Snow-white was 7 years old.
The queen became “yellow and green with envy,
and from that hour her heart turned against Snow-
white, and she hated her. And envy and pride like ill
weeds grew in her heart higher every day, until she had
no peace.. . . ” 5
Now, we all know what nations will do to achieve
peace, and the queen was no less resourceful (she would
have made an excellent head o f state). She ordered a
huntsman to take Snow-white to the forest, kill her, and
bring back her heart. The huntsman, an uninspired
good guy, could not kill the sweet young thing, so he
turned her loose in the forest, killed a boar, and took its
Onceuponatime: The Roles
37
heart back to the queen. T h e heart was “salted and
cooked, and the wicked woman ate it up, thinking that
there was an end o f Snow-white. ” 6
Snow-white found her way to the home o f the 7
dwarfs, who told her that she could stay with them “if
you will keep our house for us, and cook, and wash, and
make the beds, and sew and knit, and keep everything
tidy and clean. ” 7 T hey simply adored her.
T h e queen, who can now be called with conviction
the wicked queen, found out from her mirror that Snow-
white was still alive and fairer than she. She tried several
times to kill Snow-white, who fell into numerous deep
sleeps but never quite died. Finally the wicked queen
made a poisoned apple and induced the ever vigilant
Snow-white to bite into it. Snow-white did die, or became more dead than usual, because the wicked queen’s mirror then verified that she was the fairest in the land.
T h e dwarfs, who loved Snow-white, could not bear
to bury her under the ground, so they enclosed her in a
glass coffin and put the coffin on a mountaintop. T h e
heroic prince was just passing that way, immediately
fell in love with Snow-white-under-glass, and bought
her (it? ) from the dwarfs who loved her (it? ). As servants
carried the coffin along behind the prince’s horse, the
piece o f poisoned apple that Snow-white had swallowed
“flew out o f her throat. ” 8 She soon revived fully, that
is to say, not much. T he prince placed her squarely in
the “it” category, and marriage in its proper perspective
too, when he proposed wedded bliss —“ I would rather
have you than anything in the world. ” 9 T he wicked
queen was invited to the wedding, which she attended
because her mirror told her that the bride was fairer
Woman Haling
than she. At the wedding “they had ready red-hot iron
shoes, in which she had to dance until she fell down
dead. ” 10
Cinderella’s mother-situation was the same. Her
biological mother was good, pious, passive, and soon
dead. Her stepmother was greedy, ambitious, and ruthless. Her ambition dictated that her own daughters make good marriages. Cinderella meanwhile was forced
to do heavy domestic work, and when her work was
done, her stepmother would throw lentils into the ashes
of the stove and make Cinderella separate the lentils
from the ashes. The stepmother’s malice toward Cinderella was not free-floating and irrational. On the contrary, her own social validation was contingent on
the marriages she made for her own daughters. Cinderella was a real threat to her. Like Snow-white’s stepmother, for whom beauty was power and to be the most beautiful was to be the most powerful, Cinderella’s
stepmother knew how the social structure operated,
and she was determined to succeed on its terms.
Cinderella’s stepmother was presumably motivated
by maternal love for her own biological offspring. Maternal love is known to be transcendent, holy, noble, and unselfish. It is coincidentally also a fundament of
human (male-dominated) civilization and it is the real
basis of human (male-dominated) sexuality:
[When the prince began to search for the woman whose
foot would fit the golden slipper] the two sisters were
very glad, because they had pretty feet. The eldest
went to her room to try on the shoe, and her mother
stood by. But she could not get her great toe into it,
Onceuponatime: The Roles
39
for the shoe was too small; then her mother handed
her a knife, and said,
“Cut the toe off, for when you are queen you will
never have to go on foot. ” So the girl cut her toe off,
and squeezed her foot into the shoe, concealed the
with him on his horse as his bride. . . .
Then the prince looked at her shoe, and saw the
blood flowing. And he turned his horse round and
took the false bride home again, saying that she was
not the right one, and that the other sister must try
on the shoe. So she went into her room to do so, and
got her toes comfortably in, but her heel was too large.
Then her mother handed her the knife, saying, “Cut
a piece off your heel; when you are queen you will
never have to go on foot. ”
So the girl cut a piece off her heel, and thrust her
foot into the shoe, concealed the pain, and went down
to the prince, who took his bride. . . .
Then the prince looked at her foot, and saw how
the blood was flowing. . . . 11
Cinderella’s stepmother understood correctly that her
only real work in life was to marry off her daughters.
Her goal was upward mobility, and her ruthlessness was
consonant with the values o f the market place.* She
loved her daughters the way Nixon loves the freedom o f
the Indochinese, and with much the same result. Love
in a male-dominated society certainly is a many-splen-
dored thing.
Rapunzel’s mother wasn’t exactly a winner either.
