picking lentils out o f the ashes, dressed in rags, degraded, insulted. He was a good man.
T he father o f Hansel and Grethel also had a good
heart. When his wife proposed to him that they abandon
the children in the forest to starve he protested immediately—“But I really pity the poor children. ” 18 When Hansel and Grethel finally escaped the witch and found
their way home “they rushed in at the door, and fell
on their father’s neck. T h e man had not had a quiet
hour since he left his children in the wood [Hansel,
after all, was a boy]; but the wife was dead. ” 19 Do not
misunderstand —they did not forgive him, for there was
nothing to forgive. All malice originated with the
woman. He was a good man.
Though the fairy-tale father marries the evil woman
in the first place, has no emotional connection with his
child, does not interact in any meaningful way with
her, abandons her and worse does not notice when she
is dead and gone, he is a figure o f male good. He is the
patriarch, and as such he is beyond moral law and human decency.
T he roles available to women and men are clearly
articulated in fairy tales. T h e characters o f each are
vividly described, and so are the modes o f relationship
possible between them. We see that powerful women
are bad, and that good women are inert. We see that
men are always good, no matter what they do, or do
not do.
We also have an explicit rendering o f the nuclear
Woman Hating
family. In that family, a mother’s love is destructive,
murderous. In that family, daughters are objects, expendable. The nuclear family, as we find it delineated in fairy tales, is a paradigm of male being-in-the-world,
female evil, and female victimization. It is a crystaliza-
tion of sexist culture —the nuclear structure of that
culture.
C H A P T E R 2
Onceuponatime: The Moral
of the Story
Fuck that to death, the dead are holy,
Honor the sisters of your friends.
Pieces of ass, a piece of action,
Pieces.
The loneliest of mornings
Something moves about in the mirror.
A slave’s trick, survival.
I remember thinking, our last time:
If you killed me, I would die.
Kathleen Norris
I cannot live without my life.
