Abstract

When Helen Oyeyemi’s wicked stepmother, Boy, shows her friend her nightmarish engagement gift from her husband-to-be—a handcrafted bracelet of a white-gold snake whose body wraps around the length of Boy’s forearm—her friend replies: “I mean, could that scream ‘wicked stepmother’ any louder?” (110). Boy’s bracelet foreshadows her fate as the wicked stepmother, but her evilness is equivocal: she exiles one daughter to protect another. Angela Carter’s Snow White seems to become somewhat monstrous, too, after she is violently assaulted. When Angela Carter and Helen Oyeyemi retell a fairy tale, they reject the black-and-white lens that the conventional fairy tale is told through. Both writers unsettle the fairy tale tradition by unearthing and exposing the darker meanings that remain buried in these original tales. I argue that it is most notably through the figure of the monstrous girl that Carter and Oyeyemi foreground the patriarchal and misogynist politics that the fairy tale encodes yet overlooks. Carter and Oyeyemi, in their respective “Snow White” and “Sleeping Beauty” retellings, turn the familiar character of the innocent girl monstrous to emphasize what it means to be monstrous—and that to be monstrous is not a simple question of being virtuous or cruel, good or bad. Carter’s and Oyeyemi’s female monsters are complex, and I further examine how their actions originate from a desire to attain agency over their bodies. When Carter and Oyeyemi retell a fairy tale, they do not complicate the fairy tale but rather reveal that it is already intricate, filled with hidden messages.