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Cecilia Ekbäck’s debut Wolf Winter is an absorbing tale about fear, death and a cursed land
Alexa Actionable Analytics for the Web. AmazonGlobal Ship Orders Internationally. First, 'The Story of The Eldest Princess' from The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye, which Byatt describes as the story of her own life because she has always worried about being the eldest sister. This is a self-reflexive story with a metanarrative where the narrator constantly demonstrates self-awareness both as author and character that she is in a fairytale with all its inherent expectations and adventures. Even the title of 'The Story of The Eldest Princess' draws attention to its status as a constructed story and Byatt inserts classic themes such as royalty, a quest, animal helpers, the old crone and a "Once upon a time" opening line.
The story is of a kingdom where the blue sky has disappeared and been replaced by a green one, and there must be a quest undertaken by the three princesses to find a silver bird and her nest in order to effect a cure for the unwarranted greenness. The traditional roles of fairy princesses are rather limited in scope, with royal heroines usually passive and silent, awaiting a prince who can wake them, make them laugh or marry them after winning them as a prize.
So, how can a princess find autonomy and learn by her own experience? The self-reflexivity lies in the characters' knowledge of the framework in which they exist. They are compelled by an intrinsic fairytale motif whose ideology interpellates them. For instance, the eldest princess has read stories about princes and princesses who set out on quests, and has noticed the narrative patterns that emerge such as the inevitable failure of the oldest who will possibly be turned to stone until the youngest comes to the rescue.
Like Red Riding Hood, she mustn't deviate from the path, but her foreknowledge does arm her with the ability to deconstruct the story and extricate herself from its bounds. She meets injured creatures a scorpion, toad and cockroach upon her way and chooses to help them by leaving the road and entering the forest in order to find a wise old woman.
The Toad knows he won't turn into a prince "or any such nonsense", but if tales are nonsense then what is the status of these characters in a quasi-conventional story of princesses and talking creatures? I think they are ciphers used to reveal their own constructions. A Bluebeard-type appears in the form of the woodcutter who doesn't actually kill his wives - they just lose the will to live; the cockroach warns the princess and she listens.
When the scorpion's and toad's stock stories don't come true no tricksy stinging and no turning into a prince , she realizes "I could just walk out of this inconvenient story and go my own way". Once she sees an alternative route, she understands the restrictions and oppressions of the whole scenario. Marina Warner's book From the Beast to the Blonde particularly relates to women's historical position within the framework of tale-telling. She writes about Charles Perrault's female contemporaries who used fairytale to try and escape the limitations imposed on women's destinies: She also talks about the oral tradition and the construction of the Mother Goose storyteller which demonizes the 'old crone' figure.
She claims that "the thrust towards universal significance has obscured the genre's equal powers to illuminate experiences embedded in social and material conditions," meaning that fairytales should be considered in terms of their historical positioning because they and the way they are interpreted change diachronically. The role of storyteller within this tale is interesting. She uses tale-telling as a form of psychotherapy to heal bodies and minds, which also activates self-empowerment in the others. The princess and creatures all become 'Mother Goose' in turn as they give their stories, the princess delighting in the telling rather than in being the told.
Having rebelled against her designated role, the princess assumes the quest will continue without her - the entire framework will not break down just because she has altered the content and left the plot. However, she has disrupted the inevitable outcome - inviting possible variations. The second princess also outwits the confines of her story and leaves the youngest princess without a story. Each woman is shown to overturn her expected fate. The key to this fairy revolution lies in the power of the role of the teller: If the road shifts, then the teller and the told shift too; if 'Mother Goose' is not the generic old crone but changes as it suits her, then the characters in her stories can change their destinies too.
This was my solitary space. Byatt was the despised clever child who sought her hated school's boiler-room as a place of respite where she could escape from others and write stories. In 'The Changeling', from Sugar and Other Stories, Josephine is a writer whose stories centre on fearful boys; she has written a book called 'The Boiler-Room' about a persecuted boy called Simon Vowle.
She also fosters 'Lost Boys', a literary allusion applied to these displaced children. It is more subtle for Josephine to write about boys, in order to veil the autobiographical aspects of her work. Her writing is a channel for her own fear and she feels threatened when the character of Simon Vowle has seemingly come to life in the form of a boy, the pale and ghost-like Henry Smee, who comes to stay at her home.
So threatened, in fact, that she gets writer's block. Josephine hides from domesticity, but draws on the strength gained in having to face it. She becomes a hybrid, a self-constructed housewife-and-mother and a writer. The former is a rather successful pretence, but the latter is the 'real' her.
