Category Archives: Independence

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Snow Queen’s Reflection

Fairytales and superhero adventures seeped into our own narratives when we were kids.  Mine was The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Andersen.  I didn’t realize then how much of the story was about truth and reflection.

Towards the end of the tale, the Snow Queen sits on her Mirror of Reason in her ice palace.  Her mirror is an alternative to another mirror invented by a hobgoblin:

goblinmirror_snowQueen ” a mirror with this peculiarity, that every

good and pretty thing reflected in it shrank away to almost nothing.

On the other hand, every bad and good-for-nothing thing stood

out and looked its worst. The most beautiful landscapes reflected in

it looked like boiled spinach, and the best people became hideous,

or else they were upside down and had no bodies. Their faces were

distorted beyond recognition, and if they had even one freckle it

appeared to spread all over the nose and mouth.  ”

from Stories from Hans Christian Andersen with Illustrations by

Edmund Dulac, the Pennsylvania State University,Electronics Classics Series, 2007

After the hobgoblin’s mirror shatters it disintegrates into grains of sand which lodge in people’s eyes and cause them to see the worst in everything.

The Snow Queen finds a child who doesn’t know that shards of the hobgoblin’s mirror have infected his eyes.  She kisses him and numbs him to the pain of seeing only ugliness.  He looks at her and thinks she’s beautiful.

When I was little I wrote a story called the Snow Queen.  I was reminded of it yesterday while listening to Stephen King read from his book, On Writing.  As a child he once showed his mother a story he’d written.  She loved it and asked him, because he was so little, if he’d really made it up and he confessed that he hadn’t.  He had rewritten a story he liked.  And he told the truth.

I’m pretty sure that I truly believed that my rewrite was original.  I remember being surprised when I got a little older and discovering that there was a well-known fairytale called The Snow Queen.

Echos and mirrors.

Which childhood heroines did you echo and make your own?

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Eleanor Antin: AND!

“And, But and Or,

They’ll get you pretty far.”

CONJUNCTIONthis&thatsmall

 

 

 

I began thinking about AND while visiting an exhibit of an artist who embodies AND.  Eleanor Antin is an artist who can draw and write and perform and direct.  She creates work that is conceptual and sensuous.  She performs as a ballerina and a king and a nurse.  She just kept saying AND.  Her work kept showing me AND.  Her work started me echoing AND.

AND is the persistence of freedom, of resisting confinement by label or convention, of singing even when silenced, even if only in the privacy of the cave.  AND is the redeemer of But.

Late-born and woman-souled I dare not hope,

The freshness of the elder lays, the might

Of manly, modern passion shall alight

Upon my Muse’s lips, nor may I cope

(Who veiled and screened by womanhood must grope)

With the world’s strong-armed warriors and recite

The dangers, wounds, and triumphs of the fight;

Twanging the full-stringed lyre through all its scope.

But if thou ever in some lake-floored cave

O’erbrowed by rocks, a wild voice wooed and heard,

Answering at once from heaven and earth and wave,

Lending elf-music to thy harshest word,

Misprize thou not these echoes that belong

To one in love with solitude and song.

Echoes

by Emma Lazarus, written in 1880

Doesn’t the word ‘Twanging’ just make you laugh!

Sing more songs of AND for Echo…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Now, Voyager: Dora the Treasure

“Dora, I suspect you are a treasure,” says Charlotte Vale to the nurse.

After her journey Charlotte has returned home.  Charlotte must face her mother, but, luckily, Mother has engaged a nurse, Dora.  Mother calls out and Charlotte must obey, but in the meantime Dora has already spiked the old woman’s hot toddy.

Her mother’s voice vibrates in familiar ways, but Dora, the outside voice of bemused tolerance, can intervene.  She instructs the obedient Charlotte in techniques of conflict deflection and avoidance.  She positions herself between mother and daughter, intercepting the echo that the mother still expects to elicit from her adult child.  Charlotte offers the echo of independence instead.

from Now, Voyager, 1942, Dir: Irving Rapper; with, in order of utterance, Mary Wickes, Bette Davis and Dame Gladys Cooper; music by Max Steiner.

Please post other echos of women’s independence, for the archive.

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The Cat Who Walks by Herself

When I was a kid I had an LP of Boris Karloff reading Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories.  I still have the sound of his voice in my inner ear.  Even though Mr. Karloff had such a distinctive male voice, when he read  The Cat Who Walked by Himself I always thought of the cat as female.

Sometimes I find myself thinking, in his intonation, “for I am the Cat who walks by Herself and all places are alike to me.”  In the story, the cat tricks the woman into letting him live in the cave and drink milk.  The woman admires the cat’s cleverness and forgives him for tricking her.

I like that the Cat is forgiven by the woman, unlike Echo who is punished for tricking Hera and consigned to forever repeat only the words of others.

 

Here I repeat a bit of Kipling in the cadence of Karloff:

 

 

cat-erwauling and purring…aloud…  Who are your cats who walk by themselves?

 

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