Once a upon a time I shuddered at feminist readings of
texts. I thought they were written by angry, bitter women who needed to grow
up. I thought Feminist Academics were stuck in a world so far removed from the
every day, from my life, that they had nothing to say to me. I wanted to get
married. I wanted to have the opportunity to be a mother, and how dare they, the Feminists, make me feel less
than other women, less than what I could be, essentially, how dare they make me
feel other, for not wanting what they
wanted...
Today, however many years later, I sat down with the year 7
girl I tutor and we turned to her English exercises and began to talk about
genre, about the difference between the plot and themes, and then how these
things related to fairytales. For example, I said, why don’t we think about
Cinderella. What is the story, what happens? She gave a fairly comprehensive
run down of the girl who is made to do the cleaning, her ugly step sisters, the
ball, the fairy godmother, the pumpkin, the glass slippers, the prince, the
shoe fitting.
Ok great, I said. Now, what do you think the themes of this
story might be? She thought on it for a minute, and then I kid you not,
straight as anything, without a trace of irony, reluctance or bitterness,
because she is 12, she said, be good, work hard, get married. Yes, I said, yes,
that is absolutely a theme of this fairy tale. And now that we have established
a theme, or perhaps even a moral, we can take the time to think about it and
decide for ourselves if we agree with the theme, because sometimes we will
agree and sometimes we won’t. I left it there. She has to make up her mind.
Liberty to think is hugely important.
Now, don’t get me wrong. If twelve year old girls dream of
marrying princes, good on them. They have every right to do so, we all did,
didn’t we? And I don’t, for a minute, want to tell her not to work hard. In the
twitter feed of my mind, I was hashtagging, protestantworkethic (this is another
concept which made me very angry in first year uni, because as a protestant, I
kept thinking, working hard has nothing to do with being protestant. Oh, how
little I knew of my own heritage). What shocked me was that it took a girl
saying these things to me for every revolutionary instinct inside of me to beat against
my brain, asking for permission to rant
- I didn’t, that isn’t my job – and for me to finally realise that not only
were the feminist academics right, not only was meta narrative everywhere, and
oh my it is so, so, so pervasive and persuasive, so subtly shaping us as so
that we accept story as truth, but – and this was the scary part – somewhere,
somehow, I had fallen a sleep a poor girl consumed with longing, obsessed with lack (oh God, Freud, how did that
happen?), and woken up as a feminist having to tone down what I really
think about fairytales, feeling like I was subversive. And I am really not all
that subversive. I’m a good girl, the glass slipper fits me, doesn’t it?
I have to admit that during the course of my twenties I
changed my mind. I stopped caring about getting married. I stopped craving
motherhood. Because longing for things I didn’t have made me deeply unhappy,
not only did I have nothing, I was nothing. But everyday I’m learning to choose
that I can be something. So girls, let us take a moment to remember Cinderella.
She started with nothing and ended with everything. Work hard, be good, and
what do you know, you get everything. Or at least you get a prince, which is
kind of the same thing. Or alternatively, wake up, and joyfully realise the
slipper doesn’t fit.
