Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins. Emma Donoghue. 1993.
I do love a fairy tale. I’m a sucker for “fairy tales, but make it weird” and I always have been. However, maybe “make it weird” is the wrong way to put what I mean, because of course fairy tales are already weird and much of the 19th and 20th century approach to them has been about sucking out all of the weirdness and making them palatable and family friendly. It’s more like I want to keep fairy tales weird, or even better Make Fairy Tales Weird Again. Rescue them from the Disney Industrial Complex.
I think kids like being scared, and they like absurd and strange things, and I think one reason fairy tales can resonate past childhood is a desire to recreate the experience of the weird seeming natural. No explanations, no world-building, and no lessons other than odd ones like “don’t make bargains with elves” or something. Where a lot of fairy tale retellings fail is in trying too hard to make the stories into different kinds of stories, with characters who are relatable or events that make logical sense instead of dream sense. They try to reconstruct them, make them into stories that could happen in the world as we recognize it.
Thankfully, Emma Donoghue doesn’t do that, and I liked these stories more for it. The people are real, but they’re real in the way real people often are. They have inconvenient desires, or they hide things or themselves for no reason, or they love people who hurt them and hurt people they love. What was most interesting to me on this reread was how little true magic there is in these stories, but how surreal and magical they still felt despite that. I think it’s because they are all, in different but recurring and overlapping ways, about love - about falling in love unexpectedly and inconveniently, or finding that someone else has.
Not every love story contained here is a queer one, though most are, and I think a certain kind of queer love infuses all of them. Though I wouldn’t necessarily call this volume meta fictional, exactly, it approaches the postmodern in that the characters (who are deliberately telling their stories to other characters) seem aware that they are acting within stories, and most of the action results from them wrestling the narrative out of joint. These women know they are supposed to marry the handsome prince, and (without anything so obvious as a stated preference or revelation) they refuse to; they find themselves caught unawares by other kinds of love or other ways of being and pursue them instead. Those other ways are always surprising to them. Love seems to come out of nowhere, as if it had been in hiding.
I like Donoghue a lot. This isn’t my favorite volume of hers, that’s probably Astray or The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits. In all of her work she has a gift for looking at stories we know and turning them a bit, shaking them to see what falls out. She’s better at it than most.