Re-visionary fantasies: Feminism, fairy tales, and myth

In the past thirty years feminist revisions of fairy tales and myths have proliferated wildly. Two common tropes, the mother-daughter relationship that is at the center of such tales as Snow White and the myth of Persephone and Demeter, and the magic mirror that drives such stories as Snow White and The Snow Queen, hold the key to theorizing the process of revision and the mode of fantasy itself. A theory of revision based on psychoanalytic theories of mother-daughter relationships and their centrality to feminine subjectivity suggests that we think of originary tales and their revisions as mother-stories and daughter-stories, while an understanding of the mode of fantasy based on the trope of the magic mirror explores the importance of doubling in this field. In the first half of my dissertation, I examine the mother-daughter relationship in revisions of fairy tales and classical myth. Feminist revisers of those tales often seek to recover the mother-daughter relationship from patriarchal devaluation and marginalization. Not only is the reclamation of the mother-daughter relationship a key component in feminist revisions, but that within the texts it is explicitly linked to the process of revision itself. Revision enacts between texts the permeable boundaries, shared identity, and fluid sense of self characteristic of the mother-daughter matrix. Insofar as a revision both requires and embodies its older version, the revision does not destroy its mother-story, but instead recreates and prolongs its life. In the second half of this project, I turn to the trope of the magic mirror and its relationship to fantasy. Mirrors have long been associated with female knowledge and power, and mirrors can be fruitfully used to think about how the fantastic represents and responds to everyday experience, demonstrating that especially within this genre, the text itself is often figured as a mirror; these texts identify mirrors with fantasy literature, and specifically with feminine power, the centrality of the magic mirror in these fantastic narratives allows the doubled, divided, or multiplied self that reflects women\u27s psychological experiences to be fully portrayed