The Journal of Mythic Arts: Articles

Snow, Glass, Apples: The Story of Snow White by Terri Windling

To most people today, the name Snow White evokes visions of dwarfs whistling as they work, and a wide–eyed, fluttery princess singing, "Some day my prince will come." (A friend of mine claims this song is responsible for the problems of a whole generation of American women.) Yet the Snow White theme is one of the darkest and strangest to be found in the fairy tale canon — a chilling tale of murderous rivalry, adolescent sexual ripening, poisoned gifts, blood on snow, witchcraft, and ritual cannibalism. . .in short, not a tale originally intended for children's tender ears. More>>>

Bluebeard and the Bloody Chamber by Terri Windling

Though based on older folk tales of demon lovers and devilish bridegrooms, the story of Bluebeard, as we know it today, is the creation of French writer Charles Perrault — first published in 1697 in his collection Histoires ou contes du temps passé (Stories or Tales of Past Times). Perrault was one in a group of writers who socialized in the literary salons of Paris, collectively creating a vogue for literature inspired by peasant folk tales. These new stories were called contes des feés, from which our modern term "fairy tales" derives — but the contes des feés of the French salons were intended for adult readers.

Bluebeard," for example, has little to recommend it as a children's story. Rather, it's a gruesome cautionary tale about the dangers of marriage (on the one hand) and the perils of greed and curiosity (on the other) — more akin, in our modern culture, to horror films than to Disney cartoons. The story as Perrault tells it is this... >More>>>

A Million Little Mermaids by Virgina Borges

I am a member of The Little Mermaid generation of girls. When the Disney movie premiered in 1989, I was smitten; it was the first movie I ever saw in a theater. I loved Ariel, the spunky red–headed heroine, and Sebastian, her singing–crab sidekick. When I went home, I made myself a mermaid's tail from a sheet of butcher paper spangled with sequins and glitter. I was five years old.

It wasn't until many months later that I learned the full story of The Little Mermaid. We had a tattered picture–book copy of the original translation of Hans Christian Andersen's 1837 tale. For some reason, my mother always insisted on reading it aloud to me, rather than encouraging me to read it out loud to her, as she so often would do with other stories. When she read the book to me, it always ended happily: the mermaid gives up her voice to follow her true love, and is rewarded for her persistence with marriage. My mother told me a fairy tale of a fairy tale. (Read more.)

Healing the Wounded Wild by Kim Antieau

I  think in stories. I may even feel in stories. I have done so as long as I can remember. When I became chronically ill, I looked for answers in stories. I wrote them, and I read them. The story I came back to again and again was the fairy tale "Silver Hands." For a long time I didn't understand why. Now, at least for me, "Silver Hands" seems like a primer on how to heal. A fairy tale is a gem, whole in and of itself; it can shatter if we pick at it too much, so I will try to handle this tale with care to keep it from flying to pieces as I talk about it in relation to healing.... More>>>

The Monkey Girl by Midori Snyder

When I was a girl reading fairy tales, I appreciated those courageous maidens tromping off in iron shoes or flying on the back of the west wind to find their future husbands where they, imprisoned by trolls or cannibal mothers, waited to be rescued. I admired those young women and their single–minded purpose. They were bold, resourceful, and spirited. And they were certainly a far cry from the “waiting–to–be–awakened” girls or the girls expecting to be fitted with a shoe, a Prince, and a future all at the same time.

Yet even in their plucky natures and heroic tales, there was still something about them that troubled me. Perhaps it was the assumption of happily–ever–after, or at least the seeming surrender of all that reckless adventure. Their rites of passage completed, the journey to find a husband over, there was an expectation that life for these young women would settle once again into neatly defined roles and an untroubled routine. This assumption didn't sit well with me at all.... More>>>

Donkeyskin, Deerskin, Allerleirauh: The Reality of a Fairy Tale by Helen Pilinovsky

    

Fairy tales are stories which are based upon those issues which affect everyday life — hate and love, poverty and wealth, ugliness and beauty, hardship and happiness — disguised by a thin veneer of metaphor and magic which removes them from the immediate world, making them universal in tone, as applicable today as it was when the phrase "fairy tale" was first coined in the literary salons of 17th–century France....Thanks to the changes in the old tales made first by Victorian editors, and then by modern film–makers, "fairy tale endings" are now associated with unrealistic, inhuman flawlessness and situations in which everything, however improbably, goes right — a condition which can only be attained completely through magic, as reality is somewhat less obliging. That quality of perfection, however, is not representative of the fairy tale genre as a whole, for the unbowdlerized tales possess examples of behavior, which, when read literally, are but all too real: abandonment, incest, abuse.    More>>>

Brother & Sister: A Matter of Seeing by Ellen Steiber

          

"Little brother took his little sister by the hand and said: "Since our mother died we have had no happiness; our step–mother beats us every day, and if we come near her she kicks us away . . . Our meals are the hard crusts of bread that are left over . . . Come, we will go forth together into the wide world."

So begins the Grimms' tale "Brother and Sister," on which I very loosely based "In the Night Country," a story written for the anthology The Armless Maiden and Other Tales for Childhood's Survivors. As its title indicates, the anthology collected stories and poems that were based on traditional fairy tales and dealt with surviving the traumas of childhood. We borrowed the imagery of the old tales as a way of confronting old pain; and as an act of transformation, hoping that the magic of the fairy tales would find its way into our stories and heal those wounds. Appropriately, many of the pieces in the anthology deal with physical and sexual abuse and their aftermath. Because that was not what I came out of, I decided to write what I knew about: the breaking of the spirit, being shut down, being so locked in fear that you no longer knew who you were. Therapy had taught me that there was no magic formula to heal any of this, but intuitively I was led to a fairy tale that had quite a lot to say on the subject....  More>>>

Rapunzel, Rapunzel, Let Down Your Hair by Terri Windling

Maiden-in-a-Tower stories can be found in folk traditions around the world — but "Rapunzel," the best known of these stories, comes from literary sources. The version of "Rapunzel" we know today was published as a German folk tale by the Brothers Grimm in 1857 — but it's now believed that their "Rapunzel" was neither German nor a proper folk tale.... More>>>