Monstrous Women, Gruesome Girls, and the Beastly Wilds: Wild ways of seeing fairy tales through a feminist ecocritical lens
Creators: name: Horsfall, Shannon
Publisher: name: University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland
Year: 2024
Subjects: creative writing
picturebooks
fairy tales
reimagining
ecofeminist criticism
nature
female identity
Creative and professional writing
Literary studies
Visual arts

description: The oppression of women and girls in fairy tales has been the subject of much scholarly (and public) debate over recent decades with numerous creative reimaginings redressing the females’ positioning in the traditional tales. Significantly less attention, however, has been paid to the representation of nature and non-human animals in both traditional and contemporary retellings. While literary animal studies recognise the place of the animal in fables, and their prevalence in children’s literature in general, the animal figure in fairy tales requires further investigation. Reimagining fairy tales as a form of ecofeminist creative praxis, this thesis untangles problematic tropes of dominion of marginalised women and the non-human, and investigates how positive and agentic renderings of interspecies relationships may be constructed within this genre.
description: The PhD comprises a creative artefact and accompanying exegesis. The creative artefact consists of seven reimagined fairy tales in the picturebook form, written to speak back to the well-known traditional tales of the Western European corpus. Situated within a genre that commonly isolates female characters – by placing them in deliberate danger, foregrounding female antagonism, and presenting nature as Other – each of my reimaginings takes elements of the traditional tale and employs strategies to give agency to those oppressed, including women/girls, and the non-human. Through visual and verbal techniques of counterpoint, complement, and enhancement, I centralise female characters and the natural world as potent sources of narrative power. The placement of words and pictures in relation to and with each other inevitably changes the meaning of both, enhancing each mode to tell the greater story. In this interweaving, in this interanimate relationship, the reimagining can challenge traditional tales. The exegesis contextualises the creative works within traditional tales’ and contemporary retellings’ representations of women and nature. Both exegesis and artefact identify and expose the containment, the reduction and the material implications of that containment and reduction of women and non-human animals in fairy tales. In the process, I seek to invoke spaces for new articulations in order to free the non-human animal and children, particularly female children, from conflation with each other which reduces the individuality of both. I strive to go beyond the exposing of children’s picturebooks to feminist scrutiny or to see them, on the other hand, as a mode of environmentalist education. Instead, I endeavour to initiate a radical ecofeminist deconstruction – radical because of its acknowledgement of the subjectivity of the non-human animal. Analyses of this kind has been conducted on media, including film, advertising, and literature, but into picturebooks is rare. And yet picturebooks often inform humans’ earliest understanding of the world in which they live (Nikolajeva &amp; Scott, 2001: 3). Approaching the creation of picturebooks through the lens of radical ecofeminism, literary animal studies proffer understandings of interspecies relations to children in their formative years in ways that may impact future interactions in the material world. In unravelling and reimagining what has been acculturated for generations before through children’s literature, a new fabric of human-non-human interconnection can be woven.