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Not Simple, Not Pure: Revisioning of
Mythical Wicked Women in the Stories of
Sara Maitland
Anna Fisk
Published online: 09 Mar 2011.
To cite this article: Anna Fisk (2011) Not Simple, Not Pure: Revisioning of Mythical Wicked Women in the
Stories of Sara Maitland, Women: A Cultural Review, 22:1, 15-28, DOI: 10.1080/09574042.2011.542364
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Not Simple, Not
Pure: Revisioning of
Mythical Wicked
Women in the Stories
of Sara Maitland
Wicked Women
The British novelist, feminist and religious thinker Sara Maitland
(b. 1950) is renowned for her short stories, many of which involve the
rewriting of fairy tales and classical and biblical myths. Her retelling
of old tales is distinguished by a deep*and often discomforting*
engagement with questions of morality. This is rooted in Maitlands
political commitment and Christian faith, and is particularly evident in
her treatment of mythical female evil.
Many of the most terrifying and depraved figures in the foundational
stories of western culture are female: stepmothers and witches in fairy
tales; gorgons and child killers in classical myth. In the Bible, women are
often portrayed as temptresses who lead others to their downfall.
Feminist criticism of mythical wicked women has highlighted and
attempted to redress these cultural constructions of wicked women
with interpretations and revisions of the tales that portray the wicked
woman as an unconventional heroine who has been misrepresented
through the years, labelled evil because she resists the status quo of
patriarchal society. Any blame is passed on to male figures and the
patriarchy that undergirds their position. Another revisionist strategy is
to present the wicked woman as a symbol of female rage and revenge that
w
A N N A F I S K
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Women: a cultural review Vol. 22. No. 1.
ISSN 0957-4042 print/ISSN 1470-1367 online # 2011 Taylor & Francis
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/09574042.2011.542364
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goes beyond human choices and actions, or a person with human
characteristics, but utterly cynical and devoid of conscience. This type of
wicked woman may be darkly comic: the humour points out the limits
and hypocrisy of banal morality.
However, the above forms of revisioning may sometimes represent an
attempt to exorcise from the feminist literary canon any images of
women that do not show them in a particularly flattering light. As Susan
Sellers argues: we need to free ourselves from the myths that debilitate
women, but we also need to retain the challenges and revelations myths
enfold (2001: 136). This theme is explored in Maitlands story The
Wicked Stepmothers Lament, in which the narrator says:
Theres this thing going on at the moment where women tell all the
old stories again and turn them inside-out and back-to-front*so the
characters you always thought were the goodies turn out to be
the baddies, and vice-versa, and a whole lot of guilt is laid to rest: or at
least that is the theory. Im not sure myself if the guilt isnt just passed
on to the next person (Maitland 1987: 1478).
In Maitlands many retellings of wicked women*from fairy tales,
classical myths and biblical narratives*the guilt is not simply passed
on to the next person: her short stories take a morally ambiguous
approach, paying attention to the moral and psychological complexities of
the tales. Maitlands feminist revisioning of mythical wicked women does
not flinch from their darkness, or impose simple ethical lessons, but at the
same time she is (sometimes horribly) aware of their moral significance.
Feminist Revisioning of Fairy Tale, Myth and Bible
Maitlands work is situated within the tradition of feminist revisioning,
itself part of the wider literary tradition of appropriating and adapt-
ing ancient stories and images. Feminist revisioning has a particular
purpose, famously defined by Adrienne Rich as the act of looking back,
of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical
direction in order not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over
us (1975: 91). In Maitlands British context, contemporary women
writers who have adopted revisionist strategies include Angela Carter,
Marina Warner, Emma Tennant, Miche` le Roberts, Alice Thomas Ellis,
Jeanette Winterson, A.S. Byatt, Tanith Lee, Carol Ann Duffy, Kathleen
Jamie, Liz Lochhead, Jackie Kay and Michelene Wandor.
