Fearless Girls, Wise Women & Beloved Sisters
Kathleen Ragan
W.W. Norton & Company
New York 1998.
THE FEMALE HERO AND THE WOMEN WHO WAIT
Jane Yolen
Hero is a masculine noun. It means an illustrious warrior, a man admired for his achievements and qualities, the central male figure in a great epic or drama. A heroine, on the other hand, is the female equivalent. Or is she really his equal in the epic? We might as well have called her a hero-ess or a hero-ette, some kind of diminutive subset of real heroes. The heroine is the one who carries spears but does not hurl them. The one who dresses well but does not dirty her nails in the fight. The one who lies down in a glass casket, until revived by an awakening kiss.
Or so the Victorian folk tale anthologists would have had us believe. They regularly subverted and subsumed the stories that starred strong and illustrious female heroes, promoting instead those stories that showed women as weak or witless or, at the very best, waiting prettily and with infinite patience to be rescued. And the bowdlerizers did it for all the very best of reasons—for the edification and moral education of their presumed audiences.
A hundred years later, the same thing happened. Walt Disney, with his groundbreaking fairy tale films, re-emphasized the helpless, hapless heroine, who, he posited, has to be rescued by mice, birds, rabbits, deer, and other assorted cute fauna, or by a bunch of half-men, or dwarfs. As Jack Zipes wrote in Fairy Tale As Myth, Myth As Fairy Tale: "The young women are like helpless ornaments in need of protection, and when it comes to the action of the (Disney) film, they are omitted." So powerful are the Disney retellings that the diminution of the folk tale heroine was complete. We, the reading and viewing public, then accepted whole cloth that in folklore, as in life, everyone but the heroine is a capable being.
Was this life reflecting art or art reflecting life? As story lovers we conveniently forgot the ancient tales of Diana of the hunt, or Atalanta the strongest mover in the kingdom, or the inordinate wrath of the mother goddess Ceres, or the powerful female warriors known as Amazons, or the thousand and one other stories with a heroic female at the core. We accepted the revisionist Cinderella, patient and pathetic, forgetting how, in over five hundred European variants alone, she had made her way through a morass of petty politics or run away from an abusive father to win a share of a kingdom on her own. We let the woodsman save Little Red Riding Hood when earlier versions had already shown her and her grandmother the tidy capable actors in the drama.
In book after book, film after film, we edited, revised, redacted, and destroyed the strength of our female heroes, substituting instead a kind of perfect pink-and-white passivity. Why? I do not know. I grew up in the forties and fifties, and that kind of cheery, behind-the-active-scenes and sleeping beauty was the acceptable female mode then. Women strived for a dimity divinity. The fairy tale books reflected it, encouraged it, set it out as the norm.
However, in the past twenty-five years there has been a re-evaluation of the female hero in folklore. Perceptive anthologists have begun to resurrect the female hero, showing us some of the riches that are still in the storehouses of folklore, unremarked but quite remarkable. They have uncovered stories of the most admirable women heroes, young and old, who have been strong actors in their own epic narratives. Marina Warner calls such rescue work "snatching (the stories) out of the jaws of misogyny itself." And we are all-women and men-inheritors of this wealth, so long hidden from us.