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Feminist Rewritings of Fairy Tales in Ireland: A Case Study of Deirdre Sullivan

Diana Rodríguez Bonet
p. 41-55

Résumés

Deirdre Sullivan est une auteure irlandaise émergente qui a été récompensée à plusieurs reprises pour son travail et a reçu des critiques élogieuses d’auteurs et d’universitaires renommés tels que Jack Zipes, mais qui n’a pas été étudiée sur le plan académique. Son œuvre la plus acclamée, Tangleweed and Brine (2017), est un recueil de réécritures féministes de contes de fées et l’une des subversions les plus innovantes des contes classiques faites au XXIe siècle. Suivant la tradition des critiques de contes de fées publiées de la fin du XXe siècle à nos jours s’opposant aux messages patriarcaux véhiculés par les histoires classiques, Sullivan récupère l’héroïne spirituelle et indépendante des contes de fées perdue au XVe siècle. Les protagonistes de ces subversions rompent avec les normes imposées par la société hétéronormative et parviennent à parler ouvertement de tabous sociaux tels que la pédophilie, les abus sexuels ou la violence domestique. Cet article se concentre sur l’étude des réécritures de contes de fées dans Tangleweed and Brine pour explorer les révisions des concepts de féminité et de rôles imposés par la société, ainsi que pour mettre en avant des thèmes d’ordinaire passés sous silence.

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  • 1 Deirdre Sullivan, Tangleweed and Brine, Dublin, Little Island Books, 2017.
  • 2 Deirdre Sullivan, Savage Her Reply, Dublin, Little Island Books, 2020.

1Deirdre Sullivan is a writer and teacher from Galway who has published seven acclaimed books for adults. She is a leading Irish young adult author who has been shortlisted for the European Prize for Literature and won the An Post Irish Book of the Year Award in 2018 for her fairy-tales collection Tangleweed and Brine (2017).1 Moreover, she has also published a dark feminist retelling of the Irish myth “The Children of Lir”, which she has entitled Savage Her Reply (2020)2 and won the An Post Irish Book Award for young adults in 2020. Unlike previous fairy-tale writers like Emma Donoghue or Angela Carter, this author has not yet aroused critical attention; therefore, this is one of the first critical examinations of her fairy-tale collection. However, her work has been highly praised by writers like Juno Dawson, who compares Sullivan’s prose to that of Carter, and academics like Jack Zipes in an unnumbered page at the beginning of Tangleweed and Brine: “Sullivan’s original stories are riveting and offer readers unusual perspectives on how to read fairy tales in times of conflict”.

  • 3 Charles Perrault, The Tales of Mother Goose [Histoires ou contes du temps passé. Contes de ma mère (...)
  • 4 Giovanni Francesco Straparola, The Pleasant Nights [Le piacevoli notti, 1550], Suzanne Magnanini (e (...)
  • 5 Giambattista Basile, Pentameron: The Tale of Tales [Lo cunto de li cunti, 1634], Project Gutenberg, (...)
  • 6 Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, German Popular Stories [Kinder und Haus-Mährchen, 1812], Edgar Taylor (tra (...)
  • 7 English Fairy Tales, Joseph Jacobs (ed.), London, D. Nutt, 1890.

2The institutionalisation of the fairy tale as a literary genre was established by groups of writers, especially aristocratic women, who gathered in salons during the 17th century in France. In fact, it was during this period that Charles Perrault published Tales of Mother Goose (1697),3 which became the hypotext for the most well-known contemporary fairy-tale retellings: Disney’s movies. However, French writers were not the initiators of the literary fairy-tale tradition in Europe; two Italian writers had already done it: Giovanni Francesco Straparola with his collection Pleasant Nights (1550)4 and Giambattista Basile with Pentameron: The Tale of Tales (1634).5 Later on, at the beginning of the 19th century, Johannes Bolte and George Polívka started classifying fairy tales by referencing as many parallel versions as they could find, thanks to the Grimm Brothers, who wrote down two hundred and ten stories in German Popular Stories (1812).6 Afterwards, British folklorist Andrew Lang translated and bowdlerised Perrault and the Grimm’s collections, among other fairy tales from all around the world, in the twenty-five Fairy Books between 1889 and 1913. British fairy-tale collections were rare in the 19th century, so Lang was a pioneer in publishing fairy tales in English and it inspired others like Joseph Jacobs’s English Fairy Tales (1890).7

  • 8 Karen E. Rowe, “Feminism and Fairy Tales”, in Don’t Bet on the Prince: Contemporary Feminist Fairy (...)
  • 9 Marina Warner, Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 20 (...)
  • 10 Marcia K. Lieberman, “Some Day My Prince Will Come: Female Acculturation through the Fairy Tale”, i (...)
  • 11 Karen E. Rowe, “Feminism and Fairy Tales”, p. 210.

3However, as Karen E. Rowe asserts in her essay “Feminism and Fairy Tales”, classic fairy tales are “powerful transmitters of romantic myths which encourage women to internalise only aspirations deemed appropriate to our real sexual functions within a patriarchy”.8 Similarly, Marina Warner claims that fairy tales are “but expressions of the collectors’ and authors’ values, which are both time-bound and class-bound”.9 A clear example of this idea would be the importance of beauty in female characters, as Marcia K. Lieberman states: “Girls win the prize if they are the fairest of them all; boys win if they are bold, active and lucky”.10 In fact, being beautiful means being chosen, but beauty is also associated with good-temper and meekness, in contrast to ill-temper, which tends to be associated with ugliness, thus influencing children’s expectations when reading the story. As Rowe puts it, “[t]hese tales which glorify passivity, dependency, and self-sacrifice as a heroine’s cardinal virtues suggest that culture’s very survival depends upon a woman’s acceptance of roles which relegate her to motherhood and domesticity”.11

  • 12 Carolina Fernández Rodríguez, “Revisión del ‘mito de la belleza’ en las re/escrituras contemporánea (...)
  • 13 Ibid.
  • 14 Tatterhood and Other Tales, Ethel J. Phelps (ed.), New York, The Feminist Press, 1978.
  • 15 Jane Yolen, Sleeping Ugly, New York, Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1981.
  • 16 Linda Kavanagh, “The Ugly Sisters Strike Back”, in Cinderella on the Ball, Dublin, Attic Press, 199 (...)
  • 17 Anne E. Duggan, Donald Haase, Helen J. Callow, Folktales and Fairy Tales: Traditions and Texts from (...)
  • 18 Emma Donoghue, Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins [1993], New York, HarperCollins, 1999.
  • 19 Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry [1989], New York, Grove Press, 1998.
  • 20 Wray Delaney, The Beauty of the Wolf, London, HQ, 2019.
  • 21 Deirdre Sullivan, “Riverbed”, in Tangleweed and Brine, p. 116-128.
  • 22 Deirdre Sullivan, “Slippershod”, in Tangleweed and Brine, p. 3-10.

