Contemporary Fiction and the Fairy Tale

7. Extrapolating from Nalo Hopkinson’s Skin Folk: Reflections on Transformation and Recent English-Language Fairy-Tale Fiction by Women

Extrapolating from Nalo Hopkinson’s Skin Folk Reflections on Transformation and Recent EnglishLanguage Fairy-Tale Fiction by Women   I By  when Angela Carter’s third short-story collection, American Ghosts and Old World Wonders, was published, readers of her short fiction may not have agreed on the liberatory import of her feminism but knew to read her apparent flights of fantasy and “waywardness” as metanarrative digs, especially into the history of folk and fairy tales, from which to emerge with provoking woman-centered images and insight. In particular, “Ashputtle orTheMother’sGhost:ThreeVersionsinOneStory”wasandisreadily recognizable as a “Cinderella” narrative triptych or polyptic in a feminist frame. By enacting multiple narrative possibilities, Carter revived not only the Grimms’ “Ashputtel” but also Basile’s “La Gatta Cenerentola” and some oral traditions of ATUB featuring a traveling heroine. The “Three Versions in One Story” also worked to demythologize the “innocent heroine” portrayal of Cinderella and the fantasy of an upward heterosexual marriage as the (re)solution that Charles Perrault and the Disney industry had popu7 larized. In Carter’s text, the figure of Ashputtle, then, made her appearance as a reflection on, more than of, both “old world wonders” and “American ghosts.”1 This reflection turned on both the dissection and expansion of a few story ingredients or symbolically charged images: bloody body parts (“The Mutilated Girls”), ashes (“The Burned Child”), and dress (“Travelling Clothes”) construct narratives of (dis)juncture where marriage, inheritance, and genealogy are thematized to different effects in the three versions of the story. At the same time, if the three versions are read sequentially, their permutations of how to wound flesh, dress wounds, mourn, and generally “provide” for someone or oneself, articulate in quick succession interpretations of the mother-daughter relationship in the “Cinderella” fairy tale and bring about a far-from-uncomplicated renewal of “mother love.”2 As the italicized and ambiguous or in Carter’s title anticipates, the mother’s ghost and Ashputtle, in their different shades of pallor, are semblances of each other: Ashputtle is the Mother’s ghost as life and soul in its older meaning; and the mother’s ghost lends its appearance to Ashputtle’s terrifying desires. They are, and then they are not, each other—if in the first version Ashputtle “must do her mother’s bidding” (), in the second one it is the mother who does Ashputtle ’s—and in both cases they resent it. The final words in “Travelling Clothes,” the third version of “Ashputtle or The Mother’s Ghost,” are the mother’s, “Go and seek your fortune, darling” (), a complicated speech act, combining injunction and permission, a performative “letting go” that joins the two women in spirit as it simultaneously sets them free from one another. The final action is the daughter’s, and it holds transformative powers : she moves into the mother’s coffin, and it turns “into a coach and horses” ready for travel for the daughter’s own journey. How to read this injunction or/and permission as well as the journey metanarratively? Tiny feet, ashes, and dress all pertain to the (female) body, each inscribing multiple stories that are, at every or, made to appear at different turns as interchangeable with, juxtaposed to, or extending of one another —all supplemental apparitions of one another. “Ashputtle or The Mother’s Ghost: Three Versions in One Story,” thus, enacts possible directions , not exclusive of one another, for writers/tellers and readers/listeners who journey into rewriting the fairy tale: historically layered inquiry, rebellious critique, metaphoric exploration. Three is not a limit, though, since no single narrative path is chosen as the definitive one in Carter’s rewriting. It’s not so much that “three versions” are packaged into “one story,” but that Transformation and Fairy-Tale Fiction byWomen  no “one story” is ever single or self-sufficient, lending itself to three “versions ” at least, through the articulation of multiple historical tellings, doubts and questions about plot and image—through the potential articulated by an or, which is not simply and. Whether we read them sequentially, holistically , iconically, or intertextually, the three or more “versions” of womanhood , mother-and-daughter-hood, and story in “Ashputtle or The Mother’s Ghost”composeratherstridentlydifferentbutjoinedscenarios,linkingwith other paths that take us further into the seemingly dead recesses and potentially new extensions of the tale. The fairy tale thus appears like a multivalent narrative...