Once upon a time, when I was a girl, the Young Adult section of my rural library was more ambiguously defined and not quite so bountiful as it is now. I was obsessed with fairy tale retellings, watching Ever After (1998) until the VHS wore out, and eating up mildly titillating (to a middle schooler) Donna Jo Napoli books like The Magic Circle (1993), Zel (1996), and Sirena (1998). The library staff, still working out what this section of the shelves would look like in their newly-expanded building, had a tendency to use it for any kind of spin on a fairy tale. I remember hiding White as Snow by Tanith Lee (2000) under my bed and yet unfinished, not sure whether it was out of fear that my parents would find it or of all its unhinged and half-understood horrors. But it was Kissing the Witch by Emma Donoghue (1997), a linked collection of queered fairy tales, that opened the door into part of my mind that I had otherwise shut away.

When I had big feelings and no outlet for them, I tended to intellectualize them, so I made lists of different types of retellings I’d read until I discovered the Aarne-Thompson (now Aarne-Thompson-Uther) Index. I realized others had sought to find meaning in the various permutations of these stories. I also loved the whimsy of categories like The Animals Flee in Fear of the End of the World (type 20C), Maiden with a Separable Soul in a Necklace (412), Three Hairs from the Devil’s Beard (461), The Woman as Cuckoo in the Tree (1029). I’d never seen much of myself in Disney princesses, but I thought perhaps there were other stories that could hold a mirror up to my life or tell me what to do or how to be.

In the opening pages of Justice in 21st-Century Fairy Tales and the Power of Wonder—out now from Bloomsbury as part of their Perspectives on Fantasy series—Cristina Bacchilega and Pauline Greenhill explore this multiplicity of fairy tales. Fairy tales are “a shared dream or nightmare, enchanting lie or poetic truth, gender-shaping advertising or innocuous entertainment, traditional wisdom or thought experiment, normative script or transgressive spark” (p. 1). They challenge our ability to ascribe to them a singular meaning, shapeshifting much like their subjects depending on the zeitgeist. If they are to be reduced to one specific function, they are what Bacchilega and Greenhill call “otherwise stories.” In the tales of the otherwise, we experience:

1. Recognition, where we perceive ourselves for who we are
2. Transformation, where we push against the boundaries of who we are
3. Wonder, where we are open to possibility
4. Justice, where we balance the scales (pp. 1-4)

There is significant overlap in these dimensions of course. But what most interests Bacchilega and Greenhill in imagining the otherwise is worldbuilding—not within the storyworld itself, but in shifting our perceptions of the impossible towards the possible.

This is an academic work, so when Bacchilega and Greenhill speak of the storyworld, they are speaking not merely of the world built within the story itself but using it in the narratological sense: “multiple texts can create one storyworld; a whole genre can project one or more storyworlds; and a storyworld is a network of relations that extend from the narrative world into our imaginations and into the real world” (p. 33). The implication here is that the storyworld is not merely an act on the part of the creator but also on the part of the reader: The latter’s understanding of the story shapes the story’s meaning. In moving away from the ATU Index’s focus on plot, they argue for a “thinking with stories” approach, placing tales of wonder in conversation with each other and with communities of practice. In eschewing the traditional boundaries of categorization, they are offering “a critique of the rationalist binary thinking that makes a hard and fast distinction between alien and citizen; between nonhuman and human; between them and us; between nature and culture; between the living and the dead; between female and male; and between real and imaginary” (p. 103).

The seven chapters of the book are sprawling, covering modern fairy tales from across many cultures and contexts and drawing on theoretical frameworks from green criminology to decolonial hauntology. Chapter 4, “Finding Oneself Between Species: Hybrid Creatures and Kinship,” offers a prime example of the vast interconnections Bacchilega and Greenhill are mapping. In this chapter, they highlight that, until very recently, cross-species relationships between humans and animals were neglected in folklore studies (p. 82). To examine what fairy tales can teach us about human and nonhuman animal kinship, they use two texts that, although not conventional fairy tales, draw on folkloric tradition and motif: the Netflix series Sweet Tooth (2021-2024, based on the 2009-2021 comic book series by Jeff Lemire) and the Icelandic horror film Dýrið (Lamb, 2021). Sweet Tooth and Dýrið both use animal-human hybrid bodies to challenge human exceptionalism, an issue of immediate concern in our global climate crisis, as the survival of all species is linked. But, in addition to exploring the implications of this in terms of how we relate to our environment, Bacchilega and Greenhill make two interesting moves. First, they link these unconventional bodies to the politics of epidemics and disability. Both texts premiered during the height of COVID-19, when anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers made it abundantly clear that the lives of those of us working in public-facing roles were not valued, much in the same way the elderly or the disabled were discarded (pp. 100-101). The unconventional body in these texts provides a lens for seeing who is considered less-than-human and whose communities are valued. Second, in highlighting how these stories use fairy tale motifs even though they are not explicitly labeled as such, Bacchilega and Greenhill are making the case for fairy tale as a living, evolving genre that emerges from and is responsive to our current needs.

