Fairy tales are maps.
Ink Tales
They were written for children to use to navigate their lives and beliefs, to understand their place in the social order, to understand their limitation and possibilities as a sex. They are also warnings, cautioning girls against curiosity, disobedience, selfishness and narcissism. They caution girls against becoming themselves.
Grandma’s teeth grow into the woods we must not stray in to. Men climb women’s hair to save them. If you stray from the path it may transform into a snake and eat you. Girls burst into red capes at puberty. If you walk into a house of sweets it just might eat you.
And most important of all: do not open the door.
When I first heard the brutal grand guignol fairy tale Bluebeard, I was something like 9-years old and it haunted me. The best of books are ghosts in this way. Credited to the 19th century writer Charles Perrault the tale follows the story of a young, impoverished and curious girl, who agrees to marry a wealthy man, Bluebeard. While economically and socially privileged there is something about him that strikes fear into rational people’s hearts. After a lavish marriage Bluebeard takes the girl to his castle, and she is given keys to every room but one; and that room she is forbidden to enter. There are rumours about Bluebeard and his rumbling violence. He has been married several times before though no one knows where his wives are now. The story is both about the room and about the girl, and the keys to each. When my teacher opened the forbidden room that afternoon in class, I became a writer.
So, when I was asked to think of a fairy tale to contemporise in poetry for the anthology Fairy Tales for the End of the World it was to that locked door I was immediately called. I stood outside the room and wrote the world within it.
I wanted to extend the metaphor of the forbidden room, and so set my Bluebeard in the context of social media. My curious girl, Martha Thinbone, lives in a town clinging to the edge of the word called Austerity. She is seduced by Bluebeard, a famous social media influencer, and groomed into marriage. A Bluebeard Among the Bluebirds is a story of digital dungeons, the dark web, and the intersections between poverty and domestic violence. It is about closed rooms on the internet; how if there is a world-wide web surely there must be a world-wide spider. But it is also about the friendships nurtured by women, how all women in a way are warnings to one another.
While fairy tales are often explicit cautions to girls, they are also warnings against a world in which bad things happen to girls and women. They are dark, psychological horror stories graphic in their violence, their portrayals of sexual abuse, poverty and oppression – accurate descriptions of what life was like for women when these folk tales were handed down and not so very different now. The fairy tale is the heart of story.
After all what is a book but a forbidden room?