Feminist Fairy Tales

by Barbara G. Walker

  After her mother retired, Jill sat by the tiny fire gazing at the three beans. “It’s hardly worth keeping them for food,” she reflected. “I might as well plant them.” She went out into the garden and planted the three beans. Then she went sorrowfully to bed and tried to sleep away her hunger pangs.

  In the morning, Jill told her mother that she had planted the beans.

  “There was an old story about a giant beanstalk that grew up overnight,” her mother said. “Let’s go see if any such miracle has happened here.”

  They went to the garden and saw that a bean plant had indeed grown up overnight and was already bearing white, red, and black beans. It was no taller than any other bean plant, but Jill and her mother considered it miracle enough. At least they could eat beans.

  Jill went closer and saw that alongside the bean plant there was a deep hole, about three feet wide, going down into a shaft of blackness. The bean plant’s root went down along the side of the shaft. Moreover, the root was knobbed with ladderlike projections that looked easy to climb down.

  “Look, Mother,” said Jill, “the magic beans have made a ladder into the earth.”

  She wanted to climb down at once, to see where the hole led. “Perhaps there are treasures,” she said excitedly. “I’ve heard that there are treasures underground. The old woman was a good witch after all.”

  Jill’s mother was cautious and a little frightened by the black shaft. She warned Jill to be very careful and to climb back up immediately if she sensed anything wrong. She gave Jill a candle to illuminate whatever she might find at the bottom of the shaft.

  Jill climbed down and down. As she proceeded, the hole at the top of the shaft dwindled down to a tiny star of daylight. Soon she was enveloped in total blackness. Unable to hold her candle while climbing, she progressed by feeling her way. The beanroot with its convenient footholds seemed to go on forever.

  After what Jill thought were hours of descent, her feet found a floor. Cautiously she let go of the beanroot and lighted her candle. She saw that she stood in a rocky chamber with a tunnel leading off horizontally. She entered the dark passage with her candle held high.

  Before she had gone a hundred yards, she saw a pale glow of light coming toward her. As it approached, she saw that the light consisted of two long beams, emanating from two brilliantly shining eyes about three feet from the floor. “Oh, I’m dead,” Jill thought. “It’s some terrible animal with eyes glowing like sunlight, and it’s going to eat me up.” She wanted to run back to the beanroot, but she stood paralyzed with fear.

  When the creature came closer, she saw that it was not an animal but a dwarf, whose brilliantly shining eyes lighted his surroundings like a miner’s lamp.

  “What’s this?” the dwarf exclaimed. “One of the airy-fairies has come down from the aboveworld to visit me!”

  “Oh, no, I’m not a fairy,” Jill quavered. “I’m only a human girl. I didn’t mean to intrude. Don’t harm me. If you want, I’ll climb back up right away.”

  The dwarf snickered. “We dwarves don’t do harm to humans,” he said. “Mischief perhaps, but nothing murderous. Murder they do to themselves. Now that you’re here, human, perhaps you’d like to see some of the underworld.”

  “That would be nice,” Jill said uncertainly. The dwarf was very ugly, and his harsh, croaking voice was anything but reassuring. She remembered her mother’s advice to be more suspicious of strangers. Nevertheless, when the dwarf turned about and headed away down the tunnel, lighting the way with his brilliant eye-beams, Jill scrambled after him.

  They passed several dark side passages. Jill counted three of them on the right and two on the left. Then the tunnel forked. The left-hand way was illuminated by a fiery orange glow. The dwarf went steadily toward the glow, bringing Jill out on a high ledge overlooking a huge, noisy cavern. Below, the cavern was filled with fires and forges where many dwarves were busily working.

  “This is one of the workshops where we make treasures for the airy-fairies,” the dwarf told her. “As you must know, dwarves are the best craftsmen in the world. The airy-fairies are good at making mere illusions of treasure, that melt away in daylight. They don’t have the skill to make their own genuine crowns, necklaces, wands, pots of gold, and so on. They hire us to do it. Real fairy treasure comes not from the air but from the earth. Everything good comes from deep in the earth.”

  He sounded angry, so Jill said soothingly, “I’m sure you’re right.”

