Kate Bernheimer - Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Women Writers Explore Their Favorite Fairy Tales

ALICE ADAMS
The Three Bears and Little Red Riding Hood in the Coffin House

I was drawn to both Little Red Riding Hood and Goldilocks and the Three Bears as fantasies of escape, and, curiously, when recently I began to think of them again, I could not remember how either of them endeduntil I asked my son, who set me straight.

JULIA ALVAREZ
An Autobiography of Scheherazade

Once upon a time, I lived in another country and in another language under a cruel dictatorship which my father was plotting to overthrow. This is not a made-up story, this is not a fairy tale. This is the autobiography of my childhood in the Dominican Republic under the dictatorship of El Jefe.

MARGARET ATWOOD
Of Souls as Birds

I was not a well-brought-up little girl of the fifties. I had been born in 1939, just after the outbreak of the Second World War, and there was no hope then of sweeping the darker emotions under the rug. There they were on the world stage, displayed for all to see: fear, hatred, cruelty, blood and slaughter. A few fairy tale hanged corpses and chopped-off heads were, by comparison, nothing to get squeamish about.

ANN BEATTIE
John, Whose Disappearance Was Too Bad

As a culture, we are fairly preoccupied with sleep. In spite of the medias insistence to the contrary, I maintain that we dont really wonder, very often, whos having lots of sex; we wonder, more often, who might be getting lots of sleep. In our exhaustion, we emphatically do not wish for Prince Charming to come. If he isnt already in bed with us, to hell with him.

ROSELLEN BROWN
It Is You the Fable Is About

And then there was The Little Mermaid, far more complex but equally brutal andI was nothing if not consistenta painful story redeemed (I see now) by another noble ending which I didnt remember because its fake good cheer never registered on me. There is a view poetry should improve your life, the poet John Ashbery once said. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.

A. S. BYATT
Ice, Snow, Glass

Science and reason are bad, kindness is good. It is a frequent but not a necessary opposition. And I found in it, and in the dangerous isolation of the girl on her slippery shiny height a figure of what was beginning to bother me, the conflict between a female destiny, the kiss, the marriage, the childbearing, the death, and the frightening loneliness of cleverness, the cold distance of seeing the world through art, of putting a frame around things.

KATHRYN DAVIS
Why I Dont Like Reading Fairy Tales

A dancer inside a castle inside a book inside a bookcase inside a cupboard inside a castle-studded landscape: how deftly the Nordic Paper Industry managed to convey the terror I knew lurked at the heart of the Christian message. Your tenure on this earth, where you might actually prefer to stay (despite its perils, the perverse machinery of cause and effect embodied in snuffbox goblins and gumdrop poodles), would be finite, yet once you died youd have no choice but to go on forever and ever.

CHITRA BANERJEE DIVAKARUNI
The Princess in the Palace of Snakes

The Princess lives in an underwater palace filled with snakes. We do not know who she is, or how she came there. Do not feel sorry for her. She is happy enough. The snakes are not horrid and play with her and sing her to sleep. She has never left the palace, has never wanted to. As you might guess, there is in the story a prince. And his friend, the ministers son.

DEBORAH EISENBERG
In a Trance of Self

Any child who considers herself a candidate for expulsion from the human race is certain to tremble reading about Kay. And though I was brought up in a largely secular, Jewish home, and, as I remember, was always in some way aware that according to any strict interpretation of The Snow Queen I was out of luck, I always longed to reach the moment in the story of Gerdas tears, when Kay would be returned to himself.

MARIA FLOOK
The Rope Bridge to Sex

I recognized how many instances these fairy tales addressed situations like mine. In order for girl children to survive their sexual maturation, they would have to escape from their malevolent matriarchs. My sister Karen had disappeared. From what poison apple had she sampled? What spell had been cast upon her?

PATRICIA FOSTER
Little Red Cap

His eyes move over me with the same entranced gaze as if were magnets, attracted by an inexplicable force. The intimacy is eerie, almost unbearable. I know he has something important to show me, something that will change me, making me indifferent to trees and sky and heat. But to my surprise, he whips out a mirror. See a monkey see a monkey see a monkey, he whispers, thrusting the mirror up close to my face.

VIVIAN GORNICK
Taking a Long Hard Look at The Princess and the Pea

The elusive right man became our obsessive preoccupation. Not finding him was the defining experience. It is the same with the princess on the pea. Shes not after the prince, shes after the pea.

LUCY GREALY
Girl

I hated fairy tales as a child because they had nothing to do with reality. Not because they spoke of goblins and elves and giants, not because of such obvious unreality. It had more to do with their neatly packaged morals. Mostly, I hated the notion that you got what you deserved. As I understood life, you rarely got what you deserved, and if you did, youd better start looking over your shoulder.

BELL HOOKS
To Love Justice

Fairy tales sanctioned all that was taboo in the family. Fantasy was often seen by Christian folks as dangerous, as potentially Satanic. My love of fairy tales was accepted as long as it was not much talked about. I liked to lie in a dark room and daydream my favorite stories, making self the center of the drama.