Women’s duplicity seems to know no bounds, and they are positioned as so seductive, unfaithful, and treacherous that the two brothers do not have to travel far to find women even more lascivious than their own wives. Shahrayar quickly jumps to the conclusion that all women are alike and every night, for the next three years, he swears to marry “for one night only and kill the woman the next morning, in order to save himself from the wickedness and cunning of women.”4 The folkloric repertoire features a host of female counterparts to Shahrayar and his brother. The many princesses who assign tasks to suitors also take delight in beheading or punishing bunglers and incompetents. Still the tale from the Thousand and One Nights remains a foundational text that, like the story of Eve’s betrayal and Pandora’s curiosity, reminds us of the nexus linking femininity with sexual curiosity, infidelity, and deceit.
Like the merchant’s daughter in our story of “Beauty and the Beast,” Scheherazade volunteers to sacrifice herself and face the monster menacing the welfare of those she loves. She plans to use her storytelling prowess to delay her execution and to cure King Shahrayar of the mania that threatens to destroy his people. On each successive night, Scheherazade tells a “strange and wonderful story,” stopping midway and finishing the following night, when she begins an even “stranger and more wonderful story.” Scheherazade is described as a scholarly type. “She had read the books of literature, philosophy, and medicine. She knew poetry by heart, had studied historical reports, and was acquainted with the sayings of men and the maxims of sages and kings. She was intelligent, knowledgeable, wise, and refined.”5
Like Philomela in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Scheherazade is to double duty bound. She is no mere “clever survivor,” but also an agent of change. Philomela, whose body was violated and tongue severed by Tereus, weaves the story of her rape into a tapestry not only to exact revenge but also to model ways of broadcasting what has been silenced by a culture. Both Philomela and Scheherazade begin as victims, but the arc of their stories takes them to a position enabling them to speak for themselves and to a culture.
Kay Nielsen’s illustration for the frame tale to the Arabian Nights reminds us that Scheherazade, for all her heroic vitality, remains small and weak. Seated before the King, she is exposed literally and figuratively, the target not only of his gaze but also of his regal power. Made to appear superhuman through his oversized turban and flowing royal robes, Shahrayar may fall under the spell of Scheherazade’s stories, but he remains in charge nonetheless. More like Hestia than Aphrodite or Artemis, who stand as models for twenty-first-century tricksters, Scheherazade remains a creature of hearth and home, embracing the power of domestic ritual and renewal.
Scheherazade may lack the mobility and appetites of male tricksters, but she transcends the narrow domestic space of the bedroom through her expansive narrative reach and embraces bold defiance as she sets about remaking the values of the culture she inhabits. Behind her transformative art lurks the ruse of the disempowered, and Scheherazade, despite the physical constraints placed on her, becomes a foundational double agent whose feats establish the terms of what it means to be a female trickster.
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Tricksters to Double Duty Bound
I want to begin my analysis of twenty-first-century female double agents with Lisbeth Salander, the girl with the dragon tattoo. Lisbeth, as fans of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy will recognize, is a woman on a mission. Unlike Scheherazade, she does not use the civilizing power of story to change her culture (although one could argue that an author who begins his novel with statistics about the number of women in Sweden who have been threatened by a man does), but rather aims to exact revenge for injuries done to her and to a sisterhood of female victims.
Lisbeth’s humorlessness, her almost pathological lack of affect, makes her an unlikely candidate for the role of trickstar. But like male tricksters, Lisbeth has a bottomless appetite—for food, as well as for sexual partners, both male and female. Although she is described as an “anorexic spook” by one of the novel’s villains, she gorges herself endlessly, making for herself, typically, “three big open rye-bread sandwiches with cheese, caviar, and a hard-boiled egg” or “half a dozen thick sandwiches on rye bread with cheese and liver sausage and dill pickles.” Constantly brewing coffee, she shovels down Billy’s Pan Pizza as if eating her last meal. Consuming “every kind of junk food,” she nonetheless does not seem to have an eating disorder.6
Gluttony is writ large in the Millennium Trilogy, and sexual appetite as well, with Salander presented as what one critic describes as a “popular culture fantasy—adolescent-looking yet sexually experienced.”7 In fact, the depictions of Salander as both abject victim of rape and partner in consensual sado-masochistic erotic practices are so explicit as to arouse the suspicion of creating a sexual spectacle designed to play into the voyeuristic desires of readers. The violence may be appalling, but it also makes the film more appealing, as the box office numbers tell us.
