Dancing in worn slippers: narration, affect, and subversion in Jeanette Winterson's "Story of the Twelve Dancing Princesses"

The fairy tale has been a popular subject for contemporary revision from the 'Fractured Fairytales' of the 1960s television children's cartoon Rocky and Bullwinkle to Disney musicals and James Finn Gamer's Politically Correct Bedtime Stories. Due to its perceived significance within patriarchal western culture, the European fairy tale has been of especial interest to feminists. Attempts to rewrite classic French and German fairy tales in order to highlight and/or subvert their implicit messages about gender roles appeared in Jack Zipes' ground-breaking 1986 collection of creative and critical responses to the fairy tale, Don't Bet on the Prince: Contemporary Feminist/Fairy Tales in North America and England. Angela Carter's 1979 volume of rewritten tales, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, has been a particular focus of critical attention: Carter's often shocking revisions of well-known French and German fairy tales radically reimagine female sexuality and agency through a repositioning of the female protagonist, especially, though not always, as narrator. Elsewhere I have discussed the linguistic strategies by which Carter evokes sensory as well as emotional, and thereby intellectual, responses. In this essay I continue this analysis of feminist evocations of affect: I examine how another English postmodernist writer, novelist Jeanette Winterson, in Sexing the Cherry (1989) extends the feminist critique of the patriarchal fairy tale displayed in Zipes' and Carter's volumes through the deployment of narrative voice in her "Story of the Twelve Dancing Princesses," an ending-after-the-ending of the German fairy tale "The Twelve Dancing Princesses.