Feminism and the Beast: Juliet Marillier's HEART'S BLOOD

Feminism has long had a hate relationship with the fairy tale "Beauty and the Beast." From the animal bridegroom folktale, which Frenchwoman Suzanne de Villeneuve drew on for the first written version of "La Belle et La Bête" in 1740, to the most recent film version of B&B by Disney, feminist literary and cultural critics have often written about the not-so-hidden messages, messages encourage girls and women to stay with and even love "beastly" (i.e. abusive) men, that seem inherent in this trope.

Which is why it is such a pleasure to read contemporary novels or stories penned by authors who draw on the trope, but do so with a clear aim of subverting its sexism. My favorite short story of this type has long been Angela Carter's "The Tiger's Bride," from her 1979 collection The Bloody Chamber and Other Adult Tales, in which it is the beauty who embraces the beastly rather than the beast who is transformed into a beauty. And I've enjoyed novel-length B&B and animal bridegroom novel retellings, too, both for young adults (Robin McKinley's Beauty [1978]; S. Jae Jones' Wintersong [2017]) and for adult romance readers (Mary Balogh's Lord Carew's Bride [1995]; Elizabeth Hoyt's To Beguile a Beast [2009]), novels that draw into question some of the central assumptions of the more sexist versions of the B&B trope.

My new favorite, though, might just be Juliet Marillier's 2009 retelling, Heart's Blood.

Set in a 12th century Ireland rife with magic, Marillier's novel opens with heroine Caitrin fleeing toward the beast's home not to save a father, but instead out of grief for one. Berach, a scribe, taught his daughter Caitrin his trade, and the two spent many an hour working together, bent over quill and scroll. But after Berach's sudden death, Caitrin falls into a deep depression, during which distant cousins come and claim her home. Showing a kind face to the town, but an abusive one to Caitrin, Cillian and his mother Ita insult and physically abuse Caitrin until she has internalized all their aspersions:

You're nothing, her dream voice reminded her. You're nobody. Your father shouldn't have filled your head with wild ideas and impossible aspirations.... Bel glad you have responsible kinsfolk to take care of you, Caitrin. It's not as if you've demonstrated an ability to look after yourself since your father died. (12).

When Cillian insists that he and Caitrin wed, however, Caitrin knows she can remain no longer in her once safe home. And so she flees, with only a change of clothes and a small box containing the tools of her trade. And the hopes that she can somehow find her way back to the "old Caitrin, the confident, serene one," rather than the person she has become since her father's death, the person who could not find the power or the will to speak up in the face of Cillian and Ita's abuse (62).

The folk of a far-western settlement Caitrin lands in warn her against accepting the post as scribe at the castle of their local chieftain—"I can't think of one good thing to say about the man, crooked, miserable parasite that he is" (10). But Caitrin, fearful of a pursuing Cillian, won't let herself belief that their stories of a 100-year curse, a horrible lord, a dog large enough to eat a fully grown ram in a single bite, and tiny beings that whispered in traveler's ears and led the off the path are anything more than fearful exaggeration. Caitrin is not coerced into going to the beast's lair to save her father, as in most Beauty and the Beast retellings; she accepts a job willingly, a job which she hopes will help her find herself.

When Caitrin arrives at Whistling Tor, it is to discover that each and every story is true—at least, in its own way. Anluan, the young chieftain, limps, has the use of only one arm, and has a strangely unsymmetrical face. Caitrin's first sight of Anluan clearly places him in the "Beast" role: "There was an odd beauty in his isolation and his sadness, like that of a forlorn prince ensorcelled by a wicked enchantress, or a traveler lost forever in a world far from home." But Caitrin immediately chastises herself for placing him in such a traditional role: "I must stop being so fanciful. Less than a day here, and already I was inventing wild stories about the folk of the house. This was no enchanted prince, just an ill-tempered chieftain with no manners" (45).

