In one of those ever intriguing literary coincidences, I reread a few older Journal of Mythic Arts book recommendations today (including one on YA Mythic Arts titles which I linked to in the daily round-up) right before I came across a post at Janni’s lj for Seanan McGuire’s song “Wicked Girls Saving Ourselves”. Janni has been writing a bit lately on this subject (from a literary standpoint) and must have done a search or two. It dovetailed nicely with my comments last week on Susan (and Neil Gaiman’s short story “The Problem With Susan”) so I gave the song a listen and it’s quite cool. (It is a rough recording but her voice is beautiful.) Here’s the lyric I loved:
Susan and Lucy were queens, and they ruled well and proudly.
They honored their land and their lord, rang the bells long and loudly.
They never once asked to return to their lives
To be children and chattel and mothers and wives,
But the land cast them out in a lesson that only one learned;
And one queen said ‘I am not a toy’, and she never returned.
“I am not a toy” – isn’t the wonderful? MGuire also mentions Dorothy, Wendy and Alice in the song. It’s just killer and I loved the whole thing (and now must figure out if it was recorded at some point and thus available to purchase).
The Mythic Arts recommendation includes Brian Hall’s The Saskiad which I have yet to read and really really want to and Jane Mendelsohn’sInnocence which I have read many times and adore. Little Willow, Kimberly and I did a roundtable on it last year and shared both our mutual love for the story and for the language – which includes all sorts of Alice references. It is the ultimate story of the wicked girl fighting and winning and told in the most lyrical, elegant, mythic way. Breathtaking. Our discussion of Innocence starts at Bildungsroman and links move forward from there.
The old wicked girls, the ones who travel away from home (to Oz or Wonderland or Narnia or Neverland) are always about making the author’s idea of the right decision – about ultimately being the good girls that the story needs. This is not to denigrate those books, all of which are spectacular in their own way (and completely worthy of classic status), but rather to question what might have been if they conquered and stayed. What if Dorothy took command of the army and became queen or Wendy and Tiger Lily bonded and formed an amazon type party and what if Alice whipped those playing cards and told the Red Queen to eat it (literally)? Hell – what if Susan called out Aslan?
Wait. We know what happens then.
In Pamela Dean’s fantastic Tam Lin, Janet learns that there is a very old order to life and death at Blackstock College and in the midst of conversations about Shakespeare and sex and love, there is also the revelation of death for more than one wicked girl of the past who was cast aside for her transgressions and there is also someone who always gets her way – always, especially when it comes to affairs of the heart. Janet is not initially who you would expect to stand up to a power older than the hills but she’s all the story has and page after page, through so much wonderful smart discussion of books and learning, Janet finds her way and decides that there is much that has not been fair about Blackstock College or what happened to some other young girls many years before.
Pamela Dean is, in a word, one of my all time favorite writers. (My review of Tam Lin from last year is here.) In the same column I also loved Lisa Ann Sandell’s Song of the Sparrow about Elaine of Ascolat who did not die pining for a man but instead helped to save Arthur (and Gwynivere one of the most famous wicked girls in literature who acquits herself most beautifully here) and in another Bookslut piece there is Lisa Klein’s Ophelia where – at last – SHE LIVES! Wicked and crazy or maybe not in Klein’s take on Hamlet. I loved most of all what happened after she left Denmark and shamelessly, I’m not afraid to admit how much I adored the ending. Here’s a bit of that review:
More so than the other authors revisiting classic story lines, Klein takes her character into a whole new place. Ophelia finds a life in a French convent (“get thee to a nunnery” indeed) and develops new passions and friendships. The author takes the continuing theme of madness from the play and transfers it to a religious fervor experience by one of the convent’s other residents, creating new ways to explore and enrich Ophelia’s life. Overall a second story develops that overwhelms the first, making Ophelia a novel not at all about Hamlet, but one that merely includes him, in much the same way the play merely included Ophelia.
I am beginning to realize that I seem to be very girl-centric at this site lately but I can’t help myself. The planets (or literary gods anyway) seem to be nudging me in this direction.
Joan of Arc, my beloved Joan, is the ultimate wicked girl. Sure, she heard holy voices but she also didn’t back down – not once. She said the voices were hers; that all of it was hers and so she led an army and she won and she became more powerful than all of those men who said she was crazy.
That’s why they killed her of course, but still. For a while there, she won big.
The best book on Joan of Arc is by Mary Gordon, a short biography that was part of the Penguin Lives series. (So many good titles in this series.) Here’s to her and all the other wicked girls then and now. There will likely be more recommendations along these lines tomorrow.
[Post pic of Buffy – the ultimate wicked girl survivor.]
When I was in grad school, I found that this theme ran through everything I wrote. I have so much trouble reconciling my beloved Clive with what he did to Susan and Lucy — I know he had to show someone not being on board with things, but for such flimsy reasons! Lipstick! That traitorous girl, who acknowledged her own potential and beauty! How easily his own shortcomings flawed a story of strong girlhood, and cast a shadow over Aslan which should have never been there.
Good, good topic.
I’m not sure if anyone ever let you know, so I thought I’d drop a comment! “Wicked Girls Saving Ourselves” is available on Seanan’s album Wicked Girls, which you can find at CDBaby. It is a really good album, and worth every penny.