4Contrary to those ideals, feminism in the 1960s denounced the connection between beauty and female powerlessness and the systematic control of women bodies as desirable objects by men. So, according to Carolina Fernández Rodríguez,12 most fairy-tale renditions from the 1970s onwards tend to be imbued with feminist ideology and portray less and less patriarchal stereotypes. In fact, most of these feminist retellings place special emphasis on the revision of the traditional beauty model and the deconstruction of patriarchal archetypes. Some illustrative examples mentioned by Fernández Rodríguez13 include Ethel J. Phelps (Tatterhood and Other Tales, 197814), Jane Yolen (Sleeping Ugly, 198115) or Linda Kavanagh (“The Ugly Sisters Strike Back”, 199116). Hence, contemporary retellings of fairy tales are frequently marketed toward young adult readers and use parody, irony and aphorisms to offer alternative narratives from the heteronormative perspective according to Anne E. Duggan, Donald Haase and Helen J. Callow.17 So, queer adaptations like Donoghue’s Kissing the Witch (1993)18 or Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry (1989)19 can be found as part of the third-wave feminist movement, and Wray Delaney’s The Beauty of the Wolf (2020)20 and Sullivan’s fairy-tale revisions are part of the fourth-wave feminism as they both focus on gendered norms, giving voice to the long muted and suppressed female characters of fairy tales. Nevertheless, Tangleweed and Brine stands out from other fairy-tale collections because not only does it tell the story from the heroine’s point of view, but it also introduces non-heteronormative happy endings and openly talks about silenced topics such as domestic violence, spinsterhood or incest. Moreover, Sullivan also deals with race in one of her stories, “Riverbed”,21 a rewriting of “Donkeyskin”, which, along with “Slippershod”,22 a revision of “Cinderella”, will be the main focus of the analysis in this paper. As a matter of fact, it can be stated that those retellings are necessary in a contemporary society with global social movements such as #MeToo or #BlackLivesMatter and Sullivan’s stories dwell on topics that have been historically and culturally silenced, especially in Ireland.

  • 23 Marian Roalfe Cox, Cinderella: Three Hundred and Forty-Five Variants of Cinderella, Catskin, and Ca (...)
  • 24 Multilingual Folk Tale Database, Cinderella and Cap O’Rushes, online: http://www.mftd.org/index.php (...)

5In Tangleweed and Brine, Sullivan presents a series of thirteen open-ended dark feminist revisions of classic fairy tales such as “Cinderella”, “Snow White” or “Rapunzel”. The heroines of those contemporary fairy tales are strong, witty and empowered women. The heteronormative happy ending portrayed by traditional fairy tales is therefore set aside and the reader is presented with open-ended stories full of dark and silenced topics. The stories in Tangleweed and Brine are organised into two sections as indicated by the title: earth (Tangleweed) and water tales (Brine). In this respect, classic stories featuring forests, fauna and flora like “Little Red Riding Hood”, “Rapunzel”, or “Snow White” belong to Tangleweed and tales with seas and rivers like “A Little Mermaid” or “The Goose Girl” belong to Brine. In general, it can be asserted that Sullivan’s collection recalls previous feminist revisionists because she writes from the heroine’s point of view, like Donoghue, and exposes the cruelty of a patriarchal society like Carter. But she contributes to that tradition by portraying heroines that must rely on their own resources, resilience and creativity instead of looking for external help. Besides, those stories are unique not only because they question dominant forms of social and political relationships, but because they also expand the spectrum of relational arrangements, such as allowing the heroines to rule a kingdom on their own or deciding not to marry. It is for that reason that “Cinderella” and “Donkeyskin” have been selected for analysis in this article. On the one hand, the story of “Cinderella” is probably one of the best-known fairy tales, with hundreds of variations throughout the world, as Marian Roalfe Cox showed in 1893,23 and as the online Multilingual Folk Tale Database recollects.24 But Sullivan also manages to subvert the story and give it a new spin. On the other hand, “Donkeyskin”, a variant of “Cinderella”, is not as well-known because it is rarely included in anthologies of fairy tales in English, due to its controversial plot of incest. However Sullivan rescued that forgotten tale, connected with the story of Saint Dympna that is still popular in Irish communities, and gave a voice to the protagonist, while exposing silenced topics such as incest and paedophilia.

Domestic violence and the need for independence in “Cinderella”

  • 25 Giambattista Basile, Pentameron
  • 26 The Blue Fairy Book [1889], Andrew Lang (ed.), New York, Dover Publications, 1966.
  • 27 Ana Cristina Herreros Ferreira, “Simbolismo en los cuentos tradicionales”, Va de Cuentos, February  (...)
  • 28 Emma Donoghue, “The Tale of the Shoe”, in Kissing the Witch…, p. 1-9.
  • 29 Angela Carter, “Ashputtle or The Mother’s Ghost: Three Versions of One Story” [1987], in American G (...)

6The first literary European version of “Cinderella” was published by Basile in his Pentameron25 in 1634, but probably the most popular version of this story among English readers comes from Lang’s tale in The Blue Fairy Book (1889),26 whose source text was Perrault’s “Cendrillon” (“Cinderella”). As shown with Cox’s work, “Cinderella” is probably the most rewritten fairy tale that we know of. Even though new versions subvert previous plots, Anna Cristina Herreros Ferreira27 believes that they still keep the symbolism and the core of the tale type, so that readers identify the implemented changes and new revisions such as “The Tale of the Shoe”28 by Donoghue or “Ashputtle or The Mother’s Ghost: Three Versions of One Story”29 by Carter as relevant in present-day society.

  • 30 Hans-Jörg Uther, The Types of International Folktales: A Classification and Bibliography. Based on (...)
  • 31 The Classic Fairy Tales: Texts, Criticism, Maria Tatar (ed.), London, Norton & Co, 1999, p. 102.

