Clytemnestra
Medea
and there was a wicked witch and she was also called
witch and her name was
Joan
Circe
Morgan le Fay
Tiamat
Maria Leonza
Medusa
and they had this in common: that they were feared,
hated, desired, and worshiped.
When one enters the world of fairy tale one seeks
with difficulty for the actual place where legend and
history part. One wants to locate the precise moment
when fiction penetrates into the psyche as reality, and
history begins to mirror it. Or vice versa. Women
live in fairy tale as magical figures, as beauty, danger,
innocence, malice, and gr eed. In the personae of the
fairy tale —the wicked witch, the beautiful princess,
the heroic prince —we find what the culture would have
us know about who we are.
The point is that we have not formed that ancient
world —it has formed us. We ingested it as children
whole, had its values and consciousness imprinted on
our minds as cultural absolutes long before we were in
fact men and women. We have taken the fairy tales of
Woman Hating
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childhood with us into maturity, chewed but still lying
in the stomach, as real identity. Between Snow-white
and her heroic prince, our two great fictions, we never
did have much o f a chance. A t some point, the Great
Divide took place: they (the boys) dreamed o f mounting
the Great Steed and buying Snow-white from the
dwarfs; we (the girls) aspired to become that object o f
every necrophiliac’s lust —the innocent,
Despite ourselves, sometimes unknowing, sometimes
knowing, unwilling, unable to do otherwise, we act out
the roles we were taught.
Here is the beginning, where we learn who we must
be, as well as the moral o f the story.
C H A P T E R 1
Onceuponatime: The Roles
Death is that remedy all singers dream of