  The dwarf next led her to what he called a nursery of vugs. All around the cave walls were shallow pockets filled with many kinds of crystals, all glittering in a pale light that came from luminous patches on the ceiling. “This is one of the mature nurseries,” he said. “These crystals are full grown, no longer bathed in their natal fluid. You couldn’t stand the heat of that. These are dry, and filled with mature mineral spirits.”

  Suddenly he addressed one of the crystals in a loud tone. “How are you feeling, tourmaline?”

  To Jill’s astonishment, an eight-inch, cranberry-red crystal answered in a thin but clear voice, “Very triangular, dwarf. There’s some nameless dirt clogging my striations. Wipe me off, will you?”

  The dwarf bent over and polished the crystal with his sleeve.

  Jill exclaimed, “You talk to crystals?”

  “Of course. It makes them grow better. Don’t you talk to plants to make them grow better?”

  “Sometimes,” Jill admitted. “But they don’t talk back.”

  “The gemstones are our garden flowers, except that they live forever instead of for just a week or two. These crystals are older than the mountains. They have plenty of time to learn speech. They speak to those who understand them, such as the dwarves.”

  “Can I talk to them?” Jill asked.

  “Go ahead and try.”

  Never having addressed a rock before, Jill felt a little nervous. She said to all the crystals generally, “You are all very beautiful.”

  “Who is this person, dwarf?” demanded a green sapphire in a high, rather petulant voice. “She is too big. She will have too many inclusions. Her structure is rather loose and friable.”

  “What right have you to talk about inclusions?” a nearby aquamarine said sharply. “You’re not so perfect yourself. Your green is too yellow, whereas I have the more desirable blue tinge.”

  “Oh, be quiet, aqua,” snapped a pink beryl. “You’re altogether too common to have any opinion. I, on the other hand, am much rarer and will fetch many more pounds of gold.”

  “How conceited they are,” Jill muttered to the dwarf.

  He shrugged. “Every creature that has a lot of money spent on it is going to be conceited, inevitably. That’s the way of both worlds. Ounce for ounce, these may have more money spent on them than anything else in the universe. Besides, they are immortal. Their beauty never fades. Who in the world has any better right to be conceited?”

  “Take her away, dwarf,” piped a citrine crystal. “We don’t want to talk to anyone so ephemeral and so opaque, let alone listen to her ignorant criticisms.”

  “If you have lived so long, you should have learned more wisdom,” Jill said indignantly. “All of you should be above petty backbiting, jealousy, and rudeness. You should be like the Earth Mother herself, strong, calm, wise, and tolerant. Your beauty should be matched by largeness of spirit.”

  “You know, she may be right,” said a pale rose quartz, faintly. A small, flat crystal of ruby agreed. Soon the gemstones were discussing the matter animatedly among themselves, ignoring Jill and the dwarf.

  “This is the most amazing thing I’ve ever heard,” Jill said to the dwarf. “I never dreamed that gems could speak.”

  “Those now in use as jewelry are listening, not speaking,” he said. “They are storing up history to teach the next dominant race, which will be silicon-based and therefore much stronger and hardier than your species. We dwarves are learning to create that race. We will be its gods.”

  “What will
happen to the humans?” Jill asked.

  “Of course, they will all be killed,” said the dwarf. “Those few that manage to escape the humans’ own planetwide mutual massacre will succumb to starvation and disease. Your race isn’t good enough, physically or mentally, to occupy a leading position on this planet.”

  “Oh, no?” Jill cried angrily. “And do you think people like yourselves, who live underground and never see sunlight, grass, or trees, can understand the living earth any better?”

  “We know the earth’s very bones,” said the dwarf solemnly. “We love her as you humans never will. That’s why we are the gods of the future.”

  “I think you’re just as conceited as your crystals,” Jill said, terrified by his vision of the future. With a spasm of revulsion, she shoved the ugly dwarf as hard as she could. He fell on his back, squirming helplessly. In the same instant, Jill grabbed the red tourmaline, snapped it off its matrix rock, and ran. The crystal emitted a high, thin wail of protest in her hand, summoning other dwarves from various chambers and tunnels.