She controls her home and manages her family, as well as the stray waifs who come to her; but they don't impinge upon her creative space and energy - unlike JM Barrie's Wendy who told stories to the boys, Josephine retains maternal power by secretly learning and reusing their stories in her work.
Until, that is, the arrival of the unfathomable Henry Smee who represents the threat of one half of her world to the other. Indeed, he undertakes an intellectual battle to the death with his hostess. Byatt uses the metaphor of enclosure to depict Josephine's separation of her diverse selves. Being enclosed may be claustrophobic but it is an escape into a space that she can re-create as 'home', making it Heimlich , furnished with her own ideas. This space can then enable her to reach out into the world, which is how Josephine's writing emerges.
But her problem is finding a balance between being out in the world while remaining shut off from it. How can she engage with readers via her books while maintaining a self that is somehow separate and unreadable? Josephine sees the opportunity for controlling, rather than being consumed by, the situation; she sees the benefits of using enclosure for her own gain, for widening the space into a place for expression and later re-lives the pleasures of the freedom of being able to hide.
Why is separation from others, or into two separate selves, so essential for her successful literary expression? Josephine and Henry Smee are brought together to play out a competition on the mental plane, where the threat of Henry lies in his fusion with Josephine. The rupture of Josephine's carefully structured dual worlds begins when Henry is described as resembling the fictional Simon.
Josephine's 'The Boiler-Room' is a surreal story of a boy in a boarding school who builds himself "a Crusoe-like burrow or retreat in the dust behind the coiling pipe-system of the coke-boiler in the school basement and finally moved in there completely, making forays for food and drink at night. Most worrying for Josephine is that she starts to lose control of Simon's image and she is irritated by the intrusion into her creation.
Henry is thus depicted as a fraud, a real person who is trying to be a constructed character - a stealthy, changeling boy. For whom is he a substitute?
All of Josephine's fictional boys? The nexus of her creativity? Or does Henry represent dissolution of the 'real' Josephine, an identity that she keeps in a discrete box that functions alongside, but in opposition to, the Josephine who exists in the domestic sphere?
Writing a tale | Books | The Guardian
The language used to describe Henry paints him as an almost intangible figure, as his presence is refracted through Josephine's interpretation of his image. Once Henry has embodied fact and fiction, these become increasingly blurred for Josephine. Has she drawn Simon from the archetypal outsider, or is Simon the palette used for painting the Henry canvas?
This is the climax of the merger. Henry has 'a habit of stasis', but he also moves about like a permeating fluid. This paradox of stillness and fragile movement creates a quandary for Josephine.
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On the one hand, he is a real boy who seems to have no will of his own and is malleable; she uses her mood to gauge his, she actively reads him as a passive text - she is the writer and he is the object. But on the other hand, he is slippery and moves into the realms of being an unreadable text beyond Josephine's interpretative domain, which produces fear in her.
This terror of losing control leads to an anguishing search for an inviolate space, combined with a feeling that this place cannot be found 'out in the world'. If one is 'not at home in the world' where else is there to go? Josephine disappears into the pleasure-giving activity of writing.
Here, she deals with her fear by writing of the terror as being outside. Writing is the door that shuts her in and shuts the world out. This connection between fear, enclosed spaces and the creative imagination allows these elements to feed off each other.
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Being one of the "lost, voiceless sufferers locked in cupboards" is a torment when inflicted by others, but a self-imposed exile into the boiler-room is a delight. The sanctuary that enables expression is a form of seclusion, a framework into which Josephine thinks she has incorporated freedom, but a freedom where one keeps one's self to one's self. It's not just a fear of going into the world, but rather a fear of infiltration by the world.
Imagine the terror of someone trying to penetrate that world. For Josephine, her creativity is violated. She can't bear to be told about Henry by Henry - she has already written him in her own words and doesn't want a re-edit. The battle is for authorial ownership.
If the creation of Simon is an exorcism, then Henry is the ghost come back to haunt her. She is losing control of fear - and that is the crux of the problem. What she has written to contain her fear has materialized - it has leapt off the page and into the world. Byatt has said that Possession contains "a sort of passionate plea for readers to be allowed to identify with characters," but here Henry's identification with Simon is a form of theft, which violates the mode through which Josephine channels her excess - that's why she gets writer's block.
New Critic Cleanth Brooks says of IA Richards that he "has endeavoured to maintain a careful distinction between the emotional state produced in the reader