Session 1: Myth and the Evil Woman

1st Global Conference

Friday 1st May 2009 – Sunday 3rd May 2009
Budapest, Hungary

Conference Programme, Abstracts and Papers

Bad Girls: Fear of Women in the Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault
Cynthia Jones
Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, State University of New York at Buffalo, USA

The fear that men have towards a dominant women is evident in the fairytales of Charles Perrault.  Charles Perrault was a devout catholic and used the women in his fairy tales as moral scapegoats to subvert his fear of an assertive woman.   Most of his fairy tales are based on earlier oral tales that were in circulation around Europe; however he modified them and changed them to meet his literary needs and to express his own views on morals, especially moral behavior in women.  In most of his tales, women are punished for not abiding to a strict code of morals and they cannot be freed from their horrid state until they allow themselves to be dominated and controlled by men.  It is only at this point where the women in his fairy tales become “pure” and “beautiful,” if they do not come to their senses, then they are ruthlessly killed due to their own submission to temptation (and of course, the men in his fairy tales rarely succumb to such temptation.)

In Otto Weininger’s work Sex and Character, he expresses his fear of women and his fear of being consumed by the nothingness that is woman.  According to Weininger, man possess the ability of “absolute something” whereas woman possesses the opposite.  He states that, “the deepest fear in man: the fear of the woman that is the fear of meaninglessness that is the fear of the enticing abyss of the nothing.”(p.388)  This fear of female dominance over men, engulfing them in nothingness, is a common fear shared by men and it manifests itself in the fairy tales by Charles Perrault.  By looking at the role of women in his fairy tales, notably Little Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard, and Donkey Skin, I will discuss how Perrault condemns his female characters either to death or to a wretched and near animal state for their immoral behavior and defiance against man.  In this paper I will also discuss how some of the female characters represent his anima, his feminine counterpart in the subconscious, and how the fear and anxiety of domination by the feminine manifests itself in the fairy tales.

Mermaids, often depicted as sex objects or as female monsters, are a common figure in folklore around the world. Fish- or snake-tailed women appear in the myths and fairy tales of Europe, Africa, North America and Asia (Potts 2000: 53-154; Lao 2007:58-179).

As recently as the 1970′s and 1980′s, a misogynistic mermaid myth was resuscitated and revamped in the northern areas of Port Elizabeth, in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa. Here several people claim to have sighted the so-called Balloon-vrou, a malevolent female water spirit who attacks children, either mutilating them or spiriting them away. Apparently, contemporary preoccupations and prejudices have influenced this new version of traditional mermaid myths; for example, the Balloon-vrou or Balloon Woman is depicted as fat and ethnically black, and she has been associated with flying saucers. The Balloon Woman appears to be a hybrid being, made up of extra-terrestrial, witch and ghost, as well as mermaid, in a commingling of oral tradition with modern popular culture.

Although the myth of the Balloon Woman reached its height in the 1980′s, the newspaper article reporting the myth (in Die Burger, 25 October 2008) has appeared at a time in South Africa when violence against women and children is more prevalent than ever. For example, in South African society the rape of women and children is so commonplace as to suggest that it has become the norm. Statistics show that reported rapes increased in South Africa from 2001 to 2005 in eight out of ten provinces, with the Eastern Cape showing the greatest increase (Crime Information Analysis Centre, no date:1). As the oppression of women is both reflected in, and possibly perpetuated by various kinds of cultural production, feminist writers and artists deconstruct the ways in which art, advertising, film and literature are used to justify and maintain patriarchal hegemony. To this end, a popular tactic among feminists has been the reworking of myths and fairy tales (Cranny-Francis, Waring, Stavropoulos and Kirkby 2003:244-245). The story of the Balloon-vrou seems to offer evidence that such feminist mythopoesis – that is, the reinvention of myth and fairy tale with feminist intentions – should continue.

This paper discusses: briefly, the persistence and pervasiveness of mermaid myths; the phenomenon of the Balloon Woman and the way in which this particular myth has been reported in a newspaper; the possible ramifications of such myths in a country like South Africa which is notorious for violence against women and children; and, finally, as an example of feminist mythopoesis, a series of South African artworks depicting black mermaids that are completely different from the Balloon Woman.

Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)

No abstract is presently available