Delilah
Pandora
Jahi
Tam ar
and there was a wicked witch and she was also called
goddess and her name was
Kali
Fatima
Artemis
Hera
Isis
Mary
Ishtar
and there was a wicked witch and she was also called
queen and her name was
Bathsheba
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Vashti
Cleopatra
Helen
Salome
Elizabeth
Clytemnestra
Medea
and there was a wicked witch and she was also called
witch and her name was
Joan
Circe
Morgan le Fay
Tiamat
Maria Leonza
Medusa
and they had this in common: that they were feared,
hated, desired, and worshiped.
When one enters the world of fairy tale one seeks
with difficulty for the actual place where legend and
history part. One wants to locate the precise moment
when fiction penetrates into the psyche as reality, and
history begins to mirror it. Or vice versa. Women
live in fairy tale as magical figures, as beauty, danger,
innocence, malice, and gr eed. In the personae of the
fairy tale —the wicked witch, the beautiful princess,
the heroic prince —we find what the culture would have
us know about who we are.
The point is that we have not formed that ancient
world —it has formed us. We ingested it as children
whole, had its values and consciousness imprinted on
our minds as cultural absolutes long before we were in
fact men and women. We have taken the fairy tales of
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childhood with us into maturity, chewed but still lying
in the stomach, as real identity. Between Snow-white
and her heroic prince, our two great fictions, we never
did have much o f a chance. A t some point, the Great
Divide took place: they (the boys) dreamed o f mounting
the Great Steed and buying Snow-white from the
dwarfs; we (the girls) aspired to become that object o f
every necrophiliac’s lust —the innocent, victimized Sleeping Beauty, beauteous lump o f ultimate, sleeping good.
Despite ourselves, sometimes unknowing, sometimes
knowing, unwilling, unable to do otherwise, we act out
the roles we were taught.
Here is the beginning, where we learn who we must
be, as well as the moral o f the story.
C H A P T E R 1
Onceuponatime: The Roles
Death is that remedy all singers dream of
Allen Ginsberg
The culture predetermines who we are, how we behave,
what we are willing to know, what we are able to feel.
We are bom into a sex role which is determined by
visible sex, or gender.
We follow explicit scenarios of passage from birth
into youth into maturity into old age, and then we die.
In the process of adhering to sex roles, as a direct
consequence o f the imperatives of those roles, we commit homicide, suicide, and genocide.
Death is our only remedy. We imagine heaven.
There is no suffering there, we say. There is no sex
there, we say. We mean, there is no culture there.
We mean, there is no gender there. We dream that
death will release us from suffering—from guilt, sex,
the body. We recognize the body as the source of our
suffering. We dream of a death which will mean freedom from it because here on earth, in our bodies, we are fragmented, anguished—either men or women,
bound by the very fact of a particularized body to a role
which is annihilating, totalitarian, which forbids us any
real self-becoming or self-realization.
Fairy tales are the primary information of the culture. They delineate the roles, interactions, and values which are available to us. They are our childhood
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Onceuponatime: The Roles
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models, and their fearful, dreadful content terrorizes
us into submission — if we do not become good, then evil
will destroy us; if we do not achieve the happy ending,
then we will drown in the chaos. As we grow up, we
forget the terror—the wicked witches and their smothering malice. We remember romantic paradigms: the heroic prince kisses Sleeping Beauty; the heroic prince
searches his kingdom to find Cinderella; the heroic
prince marries Snow-white. But the terror remains as
the substratum o f male-female relation — the terror
remains, and we do not ever recover from it or cease to
be motivated by it. Grown men are terrified o f the
wicked witch, internalized in the deepest parts o f memory. Women are no less terrified, for we know that not to be passive, innocent, and helpless is to be actively
evil.
Terror, then, is our real theme.
The Mother as a Figure of Terror
Whether “instinctive” or not, the maternal role in the sexual constitution originates in the fact that only the woman is necessarily present at birth. Only the
woman has a dependable and easily identifiable connection to the child —a tie on
which society can rely. This maternal feeling is the root of human community.
George Gilder, Sexual Suicide
Snow-white’s biological mother was a passive, good
queen who sat at her window and did embroidery.
She pricked her finger one day —no doubt an event in
her life —and 3 drops o f blood fell from it onto the
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snow. Somehow that led her to wish for a child “as white
as snow, as red as blood, and as black as the wood of the
embroidery frame.” 1 Soon after, she had a daughter
with “skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood, and
hair as black as ebony. ” 2 Then, she died.
A year later, the king married again. His new wife
was beautiful, greedy, and proud. She was, in fact,
ambitious and recognized that beauty was coin in the
male realm, that beauty translated directly into power
because it meant male admiration, male alliance, male
devotion.
The new queen had a magic mirror and she would
ask it: “Looking-glass upon the wall, Who is fairest
of us all? ” 3 And inevitably, the queen was the fairest
(had there been anyone fairer we can presume that the
king would have married her).
One day the queen asked her mirror who the fairest
was, and the mirror answered: “Queen, you are full
fair, *tis true, But Snow-white fairer is than you. ” 4
Snow-white was 7 years old.
The queen became “yellow and green with envy,
and from that hour her heart turned against Snow-
white, and she hated her. And envy and pride like ill
weeds grew in her heart higher every day, until she had