Cautionary Tales

As a physical object, Kate Bernheimer's collection of stories Horse, Flower, Bird evokes nostalgia for the way books drew us in as children. The generous white space between spare, quiet sentences leaves us hungering for more pages. Rikki Ducornet's chimeric illustrations coax our powers of imagination. The book's slight size is light in the palms of our hands. But we quickly find that the experience of reading fairy tales has changed since childhood. Or rather, we've changed, our lenses now those of world-worn adults.

Bernheimer's tales are anything but cuddly and cozy. Her narratives hold a mirror up to Western constructions of gender, and the reflections disturb and chill. Bernheimer takes up the feminist charge of legendary writers like Angela Carter, adopting the fairy-tale structure to illuminate how our narratives, especially the ones we feed children, train women for brainless sexual domestication. Yet unlike Carter's lush lyrical prose, Bernheimer's is Spartan and frank, like that of a child, but gracefully, beautifully so.

Indeed, many of her protagonists are children—little girls who play games of suffering and rape and torture, who learn to find pleasure in deprivation, who replace sisters with dolls, then dolls with imaginary friends and never recover when their invisible sidekicks are kidnapped by men in the night.

One of the most haunting girls is Edith, from "A Cageling Tale," a girl who lets her pet parakeet fly free in her room. After it crashes into a window and dies, Edith leaves home and takes a job at a topless dance club where she perches in a cage of her own. When Edith is fired from the club, aging out at thirty, she gets a two-bedroom apartment, prostituting herself in one room and building herself a magnificent cage out of mechanical parts in the other. The cage is her haven, a quiet place where she can assume the familiar role of the mindless, hollow-boned bird, who eats and thinks little, a role she's been taught. The degree to which girls internalize a Western model of femininity is captured horrifically in the following passage, which comes from the bird's death: "The girl grew to love the parakeet so much it was painful. Sometimes she imagined roasting its sweet body, putting the poor thing onto a stick over a fire—it was so small and delicate, it was hard not to think this." Though the men who pay Edith for sex are called "gentle friends" and "sweet men," it is clear that Edith understands heterosexual relationships to be linked to possession, possession that is destructive, incinerating the female body, snuffing individuality out.

Another female protagonist who learns the masculine habit of keeping creatures is the girlish wife in "A Petting Zoo Tale." In this story, "the girl" builds a petting zoo in her basement, a miniature circus kept secret from her husband, who is oblivious to the animals living under his floor even while "catalogs to order live monkeys pile up by the bed." Though thematically akin to "A Cageling Tale," this one achieves its resonance through lightness and humor. Bernheimer describes the husband thusly:

Detail from cover

The girl would never forgive herself for upsetting the husband's sweet balance. He must try to keep calm, for how else could he daily don a button-down shirt, a checkered tie? Dress in a suit, as if to accompany an organ grinder through town? All he lacks is the little cap! "Look at me! A working man! Yeep! Yeep!"

Yet under the humor is the truth that domestication is often at the heart of marriage, a domestication that miniaturizes the wife, keeping her in a permanent state of girlhood, hanging gauzy curtains and Christmas lights to dress up the house that cages her, disguising it as something fun.

In "A Garibaldi Tale," the narrator invokes language rather than lights to cope with the role society's assigned her. Partially deaf with webbed toes, labeled "simple," "the child with few concerns," she is blended into the persona of her deaf, web-toed aunt, and the two of them are referred to collectively as "Auntie and Auntie." Left out of the fishing and working life at the docks, the girl acts out narratives of femininity in rhymes she pens herself. After her sister overhears her professing her love about a boy who sells cheese, she realizes that she doesn't love the boy but rather the sound of words about him. She has been taught to desire this construction of language, which posits a girl yearning after a boy. When another boy, "a nicer boy," finds her in a shed and they have sex, readers realize how misleading this narrative is. Bernheimer writes, "I laid down the burlap sack and kissed him. Then some other things happened. Though the things were unfamiliar they caused no harm." The nonchalance used to describe her first sexual experience is disorienting. That the girl describes herself as a voiceless fish at the end of the story speaks volumes. And to extend the metaphor just a bit further, take the title, "Garibaldi," the girl's town, which takes its name from a type of fish whose male members boldly attack anything that comes near the female or her eggs.

In Horse, Flower, Bird, Bernheimer's fourth book, femininity is portrayed as a series of traumas shaped by language. Despite its playful packaging, this book recalls the grim cautionary messages of old-world fairy tales. Bernheimer's message? "'[B]e careful what you read.'"