While feminist revisioning extends to all aspects of cultural discourse
(with Victorian literature another ground that has proved fertile for
16 WOMEN: A CULTURAL REVIEW
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contemporary appropriation), it is arguable that the Bible, myths and
fairy tales have been a major focus for re-imagining because they represent
and encode a cultures values in a more direct way than more complex
and literary texts (Gilbert and Gubar 1979: 36). There is something
particularly subversive about women inscribing their own stories on these
ancient and renowned tales because of their deeply personal significance,
as well as their archaic prestige (Montefiore 1987: 56). As pieces of our
cultural background, they are excessively familiar, objects of both
affection and resentment, and as such fairy tales provoke women to
rewrite and wrestle with them.
The wrestling and rewriting of literary revisioning of traditional tales
takes various forms (see Harries 2003: 99102; Sellers 2001: 1314): for
example, as a prequel or sequel, employing first-person narration or
placing a minor character at centre stage. The traditional stories may be
placed in a contemporary setting or have an alternative ending. There
may be heavy allusions to myth*in imagery or narrative structure*in a
plot that otherwise does not depend on a mythical source text.
The way that feminist revisioning defamiliarizes such well-known
tales draws attention to the revisionist project: it accentuates its argument
to make clear that there is an argument, that an act of theft is occurring
(Ostriker 1986: 236; emphasis in original). Yet it is perhaps too simple to
identify feminist revisioning solely as arguing with the original tales,
because, as Donald Haase says, retelling a traditional tale is to both accept
it and reject it (2004: 30). Revisioning is not a correcting of ancient and
timeless tales: Jan Montefiore argues that the force of the old tales is such
that revisions neither exorcise nor assume the power of their originals
(1987: 55). If feminist revisioning seeks to replace the traditional tales, then
this project is doomed to failure; however, many contemporary retellings
do not aim either to supersede the original or to uncover meanings that
are authentic to a monolithic conception of womens experience. In the
eyes of postmodern criticism, such an approach would be the assertion of
a new tyranny, rather than a disruption of the hierarchical dualism of
patriarchal discourse (Sellers 2001: 137). Instead, through their mirroring
of the traditional tales (Bacchilega 1988: 10), feminist retellings emphasize
that there is no natural or unmediated reflection of the stories (Haase
2004: 24). Most feminist revisionists do not portray their telling of the
story as one true version for all time; rather they stress that their
revisioned tale is only one version of the many possible versions. They
encourage the reader to see the new telling as a version, as one, but not the
only, way to tell the tale (Harries 2003: 102; emphasis in original).
Furthermore, when dealing with fairy tale and classical myth, there
are no original tales; rather they evolved from complex oral traditions,
NOT SIMPLE, NOT PURE 17
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and have long been subject to continuous adaptation and appropriation
(Makinen 2001: 64). The written versions we know best*by Charles
Perrault, the Grimm brothers and Hans Christian Andersen, or Homer,
Sophocles and Ovid*were shaped by their historical context and the
ideological concerns of their authors. The historical-critical approach to
the Bible has shown that its narratives have been woven together from
various written and oral sources by artful redactors. Furthermore, within
scripture there are many different versions of the same story: the four
Gospels, for example. In this sense, re-imagining the stories in the light of
feminist concerns is a seamless continuation of the tradition of myth,
Bible and fairy tale. As Sara Maitland writes, the old stories are always
and necessarily told in the authors own words and to [their] own ends
(2008a: 124).
Sara Maitland, Morality and Revisioning
Sara Maitlands feminist revisioning seeks not only to challenge her source
texts, but also to learn from them (see Maitland 2009). She also gains
literary satisfaction from rewriting fairy tales, enjoying how [y]ou can
make of them what you will*they are shape shifters (Maitland 2008a:
179), as well as her readers responses: It was the same and different. I had
read it before but I had not read it before (Maitland and Wandor 1987:
3940). However, it is her moral treatment of her source tales that
particularly sets Maitland apart from other, more well-known revisionists:
When Angela Carter was still alive, I was complaining to her that a
reviewer had compared my short stories to hers, and I said I was fed
up with being sub-Angela Carter, and she laughed and said, You dont
want to worry because we are fundamentally different. I am a 60s
libertarian and you are a 70s moralist. And I think that was a very
accurate perception of hers (Maitland 2006: 105).