Anluan has tragic reasons for his temper, his physical disabilities, and for his lack of social graces, reasons which are gradually revealed to Caitrin over the course of her weeks at the Tor. And though Anluan often falls prey to abrupt bouts of verbal anger, he never acts violently or harms the handful of faithful retainers who remain. What he does lack is hope—the hope that things might change, the hope that the dark cloud under which he has been living might ever abate. And hope is the one thing of which Caitrin will not let go. It is not physical beastliness, then, but despair, which it will be Caitrin's task to banish—not just from Anluan, but from herself.

Caitrin's job at Whistling Tor is to transcribe the documents of Anluan's ancestor Nechtan, searching for a spell which Nechtan apparently could never find. Not a spell to summon dark power, but rather to disperse it: to send the whispering denizens of the forest, the dark legacy Nechtan's willingness to dabble in black sorcery in order to gain power over his rivals, back from whence they were unnaturally summoned. Many of Nechtan's notes are in Latin, a language which Anluan's father did not have the chance to teach him before he took his life when Anluan was only nine, the most recent of a string of early deaths among the chieftain's ancestors.

The task must be completed by the end of summer, Anluan insists, without ever telling Caitrin why. But when rumors of invading Normans begin to swirl, and acts of hurtful vandalism begin to plague the Tor, the search grows ever more urgent. Caitrin is free to leave at any time; she is no prisoner. And she certainly doesn't long to return home, at least, not to a family that no longer exists. But after receiving a threatening emissary from a Norman lord, Anluan insists on sending Caitrin away. Because he doesn't love her? Or because he loves her too much?

(Spoiler: "At last I begin to understand why my father acted as I did. To lose you is to spill my heat's blood. I do not know if I can bear the pain" [315].)

Again, unlike the traditional B&B story, Caitrin's time "home" is not about proving how bad home really is when compared to the luxury of "away." Rather, it is about conquering her particular monster, banishing those who made her feel less than her true self, and remaking her once destroyed family. A task she undertakes not on her own, but with the help of allies she meets during her journey home.

Community and hope, rather than isolation, doubt, and despair, are what Caitrin needs in order to reclaim her birthright—and then, to claim her place by Anluan's side while he faces his own worst fears.



What are your favorite Beauty and the Beast retellings?



Photo credits:
Castle: Geni
Bleeding heart: Moonbeam 13, Deviant Art

Juliet Marillier

Heart's Blood

Tor, 2009

Rewriting the Beastly: Suleikha Snyder's BOLLYWOOD AND THE BEAST

The story of a beautiful woman trapped in an isolated location with a man who has been transformed into a hideous beast is one of the most prevalent tale types in all of western folklore. Myriad authors, including award-winning fantasists from Robin McKinley to Mercedes Lackey, and multiple filmmakers, from Jean Cocteau to Walt Disney, have turned to Aarne-Thompson tale type 425C for plotlines, characters, and ideological constructs in need of re-imagining. Analyzing different versions of the tale, and the ideological use writers make of it, often tell us as much about the reteller and the times in which s/he lives as about the original tale itself.

Madame de Villeneuve

In the first printed version of the tale, La Belle et la Bête by Frenchwoman Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve, the Beast asks his beauty each night not "Will you marry me," as many later versions of the tale present it, but rather "May I sleep with you tonight?" In 1740, when Villeneuve's tale was first published, women were considered the property of their fathers, and then, after marriage, their husbands; granting Beauty the right to choose whether or not to sleep with the Beast is a sign of proto-feminism on Villeneuve's part. My favorite B & B retellings, then, perhaps not surprisingly, are the ones that pay homage to the roots of feminism in Villeneuve's original tale.

In Bollywood and the Beast, romance author Suleikha Snyder gives us a Beauty and the Beast in a setting far from the Europe of the tale's origins: the cities and suburbs of modern India. Yet the feminism she brings to her retelling has clear links to the story's original interest in women's right to make decisions on their own behalf.

