The British Empire's Lost Slipper: Dangerous Irish Cinderellas

• Heiniger, Abigail ^[1]
  1. [1] Bluefield College

     Bluefield College

     Estados Unidos

     
• Localización: Contemporary Fairy-Tale Magic: Subverting Gender and Genre / Lydia Brugué (ed. lit.), Auba Llompart Pons (ed. lit.), 2020, ISBN 9789004418981, págs. 63-76
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • In The Irresistible Fairy Tale (2012), Jack Zipes ties a sense of wonder to the subversive fairy tale. He claims the subversive fairy tale often takes shape as a dystopia that ‘still pulsates with [the] utopia fervor’ (136) of the tradition it subverts. Popular British women writers like Christina Rossetti, George Egerton, and Angela Carter famously tapped into this fairy-tale wonder in their subversive fairy tales, reshaping the traditional Victorian fairy tale as a vehicle of social critique in the hopes of changing a new generation. By contrast, Irish authors such as Julia Kavanagh, Molly Keane, and Maeve Brennan use the Victorian fairy tale tradition as a pernicious force in the lives of their displaced and marginalized heroines. This chapter examines how the Cinderella fairy tale particularly encourages complacency which dooms the marginalized heroine who must forge her own happiness against the tide of mainstream culture. These fictional characters created by Kavanagh, Keane and Brennan resonate with political references to ‘Cinderella’ in Irish newspapers and pamphlets under British colonial rule. Thus, these narratives are also a part of a tradition of highly politicized Cinderella tales, in which Cinderella is stripped of wonder and positioned as a dangerously passive creature who threatens both the individual and the nation in the Irish cultural imagination.