That Lisbeth’s physical strength, as well as her technological savvy and varied appetites, are modeled on male figures becomes evident when we learn about her superhuman strength. She is nimble and muscular enough to defeat school bullies as a child and later, as an adult, thugs twice her size in physical combat. In the second novel, we discover that Lisbeth was trained as a boxer and was once a serious competitor in male contests. Whether roaming bars or roaring off on a motorcycle, she mimics male behavior rather than shaping a unique female identity. Her appeal derives in large part from her ability to serve as an ironic double of the classic male trickster, masquerading, performing, and imitating in ways that offer both serious reenactment and gender-bending parody.
Lisbeth possesses what the author describes as “sheer magic” (31) and a “unique gift” (30). When we first “see” her, it is through the eyes of her employer, Dragan Armansky, and he describes her as one of those “flat-chested girls who might be mistaken for skinny boys at a distance” and as a “foreign creature” rather like “a painting of a nymph or a Greek amphora” (36). Like Hermes before her, she wears a cloak of “shamelessness”—Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare declares her to be “introverted, socially inhibited, lacking empathy, ego-fixated,” as well as exhibiting “psychopathic and asocial behaviour, difficulty in cooperating, and incapable of assimilating learning.” Exhibiting the classic traits of Asperger’s Syndrome, she is also “cunning,” and her “quick and spidery” movements and “unusual intelligence” (32) align her once again with the impudent Hermes and his folkloric kin, whose clever antics disturb boundaries and challenge property rights. A master of the World Wide Web, she has, like Anansi, her own network to administer and instrumentalize.
In a study of tricksters in film, Helena Bassil-Morozow points out that hackers feed off the “mercurial qualities of the internet,” breaking into networks and violating legislative and regulatory structures. Icily detached from moral imperatives, these “uber-nerd villains” are represented as “invisible, unnatural, elusive, unattractive, semi-transparent from lack of fresh air and exercise, people-hating creatures.”8 Lisbeth Salander, for once, fits right in. Or does she? “Lack of emotional involvement” (32) masks Lisbeth’s deep sense of a mission to avenge rapists, murderers, and other woman-hating men—and to do good. As compensation for agreeing to keep quiet about the discovery that the now dead Martin Vanger was a serial rapist and murderer, she demands donations to the National Organization for Women’s Crisis Centres and Girls’ Crisis Centres in Sweden (406), a bargain of convenience that could be turned against her as a crusader for social justice.
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Suzanne Collins’s Katniss [Everdeen in The Hunger Games] combines Lisbeth’s survival skills with a passionate social mission, but she lacks the hipster sexual confidence and self-consciousness of her older Swedish counterpart. As many commentators have pointed out, she is modeled on Artemis, goddess of the hunt, carrying the same silver bow and arrows. Like the goddess, she to
o is protector of the young and volunteers to take her sister’s place when her name is chosen at the Reaping. Virginal and unaware of her own sexual allure, she is that rare thing in pop culture—an intelligent, courageous heroine on a complex quest of her own. Lisbeth’s near pathological lack of affect and surplus sexual energy are balanced by Katniss’s compassionate intensity and sexual innocence.
Lisbeth Salander and Katniss Everdeen mark a rupture in our understanding of what it means to be a female trickster. Unlike Scheherazade, Bluebeard’s wife, and even Gretel, Trickster Girls are experts at getting out of the house. They send strong signals about the possibilities, and perils, of new identities in the public sphere for women. As Ricki Stefanie Tannen puts it, “The female Trickster[s], whether embodied fictionally as sleuth, cyborg, or time-traveling feminista, are messengers charged with informing the collective consciousness about how identity and subjectivity can be constructed in postmodernity.”9 The new identity of the youthful Trickster Girl is not constructed at home as a wife but rather in the public sphere, and it marks a sharp break with a Trickstar like Scheherazade, who operates exclusively in the domestic sphere, becoming wife and mother, even as she recounts adventures and adversity. Yet Trickstars and Trickster Girls seem consistently united in their double mission of remaking the world even as they survive adversity.