Half Indian, half gori (white), American Rakhee (Rocky) Varma has been working to establish her acting credentials in Bollywood. Most of the Indian-born actresses on the Bollywood scene look down on her because she doesn't understand Hindi, and because she's "fair without having to endorse a whitening cream." After Rocky somewhat intemperately calls the industry on its racial biases during a television talk show interview, the director of her new film refuses to have her bunk with the rest of the cast and crew, fearing the drama likely to ensue. When Rocky's protective father worries about the dangers of staying alone in a hotel, Rocky's co-star, Ashraf Khan, offers to have Rocky stay at his family's home, where her safety and privacy will be ensured. His Nani (grandmother) is friendly, and his reclusive brother, disabled ten years earlier in an accident, will surely stay far out of her way.

When Rocky arrives, however, Ashraf's older brother, Taj, is far from invisible. In fact, despite his scarred face and inability to walk, Taj seems to go out of his way to annoy Rocky with his sharp insults and sultry sexual innuendoes. Though she's attracted to the handsome, scarred older man (35 to her 21), Rocky makes it clear that she finds his beastly behavior less than charming:

Taj was a chauvinistic pig. Like any other chauvinistic pig out there in the street. No better than someone who catcalled her or undressed her with his eyes. "You know what? It's not your face that makes you a monster. It's everything else. You're disgusting."

Unlike earlier Beauties, whose kind behavior tames their Beasts, Rocky doesn't teach Taj to be less beastly. She hews more closely to romance novel conventions, the ones that have the hero drawn to the heroine because she speaks the truth to him ("you're disgusting"), rather than flattering him. And it's as much the urging of his brother as his own attraction to Rocky that brings Taj to gentle his behavior towards his houseguest. And then, in true Beauty and the Beast fashion, Taj and Rocky are soon in the midst of a passionate affair.

As Marina Warner has argued, many of the feminist retellings of B & B from the 1970s and 80s (see, for example, Angela Carter's "The Tiger's Bride," or the 1987 CBS television series) invert the traditional tale's domesticating dynamic. Rather than portraying the Beast being in need of Beauty's taming influence, these feminist retellings insist that it is Beauty who is in need of the Beast: "the Beast no longer needs to be disenchanted.... Beauty has to learn to love the beast in him, in order to know the beast in herself," in particular, to accept and embrace her own erotic desires (From the Beast to the Blonde, 312).

Snyder seems more interested in contesting the traditional storyline, the one which constructs Beauty as tamer of the Beast. Taj ironically imagines her in such a role several times in the novel, but Rocky is well aware that taking on such a role is not her job: "I'm not näive.... I don't think I can kiss your boo-boos and make them better. Only you can do that." To bring that point home, Snyder inverts the ending of the traditional story. In most versions, Beauty leaves the Beast, at least temporarily, a move that endangers his life. In order to save him, she must give up the outside world, and return to the confinement of his. In contrast, Rocky realizes that to remain in isolation with Taj (who has only left his house four times in the past ten years) would mean giving up far too much: "She didn't want to be here forever, trapped in a fairy tale. She wanted to go back to Mumbai and home to Chicago and visit Bali and Berlin and Botswana. She still had so many things to do and to see." And so this Beauty leaves her Beast behind, unwilling to remain in the cage he's crafted for himself. It is Taj, not Rocky, who must "return" to the world he's left behind if he is to win her love: the world beyond his garden's walls.

Snyder's book is not without its flaws. Its secondary plotline, conveyed primarily through a third point of view (Taj's brother's), takes up so much space, and demands so much of the reader's emotional energy, that the primary love story often feels as if it is given short shrift. The nasty portrayal of Rocky's female colleagues in the opening chapters contains hints of misogyny (although I can understand it, if not like it, by reading these female colleagues as stand-ins for the original Beauty's selfish sisters). The secondary plot's villainess seems to have walked straight in from an evil-stepmother fairy tale rather than a Beauty and the Beast story. And the construction of Taj's caretaker, Kamal, veers dangerously towards Orientalizing (in the Edward Said sense): "There was something almost unearthly about him. And not just the ninja-like way he moved. It was his calm and his confidence, and how he seemed to know so many things intuitively," Rocky thinks of him at one point. Snyder, to her credit, seems to realize that she's walking a dangerous line here, by having Rocky also think, "Kamal was somehow... more. But he was human. She knew that."