The moral impetus of Maitlands writing comes both from her political
stance as a committed feminist and from her spiritual identity as a
Christian. She prefers to use the termspiritual realism to magical realism
as regards her own work (ibid.: 106) because this expresses her belief in an
underlying reality to her chosen metaphors and symbols (Alexander 1989:
82). In this sense, there is a difference between her revisioning of classical
myth and fairy tale and her Midrash on biblical characters:
Snow White, or her stepmother, or Persephone, or Helen of Troy*
theyre all heavyweight typologies, but they arent the same, or
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at least I cant bring to them the same weight of affectionate humour
and ideological ownership that I could to a biblical character
(Maitland and Wandor 1987: 34).
In my own reading of Maitlands work, I find this most evident in her
revisioning of New Testament women: Mary Magdalene is, for me, not a
myth but a sister (ibid.: 72). While she does approach characters from the
Hebrew Bible, such as Eve, Sarah and Delilah, with more solemnity than
other mythical figures, there is a sense of affection and moral depth in
most of her revisioning, whatever the source tale. The spirituality and
morality inherent in Maitlands fiction does not result in a heavy-handed
or simplistic didacticism; rather, profound moral questions are generated
by the conflicts within the tales. As Michelene Wandor writes: it is the
tension between [Maitlands] knowledge of . . . hell and the security of her
cultural heritage that provides the tensions and excitement of her writing
(ibid.: 170).
Maitlands 1983 essay A Feminist Writers Progress is a fairy-tale-like
narrative of her development as a feminist writer, written in the third
person (Maitland 1983a). After she found support from a women writers
collective for her decision to write from a political standpoint (other
members were Zoe Fairbairns, Miche` le Roberts and Michelene Wandor),
she also formed an identity as a reteller of old tales, moving away from
social realism. Maitland then found that she could not simply remould
myth and fairy tale according to idealistic beliefs about women. She found
in her feminist revisioning that killings and betrayals and cruelties were
all there in the stories and could not be escaped (Maitland 1983a: 21). For
her, it was not just the challenge of the stories, but also the challenge of
her own experience that she could not simply rewrite these tales to
become more palatable to feminist sensibilities: when writing truly out
of her own experience as a woman she had to recognise the conniving,
treacherous, unloving, unlovely things that she did (ibid.). It was a sense
of faithfulness to herself as well as to the tales themselves that resulted in
Maitlands revisioning of wicked women in a way that faces up to
womens capacity for evil:
The Goddesses side with men and women betray their sisters and their
mothers and their daughters . . . Women choose badness and madness
daily and mythologically, and the Feminist Writer could not go on
with her quest without telling these stories too (ibid.).
As the stories got darker, Maitland found that her work became less
popular with her feminist readers and that she herself was becoming
uncomfortable, even afraid of her own stories (ibid.). The plots of social
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realism are constrained by the boundaries of possibility; in more fantas-
tical or magical fiction, these limitations are no longer there: There were
no natural limits (ibid.). In the revisions of mythical wicked women
discussed in what follows, Maitland goes to a much darker place than if
she were writing realistically about contemporary characters. In attempt-
ing to go into the mind of evil, the writer and the reader are prepared to
go further than they would with more realistic settings and plots. Thus,
Maitland achieves the terrifying combination of believable characters who
behave in ways that are beyond belief.
Wicked Women and Womens Sin
Maitland is a Christian feminist who has engaged with the feminist
theology movement in her non-fiction, including the edited collection
Walking on Water: Women Talk about Spirituality (Garcia and Maitland
1983) and her monographs A Map of the New Country (1983b) and A Big
Enough God: A Feminists Search for a Joyful Theology (1995). The themes
of feminist theology are also explored in her fiction, most notably the
1984 novel Virgin Territory; and it also has a bearing on Maitlands
understanding of the sin of the mythical wicked women she revisions.
