Gender-Swapped Fairy Tales

Karrie Fransman and Jonathan Plackett
Faber & Faber. £20 hb. ISBN 978-0-571-36018-5.

This is a very odd book. The authors start with the observation that fairy tales accept and support conventional gender roles, such as active male and passive female. They wish to subvert this, which is always a task worth doing. But they do not wish to import their own biases by rewriting the stories. Instead, they take version from Lang’s Fairy Books, and apply a computer algorithm to change all genders. This leads to such stories as Handsome and the Beast or Jacqueline and the Beanstalk, some of which do work effectively. But they do not question the algorithm. So they allow a musical instrument called a ‘hautgirl’. And their male version of a wicked witch is a wicked wizard. Given the current connotations of the word ‘wizard’, this does not feel right; such a man is better described as a wicked sorcerer. There are other places where following the algorithm blindly leads to poor results.

An adult reading these stories will inevitably be led into questions about gender in our society, and this is an important part of the authors’ intention, discussed in the introduction. Why should merchants, millers, and even woodcutters, not be women? What is a witch, and why is she wicked? What is the difference between a woman (especially a queen) wanting a child and a man (especially a king) wanting a child? But for guidance on these questions, one needs to go further than their introduction and look at some feminist critiques of fairy tales.

How would children react to these retellings? The authors give no indication that they have tested their version on children. I feel (though I have not tried it myself) that they would be very confused. Inevitably they will also come across conventional versions, and see the differences. But children of an age to enjoy the best-known stories would probably be too young to understand why these versions are different — though I would love to be proved wrong on this.

I feel this book is fundamentally misconceived. The authors want “a world where little girls can be powerful and where little boys can express their vulnerability without anger.” Stories can help in achieving this, and I support and admire the authors’ desire for it. But a better use of stories is to search for ones that already include such themes. It is not difficult to find such stories. Introduce children to Mollie Whuppie or Kate Crackernuts, let them accompany a young woman on her journey to the castle East of the Sun and West of the Moon. Buy Fiona Collins’s Folk Tales for Bold Girls. Look for such out-of-print books as Esther Phelps’s The Girl of the North and James Riordan’s The Woman in the Moon. And nowadays, even Disney films offer different outlooks on gender.

The book is well produced and well illustrated.

Facts & Fiction 119. November 2021.
©Daniel Cohen