Yet despite its flaws, Bollywood and the Beast is well worth a read, particularly for those intrigued by the ways that European fairy tales continue to be re-envisioned for each author's, and each age's, ideological needs.

Photo credits:

Villeneuve: MetroNews

Suleikha Snyder

Bollywood and the Beast

Samhain, 2014

Foodie Feminism: Laura Florand's THE CHOCOLATE KISS

Hunger for food and hunger for sex are two of the most essential drives human beings can experience. Mix the two together in a novel, and you have the recipe for a tasty literary concoction known as the "foodie romance." Often set in a professional culinary setting (a restaurant, a bakery, a catering company), and featuring characters who work therein, the best foodie romances aren't just about a couple falling in love; they're about the way that a love of food contributes to, or serves as a symbol of, a newly developing romantic relationship.

The most enchanting books amongst the recent smorgasbord of foodie romances must certainly be those written by Laura Florand. The first novel in her Chocolate series, The Chocolate Thief, about an American chocolate heiress hoping to expand her mass-market company's reach by drawing on the talents of a world-renowned French chocolatier, was published to deserved acclaim last summer. Her follow-up, The Chocolate Kiss, proves an equally enticing treat—frothing with humor, taut with sexual tension, bubbling over with sophistication and charm. And, best of all, this bonbon of a book has a delicious core of feminist sensibility at its heart.

Since graduating from college, Magalie Chaudron has worked with her Aunt Geneviève and her aunt's lover, Aunt Aja, in their Paris tea shop, La Maison des Sorcières (The Witches' House). Her specialty is the pot of chocolat chaud, so seemingly simple to prepare, yet so delicious when it's made by Magalie. Perhaps it's that slow smile that grows in her when she stirs it. Or perhaps it's the wish she adds after observing what each patron most needs: May you realize your own freedom. May you love your life and seize it with both hands. May all your most wonderful dreams come true. 

But it's Magalie's worst nightmare, not her most wonderful dream, when Phillipe Lyonnais, Paris's Prince des Pâtissieres, decides to open a branch of his world-renowned pastry shop just down the street from La Maison des Sorcières. Despite her aunt's matchmaking schemes, Magalie is certain that "in the whole history of the known world, there had been no mention of a romantic attachment between a prince and a witch. Lots of battles, yes, lots of arrogant royals reduced to toads, but not much love lost." The fame of Lyonnais is certain to put her aunts' tiny tea-shop out of business, and Magalie, plagued by a perpetually peripatetic childhood, yet again out of a place to call her own.

When Magalie sets off to beard the lion in his den, to ask him to open his new shop elsewhere, Phillipe's arrogant confidence and unrecognized privilege (not to mention her own attraction to him) annoy her to the point of rage. She's no beggar, here to ask the lofty prince for a boon. Her cold, ego-puncturing remarks catch Phillipe's attention, but it's not until she refuses his peace offering—one of his own, hand-made macarons ("His Désir. Apricot kissed by pistachio, with the secret little square of pistachio praline hidden inside, like a G-spot")—that he realizes there's something different about this prickly young woman, something that for the first time in a long time fills him with dissatisfaction. He'd "been having a good day," Phillipe thinks, "until he got cursed by a witch."

In his turn, Phillipe refuses Magalie's offering of a cup of her chocolat chaud during the grand opening of his new shop, and the battle lines are drawn. Phillipe devises ever more delectable combinations of macaron ingredients, hoping to overwhelm Magalie's palate; Magalie adds wishes to her patrons' chocolat chaud, all of which, infuriatingly, seem to send them scurrying to the new Lyonnais shop down the street. Who will give in first? Magalie, who knows that a susceptibility to princes has led to many a fine woman's downfall, and refuses to accept the role of helpless princess? Philippe, whose "superiority complex" is so great that he chooses the site of his new shop as "a polite gesture," so "he could make it easier for weekend tourists and not force them to choose between himself and Notre-Dame"?