  They moved too slowly to catch Jill, who raced desperately along, trying to remember the route she had taken and counting the entrances to side passages. She found her way back to the base of the beanroot shaft and began to climb, pushing the tourmaline crystal into her pocket.

  All the way up the shaft, the shrill little voice of the crystal was crying, “Thief! Thief!” Jill paid no attention to it. She heard a clamor of dwarves below and climbed all the more frantically. She was panting, trembling, gasping for breath. Several times she almost lost her hold on the beanroot projections and her heart seemed to jump into her throat. After what seemed an eternity of terrified exertion, she scrambled out of the top of the shaft and fell at her mother’s feet.

  “Quick, cut down the bean plant,” she gasped.

  Her mother lifted her to her feet. “Jill dear, these beans are all we have to eat,” she protested. “We mustn’t destroy our food source.”

  “Mother, trust me, our lives may depend on closing that magic root shaft, right now!”

  Her mother trusted her, picked up a hoe, and chopped the bean plant down. Instantly, the root shaft closed and became solid ground again.

  Jill took the now silent tourmaline crystal from her pocket and showed it to her mother, whose eyes bulged. “I never saw anything so beautiful,” she said. “A dozen egg-size gems, fit for a queen’s crown, could be cut out of that.”

  “This is the bird that will lay golden eggs for us,” said Jill.

  She and her mother borrowed travel expenses from a neighbor and carried the tourmaline to the queen’s castle. After days of negotiation, they sold the crystal to the queen’s gem cutter for a medium-sized fortune. On returning home, they were able to buy a more commodious cottage with a barn and a small herd of cows. They prospered and lived happily ever after.

  Gems cut from the tourmaline never spoke again. But they listened.

  NINE

  The ever-popular, impossible-shaped Barbie and her numerous clones surely have helped train American girls to be forever dissatisfied with themselves and to think of the ideal female form as one that almost no female ever achieves. Barbie is the unattainable ideal produced by the latter half of the twentieth century. In other times women’s self-image has been mocked by the eighteen-inch waist of the hoopskirt era; the huge padded rear of the bustle; the Chinese bound foot and its Western approximation, the high heel; the romantic painters’ fat nudes, in times when most women suffered from malnutrition; and even the impossibly parthenogenic medieval Virgin Mary, whose maternal purity remained always unreachable by any mortal woman. We still have adolescent girls falling victim to anorexia and other eating disorders, partially because they despise themselves for not being more like Barbie.

  At the same time, Barbie has become a symbol of the beautiful bimbo with the overstuffed closet and the empty plastic head. Similarly, GI Joe symbolizes mindless, ceaseless military aggression, in a world that needs peace above all. Together, these dolls say a lot about our culture. Their messages are not lost on our children.

  She slapped his face as hard as she could.

  Once upon a time there was a toy shop where the dolls came to life at night, after dark. A half-forgotten genius named Mikimaus had taught them long ago to open the seals on their boxes and emerge for the nightly revels, then reseal themselves in at the first sign of dawn. Children sometimes noticed that the dolls bought in this shop looked a bit worn, but their elders seldom paid attention. Aside from the baby dolls, who did nothing but cry and wet and were excessively boring, by far the most popular doll in the shop was Barbidol. She looked grown-up enough to have lived about eighteen human years, and she wore costumes enough to have lived about eighteen human lifetimes. She was a fashion model, rock star, astronaut, cheerleader, nurse, beach bunny, princess, showgirl, artist, ballerina, actress, dream date, prom queen, gymnast, and beauty-contest winner, of at least eleven different nationalities. She had far more clothes than any other doll, and that put her at the top of the toy shop social order.

  Barbidol had nothing but contempt for the human females, both large and small, who came to the shop. Not one of them had ever even approached her own perfect proportions. Their waists were too wide, their busts too small or droopy, and their feet were monstrously huge. Barbidol showed them the proportions they should desire but never achieve, so they could learn to despise their own appearance. She dreaded the day when some loutish adolescent would buy her and take her away from the shop where she was queen.

