I found A Fair Maiden on a discount table at Chapter's, and remembering how I cried while reading We Were The Mulvaneys, I decided I'd give Joyce Carol Oates another read. In the end, I'm not certain this slim novella is a fair follow-up to my previous experience with the author, but reading some reviews here, perhaps it is.
Right from the beginning, when Katya meets Marcus Kidder and he asks, "What would you choose if you had your wish?", the teenage girl feels like she's being drawn into a fairytale. The fairytale elements continue until, abruptly, the old man tells her the fable of the Fair Maiden and his intentions become explicit. I don't know if I understand why the author decided to stop the allusions and force the plot in this way, but just as it interrupted the flow of the story for me, it also seemed to break the spell for Katya and she reverts to her former self; the lower class partygirl, so desperate for love and attention, that she offers herself up to her rough and abusive cousin in order to feel human connections. That with remorse she returns to fulfill her destiny with Mr. Kidder rings true with both Katya's own sense of compassion and the requirements of a sort of "happily ever after" ending.
I remember reading a conversation on facebook once where a young mother was lamenting that as much as she wanted to read classic fairytales to her kids, she found it challenging to sanitise them as she went along because they were far too violent and scary. Her friends agreed, this editing is something each of them did, and one of them remarked that she couldn't even show her kids Disney's The Little Mermaid because it was too violent. This is where I itched to jump in, to say that I hadn't let my girls see that movie when they were little because it had been too sanitised. When I read the original Hans Christian Anderson tale, I was struck by the commonsense moral it was trying to impart: a woman should not change herself, give up what is important to her (neither her inherent gifts or her family), for the love of a man. That's a powerful message, one that likely doesn't get through to women in love, and it's a message that Disney totally removed from their version of the story. The last thing I wanted imprinted on my little girls' minds was that they, like Ariel, could give up everything, literally give up their voices, and that would lead to happily ever after. I wanted to tell these young mothers that fairytales have survived all these years for a reason; not despite the violence and fear mongering but because they must satisfy a basic human psychological need. In the end I didn't intrude upon the conversation, just watched it, bemused, as though through a magic mirror.
In this modern fairytale, Oates updated some archetypes for her characters. Like Cinderella, Katya has been abandoned by her father to be raised by a mother and siblings who don't seem to care much about her welfare. In Bayhead Harbor, she wistfully gazes at the castle-like homes and imagines what it would be like to live in one. (I was intrigued when, in the fairytale within the book, it said that the Fair Maiden was raised by her grandmother. I was waiting for it to be revealed that Katya was actually the daughter of one of her sisters left in the care of what was her grandmother, but whom she had been told was her mother, explaining her apparent neglect, but that never came out. Still, I wonder if that's the assumption we are meant to make.) Katya keeps assuming that someday her Dad will come back to her, that like Hansel and Gretel's father, he didn't leave on purpose. And Marcus Kidder is a wolf in sheep's clothing, literally, when he removes his "snow white" wig to reveal a monster underneath.
I was intrigued by the inclusion of crystal meth in this book as it dovetails with some of my reading this year. I must be naïve, but I just don't see meth around me. But, watching Breaking Bad on Netflix and reading books like Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey through His Son's Meth Addiction and Tweak: Growing Up On Methamphetamines, I am told that it is everywhere around me and destroying lives and families. As Tina Fey said in a prayer for her daughter in Bossypants: When the Crystal Meth is offered, May she remember the parents who cut her grapes in half and stick with Beer. This is a prayer I've never thought to say-- could this be the greatest danger my kids will have to face? Is this the real moral of this story? I also recently watched the movie "Winter's Bone", and find Katya to be similar to Jennifer Lawrence's character in that she's from a low income neighbourhood, surrounded by meth users, has a missing father (who in the end has a similar fate), a mother who is more needy than nurturing, and a community that is not above dealing violently with her. Is this the modern day dangers that the author is trying to warn the reader about? And does it take the creepy Lolita scenes, the discomfort and danger of this fairytale situation, to imprint the dangers on a deep psychic level? Maybe I'm answering my questions as I ask them, but if there's a way to have my kids turn out more like Jennifer Lawrence's character than Katya, I'm ready to hear it.
I can usually find a few quotes to mark and savour but in A Fair Maiden I did not. These seem to be some favourites of others:
To the young there are no degrees of old just as there are no degrees of dead - either you are, or you are not.
A female is her body. A guy can be lots of things, not just his body.While these might be some interesting observations (and in the second case, while it might be more trope than truism, it at least illuminates Katya's thinking), I don't find them to be examples of amazing writing. And if I may share a peeve about the author's writing in this story: why did she repeat the phrase "sick-sinking feeling"? I think it occurred four times throughout this short work and it jolted me every time I saw it repeated after liking it the first time.
I can understand why this book was on the discount table-- it wouldn't be for everyone, but it did give me some things to think about. I'll definitely give Joyce Carol Oates more opportunities to enlighten me, knowing that she's not likely to sanitise her storytelling.