Is Magalie witch or princess? Is Philippe prince or beast? Can Rapunzel invite the prince into her tower without ceding him herself? Or with both of them starving, will the beast consume her whole?

Asking, not demanding; choosing, not being forced; trusting, not just the one you love, but above all yourself: these are the ingredients for a lasting, and feminist, love, Florand's novel argues, a love that doesn't diminish, but makes you ten times bigger, ten times more powerful. And one that satisfies the deepest hungers we'll ever know.





Photo/Illustration credits:
• Chocolat chaud: My French Country Home
• Macarons: Ladurée
• "She filled her home...": Bethany Barton, The Honesty Revolution

 ARC courtesy of netgalley

Laura Florand, The Chocolate Kiss. Kensington, December 2012.

Next time on RNFF:

Talking about sex in romance

Free to Be... A Feminist

I was musing the other day, wondering when it was that I first became a feminist. It must have been in college, I guessed, after first taking a course in Women's Studies and being introduced to the central ideas of the second wave feminist movement. But my memory is remarkably bad, something brought home to me yet again after reading these great posts by Dan Kois on Slate about the 40th anniversary of the making of the record album Free to Be... You and Me, which was first released in November 1972. Marlo Thomas and the myriad talented authors, songwriters, actors, and musicians that she recruited to create this groundbreaking album never used the word "feminist" in any of the songs or skits on the record. Yet the examples they set before these (at the time) seven-year-old ears clearly had a lasting effect, allowing me not just to dream of a world where I could "be almost anything [I] want to be," but to take it for granted that such a world would exist when I became a grown-up. Yes, I first became a feminist not in college, but after listening to "Parents Are People," "My Dog is a Plumber," "The Sun and the Moon," and all the other stories, poems, and songs on Free to Be...

The record album is long gone (did one of my younger sisters score it during one of the many "please move your stuff out of our house, we're not your offsite storage" kicks my parents went through over the years?). But I still have a copy of the book, originally published in March of 1974 as an expanded companion volume to the album. Interestingly, the copyright page of my edition reads "Bantam edition/December 1987," dating not from my childhood but from the months right after I graduated from college. Was it a nostalgic purchase, a last glance back at childhood before I moved definitively into the working world of grown-up-ness? Or was it simply a recognition of my roots as a feminist?

Given that the Free to Be project aimed, in the words of one of its co-creators, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, to "dispel myths that distort reality—like pretty-equals-good, and all-mothers-stay-in-the-kitchen, and big-boys-don't cry," to "challenge stereotypes that have imprisoned children's imaginations [and] stunted their emotional development," it's hardly surprising that romance stories are hardly to be found amongst the album's track or the book's pages (12). Yet the story that first comes to mind when I think back to Free to Be... is a romance, at least a romance of sorts: Betty Miles' retelling of the Greek myth of Atalanta.

Second-wave feminists began arguing that folk and fairy tales socialized young children into patriarchal ideology around the same time that Marlo Thomas was putting together the original Free to Be... album. Marcia Lieberman's " 'Some Day My Prince Will Come': Female Acculturation Through the Fairy Tale" (College English 1972) first took issue with the sexism in many familiar fairy tales, and many feminists debated the role such stories should play in childrearing throughout the 1970s and 80s. Some wished to toss out folklore and its outdated sex roles altogether, sex roles that taught girls that beauty and passivity were the highest feminine virtues. Others, arguing for the psychological importance of this literature, decided instead to collect relatively unfamiliar tales that featured stronger, more active female characters (for example, Rosemary Minard's 1975 Womenfolk and Fairy Tales). Still others chose to rewrite the "classic" tales in ways that challenged conventional views of gender socialization and sex roles (Jay Williams' The Practical Princess, published in 1969, and Jack Zipes' 1986 collection, Don't Bet on the Prince).