Bacchilega and Greenhill’s work fits alongside heightened cultural awareness of the functions of fabulism in fictions by the marginalized. In 2018, Kit Haggard noted how fabulism has become a popular mode in works by women and queer people, offering Carmen Maria Machado, Helen Oyeyemi, and Karen Russell as examples. [1] Haggard writes how this trend coincided with both an “increased attention to diversity in art and entertainment” and a rise in hate crimes, stating that “the tension between those things—increased visibility and at the same time, increased violence—needs release, and fabulism is a way of accessing and depicting that in-betweenness, that strangeness.” Benjamin Schaefer, in the editor’s note of the most recent issue of Fairy Tale Review, describes the trope of transformation within recent fabulist narratives as a reunion with the self:

I remembered that for queer people—and women and BIPOC and people with disabilities—the journey towards an experience of our wholeness always begins with our bodies. It is our bodies that are often at odds with everything around them—that is to say they are at odds with the patriarchy and majority culture—but they are also the place from which we must learn to speak and to thrive and to live wholly. Our bodies are the vessels that house our stories—stories not of our becoming, but of our being. [2]

Bacchilega and Greenhill address representations of embodied sexuality and gender via texts like Julián Is a Mermaid (2018) and the forest-based Polish crime film Pokot (2017, based on Olga Tokarczuk’s 2009 novel, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead), continuing this trend of paralleling the genre hybridity of fairy tales with gender play and performance. But their most powerful contributions come from their linking of global Indigenous struggles through texts like Gräns (2018)—wherein trolls are avatars for the Sámi and a cemetery is deliberately reminiscent of residential school unmarked graves—and the Canada/New Zealand co-production Night Raiders (2021), which places Cree folk figures in a dystopian, futuristic context. If fairy tales create a storyworld where we can question the arbitrary and harmful borders imposed by systems of power, the storyworld perhaps also provides an answer: Peoples and cultures pushed to the margins can, when united, give true name to the real villains of the world. Perhaps we’d be so lucky that, Rumpelstiltskin-like, these villains would tear themselves apart in their anger.

I have found it difficult of late to be a lover of fairy tales in all their modern permutations. Neil Gaiman is a wolf in sheep’s clothing (ATU 123B), publicly proclaiming himself feminist while sexually assaulting multiple people. J. K. Rowling is a fascist transphobe, inciting violence against those who would undertake the divine alchemy of the self (ATU 514). [3] The Democrats are posting through the coup, saying the emperor is wearing no clothes (ATU 1620), as if that will stop the deportations. Like any reader of speculative fiction, I’m drawn in by wonder. Like any writer, I’d like to believe that the correct words hold the key to righting the universe. But it has been hard lately to see the possibilities of the fantastic beyond entertainment. What is radical about Bacchilega and Greenhill’s book is that, through the border crossing inherent to their interdisciplinary work, they draw our attention to the fact that meaning, and therefore transformation, is not made in isolation. The story-thinking enabled by these many tales gains power through the collective. In multiple retellings and through multiple audiences, the borders of possibility can shift.

Endnotes

[1] Kit Haggard, “How a Queer Fabulism Came to Dominate Contemporary Women’s Writing,” The Outline, August 8, 2018, https://theoutline.com/post/5751/fabulism-fiction-carmen-maria-machado-daisy-johnson-melissa-broder. [return]

[2] Benjamin Schaefer, “Editor’s Note,” Fairy Tale Review, vol. 19 (The Rainbow Issue), 2023, pp. 15-19. [return]

[3] This magical metaphor for the trans experience is attributable to a tumblr-ification of Julian Jarboe’s “The Android That Designed Itself” from Everyone on the Moon Is Essential Personnel: “Why does God create grapes and wheat, but not wine and bread? God does this because God wants us to share in the act of creation. To be how you made me, to become how God made me, through you, I can remake myself. You and I: we are already only whole, and shifting towards the divine.” (p. 35) [return]