7Thus, the ATU30 classification (Aarne-Thompson-Uther classification) becomes pertinent in the study of fairy tales because it helps understand which recurrent motifs are subverted in recent stories. Finnish folklorist Antti Amatus Aarne catalogued folktales into different themes, making possible a coding of the tales. Later on, Stith Thompson revised and enlarged Aarne’s index and published a jointly authored work entitled The Types of the Folktale (1910). In that system, which was originally called the “AT number system” and nowadays is known as the “ATU number”, folktales are classified by Aarne into seven broad categories. Within each category, the different types of folktales are subdivided by their motif patterns and individual types. According to Maria Tatar,31 the central focus in “Cinderella”’s tale type is the unbearable family situation produced by the father’s remarriage. So, looking at the ATU classification, it belongs to tale type 510: “Cinderella and Cap-o’-Rushes”, more specifically to subtype 510A: “Persecuted heroine”, where motifs such as S31: “Cruel stepmother” or L55: “Stepdaughter heroine” can be found in most retellings.

  • 32 Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers, London, Vintage Book (...)
  • 33 Ibid., p. 569.
  • 34 Deirdre Sullivan, “Slippershod”, p. 4.

8Warner32 states that 80% of French widowers remarried within the year in the 17th and 18th centuries. Moreover, when the new wife entered the household, she and her children often had to compete for resources and love with the offspring of the previous marriage. However, the father’s responsibility for choosing a potentially conflictual marriage partner is ignored and sometimes even the father is suppressed as a character: “[…] tales consistently fail to ask, why did Cinderella’s father marry again so quickly, so unwisely? Or, why does he allow Cinderella’s mistreatment at all?”33 I believe that Sullivan, a social media activist and advocate of female rights, chose to rewrite this particular tale, with the title “Slippershod”, to expose this inherent domestic violence in the “Cinderella” tale, but in this case, it comes from both the father and the stepfamily: “When he returned, he’d open up the door, and you’d approach. Eagerly, with smiles, the first few times. Then slowly, like a dog that knows that legs are built to kick”.34 Thus, not only does she revise motif S31 by including the father as a cruel character, but she also exposes motif L52: “Abused youngest daughter”.

  • 35 Mary Ryan, “A Feminism of Their Own?: Irish Women’s History and Contemporary Irish Women’s Writing” (...)
  • 36 https://www.womensaid.ie/about/policy/natintstats.html
  • 37 Deirdre Sullivan, unpublished interview conducted by Diana Rodríguez Bonet, 15 April 2019.
  • 38 The Eighth Amendment of the Irish Constitution (1983) recognised the equal right to life of the pre (...)

9Domestic violence keeps being a serious global issue, as can be seen with the #MeToo movement. In the case of Ireland, Mary Ryan35 states that this problem is very worrying because many domestic violence cases went unreported up to 2010 in Ireland and, according to Women’s Aid (2021),36 one in four women in the Republic of Ireland has been abused by a current or former partner. As a matter of fact, Sullivan commented in a personal interview37 that the Magdalene Laundries, the Eighth Amendment38 and clerical child abuse scandals hum beneath her writing because she comes from the county where the Church buried the remains of eight hundred children in a septic tank.

  • 39 Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde…, p. 1050-1051.
  • 40 Jeanne Marie Leprince de Beaumont, more commonly known as Madame Leprince de Beaumont, was a French (...)
  • 41 Ruth B. Bottigheimer, Grimm’s Bad Girls and Bold Boys: The Moral and Social Vision of the Tales, Ne (...)
  • 42 Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde…, p. 1051.
  • 43 Irish graffito, quoted by Julia O’Faolain in “Interview with Myself”, London Review of Books, vol.  (...)
  • 44 Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde…, p. 1054.
  • 45 Deirdre Sullivan, Tangleweed and Brine, p. 3.
  • 46 Angela Carter, The Magic Toyshop [1967], London, Virago, 1981.
  • 47 Max Lüthi, The European Folktale: Form and Nature [Das Europäische Volksmärchen: Form und Wesen, 19 (...)

10One issue related to domestic violence, as the unreported cases show, is the silence of the victims, which can be seen in most traditional fairy tales. According to Warner,39 Madame Leprince de Beaumont40 has a story about a young wife who is beaten up by her husband and asks her neighbour for help. This neighbour, a wise woman, maybe even a witch, gives her a jug of water and tells her to swallow and keep the water in her mouth whenever her husband comes back home. After eight days, she has not been beaten up again, so she goes back to get another jug of the magic water. However, she learns that it was just plain water and that the solution was simply to keep quiet instead of reproaching her husband for being drunk all the time. The story ends with a reformed husband and the implication that her bitter tongue was the cause of his bad habits. Ruth B. Bottigheimer41 analysed the speech patterns of female heroines and villains in the Grimm’s fairy tales and found that, with later editions, virtue was silenced and villainy had become loquacious, “with the witches and wicked stepmothers far surpassing other women in articulacy”.42 Silence could be seen as a survival strategy for women in fairy tales, as Irish writer Julia O’Faolain wrote: “Whatever you say, say nothing”.43 The speechlessness of female characters is entangled with the ideal criteria held up for women and thus might foster the desire for silence from powerful characters. Warner44 goes further by implying that the vanishing of fairy-tale mothers could be due to an exemplary silence and self-erasing of the story. In fact, “Slippershod” presents a heroine who is still being shaped by her absent mother. In this retelling, the protagonist keeps remembering her mother’s advice about being a good daughter: “Be gentle and be kind and be my daughter”,45 and she ponders about her childhood, when she used to be immaculate because she kept silent like her mother. However, Sullivan’s heroine becomes more loquacious and breaks the silence to tell her story. She is the narrator and verbalises her grief, as heroines do in Donoghue’s collection Kissing the Witch (1993) or Carter’s The Magic Toyshop (1967).46 By contrast, Max Lüthi claimed in his book The European Folktale: Form and Nature (1909) that “folktale characters always act with composure. Even when rage, anger, jealousy, possessiveness, love and longing are mentioned, there can be no question of real surges of emotion, greed or passion”.47

  • 48 Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde…, p. 1078.

11But Warner48 observes that contemporary female writers have been attracted to silent heroines who know neither how to speak, nor laugh, nor cry and are silenced after they have been entranced or have vowed to be silent for ever. “Slippershod” befits this category because there is no magic in the story and the protagonist’s responsibilities are traditional and instigated by her mother.

  • 49 Ibid., p. 588.
  • 50 Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories [1979], New York, Penguin, 1993.
  • 51 Ana Cristina Herreros Ferreira, Libro de brujas españolas, Madrid, Siruela, 2009.
  • 52 Karen E. Rowe, “To Spin a Yarn: The Female Voice in Folklore and Fairy Tale”, in Fairy Tales and So (...)
  • 53 The fourth wall, which has been reinterpreted for the purpose of this paper, is a performative conv (...)