Hippomenes and Atalanta at the Louvre

Betty Miles proved herself at the forefront of this trend with her retelling of the story of Atalanta for the original Free to Be... album. In the Greek myth, Atalanta, who has taken a vow of chastity in the name of the huntress goddess Artemis, has no wish to marry. After her father pressures her to do so, she agrees, but with one condition: she will only marry a man who can best her in a footrace. Many men try, and many men lose, forfeiting not only Atalanta, but their own lives. Until one young man, Hippomenes, calls on Aphrodite for aid. The goddess of love gives Hippomenes golden apples, which he throws at Atalanta's feet each time she pulls ahead of him during their race. Distracted by the irresistible apples, Atalanta veers off course to retrieve them, ultimately allowing Hippomenes to win the race and her hand in marriage.

The opening of Betty Miles' version of the story tells a similar tale, with small but telling tweaks. Atalanta is desired not for her looks, or for her bloodlines, but because she is "so bright, and so clever, and could build things and fix things so wonderfully" (128). Atalanta's father, a king, is constructed not as simply domineering, but rather as "a very ordinary king; that is, he was powerful and used to having his own way"(128). It is the father, not Atalanta, who comes up with the idea of the footrace, choosing it not only because of his daughter's resistance to marriage, but also because of his own inability to decide who will be the best suitor. In these opening paragraphs, it is not the king, but Atalanta who strikes the reader as the competent and confident participant in this joust over marital prospects.

As the story progresses, Miles makes even larger changes to Atalanta's story. First she re-imagine its hero. It is not Hippomenes, who claims the blood of Poisedon, but the far more prosaic "Young John, who lived in the town" who proves to be Atalanta's chief competitor. While Hippomenes desires Atalanta at first sight, the highly enlightened Young John wishes to meet the princess after seeing her "day by day as she bought nails and wood to make a pigeon house, or choose parts for her telescope, or laughed with her friends" (131). And while Hippomenes does not question the wisdom of winning a mate via footrace, Young John believes it "not right for Atalanta's father to give her away to the winner of the race. Atalanta herself must choose the person she wants to marry, or whether she wishes to marry at all" (131). He races not to win her hand in marriage, but rather for the chance to talk with her, to get to know her, to ask the bright, clever girl if she will be his friend. (On the album, both the patriarchal King and the feminist  Young John were voiced by Alan Alda, suggesting not just difference, but continuity between the two characters. A hopeful sign that the conventional view could easily be transformed into the progressive? Or an ironic warning that Young John might all too easily slip back into the role of dominating patriarch?)

Illustration by Barbara Bascove from Free to Be... You and Me

Miles also rewrites the outcome of Atalanta's footrace. It is not through the intervention of a goddess that John becomes the victor, but instead through his own hard work, running every night after his studies are finished. And Atalanta is not distracted by gaudy fruit, nor is she defeated. For she, too, has practiced every day until she, just like John, "could run the course more quickly than anyone had ever run it before" (131). Instead, John "ran as her equal, side by side with her" until "smiling with the pleasure of the race, Atalanta and Young John reached the finish line together" (135). The memory of Marlo Thomas' and Alan Alda's voices, joined in joyful celebration of their characters' mutual triumph, rings with pleasure in my head to this day.

Miles ends her story not with a wedding, but with adventure. After the two spend the day together, sharing their ideas and interests, each leaves home: "John sailed off to discover new lands. And Atalanta set off to visit the great cities" (135).

Yet the possibility of marriage, of a romantic relationship that develops out of shared admiration and shared interests, remains temptingly open between these two friends: "Perhaps some day they will be married, and perhaps they will not," the narrator teases. The openness of that ending offers young listeners, and young readers, the opportunity to envision either possibility, without insisting they choose one or the other. The story ends by assuring us that no matter which we chose, Atalanta and John would both be "living happily ever after." A feminist fairy tale conclusion indeed.


Do you have any Free to Be... memories? And can you remember when you first considered yourself a feminist?



Photo/illustration credits:
Atalanta and Hippomenes statues: Oregon Live

Next time on RNFF:

Subverting romance conventions in Eloisa James' Your Wicked Ways