Doubling and Multiplying the Self/Story in Catherynne M. Valente's The Ice Puzzle: Readers, Writers, and the Best of All Girls

Abstract

After I presented a paper at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts some years ago, I was asked the following question: Is there a difference between the doubled self and the multiplied self? I was giving a paper on the doubled and multiplied self in two unusual fairy-tale revisions, Kelly Link's Girl Detective and Catherynne M. Valente's The Ice Puzzle. Link's short story is a reworking of, among other narratives, Twelve Dancing Princesses, a fairy tale about twelve princesses who, despite being locked in their bedroom by their father ever)? night, manage to dance their shoes to pieces. Valente's online novel1 is a reworking of, among other narratives, Hans Christian Andersen's Snow a fairy tale uncharacteristic for Andersen in that its protagonist, Gerda, is not tortured terribly, despite being a little girl. Gerda sets out on a quest to rescue her best friend, Kay, from the clutches of the evil Snow Queen, who holds him hostage as he tries to complete a puzzle made of ice; doing so would win him his freedom and a new pair of skates.In my answer to the question at the conference, I noted that both Girl Detective and The Ice Puzzle celebrate the multiplicity of many of their characters, seemingly in opposition to Sigmund Freud's notion of the doppelganger as essentially uncanny and threatening, and I posited that this difference is in some way gendered, as well as genred-that in feminist fantastic discourse the double was a figure to be welcomed and admired rather than feared and/or destroyed (destroying oneself in the process, of course). After moderating the panel, Cristina Bacchilega asked the question that generated this expansion: Is the multiplied self different from the doubled self? Of course, as Bacchilega must have known, the answer is yes. There is a significant difference between the representations of the doubled self and the multiplied self in these radically experimental texts.This is a difference I neglected to address in my book on fairy-tale revisions, Fair)s Tales, Myth, and Psychoanalytic Theory: Feminism and Retelling the Tale. There I engaged with the phenomenon of doubling for female characters and in feminist theory regarding feminine subjectivity, particularly as it involves mothers and daughters. During a brief consideration of doubling outside that dyad, I discussed Link's Girl Detective and the joy associated with the multiple possible selves of the protagonist and the twelve dancing bank robbers without realizing that they represented a significantly different dynamic from that of the simple double. I failed to realize this difference even though most of the doubles I studied represented danger and menace to their protagonists, often in the form of a competitor, whereas Link's multiple selves told quite a different story.In Valente's startlingly beautiful online novel The Ice Puzzle, Hans Christian Andersen's Snow is refracted and transmuted into a variety of settings. None of these shards recreates the original plot of the fairy tale, but each one tells a tale that, by overlaying Snow suggests not only kinship but also a path not taken by the various tales. The story is doubled and multiplied, often in the most elliptical, poetic ways. The novel is conceived of as a puzzle itself, and with each chapter termed a shard, the implication is that something-Andersen's original story?-has been shattered.Consider a shattered mirror and its refractions; each shard shows its own reflection, creating a kaleidoscopic effect. However, the shards are associated with the shards that make up the Snow Queen's shattered mirror of ice, part of which is the ice puzzle that a little girl is trying to solve in one of the novel's through-lines. In each chapter or shard, certain words are surrounded by a pattern of broken glass. The reader pieces these together at the end of the book-they fall into the shape of a broken mirror-which puts the reader in the position of the child, and thus of the Snow Queen herself, because we find at the end of the novel that, when the girl successfully completes the puzzle, she becomes the new Snow Queen. …