12The most well-known fairy-tale collections, Tales of Mother Goose by Perrault, German Popular Stories by the Grimm Brothers or The Fairy Book by Lang among others are not told in the first person, so the voice of the storyteller must be issuing from elsewhere, silencing the female voice as Warner warns in her book From the Beast to the Blonde.49 Even contemporary revisions such as The Bloody Chamber (1979)50 by Carter or Herreros Ferreira’s Libro de brujas españolas (2009)51 record female experiences from a third-person point of view. However, Donoghue broke this narrative convention in writing all the stories through the protagonist’s voice in Kissing the Witch. Wray Delaney, British writer Sally Gardner’s penname, also rewrote the story of “Beauty and the Beast” using a first-person narrator in her book The Beauty of the Wolf, and Sullivan is varying between a first and second-person narrator in Tangleweed and Brine. In fact, if we recover the idea of women as tale-tellers introduced by Rowe,52 we could say that the use of a female narrator speaking directly to the audience makes the reader perceive that the stories could be true, and enhances the illusion of truthfulness and veracity because the story is received straight from the protagonist. In “Slippershod”, the reader is presented with a second-person narrator who speaks directly to the protagonist, which is an uncommon type of narration in fairy tales, and Sullivan manages to create a rare sense of intimacy between protagonist, narrator and reader. In using this type of narration, Sullivan breaks the fourth wall53 because the narrator’s voice speaks directly to the reader, hence positioning herself as a leading feminist writer.

  • 54 Myrtle Hill, Women in Ireland: A Century of Change, Belfast, Blackstaff Press, 2003, p. 218.
  • 55 Ruth B. Bottigheimer, Grimm’s Bad Girls and Bold Boys…, p. 39.
  • 56 Ibid., p. 37.
  • 57 Marisol Morales Ladrón, “Espacios invisibles, espacios de silencio: Emma Donoghue y su re-visión de (...)
  • 58 Ana Cristina Herreros Ferreira, “Cenicientas y Cenicientos” in “Simbolismo en los cuentos tradicion (...)

13Sullivan’s subversions challenge traditional Catholic values, so inherent in Irish society, and revise heteronormativity. As the role of women in Ireland has considerably changed in the past years, with, for example, the legalisation of abortion in 2018 – even though it was only approved by 66.4% of voters –, and as “in modern Ireland things which were once hidden are now being told”,54 in “Slippershod”, Sullivan retrieves the witty and independent heroine that was lost between 1400 and 1700. According to Bottigheimer55 fundamental alterations to the original version were made during that period because they coincided with the social definition of gender and the categorisation of sex and sexuality. After that period, Bottigheimer56 claims, fairy-tale girls became damsels in distress, mothers retreated into the shadows, and female helpers simply disappeared. Before 1500, sex, sexuality and sexual relations were not associated with gender roles and it was not until 1700 that modern attributions of femininity took shape and led to the concept of femininity that until recently has been regarded as normal. As Marisol Morales Ladrón points out,57 the rupture between mother and daughter is very common in fairy tales, and this absence is usually substituted by a fairy godmother who tends to play the role of the donor (provider). However, Sullivan does not introduce a donor in “Slippershod”, so this Cinderella can only rely on herself and her own needs to become a woman on her own. Herreros Ferreira stated in her online course “Simbolismo en los cuentos tradicionales” [“Symbolism in Traditional Tales”],58 that the only way Cinderella can grow up and become a woman is by losing both the protection of her mother and that of the donor. Thus, rewriting fairy tales implies a re-elaboration that may appropriate, criticise, enhance or replace the original plot and introduce topics that have long been silenced, such as incest, domestic violence or sexual harassment.

14The story of “Cinderella” has been rewritten thousands of times, but the happy ending seems to be a recursive pattern in all versions, even in Donoghue’s “The Tale of the Shoe”, where Cinderella, after attending the ball, gives up her heels and the stereotypes linked to femininity only to end up in a same-sex relationship. As children’s stories expect to have a happy ending, it could be expected that adult versions of fairy tales would portray a different ending for Cinderella, which is exactly what “Slippershod” presents. Sullivan’s protagonist does not want to attend the ball and meet a prince; instead, she wants to escape her home to never return. So, in this 21st century revision, Cinderella does not end up in a romantic relationship, but she happily runs away and prefers to be alone. Sullivan is normalising a taboo of modern-day society: spinsterhood. According to Sullivan, “the Church still has a stranglehold on the education system and the health service that casts a long shadow”59 which can be sensed in the marital status in Ireland. According to the Central Statistics Office (CSO) data collection,60 the number of single persons quickly dropped after the age of 30 in Ireland until 2016. In fact, the number of marriages increased by almost 100,000 every six years between 1996 and 2016.61 However, CSO data between 2017 and 201962 show that marriages in Ireland slightly decreased every year, ranking eighteenth in the EU twenty-seven member states,63 which Iona Institute for Religion and Society64 attributes to socio-economic conditions. Moreover, 56.7% of all marriages opted for religious ceremonies in 2021, with 39% being Roman Catholic. Therefore, statistics show that not only has there been a rise in marriages between 1996 and 2016, but most Irish couples still prefer traditional weddings.65 All in all, Sullivan goes one step further than previous feminist rewritings of “Cinderella” because she takes into account contemporary legal and social changes in Ireland to subvert this fairy tale in an innovative way.

Incest and race in “Donkeyskin”

  • 66 Hans-Jörg Uther, The Types of International Folktales…, vol. I, p. 295.

15The story of “Donkeyskin” is not as well-known as “Cinderella” or “Snow White” among readers because it is rarely included in anthologies of fairy tales in English due to its controversial plot. According to the ATU classification and as in “Cinderella”, it is the tale type 510: “Cinderella and Cap-o’-Rushes”, but it in fact belongs to subtype 510B: “Unnatural love”, where we can find motifs such as T311.1: “Fight of maiden to escape marriage”. It is an old tale that has been neglected and become taboo over time because the heroine’s fight is with the unwanted attention of her father, the king, rather than the cruelty of another woman; in other words, a story about incest. In fact, Uther states in his book The Types of International Folktales that “this form of incest is often documented independently since the 12th century”.66

  • 67 “Bobino”, in The Grey Fairy Book [1900], Andrew Lang (ed.), New York, Dover Publications, 1967, p.  (...)
  • 68 “The Boy Who Could Keep a Secret”, in The Crimson Fairy Book [1903], Andrew Lang (ed.), New York, D (...)