While the postmodern Trickster Girl shares much with Hermes, Coyote, Loki, and Anansi, she also diverges sharply from her male counterparts. In shaping a new social and cultural identity, figures like Katniss and Lisbeth disavow the role of victim, refusing to succumb to the brute force of patriarchal rule. They are both survivors, managing to cheat death (Lisbeth is buried alive and Katniss is imperiled repeatedly) and reinvent themselves with new identities. And they embark on an explicit social mission missing in the aspirations of classic male tricksters. Like Scheherazade, they assume a social mission once they refuse the status of victim, and justice becomes their consuming passion, even as they retain many of the appetites of male tricksters.
Does the arc that takes us from Scheherazade to Lisbeth mark progress? Many of the female revenge fantasies that have proliferated in popular culture have been constructions of male writers and filmmakers. Critics have been quick to point out that some of these trickster heroines are less double agents than women who mimic models of the “conventional male action hero.” Part of what makes Lisbeth Salander unique is her physical appearance, both masculine, or boyish, and muscular. Her tattoos, her lovemaking (she initiates and takes control), her technological skills, her decisive actions, and even her way of looking at people deviates sharply from feminine forms of self-representation and behavior. One critic surmises that Salander embodies a “creepy man’s fantasy—a smart woman with a girl’s barely pubescent body”; another sees in her a fantasy about “total control.”10 Self-contained and operating comfortably as an “independent contractor,” she has been conditioned by her traumatic childhood as well as by her genetic makeup to act more like a man than a woman, thereby operating less as reformer than as a figure who perpetuates cultural, social, and political norms. “Larsson’s work,” as two critics write, “is enmeshed in the very social, gendered, and economic paradigms it appears to want to critique.”11 Ironically, the androgynous nature of Trickster Girls enables male cross-identification, thus further diluting the feminist message in the eyes of some critics.
Critics may be right to scold Stieg Larsson for embracing the pop-culture conventions of heroic individualism. The writer’s work would most likely not have shot up to the top of bestseller lists had he created a heroine with impeccable feminist credentials and a pragmatic political agenda. Instead, Larsson did exactly what we expect from iconoclasts, bricoleurs, and myth-makers. He constructed a heroine who becomes enmeshed in cultural contradictions and thereby unsettles and disturbs us, obliging us to rethink how we have made the world. Lisbeth Salander serves as a true double agent in forging her own unique social identity and gender distinctiveness as well as seeking retribution for victims of the social structures she shows to be tainted with hypocrisy, self-serving interests, and unrestrained greed.
The Trickster Girl materializes not out of thin air but from a close look at a variety of genres and archetypal characters that cross the divide separating literature and folklore. Given the fact that the covert operations of female tricksters were carried out so long in the domestic sphere, it is not surprising to find that fairy tales rather than myths became the privileged site for capturing their activities. That the female trickster migrated into fairy tales in no way diminishes her mythic power. The time might now be right to heed the advice of Claude Lévi-Strauss and to embrace the view that all versions of a story belong to the myth and require attentive inclusion. Unbridled appetites and mercurial energy have always made tricksters easy to identify. Their double-faced nature—incarnating paradox, exploiting contradictions, and enacting dualities—can be found in nearly every cultural landscape. If the male trickster occasionally oscillates between female and male, the female trickster has developed a more fluid notion of gender identity and has embraced androgyny in her postmodern incarnations. But she has performed her most devious prank by pulling the wool over our eyes for so long, by giving herself a cloak of invisibility, even as she prowls around both at the margins and right in the center of our cultural entertainments, doing her work as double agent, to save herself and to rescue others.
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† From Maria Tatar, “Female Tricksters as Double Agents,” in The Cambridge Companion to Fairy Tales, ed. Maria Tatar (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015), pp. 39–40, 46–50, 56–59. Copyright © 2015 Cambridge University Press. Reprinted by permission of Cambridge University Press.
1. Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998), 8.
2. Marilyn Jurich, Scheherazade’s Sisters: Trickster Heroines and Their Stories in World Literature (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998), xvii.
3. Muhsin Mahdi, ed., The Arabian Nights, trans. Husain Haddawy (New York: Norton, 1990), 16.
4. Ibid., 12.
5. Ibid., 13.
6. Stieg Larsson, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (New York: Knopf, 2002), 346, 213, 362, 32.
7. Cecilia Ovesdotter and Anna Westerstahl Stenport, “Corporations, Crime, and Gender Construction in Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: Exploring Twenty-First Century Neoliberalism in Swedish Culture,” Scandinavian Studies, 81 (2009): 157.
8. Helena Bassil-Morozow, The Trickster in Contemporary Film (London: Routledge, 2012), 80.
9. Ricki Stefanie Tannen, The Female Trickster: The Mask That Reveals (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 26.
10. Both quoted in David Geherin, The Dragon Tattoo and Its Long Tail: The New Wave of European Crime Fiction in America (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012), 22.
11. Ibid., 160.
CRISTINA BACCHILEGA
From The Fairy-Tale Web: Intertextual and Multimedial Practices in Globalized Culture, a Geopolitics of Inequality, and (Un)Predictable Links†
Adapting Fairy Tales, to What Ends?
In 2005 the Bloomingdale’s holiday window display in New York City featured eight popular fairy-tale scenes, ranging from “Cinderella” to “Aladdin.” Highlights of what in that context was a mixed bag of traditions—narrative, festive, commercial, and touristic—remain viewable on About.com Travel to New York City Guide as a series of ten images. The “Cinderella” scene is tagged “Imagine being invited to the ball,” and the “Aladdin” one “Imagine the ride of your life.” In these windows, the magic helper who makes such wishes come true—respectively, the fairy godmother and the genie—has a large presence. Each chosen scene of the ensemble projects a sense of anticipation and attainable gratification. In the “Frog Prince” display, the frog is handing the young woman a translucent ball. Both characters wear crowns, signaling that their comm
on royal status will eventually bring them together. How? No matter what the Brothers Grimm wrote, and as the very red lips of the frog in the window signal, the answer in popular cultural memory is “with a kiss.”
Not only are the frog’s lips larger and redder than the princess’s, but also his hard and sparkling “body” is more like a gigantic conglomerate of costume jewelry than a slippery force of nature. In contrast, the fairy-tale heroine is bland, a well-dressed life-size mannequin with no expression or light of her own. The precious ball between them looks like an oversized pearl or perhaps a magic ball in which to read one’s future; also strategically placed between the frog suitor and the princess but more in the background, a golden reindeer conflates the magic of fairy tales with the gift-giving rituals of the season. The scene anticipates romance and fulfillment in a preset fantasy world for both characters, and the presence of the reindeer further suggests this is a “free” exchange that is part of a gift economy. Of course, the association of fairy tales with the holiday season is hardly new, as seen in British pantomime and Christmas editions of tales of magic for children. But in its fantastic showcasing of artificiality, this display is decidedly hyperreal, simulating an original that never existed and presenting it as not only desirable but also attainable. With the swipe of a credit card. In this fairy-tale scene the princess-like mannequin stands in for the consumer of a happily-ever-after fantasy that the amphibian rep for capitalism offers her.
To cash in on the genre’s worldwide appeal is common in globalized consumer capitalism, where plots, metaphors, and expectations associated with fairy tales pervade popular culture, from jokes and publicity to TV shows and songs. This confirms that fairy tales continue to exercise their powers on adults as well as children. Powers, I stress, not power, because, historically as in the present, fairy tales come in many versions and are in turn interpreted in varied ways that speak to specific social concerns, struggles, and dreams. Even the Bloomingdale’s “Frog Prince” scene tells more than the “shopping will buy you romance and happiness” story. In the online picture, we see the potential consumer reflected in the soft glow of the fake “pearl” in the window, but s/he need not be taken in by the glamour. After all, we are not passive consumers, and this is but one scene in the tale; we can imagine different choices and endings, and we do.
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