The feminist theological concept of the specifically womens sin being
passivity and self-negation, due to the internalization of patriarchal
expectations (see Plaskow 1980; Saiving 1960), is apparent in some of
Maitlands stories. Her 1978 novel Daughter of Jerusalem is set in
contemporary London, but each chapter closes with a re-imagining of
the story of a biblical woman. One such retelling is the story of Samson
and Delilah, a popular image of the femme fatale throughout western
culture. Maitlands version conveys a clear feminist message, but without
a simple reversal of the good/evil dichotomy. Delilah is not portrayed as
innocent, or as an evil temptress. Rather, she comes to realize that she
hurt Samson and ultimately herself due to her adoption of misogynist
attitudes. Maitland implies that what Delilah hated in Samson was what
she hated in herself, as a woman: There was a softness in him which she
did not love, which she despised, which made her want to destroy him
(Maitland 1978: 110). She found it arousing that he was strong enough to
kill her (ibid.: 109), and this is explained by Delilahs internalization of
her misogynist culture:
She had been brought up among real men, who killed in the army and
came home at night to kill again on the bodies of their women, who
had been hard brutal men without softness. That was how a man
20 WOMEN: A CULTURAL REVIEW
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should be, not amenable to the wishes of a woman, not lured by
beauty, not kind and compassionate with her weakness (ibid.: 110).
After the cutting of Samsons hair, she realizes that she was wrong, that
his weakness, his passions, his uncertainties; those were the things that
a man should have (ibid.: 111). Maitlands feminist message is made
obvious as Delilah comes to the awareness that [i]t was herself she had
betrayed, herself she had sold for silver, herself she had besmirched and
stolen the strength from: because she had not been woman enough to
meet the new and gentle man in him (ibid.).
A less sympathetic portrayal of the female sin of seeing oneself only
as reflected in the eyes of men is found in the 2003 story Helen of Troys
Aerobics Class. The story takes place in Troy, with Helen exercising to
the beat of the eunuchs drum, one example of the exhausting amount of
effort she puts into disguising the fact that she is ageing. She ran away
with Paris because of what he showed her about herself: in the mirror of
his dark eyes she could see herself as the most beautiful woman in the
world (Maitland 2003: 136). Now she is sixty years old and any guilt she
feels at all the death she has caused is kept under the surface, directed into
the desire to show herself to be worth it: she had an obligation to
maintain her beauty, or else there will be no sense in all of this. It is not
vanity, but duty (ibid.: 137).
Despite the fact that Maitland portrays her as unhappy, Helen is a
figure to be pitied rather than sympathized with: It is just not possible
for other women to understand the difficulties and responsibilities of
being so beautiful (ibid.: 142). This story juxtaposes an ancient tale*
referring to its cultural legacy with a thousand ships, a hundred thousand
men who will never go home and all the bright flames and dead ash of
Troy (ibid.: 146)*with modern concepts such as working out and
contemporary standards of beauty, perhaps even allusions to the advert-
ising slogan of various LOre al beauty products: Because Im worth it.
Maitlands Helen brings to mind todays celebrity culture and the famous
women who spend lots of time and money on how they look, knowing
the gaze is on them. Yet this story provokes judgement of the banality
and vanity of Helen and women like her, rather than any feminist
solidarity.
Revenge against Men
Other Maitland tales with a strong feminist edge present the wicked
womans behaviour as stemming from a desire to have revenge against
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men and masculine culture. Maitlands vengeful women are not port-
rayed as morally upright feminist heroines, however. One of the most
memorable of these appears in her retelling of the story of Jael from the
Hebrew Bible. Strictly speaking, Jael is not a mythical wicked woman in
that, however terrifying she may be to the male imagination, she was on
the good side of the narrative, the side of God and the Israelites. Yet
Maitlands explicit description of Jaels murder of Sisera, and of her
motives, do not show her simply as an example of God exalting the lowly
or of womens cunning, as in much feminist biblical interpretation.
Instead, when Jael bangs a tent peg into Siseras skull, it is a reversal of
rape (Duncker 1992: 136). Maitland makes clear that not only can women
be violent, they may also enjoy violence. Despite the tenderness she feels
for Sisera, and her admiration of his beauty, as Jael hammers the peg she
takes pleasure in what she is doing:
the pointed stick no longer alien but part of her person . . . the point is
finding its own pathway into the depths of the man. He groans once,
unable to resist the strength behind her stroke and she has heard that
groan before. She breaks through her own carefulness, becomes
beserk, and long after it is necessary, bang, bang, bang, rhythmical and
powerful (Maitland 1983c: 2).
