doormats (as in ‘Snow White’, ‘Cinderella’, and ‘Sleeping Beauty’) or are severely
mutilated (as in ‘The Little Mermaid’).
The move was on for female heroes (I’ll use the term in preference to ‘heroines’ —who
tend to wait around a lot). Unfortunately, the female heroes of the early 1970s tended
not to be of a different order, as is Tenar in Le Guin’s Tehanu. They tended to be more
like men tricked out in drag. The stories were the same as those with male heroes in
them. But instead of being about boys seeking adventure, profit, and someone to
rescue, girls were in the starring roles. They rescued instead of being rescued. Like
television situation comedies that colour middle-class families black, most of those tales
died natural deaths. The Paper Bag Princess by Robert Munsch is a dubious exception.
It is still in print, and the princess uses the feminist tactic of deceit to defeat the dragon
and rescue the prince. But as the prince suffers from the traditionally feminine vice of
vanity, s/he is essentially rejected for a lack of machismo.
When revisionist tales virtually disappeared in the late 1970s, reclaimed tales looked
like a more viable alternative. But in the first collections of reclaimed tales, the
preference for male characteristics in female heroes was still much in evidence. In the
introduction to Tatterhood and Other Tales, for example, Ethel Johnston Phelps states a
preference for stories with ‘active and courageous girls and women in the leading roles’,
ones who are ‘distinguished by extraordinary courage and achievements’ (1978: vx). In
other words, she prefers the same old male type, who, as Valerie Walkerdine suggests, is
‘gender-neutral, self-disciplined, and active’ (120). That is, the preferred hero is still a
man.
The one voice that begs to differ belongs Angela Carter. Her two collections of
reclaimed fairy tales for Virago are so good they are difficult to put down. She doesn’t
just present tales about the unrelieved glory of women—a male-order project anyway.
Instead, she tries ‘to demonstrate the extraordinary richness and diversity of responses
to the same common predicament—being alive—and the richness and diversity with
which femininity, in practice is represented in “unofficial” culture: its strategies, its
plots, its hard work’ (Carter 1991: xiv). One of her favourite stories from this collection
was apparently ‘Tongue meat’, a Swahili story that tells of a languishing queen who only
revives when fed ‘tongue meat’, something that turns out to be a metaphor for stories.
The tales of girls and women that Angela Carter revives are exactly that kind of ‘tongue
meat’. They establish an alternative feminist tradition—one that hadn’t been visible
before.
While it is true that fairy tales seem to have enjoyed the most dramatic revival as a
result of twinned interests in women’s studies and children’s literature studies, other
reclamation projects are also taking place. The texts being rediscovered by feminist
critics are important because they provide a historical context for our own ideological
assumptions about gender, about what constitutes good literature, and about what is
worth remembering, circulating and retaining for study.
One of the most compelling studies of women’s texts lost and found is, ‘Lost from the
nursery: women writing poetry for children 1800–1850’, by Morag Styles (1990). Styles
came to write the article because she casually noticed how few women were represented
in poetry anthologies for children, especially poets who published before 1900. As she
FEMINIST CRITICISM: FROM SEX-ROLE STEREOTYPING TO SUBJECTIVITY 103