16As a matter of fact, if we look at the classic tales that still circulate nowadays, we can see that those with wicked stepmothers have survived in multiple versions, but those with an errant father have mostly died out. Having a look at the ATU classification, it can be seen that motif S31: “Cruel stepmother” appears in types 403, 425, 432, 450, 451, 480, 502, 510, 511, 516, 590, 592, 706, 708, 709 and 720, with examples such as “Cinderella” or the stories of Baba Yaga. In contrast, motif S11: “Cruel father” only appears in tale types 451, 516, 671, 706, 725 and 870, with examples as “Bobino”67 or “The Boy Who Could Keep a Secret”,68 both published by Lang.

  • 69 Clare Bradford, “Monsters: Monstrous Identities in Young Adult Romance”, in (Re)imagining the World (...)
  • 70 Marian Roalfe Cox, Cinderella…, p. 53-86.
  • 71 Janice Haaken, Pillars of Salt: Gender, Memory, and the Perils of Looking Back, New Brunswick, Rudg (...)
  • 72 Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde…, p. 899.
  • 73 Ibid., p. 908.

17Moreover, according to Clare Bradford,69 there are very few retellings of “Donkeyskin” for young adults, although Cox classified ninety-six stories as “Catskin and Cap o’Rushes”70 variants. Despite this, Janice Haaken71 explains that a version of this tale, related to the story of Saint Dympna, is still being told in Irish communities. That could be the reason why Irish writers such as Donoghue and Sullivan have retrieved that long-forgotten tale and have given it a spin in their respective fairy-tale collections. According to the tale, Saint Dympna was a 7th-century princess, the daughter of a king of Britain or Ireland. She had a beautiful mother who died, and, like Donkeyskin, she had to flee her kingdom because her father tried to marry her. The story of Saint Dympna, whose cult has been kept fervently in Catholic northern Europe according to Warner,72 is illustrated in a sculptured altarpiece in the church of Saint Dympna in Geel, Belgian Flanders, and her official life was written in the 13th century by Peter of Cambrai. The story of Saint Dympna, who became patron saint of the insane because there is an “affinity between mental distress and incestuous transgressions”,73 therefore passed from folklore into hagiography in the 13th century and then into belief in the 15th century.

  • 74 The Classic Fairy Tales…, p. 103.
  • 75 Ibid.
  • 76 Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde…, p. 713.
  • 77 Sophocle’s tragedy Oedipus (c. 5th BC) already revolved around this universal law.
  • 78 Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde…, p. 714.

18According to Tatar,74 stepmothers and their daughters tend to vanish from tales depicting the erotic persecution of a daughter by her father. Yet, the father’s desire for his daughter in the “Cap O’Rushes” type (ATU 510B), gives a strong motive for a stepmother’s jealousy in the “Cinderella” type.75 Those two plots can therefore be linked together to present oedipal fantasies. As Warner76 reminds us, there is a universal law in human society that forbids sex between mother and son, father and daughter or brother and sister. In fact, it is possible to trace this law back to ancient Greece with myths that defined and conveyed its inappropriateness.77 However, Warner78 states that although incest between father and daughter is strongly shown in fairy tales, it has not been as predominant in Western mythology as the mother-son prohibition.

  • 79 “Donkeyskin”, in The Grey Fairy Book, p. 1-15.
  • 80 Christine Goldberg, “The Donkey Skin Folktale Cycle AT (510B)”, The Journal of American Folklore, v (...)
  • 81 Marian Roalfe Cox, Cinderella…, p. 53-80.
  • 82 Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde…, p. 349.

19As a matter of fact, Basile included in his Pentameron the first modern variation of an incest tale, which he called “The She-Bear”. Later, in the 17th century, Perrault wrote a version of that tale, called “Peau d’Âne” (“Donkeyskin”). Additionally, the Grimm Brothers included in their 19th century fairy-tale collection a story called “Allerleirauh” (“All-Kinds-of-Fur”), which has a very similar plot to Perrault’s version. Lastly, Lang published the English translation79 of this story in The Grey Fairy Book in 1900, but, unlike his predecessors, his story was somewhat euphemised because there was no threat of incest between father and daughter. So, as Christine Goldberg80 states in her essay, the so-called “Donkeyskin” folktale is a very old story – even though its origin is still unknown – which surprisingly remains popular in France. As Cox showed in her study of three hundred and forty-five variants of Cinderella, up until the 19th century, there were at least seventy-seven versions with what she called an “unnatural father”.81 So, it could be claimed that the disappearance of this tale type might have been caused because “unnatural fathers” exist in real life. In fact, Warner explains that the proposal of marriage of a father to his daughter is psychologically too hard to accept for the reader because it is not an impossible situation: “[…] it belongs to a different order of reality / fantasy […]. It is when fairy tales coincide with experience that they begin to suffer from censoring, rather than the other way around”.82 A daughter can express love for her father when she is a child, but the young woman who becomes aware of her eligibility and is on the threshold of marriage knows that the bond with her father has limits.

  • 83 Deirdre Sullivan, “Riverbed”, p. 118.
  • 84 Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde…, p. 1043.
  • 85 Deirdre Sullivan, “Riverbed”, p. 118.
  • 86 Rape Crisis Network Ireland, Rape Crisis Statistics 2020, online: https://www.rcni.ie/wp-content/up (...)

20Sullivan’s story “Riverbed” portrays a young and intelligent brown-skin girl who becomes aware of her father’s attention at the tender age of thirteen: “I was thirteen the first time that I saw Him look at me. The way that men look at women”.83 Warner84 claims that Perrault and Grimm’s Donkeyskin becomes speechless after her father’s assault and she only speaks to herself in private; like Cinderella, she suffers in silence and is eventually rewarded with a happy ending. But Sullivan’s story uses a first-person narrator, so the reader can feel the impotence and fear of the princess: “[…] when I go to Him I hide my face. I smear dirt on it, cut my skin and rat my hair as wild as it can go […] The features that I wear are hers. And He can never know. Or He will have me”.85 “Riverbed” clearly states the king’s sexual desires and it exposes paedophilia, which is a concerning issue in the contemporary world and has not been explicitly addressed in a rewriting of any fairy tale before. One could argue that Carter’s “Snow Child” had already denounced the rape of a child, but the age of the protagonist is not stated in that story; the reader assumes she is an underage girl because most of the classic fairy tales portray underage protagonists, like “Snow White”. The Rape Crisis Network Ireland (RCNI)’s Rape Crisis Statistics 2020 report86 stated that 14% of incidents of abuse against children aged thirteen to seventeen were perpetrated by family members and girls have greater vulnerability than boys as they grow into adulthood (42% and 16% respectively). Moreover, girls’ vulnerability increases to more extreme forms of sexual violence such as rape as they grow old.