Jael acts out of revenge: she and Deborah know who the enemy is and
delight in the knowledge that, from now on, their husbands fear them, as
does the whole victorious, manic, excited exultant army (ibid.: 4). This is
an ambiguous story, simultaneously celebrating womens solidarity
against the common enemy, revealing both the power and the disturbing
aspect of womens righteous anger.
Another story that explores female rage and vengefulness is Siren
Song, in which Maitland collapses two separate myths: one, the Homeric
description of sirens as creatures that tempt men to their deaths; the
other, Ovids tale about the sirens becoming bird-like in order to look
for their friend Persephone after she was taken by Hades (Warner 1994:
4002). Maitlands sirens speak as one, explaining how they had been
entrusted with the care of Persephone when Hades raped her. They
became sirens in order to exact revenge on males:
we rend them with our long talons, sear them with our sharp beaks,
destroy them with our bright eyes and devour them for our amuse-
ment and nourishment. Then, with the moon high above us, white
and harsh on the jagged rocks, we laugh; and for a few moments our
pain is softened, our grief is comforted, our anger is slaked, our desire
is fulfilled (Maitland 2008b: 1489).
22 WOMEN: A CULTURAL REVIEW
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Their hands could not protect Persephone, so we have grown talons;
they could not run fast enough, so we have grown wings; they learned to
sing because [t]he cold wind of his coming carried our little weak voices
into nothing; and he hit their mouths, so now we have beaks of iron
(ibid.: 151). They argue: we are justified when we seek vengeance; for our
malice is not without cause; our cruelty is small payment for mens lust
(ibid.: 155). Maitlands revisioning of the sirens is similar to Ostrikers
interpretation of Margaret Atwoods poem of the same name: the female
power to do evil is a direct function of her powerlessness to do anything
else (1986: 222). As such, Maitlands sirens are objects of sympathy, but
they are not morally rehabilitated: they break a man on the snares and
delusions of his own heart . . . for no higher gain than the satisfaction of
our own foul lusts and greeds (Maitland 2008b: 153).
A particularly disturbing tale of womens revenge against men is that
of Philomel and Procne, which Maitland revisions as The Swallow and
the Nightingale. It opens with these sisters giggling over a cooking pot, as
they prepare the body of Procnes son to feed to her husband. Maitland
describes Philomel and Procnes closeness when growing up, their
joyfulness and loveliness, and how they are both frivolous and insensitive,
but not stupid. Procne is sent to marry Tereus, a king from Thrace whose
barbarian culture is very different from that of the sisters. She is happy
with him until she has a child, who she feels is not really hers, but
a Thracian baby (Maitland 2008b: 227). After having the child, she no
longer wanted to have sex, so Tereus tries to cheer her up by travelling to
fetch her sister to visit her. Procne knows that her husband and sister will
end up sleeping together, and does not mind this: she was amused and
tender towards them in her thoughts (ibid.). Yet, in Tereuss mountain
culture, which she does not understand, sexual desire is
as powerful as ice-melt in springtime and dangerous and overwhelm-
ing. And because it is so real and so hard-edged and so demanding it is
also set about with taboos and controls and restraints and rules and
laws and deep, deep shame. Men hate their own lust and hate women
because they arouse it (ibid.: 228).
Here, Maitland revisions the story as Philomel consenting to Tereus,
rather than being raped: What he thought was rape she thought was a
game (ibid.). Out of shame, he hates himself and hates Philomel for not
resisting him: There was a bloody hole in him, a pit filled with a howling
darkness of guilt and fear and lust and shame (ibid.: 229). So he makes a
hole in Philomel*he cuts out her tongue. These events are described
with shocking vividness. Maitland is also unflinching in writing this
NOT SIMPLE, NOT PURE 23
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section of the story from Tereuss viewpoint, giving some explanation of
his horrendous actions.
