What we're reading, what we're liking
Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Women Writers Explore Their Favorite Fairy Tales by Kate Bernheimer, ed.
The fascination women writers in particular have with the primal language of fairy tales is suggested by the sterling lineup of talent contributing to this collection of essays. Bernheimer's introduction may be a tad lackluster (she finds it necessary to defend the legends from accusations that they are "antiwoman"), but such eloquent writers as A.S. Byatt, Joyce Carol Oates, Margaret Atwood and Ursula K. Le Guin join many others less well-known but highly esteemed by discriminating readers, such as Kathryn Davis and Vivian Gornick. Despite Bernheimer's disclaimer on the antiwoman question, what makes these essays so often so bracing is the writers' full knowledge that fairy tales are one way girls learn to be women, to good effect and bad. And the stories are violent, and (covertly, at least) sexy. Ann Beattie is funny in her assertion that sleep means more to modern women than sex ("We emphatically don't wish for Prince Charming to come. If he isn't already in bed with us, to hell with him"), and Francine Prose sees Sleeping Beauty's appeal from the distaff side ("The surest route to a man's (or to some men's) heart is to pretend to be unconscious; I'm asleep dear ... and actually, to tell the truth, I may not even be ... real").
-- Laura Miller
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