Breaking his Spell: Rewriting the Mythic Female Body in Intan Paramaditha’s Apple and Knife

Gema Charmaine Gonzales

doi:10.22452/sare.vol57no1.7

Abstract

Numerous are the patrilineal mythic narratives that institutionalize unidimensional representations of women, portraying female bodies either as repositories of submission and passivity or as cesspools of chaos and corruption. Through insidious reproduction, such myths cast a discursive spell that dispossesses women of their subjectivity and agency. To break this curse and regain their voice, feminist authors have undertaken the task of rewriting old myths in ways that speak to current local problematiques. Intan Paramaditha’s collection of stories, Apple and Knife (2018), is exemplary of this mission: in her speculative quill, fairy tales become reports of female body policing, vampires are symbolic of non-normative roles and a menstruation-eating monster is a counter-metaphor to misogynist scatological taboos. With a framework informed by feminist and postmodernist studies, this article explores the stylistic modes of corporeal writing in revisionist mythmaking. How are female bodies recast in revised myths in the interest of subverting standards of femininity? How does speculative fiction serve as an effective instrument in celebrating bodies symptomatically silenced in “original” texts? By fostering a dialogue between corporeal writing and revisionist speculative fiction, this paper examines how the female body may be reimagined outside what is deemed singular, natural, or authentic, both in terms of genre and gender.

Highlights

To veer away from the pitfall of relegating the question of myth as belonging to a distant anteriority or worse as situated solely on the fabled or non-material plane, it seems necessary to begin by pointing out how discursive conceptualizations of a normative female imaginary provoke bouts of gender-based violence that are very much real and present
In an attempt to challenge unidimensional representations of femininity that prompt violence against women, feminist authors of the twenty-first century have undertaken the task of recasting ancient myths as alternative herstories that expose plural female subjectivities
A lecturer of Film Studies at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia, Paramaditha has engaged in questions of gender, female resistance, and literature as activism in the local cinematic context

Summary

Introduction

To veer away from the pitfall of relegating the question of myth as belonging to a distant anteriority or worse as situated solely on the fabled or non-material plane, it seems necessary to begin by pointing out how discursive conceptualizations of a normative female imaginary provoke bouts of gender-based violence that are very much real and present. The four short stories analyzed expose several deconstruction strategies in revisionist mythmaking, such as inversion, poetics of duplicity, and representations of the excess These texts re-envision the destructive images of mythic female characterization: the evil hag in “Scream in a Bottle” and “Blood”, the good-girl heroine in “Vampire”, and the sadist queen in “Beauty and the Seventh Dwarf”. The witch’s implication in death is revoked by her act of preserving life, and the stock witch-as-villain trope is recast into a narrative about a misjudged heroine Through this revisionist strategy, the short story brings into focus the voicelessness of female mythic characters who do not correspond to gendered status quo, while at the same time rooting out the source of this correspondence in mythic characters’ portrayal as repositories of “truth”. Reinscribing menstrual discourse within a new value system, this revision takes part in menstrual activism, the taboo of cannibalism negates the taboo of menstruation, and succeeds in upsetting the stigmatization of the female body in its excess

Conclusion

Works Cited