  • 87 The space between the bed and the wall. Ruelles became the word for the salons where most modern fa (...)
  • 88 Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde…, p. 894.

21Even though children aged thirteen onwards, like the protagonist of “Donkeyskin”, are most vulnerable to rape perpetrated by a male non-family member according to the Rape Crisis Statistics 2020 report, the possibility of a father abusing his daughter is very real in our society’s view of the world. But Sullivan’s heroine is very aware of her beauty, her youth and her father’s desires, so she does not allow her father to subjugate her. The most well-known versions of this tale, Perrault’s “Peau d’Âne” (“Donkeyskin”) and the Grimm’s “Allerleirauh” (“All-Kinds-of-Fur”), present a benevolent king who only wants to please his wife’s wishes of remarrying someone as beautiful as her. But the emphasis in incest tales shifts in the 17th century from the daughter’s responsibility to the father’s in the ruelles (alleys)87 according to Warner.88 In general, Sullivan’s version considers the heroine’s actions, motives and rights just as the old versions in the ruelles.

22Because “Riverbed” does not introduce the element of magic, the protagonist relies on her wits and whatever objects she can gather to escape this violent situation. Yet, in Sullivan’s story, the heroine decides to stay at the palace and confront her father, who locks and ties her to the bed. Sullivan creates a princess who does not believe in becoming a traditional queen, and that is why her only desire is to have her power and freedom back. This feminist rewriting does not include any romantic relationship for a happy ending, similar to “Slippershod”, and the princess becomes the ruler after having killed her father. As Lieberman89 says, Perrault’s heroine wins the final prize (marrying a rich prince) because she is the fairest of them all; thus, she is perpetuating the myth of beauty presented by Fernández Rodríguez.90 Moreover, the princess’s father is forgiven for his actions rather than pilloried, thus restoring the patriarchal order at the end of the tale, which, according to Warner, belongs to the “Frenchman’s romantic assertion of the goodness of choice and love in marriage”.91 However, as shown before, CSO data between 2017 and 201992 show that marriages in Ireland have been decreasing, so contemporary Irish retellings of fairy tales like Sullivan’s need to portray this social change. For this reason, Sullivan’s princess becomes a strong and independent woman who does not need a love partner to fulfill her dreams. All in all, it could be stated that Sullivan’s version shows that women are just as capable as men of holding high positions and jobs, but patriarchy is still in the way of women’s progress in the 21st century. According to the CSO,93 there is only 22.2% of female representation in the Dáil. In addition, although there are more women aged 25-34 with a third level of qualification (59.9%)94 than men in the same age group, only 24.7% work forty hours or more a week. Similarly, only 26% of all senior roles in large enterprises were held by women in 2019 and only 11.5% had CEO positions. Furthermore, the Gender Pay Gap continues to segregate workers in Ireland because males have higher earned incomes than females across all levels of education.95 As can be seen, Sullivan presents retellings that are relevant to Ireland nowadays, given the challenge to traditional Catholic values and the revision of heteronormative female roles. Moreover, Tangleweed and Brine can not only be considered an inclusive collection in feminist terms, but it also presents different ethnicities, like a brown-skin princess in “Riverbed” who could belong to the Traveller community which represents only 1% of the Irish population. Her physical description and the fact that we are told that her mother was a witch who read the cards make the reader believe this hypothesis: “Witches burn, and sometimes men catch fire. My mother read the cards. She knew her fate. Our hands upon the deck”.96 Moreover, no one knows where she came from: “Where was my mother from? Who were her people? People tell me that they don’t know”.97

Some concluding remarks: fairy-tale rewritings in the 21st century

  • 98 Angela Carter, foreword in Charles Perrault, The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault, Angela Carter (tr (...)
  • 99 Jack Zipes, Why Fairy Tales Stick: The Evolution and Relevance of a Genre, New York, Taylor & Franc (...)

23It is undeniable that there are multiple fairy-tale adaptations in our society. As Carter pointed out, “each century tends to create or re-create fairy tales after its own taste”.98 Moreover, as Zipes states, those fairy tales have changed with new technologies prompting fresh and urgent issues that concern our social lives.99 This can be confirmed by the fact that still in 2022 there are retellings of folktales being made in different formats: some examples include the TV series Once Upon a Time (2011), Bill Condon’s film Beauty and the Beast (2017), Guy Ritchie’s movie Aladdin (2019), Sally Gardner’s book The Beauty of the Wolf (2019), Lauren Schmidt Hissrich’s TV adaptation The Witcher (2019) and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical Cinderella (2021).

  • 100 Cathy Sweeney, Modern Times, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2020.
  • 101 Cristina Bacchilega, Fairy Tales Transformed? Twenty-First-Century Adaptations and the Politics of (...)
  • 102 Ibid., p. 4.

24It is therefore not surprising that Sullivan chose to rewrite classic fairy tales instead of creating new stories that introduce queer and / or feminist identities like Cathy Sweeney’s Modern Times.100 Cristina Bacchilega confirms that “there is a widespread sensibility to issues of gender in fairy tales”101 and some versions “are produced and / or received as inspirations to undo privilege and prejudice”.102 Similarly, Karlyn Crowley and John Pennington believe that feminist retellings do not only replicate structures of classic tales, rather

  • 103 Karlyn Crowley, John Pennington, “Feminist Frauds on the Fairies? Didacticism and Liberation in Rec (...)

[…] powerful feminist fairy, the ones that are descriptive and self-reflexive, do not simply subvert stereotypes and replace the old with the new, rather they rattle the foundational cages of the tale where the power structures reside.103

  • 104 Cristina Bacchilega, Fairy Tales Transformed?…, p. 38.

In my opinion, Sullivan’s collection revises both thematically and structurally classic tales, for example in imagining situations that would seem impossible to include in Irish society, as has been shown with the analysis of “Riverbed” and the inclusion of the Traveller community. In addition, Bacchilega believes that “these texts open up their target audiences and readers more generally to imagining alternative (hi)stories and futures the Happy Ever After forecloses”,104 which is precisely what Sullivan does in “Slippershod” by allowing the protagonist to escape without a love partner.

