Myth and Fairy Tale in Contemporary Women's Fiction, and: Tracing Arachne's Web: Myth and Feminist Fiction (review)

"Long ago, so far . . ." "Once upon a time . . ." "In the beginning . . ."

Literature draws upon myth to imply authority, resonance, importance, significance. Although myth can be used to reinscribe notions of "human nature" gender roles, or class distinctions, it can also lend itself to subversion and resistance, for truths can be written under the guise of mythic fantasy that cannot always be told in a realistic mode. Even though many feminist theorists have seen myth as regressive, women authors have frequently used myth to subvert oppressive structures.

How women write and rewrite myth has been the subject of studies beginning with the second wave of the women's movement. Susan Sellers and Kristen M. Mapel Bloomberg both draw upon feminist literary criticism and French feminist theory in their new books. Both see the women writers they study as using myth to rewrite and subvert oppressive narratives and open up new possibilities for women's fiction.

Susan Sellers's Myth and Fairy Tale in Contemporary Women's Fiction (2001, NY: Palgrave [formerly St. Martin's Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers Ltd., formerly Macmillan Press Ltd.]) examines a range of contemporary women's fiction through a lens constructed mainly from French feminist theory, particularly that of Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray.

Sellers includes a wide range of fiction by women, including genre fiction. Her study sets novels by A.S. Byatt, Fay Weldon, Hélène Cixous, Anne Rice, Sheri Tepper, and Angela Carter side by side, often generating fascinating parallels. For example, she juxtaposes Byatt's "The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye" with Weldon's The Life and Loves of a She Devil to reveal "the mechanisms that turn women into monsters" (40).

Sellers reads Byatt and Weldon in light of Apuleius's telling of the Cupid and Psyche story and discusses Christine Crow's Miss X or the Wolf Woman in tandem with Hélène Cixous's The Book of Promethea. Michèle Roberts's The Book of Mrs Noah and Impossible Saints are read in the light of Luce Irigaray's "Divine Women." The vampire novels of Anne Rice are examined next to Emma Tennant's Two Women of London: The Strange Case of Ms Jekyll and Mrs Hyde and a short story by Pat Califia, "The Vampire," all three being analyzed in terms of Julia Kristeva's Powers of Horror. Judith Butler's concept of performativity is applied to Marina Warner's "The Legs of the Queen of Sheba," Emma Donoghue's Kissing the Witch, Sheri S. Tepper's Beauty, and Alice Thompson's Pandora's Box. Seller's most extensive discussion of a single author is her chapter on Angela Carter in which she analyzes Nights at the Circus in terms of Nicole Ward Jouve's Female Genesis: Creativity, Self and Gender.

Sellers sees myth as having potentially transformative power, saying that "myth's form and collaborative gestation offers empowering paradigms for our collective and individual presentations, analyses, and transformations" (viii). Her book's purpose is to show "the power of myth in giving expression to our common experiences and about the role of narrative in enabling us to undergo, shape and survive those experiences" (vii).

Kristen M. Mapel Bloomberg's book is a study of some of the myths used by six women writers from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She examines three generations of writers, a fascinating and diverse range both well-known and relatively obscure: Sarah Orne Jewett, Emma D. Kelley-Hawkins, Onoto Watanna, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Edith Wharton, and Djuna Barnes. Of these, two are African Americans, three European Americans, and one Chinese American. One of the six was openly lesbian (Barnes) while another (Jewett) lived in a long...