  Barbidol had several female associates whose proportions were exactly like hers, and also a male consort named Kendall. He looked a bit more like a human being, in a prep-school sort of way. Kendall’s only mission in life was to escort Barbidol in her various roles and activities, so he was allowed to wear tuxedos, swimsuits, and ethnic or theatrical costumes but no work clothes. He never worked. He looked down particularly on those humans who had to scrimp and save money that they earned by working in order to buy him. Like Barbidol, Kendall was a snob.

  One night, Barbidol noticed a new grown-up male doll on the premises. His name was Gijo, and he wasn’t interested in female dolls at all. He seemed to care only for uniforms, helmets, guns, grenades, bombs, and other battlefield hardware. He liked to kill enemies and blow things up. He knew nothing of proms, parties, fashions, cruises, or any of the other civilized frivolities that preoccupied Barbidol and Kendall. He dwelt only in the all-male, generally working-class milieu of war.

  Barbidol found herself more and more fascinated by Gijo, especially because he didn’t seem affected by her charm. This was a novel experience for Barbidol. She was used to being the center of attention at all times. She began to see Gijo as a challenge to her powers of attraction. Besides, as she remarked to Kendall, he was kind of cute.

  Kendall didn’t think so. “He’s shorter than you, and built like an outhouse,” he sniffed. “Besides, he’s Not Our Sort. He probably doesn’t even know how to dance. Wouldn’t you be embarrassed if your friends saw you dating an ape like him?”

  “I don’t think he’s quite an ape,” Barbidol said meditatively. “He’s kind of sexy. Maybe with him I could do things I haven’t done before.”

  “Maybe, but I’ll bet you wouldn’t like them,” Kendall grumbled. He was feeling pangs of jealousy, because he had never seen Barbidol cast that speculative look upon anyone but him. “Gijo is nothing but a crude, low-class, stupid grunt, without a particle of breeding. I know, trust me.”

  “Oh, I do trust you, Kendall,” she said, batting her eyelashes, which were real nylon and generally considered one of her best features. “But it’s always broadening to meet new kinds of people and have new experiences, don’t you think?”

  “Yes, if you want to become nothing but a broad,” Kendall snapped irritably. He didn’t often make puns, because Barbidol never caught on to them anyway, but he was fuming.

  Barbidol ignored Kendall’s objections and began to flirt w
ith Gijo. Following her perennial guide, the “How to Be Popular” advice column for girls, she pretended to be intensely interested in whatever he liked. Consequently, she found herself listening to hours of his monologues about automatic weapons, handguns, assault rifles, ammunition (which he called “ammo” or “rounds”), explosive devices, minefields, barrages, air cover, foxholes, and beachheads. She was severely bored by all this, but she liked watching Gijo’s eyes light up when he expounded on notable battles and famous generals. The fact that she couldn’t understand what he could possibly think so fascinating about all these matters made him seem all the more exotic and unusual.

  She tried to attract Gijo by becoming less frivolous. She neglected her customary activities. She didn’t even talk about going to the mall. She lost interest in pool parties, luncheons, fashion shows, and shopping expeditions with her friends. She sometimes forgot to put on her makeup and style her hair properly. Her best friend Midj told everyone that Barbidol was turning into a frump. “The next thing you know,” Midj said maliciously, “she’ll be spreading that hourglass waist into a jelly glass.”

  Barbidol’s conversational skills deteriorated also. She was no longer able to discuss the latest designer jeans or this month’s eyeshadow color (“Tahitian apricot”). Instead, she talked of air strikes, tanks, and nukes. She let her clothes become shabby and unwashed. Her friends found her boring. Kendall started dating Midj, though his heart wasn’t in it. He missed the old Barbidol and hoped to bring her to her senses by making her jealous.

  She didn’t notice.

  Gijo seemed to enjoy Barbidol’s rapt attention. However, on the few occasions when she did some of the talking, he would gaze into space, fiddle with his sidearm, or push his cap over his eyes and go to sleep. Barbidol had an uneasy feeling that his interest in her talk was minimal at best. Still, she chattered on while his eyes glazed over or closed altogether. Piqued by his indifference, trying to become more interesting, she began to do some unprecedented thinking.