104 TARA STILLIONS WHITEHEAD The Mother Must Die and Other Lies Fairy Tales Told Me • aving lost my own mother to addiction and institutions during late childhood, I wanted so much to believe that I was being watched over by her. And when I gave birth to my own daughter, the monomanias and depressions, the obsession with and romanticizing of my own immortality or death, enacted a daily terror. What if Cinderella’s mother’s last words to her daughter were not so impotent as “remain pious and good”? What if she had confessed that “you don’t have to be a rich man’s wife” and then, in lieu of crossing herself , slipped her beloved jellybean the key to a safe deposit box? Listen: I’ve thought a lot about Cinderella and her abjection: a bedless child assaulted in her own home by strange women, ghosted by a rich father, left sheltered like a pretty corpse at her mother’s grave. She is dealt an ugly hand. But not an unfamiliar one as far as fairy-tale daughters are concerned. Cinderella’s lack of agency, though? Maddening. Learned helplessness ! And not to salt the wound, but those ubiquitous adaptations of her life and the lives of other motherless fairy-tale gals! In constant retellings , the daughters are helpless and the mothers to blame—unless they are dead, and even then, they are problems. In waltz the replacements: stepmothers, witches, evil queens. Out with the old! This is the legacy of fairy-tale mothering. It is a mother’s destiny to self-destruct, her curse on the daughter. ‘ When the “mother” of confessional poetry1 writes a collection of reimagined fairy tales, it’s not surprising to see reinvented mother 1. Robert L. Phillips deemed Anne Sexton both the “mother” and “high priestess of the confessional school” in his 1973 book The Confessional Poets. h 105 archetypes at the forefront. Anne Sexton penned four books prior to Transformations (1971), and fairy-tale conventions, particularly those related to mother-daughter relationships, appear in those earlier poems, too. “There are some stories that are long and thin,” Sexton writes. “They should be. There’s a reason for it. I don’t decide this. The story writes itself and must find its right form.”2 She found her truest form in fairy tales. ‘ I don’t know why it blew my mind to discover Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s diagram of “Cinderella ” included in the foreword to Anne Sexton’s Transformations. I’d been teaching his “Shapes of Stories ” for about seven years and finding more and more relevance in their representations in the busy machines of modern media. And then I came across his foreword in Sexton’s book, which is nearing its 50th birthday, and the writer inside of me went, as my seven-year-old daughter calls it, “banana bonkers.” I find immeasurable rhetorical value in Vonnegut’s visualizations—how brilliantly they reveal fantasy’s idealism, shaping and shattering expectations. As a writer who is also a mother of two young children, I’m keenly aware of stories as instructors, interpreters, and models (realistic and unrealistic) of the human condition. I’ve become obsessively pre occupied with fairy tales. They are powerful resources and can alleviate 2. Patricia Marx, “Interview with Anne Sexton.” The Hudson Review. Vol. 18, No. 4 (Winter, 1965– 1966), p. 567. “Diagram of Cinderella,” from Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s University of Chicago rejected master’s thesis: “The Fluctuations Between Good and Evil in Simple Tasks.” 106 some of my mothering3 if I let them. I am fascinated that “Cinderella” has been transformed into so many normalized, instructional, believable narrative arcs—marketed to the hilt—both an outrage and gift to us mothers. Vonnegut chides fairy tales with his felt-tip pen. Or does he revere them? Sexton rebukes normalization with her irreverent transformations . She rebukes everything! In his foreword, Vonnegut describes Sexton’s poetry as doing him a “favor”: “[S]he domesticates my terror, examines it and describes it, teaches it some tricks which will amuse me, then lets it gallop wild in my forest once more.” Vonnegut’s terror was the dehumanization of the modern world, and...
Read full abstract
Nov 11, 2024
Claudiu Coman + 7
Just Published
Open Access