Abstract
Storytelling makes people thrive – men, women, sultans, peasants. When I was a child and highly inquisitive, fairy tales fed my curiosity; they seemed to offer the possibility of change, of magical transformation, beyond the boundaries of their improbable plots and implausible ‘happy ever afters’. Beyond their fantastically illustrated pages, where wolves threatened denouement and old crones plotted gruesome ends, these stories promised metamorphoses, not only in the world betwixt and between the pages, but in this world. And this instability of appearances, these sudden swerves of destiny, created the first sustaining excitement of experiencing such stories. Like romance, or adventure stories, to which fairy tales bear a strong affinity, they told me I could remake my world in the image of desire. These stories informed my childhood ideas of what it is to exist in the world – as a girl, and within nature. And while I was weaned on traditional fairy tales in book form, when I cast my mind back to these stories it is the images of Disney that swirl through my mind. With its musical scores that soared and swelled, these films transported me into magical places where evil is always recognisable and good takes the form of a dependable male hero.
However, fairy tales have long been known as heteronormative and patriarchal narratives that perpetuate gender stereotypes and limit possibilities for interruptions to assumptions around gender roles (Naraharisetty, 2018: n.p) and as such, patriarchal directives within fairy tales delimits girls and womens’ identity options. Further, these patriarchal narratives extend to the natural world where nature is presented as an ‘Other’, ‘[wherein] the proliferation of … fairy tales is correlated to a growing awareness of human separation from the wild and natural world’ (Bernheimer, 2009: xix). In traditional tales, domination of nature is illustrated as a means to achieve a sense of safety in those spaces not under direct human control (Wood, 2011: ii). In silencing these entities, limiting possibilities of agency, both women and nature are controlled by the dominant societal force.