Tereus leaves Philomel with a family in the woods and tells Procne
that she is dead. The silenced Philomel stitches a tapestry depicting what
happened to her and, once Procne receives it, she smuggles Philomel into
the palace and they plan their revenge. Procne decides that Tereus had
cut out their words, they would make him eat his word his dearest
word, his statement to the future, his glory, his son (ibid.: 235). After he
has eaten his own child, Procne tells him what she has done, and Philomel
comes in carrying the childs skull full of wine. The story then ends
abruptly and self-consciously, with the narrator asking the reader if this
terrible story is about
mens shame and womens shamelessness? A rare dangerous story
about a woman who loves something more than her own child? Is it
a story about cultural difference, about Greek and barbarian, about
male and female, about speech and silence, about tongues and penises?
(ibid.: 236).
The narrator tells us that [e]ven the poets cannot bear this story, and so
ends it awkwardly (ibid.), with the gods intervening once Tereus has
drawn his sword, turning all three characters into birds.
What most characterizes Maitlands version is the callously joyous
nature of the sisters, their love for each other and self-assuredness of their
desires. They are neither evil witches nor passive victims, but they are not
heroines either. However much feminism may approve of women loving
each other more than their husbands, there are few things in western
culture that make us shudder more than a mother killing her own child,
let alone doing so light-heartedly.
Silence and The Swans
The theme of a mythical woman who loves something more than her
husband or children is continued in The Swans. This story focuses not
on the wicked woman, the Old Queen*who makes it look as if her
daughter-in-law has eaten her children*but on the Young Queen. She
allows her children to be stolen, maintaining a vow of silence and
stitching shirts in order to release her brothers from an enchantment that
turned them into swans, keeping her vow even to the point of being
nearly burnt as a witch. Although this story is hardly a typical feminist
fable, Maitlands retelling is fairly straightforward: her interest in silence
means that she does not interpret this story as [t]he equation of silence
24 WOMEN: A CULTURAL REVIEW
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with virtue, of forbearance with femininity (Warner 1994: 394). Instead,
she respects the heroines integrity in sticking to her task no matter what,
and regards her as being an unusually active heroine in that she is the
rescuer rather than the rescued (Maitland 2009).
Maitland is sympathetic to the Old Queen: the Young Queen respects
her and knows that she herself would not rest easy if her son . . . came
home one day with a half-naked but beautiful woman-child who would
not speak (Maitland 2008b: 24). In the end, the children are found and the
Old Queen is not thrown on to the fire, as in the original story (Maitland
2009). Yet there is a sad tinge to the story in that the Young Queens
children have learned something from her silence; they never ask why
she preferred her brothers to her sons (Maitland 2008b: 29). It is this
taboo that led Maitland to revision the story: Surely a woman is not
meant to love her brothers more than her husband and children?
(Maitland 2008a: 184; emphasis in original).
In Maitlands discussion of The Swans, and in the conclusion of The
Swallow and the Nightingale, there is a sense that she is not completely
in charge of the stories, that they take her to places where she would
rather not go. Furthermore, while she can play with and rework the old
tales, they seem to have a life of their own and cannot be completely
transformed by the feminist revisionist. As in The Swallow and the
Nightingale, Maitland inserts her own authorial voice into the text of her
revisioning of the Roman Christian martyrs Felicity and Perpetua.
Writing about these historical women, the author admits: I want to
use them for my own morally uplifting purposes. They resist me. Their
voices are clear and individual (Maitland 1993: 82). To some extent, the
mythical characters and the mythical tales themselves have their own
clear and individual voices that the revisionist is not able to silence.
Guilt and Taboo
Maitlands tendency to explore deeply rooted taboos is continued in her
revisioning of Jocasta, the mother and wife of Oedipus. In myth, Jocasta
is not a wicked woman but an unfortunate one, who commits incest
unknowingly and, overcome with shame, kills herself once the truth is
uncovered. In Maitlands version, Loving Oedipus, Jocasta is morally
responsible. The story opens: Of course I knew (Maitland 2003: 163).