*
This depiction o f women as flesh on an open market, of crippling and
mutilation for the sake of making a good marriage, is not fiction; cf. C hapter
6, “Gynocide: Chinese Footbinding. ”
40
Woman Hating
She had a maternal instinct all right—she had “long
wished for a child, but in vain. ” 12 Sometime during her
wishing, she developed a craving for rampion, a vegetable which grew in the garden of her neighbor and peer, the witch. She persuaded her husband to steal
rampion from the witch’s garden, and each day she
craved more. When the witch discovered the theft, she
made this offer:
. . . you may have as much rampion as you like, on
one condition — the child that will come into the world
must be given to me. It shall go well with the child, and
I will care for it like a mother. 13
Mama didn’t think twice —she traded Rapunzel for a
vegetable. Rapunzel’s surrogate mother, the witch, did
not do much better by her:
When she was twelve years old the witch shut her up
in a tower in the midst of a wood, and it had neither
steps nor door, only a small window above. When the
witch wished to be let in, she would stand below and
“Rapunzel, Rapunzel! let down your hair!” 14
The heroic prince, having finished with Snow-white
and Cinderella, now happened upon Rapunzel. When
the witch discovered the liaison, she beat up Rapunzel,
cut off her hair, and cloistered her “in a waste and
desert place, where she lived in great woe and misery. ” 15
The witch then confronted the prince, who fell from the
tower and blinded himself on thorns. (He recovered
when he found Rapunzel, and they then lived happily
ever after. )
Onceuponatime: The Roles
41
Hansel and Grethel had a mother too. She simply
abandoned them:
I will tell you what, husband.. . . We will take the
children early in the morning into the forest, where
it is thickest; we will make them a fire, and we will give
each of them a piece of bread, then we will go to our
work and leave them alone; they will never find the
way home again, and we shall be quit of them. 16
Hungry, lost, frightened, the children find a candy
house which belongs to an old lady who is kind to them,
feeds them, houses them. She greets them as her children, and proves her maternal commitment by preparing to cannibalize them.
These fairy-tale mothers are mythological female
figures. T hey define for us the female character and
delineate its existential possibilities. When she is good,
she is soon dead. In fact, when she is good, she is so passive in life that death must be only more o f the same.
Here we discover the cardinal principle o f sexist ontology—the only good woman is a dead woman. When she is bad she lives, or when she lives she is bad. She
has one real function, motherhood. In that function,
because it is active, she is characterized by overwhelming malice, devouring greed, uncontainable avarice.
She is ruthless, brutal, ambitious, a danger to children
and other living things. W hether called mother, queen,
stepmother, or wicked witch, she is the wicked witch,
the content o f nightmare, the source o f terror.
42
Woman Haling
The Beauteous Lump of Ultimate Good
What can it do? It grows,
It bleeds. It sleeps.
It walks. It talks,
Singing, “love’s got me, got me. ”
Kathleen Norris
For a woman to be good, she must be dead, or as
close to it as possible. Catatonia is the good woman’s
most winning quality.
Sleeping Beauty slept for 100 years, after pricking
her finger on a spindle. The kiss of the heroic prince
woke her. He fell in love with her while she was asleep,
or was it because she was asleep?
Snow-white was already dead when the heroic prince
fell in love with her. “I beseech you, ” he pleaded with
the 7 dwarfs, “to give it to me, for I cannot live without
looking upon Snow-white. ” 17 It awake was not readily
distinguishable from it asleep.
Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow-white, Rapunzel
—all are characterized by passivity, beauty, innocence,
and victimization. They are archetypal good women —
victims by definition. They never think, act, initiate,
confront, resist, challenge, feel, care, or question. Sometimes they are forced to do housework.
They have one scenario of passage. They are moved,
as if inert, from the house of the mother to the house
o f the prince. First they are objects of malice, then they
are objects o f romantic adoration. They do nothing to
warrant either.
That one other figure of female good, the good
fairy, appears from time to time, dispensing clothes
Onceuponatime: The Roles
43
or virtue. H er power cannot match, only occasionally
moderate, the power o f the wicked witch. She does have
one physical activity at which she excels — she waves her
wand. She is beautiful, good, and unearthly. Mostly,
she disappears.
These figures o f female good are the heroic models
available to women. And the end o f the story is, it would
seem, the goal o f any female life. T o sleep, perchance
to dream?
The Prince, the Real Brother
The man of flesh and bone; the man who
is bom, suffers, and dies—above all, who
dies; the man who eats and drinks and
plays and sleeps and thinks and wills; the
man who is seen and heard; the brother,
the real brother.
Miguel de Unamuno,
Tragic Sense of Life
He is handsome and heroic. He is a prince, that is,
he is powerful, noble, and good. He rides a horse. He
travels far and wide. He has a mission, a purpose. Inevitably he fulfills it. He is a person o f worth and a worthwhile person. He is strong and true.
O f course, he is not real, and men do suffer trying to
become him. T hey suffer, and murder, and rape, and
plunder. T hey use airplanes now.
What matters is that he is both powerful and good,
that his power is by definition good. What matters is
that he matters, acts, succeeds.
One can point out that in fact he is not very bright.
44
Woman Haling
For instance, he cannot distinguish Cinderella from her
two sisters though he danced with her and presumably
conversed with her. His recurring love o f corpses does
not indicate a dynamic intelligence either. His fall from
the tower onto thorns does not suggest that he is even
physically coordinated, though, unlike his modern
counterparts, he never falls off his horse or annihilates
the wrong village.
The truth o f it is that he is powerful and good when
contrasted with her. The badder she is, the better he is.
The deader she is, the better he is. That is one moral of
the story, the reason for dual role definition, and the
shabby reality of the man as hero.
The Husband, the Real Father
The desire of men to claim their children may be the crucial impulse of civilized life.
George Gilder, Sexual Suicide
Mostly they are kings, or noble and rich. They are,
again by definition, powerful and good. They are never
responsible or held accountable for the evil done by
their wicked wives. Most of the time, they do not notice
it.
There is, of course, no rational basis for considering
them either powerful or good. For while they are governing, or kinging, or whatever it is that they do do, their wives are slaughtering and abusing their beloved
progeny. But then, in some cultures nonfairy-tale
Onceuponatime: The Roles
45
fathers simply had their female children killed at birth.
Cinderella’s father saw her every day. He saw her
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
&nb
sp; 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.
Emily Bronte
T h e lessons are simple, and we learn them well.
Men and women are different, absolute opposites.
T h e heroic prince can never be confused with Cinderella, or Snow-white, or Sleeping Beauty. She could never do what he does at all, let alone better.