metaphysica, ed. J. A. Smith and W. D. Ross (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908), 980.

  11.Bernard de Clairvaux, Sermones super Canticum Canticorum, in S. Bernardi Opera II, ed. J. Leclercq (Rome: Editiones Cistercienses, 1958), 56.

  12.Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns and Homerica/Works and Days, trans. Hugh G. Evelyn-White (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, 1914), Theogony, 585; Works and Days, 57.

  13.Note that the Aesopian fable “Zeus and the Jar of Good Things” (#526) has a jar with very different contents, one that is opened by “man,” releasing all the good things and returning them to the gods, leaving behind only hope.

  14.Ingri d’Aulaire and Edgar Parin d’Aulaire, Book of Greek Myths (New York: Doubleday, 1967), 72, 74.

  15.Edith Hamilton, Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes (1942; New York: Grand Central Publishing, 1976), 89.

  16.Edwin Haviland Miller, Salem Is My Dwelling Place: A Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991), 345.

  17.Nathaniel Hawthorne, A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys (New York: Knopf, 1994).

  18.Laura Mulvey, Fetishism and Curiosity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 59.

  19.See Sarah B. Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity (New York: Schoc
ken, 1975), 4. Pomeroy models what seems at first an unexpected leap but is in fact symptomatic of a patriarchal logic that emerges whenever women are driven by epistemophilia, the desire to know more. “Pandora is comparable to the temptress Eve, and the box she opened may be a metaphor for the carnal knowledge of women, which was a source of evil to men” (4).

  20.Stephen Greenblatt, The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve (New York: W. W. Norton, 2017), 126, 131.

  21.Revelations 17:4 (King James).

  22.Charles Perrault, “Bluebeard,” in Classic Fairy Tales, 2nd ed., ed. and trans. Maria Tatar (New York: W. W. Norton, 2017), 188–93.

  23.These voices are cited by me in Secrets beyond the Door: The Story of Bluebeard and His Wives (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 20.

  24.Beverly Lyon Clark, Louisa May Alcott: The Contemporary Reviews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 247.

  25.Louisa May Alcott, The Journals of Louisa May Alcott, ed. Joel Myerson and Daniel Shealy (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), 165–66.

  26.Louisa May Alcott and Anna Alcott Pratt, Comic Tragedies, Written by “Jo” and “Meg” and Acted by the “Little Women” (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1893), 7.

  27.Madeleine B. Stern, Louisa May Alcott: A Biography (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1999), 70.

  28.Louisa May Alcott, The Annotated Little Women, ed. John Matteson (New York: W. W. Norton, 2015), 182.

  29.Alcott, Annotated Little Women, 430.

  30.Alcott, lxi.

  31.Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), 7.

  32.“J. K. Rowling, by the Book,” New York Times, October 11, 2012. Ursula Le Guin, Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places (New York: Grove Press, 1989), 213.

  33.Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Reinventing Womanhood (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 212.

  34.Carole Gerson, “‘Dragged at Anne’s Chariot Wheels’: L. M. Montgomery and the Sequels to Anne of Green Gables,” in Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada 35, no. 2 (1997): 151.