Yet she is not presented as an object of moral horror. Her romantic love
for Oedipus is tied up with maternal guilt at having abandoned him as a
baby, emphasized by the repeated reference to his crippled feet:
Tenderness was always at the root of my desire for him. Tenderness
NOT SIMPLE, NOT PURE 25
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and guilt a powerful aphrodisiac (ibid.: 164). Maitland is adept at
provoking the readers empathy, and thus this story*which shows just
how thin the barriers between different kinds of love can be*makes
uncomfortable reading: incest is arguably just as strong a taboo today as it
was in ancient Greece. As such, the reader identifies with Tiresias, who
looks upon Jocasta with love and condemnation (ibid.: 172). She agrees
with him that [i]t was wrong, but argues that, I wanted him. I needed
him. Is it wrong to take what you need? (ibid.).
Moral evil and guilt, as well as the fairy-tale tradition and the taboo of
child abuse, are explored in The Wicked Stepmothers Lament, which
uses a modern voice and modern references in telling an old tale. Maitland
emphasizes the role of Cinderellas dead mother in the tale, quoting the
Grimm brothers version at the beginning of the story: she called her
only daughter to her bedside and said, Dear child, remain pious and
good, and then our dear God will always protect you, and I will look
down on you from heaven. The wicked stepmother, the narrator, is
driven to abuse Cinderella because she follows her mothers instructions,
and she could not believe the sweetness of that little girl and her wide-
eyed belief that I would be happy and love her if she would just deny
herself (Maitland 1987: 150). This story is a comment on fairy tales and
female passivity: the child invented castles in the air to which someone,
though never herself, would come and take her one day (ibid.: 151).
Although the child, and her mother, commit the womens sin of self-
abnegation, and the feminist reader canidentifywiththe narrators desire to
provoke Cinderella into fighting back and becoming powerful through
anger, the stepmother is not looking for self-justification (ibid.: 147).
While the origins of the abuse are explained in terms of the more severe
aspects of feminist anger, in the end it is caused simply by belly-deep
madness: I beat her . . . systematically and severely . . . I used her and
I worked her and denied her pleasures and gave her pain (ibid.: 151). This
story also discusses male roles in fairy tales: the father does nothing, and
even the most silvery of princes soon goes out hunting and drinking and
fighting and whoring (ibid.: 150). Most of all, this story is concerned with
women and morality in myth: its more complicated, more complex than
its told, and the reasons why its told the way it is are complex too (ibid.:
148). The narrator does not want to retell the tale so that she is not guilty,
whichis oftenthe approachof feminist revisioning and feminismingeneral:
I want to carry and cope with my own guilt, because I want to carry
and cope with my own virtue and I really dont see that you can have
one without the other . . . Im not willing to be a victim. I was not
innocent, and I have grown out of innocence now and even of wanting
26 WOMEN: A CULTURAL REVIEW
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to be thought innocent. Living is a harsh business . . . and I feel the
weight of that ancient harshness and I want to embrace it (ibid.).
The Moral of the Story
All of the stories discussed here include some element of guilt and blame,
and they all embrace that ancient harshness (Maitland 1987: 148). The
darkness of many of Maitlands stories is not due to pessimism about
human nature or gratuitous cruelty; rather, it is a willingness to explore
all aspects of human experience truthfully. As a writer, Maitland is
comparable to her revision of Eve in the story Choosing Paradise. Eve
finds that once she reaches the menopause, she is able to return to Eden.
Yet she chooses not to because she does not want to go back to a state of
innocence; she wants to know what happens next. This is the same reason
why she first disobeyed God years before: she ate the apple because she
was curious, because she wanted to know what would happen if she did,
what would happen next. She ate the apple because the snakes slitty-eyed
smile was not simple, not pure (Maitland 2003: 160).
Most of Maitlands revisions of wicked women are*despite the
strong sense of moral awareness*neither simple nor pure, and many are
difficult and painful to read. Yet this is what, according to He le` ne Cixous,
we need our writers to do to make us recognize that the tales of crime
that we shiver to read are really about ourselves, though under an
assumed name, under a pseudonym . . . we are in all the Greek tragedies,
which are our tragedies, except that we are not encouraged to make the
connection (1993: 49). In Maitlands writing, the connection is made: the
painful and necessary recognition that the faces in mythology may be our
own faces (Ostriker 1986: 215). Returning to Cristina Bacchilegas
metaphor, Maitlands mirroring of traditional tales also holds up a
mirror to the human female face. While the reflected image may be
disturbing, it is one from which it is hard to turn away.
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