Where are the Finettes?

I've been watching Once Upon a Time and reading Fairest and Fables and I wonder...

Where are the Finettes?

The Snow Whites, the Sleeping Beauties, the Cinderellas and the Rapunzels are all with us. Even the lesser known Rose Reds. But the Finettes?



Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy (above) and Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier de Villandon (immediately above) each wrote a tale featuring a heroine named Finette. These were actually different Finettes, so my question is a little off point. Nonetheless, two of the great names of fairy tale produced a heroine whose name means 'cunning' (you can actually find the contemporaneous definition in a French dictionary from 1694 on google books... which is one of the reasons I love google books). L'Héritier, whose cousin was Perrault, went so far as to subtitle her tale "The Clever Princess" (L'adroite Princesse).

These Finettes are beautiful, yes, but they are named for their intelligence and ability to think quickly and act with great shrewdness. They can not only see through trickery, they know how to be tricky when they need to be. These are women who can use their minds to figure out how to succeed in adversity.

Yet, these are not simply intellectual women. When it's called for, they're able to physically defend themselves. D'Aulnoy's Finette can bake an ogre as easily as lopping the head off his monstrous wife. L'Héritier's Finette has a hammer and isn't afraid to use it when a villain tries to seduce her.

These are the heroines I'd love to see in the meta-fairy tale extravaganzas that are so popular today. You get the feeling that writers are trying to recast the Snow Whites and Cinderellas as Finettes, but the legacy of the Grimms, of Perrault, of Disney weighs heavily. I'd like to see writers rediscover the Finettes (yes, d'Aulnoy's Finette is actually a Cinderella, so it wouldn't be difficult) and bring them into twenty-first century popular culture.

And I'd like to look up Finette without running across my own blog posts quite so often. Here's the challenge, if you blog about fairy tale, blog about Finette!

Cupcakes and Feminism are not incompatible

For a meeting of my feminist-orientated reading group, I made cupcakes. I made green velvet cupcakes, to be specific, because it's almost St Patrick's Day and half my ancestors hail from Ireland.

The reason I'm blogging this? Lately, I've been running into quite a bit of negativity around the issue of whether feminists should be quite so interested in cupcakes. A specific example? I discussed Linda Grant's recent piece in The Guardian with a friend and colleague. Grant concludes:

"And I don't care if some people think feminism is a dirty word, because without it, we'd still be back where we were, stuck forever, too scared to open our mouths in case men think we're not feminine enough. Enough of cupcakes and high heels, they have their place, but they didn't win me the right to buy them."

Well, aside from the fact that I bake my own cupcakes, I was a little baffled as to why cupcakes and high heels (after all, Louis XIV made heels fashionable - he liked the way his legs looked in them) should feature so strongly in her conclusions. I might not open my mouth while actually eating a cupcake - that's rude - but buying/making/eating cupcakes certainly doesn't stop me from speaking up. Likewise, I'm not quite so sure why 'feminine' appears to be used in a quasi-patriarchal manner here. You can be very feminine indeed - and still be an outspoken feminist.

I'm not saying every feminist should bake cupcakes and develop a fondness for shoes. Nor am I saying that every woman who bakes cupcakes and has a fondness for shoes is a feminist. It's just that they aren't actually mutually exclusive.

And there are bigger issues than cupcakes and high heels... which is in part why I'm puzzled that some feminists seem to think these are issues at all. They aren't, unless you're thinking of the implications of the rise of the domestic/maker culture. They're simply part of my life as a woman and feminist - an enjoyable part through which I can celebrate the fantastic baking skills of my grandmother and great grandmother and countless other women who were crazy creative in their kitchens, often keeping families fed and clothed in the most trying of circumstances.

Such anti-cupcake rhetoric trivialises and ridicules feminists who happen to enjoy a certain baked good, but who do believe passionately in women's rights. The thing that really disappoints me is that this ridicule comes from fellow feminists.

In any case, my reading group very much relished a range of baked goods while we hotly debated politics and literature and planned future events.

The Introverts

I'm just downloading Susan Cain's book onto my iPad after listening to her talk at TED. It was one of those amazing moments where I really learned something about myself.

I'm an introvert. I think many academics probably are. It makes sense, doesn't it? We were often the children who liked to read a book rather than play sport. Yet I always felt pushed to be an extrovert.

Cain's comments about our teaching environments really caught my attention though. I've often 'inherited' subjects that involve 'class participation' marks. These have always made me uneasy and I've often dropped this assessment from the subject when I've had the chance. While I like students to get involved in discussion and experience frustration when no one talks, I've also been perfectly happy if some students choose not to talk.

Because, the thing is, they may not talk, but that doesn't mean they aren't listening and thinking and those are equally important aspects of participation. They're aspects that can't be reliably assessed as participation, that's all.

In school, I very rarely raised a hand to answer a question. When the teacher would try to prompt a response from me, I'd go blank and look a great deal like a deer stuck in the headlights. The teacher would inevitably be confused. My grades were good. I obviously knew things - I obviously thought a lot. Why didn't I contribute? It's simple really. I was absorbed in thinking about what everyone else was saying. I was contemplating. I wasn't ready to say what I thought. So I've always had sympathy for students who don't like to talk in class.