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Notes

1 Deirdre Sullivan, Tangleweed and Brine, Dublin, Little Island Books, 2017.

2 Deirdre Sullivan, Savage Her Reply, Dublin, Little Island Books, 2020.

3 Charles Perrault, The Tales of Mother Goose [Histoires ou contes du temps passé. Contes de ma mère l’Oye, 1697], Charles Welsh (trans.), Lexington, D. C. Heath & Co, 1901.

4 Giovanni Francesco Straparola, The Pleasant Nights [Le piacevoli notti, 1550], Suzanne Magnanini (ed. and trans.), Chicago, Iter Academic Press, 2015.

5 Giambattista Basile, Pentameron: The Tale of Tales [Lo cunto de li cunti, 1634], Project Gutenberg, 2000, online: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2198.

6 Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, German Popular Stories [Kinder und Haus-Mährchen, 1812], Edgar Taylor (trans.), London, C. Baldwyn, 1823.

7 English Fairy Tales, Joseph Jacobs (ed.), London, D. Nutt, 1890.

8 Karen E. Rowe, “Feminism and Fairy Tales”, in Don’t Bet on the Prince: Contemporary Feminist Fairy Tales in North America and England, Jack Zipes (ed.), New York, Methuen, 1986, p. 211.

9 Marina Warner, Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2014, p. 270.

10 Marcia K. Lieberman, “Some Day My Prince Will Come: Female Acculturation through the Fairy Tale”, in Don’t Bet on the Prince…, p. 188.

11 Karen E. Rowe, “Feminism and Fairy Tales”, p. 210.

12 Carolina Fernández Rodríguez, “Revisión del ‘mito de la belleza’ en las re/escrituras contemporáneas de cuentos de hadas”, paper from the conference “Mitos: Actas del VII Congreso Internacional de la Asociación Española de Semiótica”, Zaragoza, 4-9 November 1996, p. 354.

13 Ibid.

14 Tatterhood and Other Tales, Ethel J. Phelps (ed.), New York, The Feminist Press, 1978.

15 Jane Yolen, Sleeping Ugly, New York, Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1981.

16 Linda Kavanagh, “The Ugly Sisters Strike Back”, in Cinderella on the Ball, Dublin, Attic Press, 1991, p. 20-25.

17 Anne E. Duggan, Donald Haase, Helen J. Callow, Folktales and Fairy Tales: Traditions and Texts from around the World, revised and expanded ed., Wesport, Greenwood Press, 2016, vol. I, p. 198.

18 Emma Donoghue, Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins [1993], New York, HarperCollins, 1999.

19 Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry [1989], New York, Grove Press, 1998.

20 Wray Delaney, The Beauty of the Wolf, London, HQ, 2019.

21 Deirdre Sullivan, “Riverbed”, in Tangleweed and Brine, p. 116-128.

22 Deirdre Sullivan, “Slippershod”, in Tangleweed and Brine, p. 3-10.

23 Marian Roalfe Cox, Cinderella: Three Hundred and Forty-Five Variants of Cinderella, Catskin, and Cap o'rushes, London, David Nutt for the Folk-Lore Society, 1893.

24 Multilingual Folk Tale Database, Cinderella and Cap O’Rushes, online: http://www.mftd.org/index.php?action=atu&src=atu&id=510.

25 Giambattista Basile, Pentameron

26 The Blue Fairy Book [1889], Andrew Lang (ed.), New York, Dover Publications, 1966.

27 Ana Cristina Herreros Ferreira, “Simbolismo en los cuentos tradicionales”, Va de Cuentos, February 2022, online: https://cursos.vadecuentos.com/course/simbolismo-cuentos-tradicionales.

28 Emma Donoghue, “The Tale of the Shoe”, in Kissing the Witch…, p. 1-9.

29 Angela Carter, “Ashputtle or The Mother’s Ghost: Three Versions of One Story” [1987], in American Ghosts and Old World Wonders, USA, Trafalgar Square, 1994, p. 110-120.

30 Hans-Jörg Uther, The Types of International Folktales: A Classification and Bibliography. Based on the system of Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson, Helsinki, Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia (FF Communications; 284-286), 3 vol., 2004.

31 The Classic Fairy Tales: Texts, Criticism, Maria Tatar (ed.), London, Norton & Co, 1999, p. 102.

32 Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers, London, Vintage Books, 1994, p. 584.

33 Ibid., p. 569.

34 Deirdre Sullivan, “Slippershod”, p. 4.

35 Mary Ryan, “A Feminism of Their Own?: Irish Women’s History and Contemporary Irish Women’s Writing”, Estudios Irlandeses, no. 5, 2010, p. 97.

36 https://www.womensaid.ie/about/policy/natintstats.html

37 Deirdre Sullivan, unpublished interview conducted by Diana Rodríguez Bonet, 15 April 2019.

38 The Eighth Amendment of the Irish Constitution (1983) recognised the equal right to life of the pregnant woman and the unborn child. It was repealed in 2018.

39 Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde…, p. 1050-1051.

40 Jeanne Marie Leprince de Beaumont, more commonly known as Madame Leprince de Beaumont, was a French novelist in the 18th century who wrote one of the best known versions of “The Beauty and the Beast”.

41 Ruth B. Bottigheimer, Grimm’s Bad Girls and Bold Boys: The Moral and Social Vision of the Tales, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1989, p. 177-187.

42 Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde…, p. 1051.

43 Irish graffito, quoted by Julia O’Faolain in “Interview with Myself”, London Review of Books, vol. 16, no. 12, 1994.

44 Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde…, p. 1054.

45 Deirdre Sullivan, Tangleweed and Brine, p. 3.

46 Angela Carter, The Magic Toyshop [1967], London, Virago, 1981.

47 Max Lüthi, The European Folktale: Form and Nature [Das Europäische Volksmärchen: Form und Wesen, 1909], John D. Niles (trans.), Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1982, p. 15.

48 Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde…, p. 1078.

49 Ibid., p. 588.

50 Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories [1979], New York, Penguin, 1993.

51 Ana Cristina Herreros Ferreira, Libro de brujas españolas, Madrid, Siruela, 2009.

52 Karen E. Rowe, “To Spin a Yarn: The Female Voice in Folklore and Fairy Tale”, in Fairy Tales and Society: Illusion, Allusion, and Paradigm, Ruth B. Bottigheimer (ed.), Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986, p. 56.

53 The fourth wall, which has been reinterpreted for the purpose of this paper, is a performative convention in which an invisible and imaginary wall separates actors (characters) from the audience (readers). Breaking this wall means violating the convention, which can be done by directly referring to the audience (readers).

54 Myrtle Hill, Women in Ireland: A Century of Change, Belfast, Blackstaff Press, 2003, p. 218.

55 Ruth B. Bottigheimer, Grimm’s Bad Girls and Bold Boys…, p. 39.

56 Ibid., p. 37.

57 Marisol Morales Ladrón, “Espacios invisibles, espacios de silencio: Emma Donoghue y su re-visión de los cuentos de hadas”, in Irlanda ante un Nuevo Milenio, Inés Praga Terente (eds.), Burgos, Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad, 2002, p. 210.

58 Ana Cristina Herreros Ferreira, “Cenicientas y Cenicientos” in “Simbolismo en los cuentos tradicionales”.

59 Deirdre Sullivan, unpublished interview conducted by Diana Rodríguez Bonet, 15 April 2019.

60 Central Statistics Office, “Census of population 2016”, online: https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-cp4hf/cp4hf/ms.

61 Ibid.

62 Central Statistics Office, “Archive”, online: https://www.cso.ie/en/statistics/birthsdeathsandmarriages/archive.

63 Central Statistics Office, “Marriages 2019”, online: https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/er/mar/marriages2019.

64 Iona Institute for Religion and Society, “Marriage in Ireland Continues Its Decline”, 23 June 2020, online: https://ionainstitute.ie/marriage-in-ireland-continues-its-decline.

65 Central Statistics Office, “Marriages 2021”, online: https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-mar/marriages2021/marriages2021mainresults.

66 Hans-Jörg Uther, The Types of International Folktales…, vol. I, p. 295.

67 “Bobino”, in The Grey Fairy Book [1900], Andrew Lang (ed.), New York, Dover Publications, 1967, p. 197-204.

68 “The Boy Who Could Keep a Secret”, in The Crimson Fairy Book [1903], Andrew Lang (ed.), New York, Dover Publications, 2003, p. 62-79.

69 Clare Bradford, “Monsters: Monstrous Identities in Young Adult Romance”, in (Re)imagining the World: Children’s Literature’s Response to Changing Times, Yan Wu, Kerry Mallan, Roderick McGillis (eds.), New York, Springer, 2013, p. 123.

70 Marian Roalfe Cox, Cinderella…, p. 53-86.

71 Janice Haaken, Pillars of Salt: Gender, Memory, and the Perils of Looking Back, New Brunswick, Rudgers University Press, 1998, p. 116.

72 Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde…, p. 899.

73 Ibid., p. 908.

74 The Classic Fairy Tales…, p. 103.

75 Ibid.

76 Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde…, p. 713.

77 Sophocle’s tragedy Oedipus (c. 5th BC) already revolved around this universal law.

78 Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde…, p. 714.

79 “Donkeyskin”, in The Grey Fairy Book, p. 1-15.

80 Christine Goldberg, “The Donkey Skin Folktale Cycle AT (510B)”, The Journal of American Folklore, vol. 110, no. 435, 1997, p. 32.

81 Marian Roalfe Cox, Cinderella…, p. 53-80.

82 Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde…, p. 349.

83 Deirdre Sullivan, “Riverbed”, p. 118.

84 Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde…, p. 1043.

85 Deirdre Sullivan, “Riverbed”, p. 118.

86 Rape Crisis Network Ireland, Rape Crisis Statistics 2020, online: https://www.rcni.ie/wp-content/uploads/RCNI-Rape-Crisis-Statistics-2020-FINAL.pdf.

87 The space between the bed and the wall. Ruelles became the word for the salons where most modern fairy tales were told in the 17th century.

88 Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde…, p. 894.

89 Marcia K. Lieberman, “Some Day My Prince Will Come…”, p. 188.

90 Carolina Fernández Rodríguez, “Revisión del ‘mito de la belleza’…”.

91 Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde…, p. 768.

92 Central Statistics Office, “Archive”, online: https://www.cso.ie/en/statistics/birthsdeathsandmarriages/archive.

93 Central Statistics Office, “Women and Men in Ireland 2019”, online: https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-wamii/womenandmeninireland2019.

94 Central Statistics Office, “Women and Men in Ireland 2019”, online: https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-wamii/womenandmeninireland2019/education.

95 Ibid.

96 Deirdre Sullivan, “Riverbed”, p. 12.

97 Ibid., p. 19.

98 Angela Carter, foreword in Charles Perrault, The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault, Angela Carter (trans.), London, Gollancz, 1977, p. 17.

99 Jack Zipes, Why Fairy Tales Stick: The Evolution and Relevance of a Genre, New York, Taylor & Francis Group, 2006, p. xii.

100 Cathy Sweeney, Modern Times, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2020.

101 Cristina Bacchilega, Fairy Tales Transformed? Twenty-First-Century Adaptations and the Politics of Wonder, Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 2013, p. 12.

102 Ibid., p. 4.

103 Karlyn Crowley, John Pennington, “Feminist Frauds on the Fairies? Didacticism and Liberation in Recent Retellings of ‘Cinderella’”, Marvels & Tales, vol. 24, no. 2, 2010, p. 304.

104 Cristina Bacchilega, Fairy Tales Transformed?…, p. 38.

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Diana Rodríguez Bonet, « Feminist Rewritings of Fairy Tales in Ireland: A Case Study of Deirdre Sullivan »Études irlandaises, 47-2 | 2022, 41-55.

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Diana Rodríguez Bonet, « Feminist Rewritings of Fairy Tales in Ireland: A Case Study of Deirdre Sullivan »Études irlandaises [En ligne], 47-2 | 2022, mis en ligne le 08 novembre 2022, consulté le 18 avril 2024. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/etudesirlandaises/13253 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/etudesirlandaises.13253

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Auteur

Diana Rodríguez Bonet

University of Lleida (Spain)

Diana Rodríguez Bonet a obtenu deux masters en 2019, l’un en littérature et linguistique anglaise, où elle a eu le plaisir de travailler avec le Dr Pilar Villar-Argáiz en tant que directrice de thèse, et l’autre en physique. Elle a ensuite rejoint le département d’anglais de l’université de Lleida (Espagne) en tant que professeure adjointe et a commencé son doctorat qui porte sur une analyse comparative de Deirdre Sullivan et Sally Gardner sous la direction de Pilar Villar-Argáiz.

Diana Rodríguez Bonet obtained two Master programs in 2019, one in English literature and linguistics, where she had the pleasure to work with Dr. Pilar Villar-Argáiz as her thesis’ supervisor, and another in physics. She then joined the English Department at the University of Lleida (Spain) as an assistant professor and started her PhD on a comparative analysis of Deirdre Sullivan and Sally Gardner under the supervision of Dr. Pilar Villar-Argáiz

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