Moreover, as the tutor or the lecturer, I myself am paying attention to the discussion - I'm listening, I'm thinking about what's said. I'm not always paying attention to who is talking and who isn't. This makes it very difficult for me to sit down afterwards and assess participation. If I'm paying attention to who is talking and who isn't, I'm frustrated, because I really want to follow what's happening in the discussion itself. I also don't want to interrupt that discussion to ask 'Betty' a question just because 'Betty' hasn't spoken in three weeks. 'Betty' might simply not have anything to say yet. That's okay by me. I hope she will have something to say at some point and I hope I can create an environment where she'll feel able to say something about what she's thinking, but I don't want to put her on the spot. I know how it feels.

This is not to say that class participation works the same way in every group, for every teacher. It's just that, for me, class participation is stressful and unnatural.

On the other side of the coin, I create reading groups. I encourage my students to make time to talk to each other. Nothing makes me happier than seeing a group of students talking over coffee (okay, I'm lying, there are other things that make me happier, but you know what I mean). The time I spend in reading groups or talking to students and colleagues is wonderful and inspiring. However, as Cain points out, introverts do like to share ideas, to talk and discuss. It's just that we need time to be alone, to contemplate too.

I usually excuse my habits of avoiding my office on my restlessness, my need to play music loudly, my inability to focus in an office. Really, it's just that I'm an introvert. I need my own space to think and write. I could shut the door and put a sign up, but I'd feel caged in. I like to walk around, play music, make a cup of tea. My biggest breakthroughs in thought have often occurred when I'm picking tomatoes or when waiting for the kettle to boil or going to collect the mail. I then have the freedom to rush back to a pen or the keyboard and jot everything down before I lose it.

So, I'd encourage people to listen to Cain's talk and really think about the positive contribution introverts make. We do live in a society that values the extrovert and tries to turn introverts into extroverts. I hope as she suggests, this might be changing.

Is the Wolf the Bad Guy?

This morning I did a quick double-take when I saw the Guardian's commercial for 'open journalism.' It's based around a fairy tale.

From the Guardian:

"This advert for the Guardian's open journalism, screened for the first time on 29 February 2012, imagines how we might cover the story of the Three Little Pigs in print and online. Follow the story from the paper's front page headline, through a social media discussion and finally to an unexpected conclusion."

It's a dramatic commercial with fantastic visuals. I won't comment on the concept of 'open journalism.' What intrigued me, of course, was the use of this particular tale.

The tale of the three little pigs has always straddled fable, fairy and nursery tale. It's a rather peculiar tale from that perspective. I like the Joseph Jacobs version (1890) with the rhyme:

Once upon a time when pigs spoke rhyme
And monkeys chewed tobacco
And hens took snuff to make them tough
And ducks went quack, quack, quack, o!

In Jacobs version, only the last pig survives, having successfully dispatched the wolf and eaten him for supper. The big bad wolf, of course, is a stereotypical villain. Tales of werewolves and Little Red Riding Hood did the wolf no favours in our earlier history. However, in recent years, the wolf has been increasingly vindicated and suspicion thrown on the pigs, as in The True Story of the Three Little Pigs or The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig, or on the girl, as in Honestly, Red Riding Hood Was Rotten. And remember Enchanted, where Giselle is tucking Morgan in?

Giselle: I remember this one time, when the poor wolf was being chased by Little Red Riding Hood around his grandmother's house, and she had an axe... oh, and if Pip hadn't been walking by to help I don't know what would've happened!
Morgan: I don't really remember that version.
Giselle: Well, that's because Red tells it a little differently.

Indeed, even Oz and Team Jacob have redeemed the wolf. (And I keep hearing about a pilates wolf in Grimm.)

The Guardian's 'open journalism' likewise suggests the wolf's innocence, first through video of the wolf with an inhaler (being asthmatic, how could he blow down the houses?), second through showing that the pigs were covering up their own crime, being in financial difficulty due to high mortgage payments.

The redemption of the wolf is almost so familiar now that the surprise would be to discover an actual bad wolf (well, outside of Doctor Who).

Nonetheless, fairy tales have long been used to speak of politics and social problems. Some have suggested that by using a fairy tale, the Guardian's commercial appears 'silly' and at times the men-in-pig-suits do jar with the hype and promise of 'open journalism.' Yet, the fairy tale take on housing difficulties and crime is not so ridiculous. Tales like The Three Bears, Jack and the Beanstalk, Puss in Boots and Hansel and Gretel have long responded to problems of poverty and homelessness and their links to crime.

Speaking of fairy tales, I discovered today that the 'Fairy Tales Re-Imagined' panels are up as podcasts and can be located here.

Today in Craft News

I usually check in on Craft at least a few times a week. Today was a good day.

I've taught Gaiman's Anansi Boys and as you may remember, Fat Charlie had some bad memories of President's Day. Too bad he hadn't seen these crafty ideas.

I then scrolled down and what did I see? A Frog Prince! I love his toes. That sounds a bit odd, I know, but if you go through to the pattern site, you'll see what I mean when you look at the detail. I've always loved the Frog Prince and had particular fun teaching it. It's a great example of the impact of retelling for fairy tales. Not only does the princess smash the frog against a wall (thus turning him into a handsome prince) in earlier versions, but she also spends rather a pleasant night with her new prince before they see to social niceties like marriage.

The princess's actions in these earlier versions are indicative of the violence utilised by fairy tale heroines when their freedoms are threatened by men. There is still a presumption that the fairy tale princess is a passive creature. If you go back far enough, you discover she's really not.