Think about fables and folktales for a moment. Most of the ones that come to mind (usually filtered through the point of view of Walt Disney and the company that bears his name) feature girls and women not at all; as evil step-mothers and/or witches; or as helpless idiots in need of rescue, because they can’t handle the particular situation alone.
But there are a lot of folktales out there in which girls and women hold their own as well (if not better) than boys or men would in comparable situations. More than 100 of such fables from all over the world are collected in Kathleen Ragan’s 1998 book Fearless Girls, Wise Women & Beloved Sisters: Heroines in Folktales from Around the World.
And some of them seem rather familiar. Remember “Rumplestiltskin”? As Ragan points out, that story has “a female protagonist (who) gets bumped around from one obnoxious man to another.” These being her father, the king and Rumplestiltskin himself. And in that story, she’s saved by happenstance, not by her own actions. Ragan asks why in “Rumplestiltskin” the woman wouldn’t tell the king the truth about spinning straw into gold. Or why she’d agree to give away her child. This woman’s a bit of a moron, isn’t she?
Not so the woman in the very similar tale from Scotland called “Whuppity Stoorie.” This woman, whose husband ran off and left her with a young child and little to live on (and who receives no help from anyone else in the community), discovers one day that a sow soon to farrow is lying on her back, “grunting and groaning, and ready to die.”
This comes as a blow to the woman, who’d hoped for a “fine litter of pigs”, and she sits down and cries. An old woman comes up the hillside, and somehow knowing the sow is sick, asks what the woman will give in exchange for curing the animal.
“Anything”, says the woman, whom the text describes as stupid. And in a way she is stupid, because the “anything” turns out to be her child. But she’s not as stupid as the nitwit in “Rumplestiltskin”, because she gets herself out of the situation, without any outside help. As in “Rumplestiltskin”, the woman can keep her child if she guesses the trickster’s name. In “Whuppity Stoorie”, the woman later hears the old woman singing and sneaks up to investigate. And she hears the old woman state her name: Whuppity Stoorie.
Now armed with this information, the woman succeeds in keeping her baby when Whuppity Stoorie returns, demanding “payment.” And again, she handled her situation without help from anyone else (In “Rumplestiltskin” someone else hears Rumplestiltskin say his name and is nice enough to tell the woman in that story what it is). And as Ragan points out, because she’s preoccupied by the fact that the sow (likely her only source of income) might die, the woman is tricked into a bad bargain.
Another story, out of England, called “Molly Whuppie” involves three sisters, the youngest children of a family that abandoned them in the woods because they felt they’d too many mouths to feed.
The girls come to a house and ask for something to eat. The woman there urges them to go away before her husband, a giant, returns. He’d kill them when he returns, she warns.
The girls say they’ll leave before he comes home, and the giant’s wife relents.
But they don’t leave before then, and the giant arrives, proclaiming…
Well, you know.
Instead of killing the girls, the giant orders them to stay the night and to sleep in the same bed with his three daughters. The youngest of the abandoned girls, the eponymous Molly Whuppie, notes that the giant had put straw ropes on her neck and those of her sisters, and gold chains around his own daughters’ necks. So she waits until the other girls are all asleep, and switches the necklaces. The giant comes in the dark room later, feels for the straw, and takes and kills his own daughters.
Molly and her sisters then slip out of the house and soon reach another house, the King’s. He gives her three challenges in succession, each involving going back and facing the giant. The reward is that each of her sisters and herself will have one of his sons to marry.
So Molly goes back and in turn gets from the giant a sword, a purse from beneath the giant’s pillow, and the ring he wears on his finger. On that last expedition, she’s captured and put in a sack. But she tricks the giant’s wife into letting her out and putting herself into the sack.
And she successfully completes her final task.
“Molly Whuppie” is very similar to stories about Jack and his exploits in fighting a giant. But in this case, it’s a clever girl who wins out.
And those are just two of the stories in this book. Even those stories we’re familiar with, like “Cinderella” and “Little Red Riding Hood”, have older variations in which the female characters are capable of handling things on their own. In the introduction to the book, for example, Jane Yolen points out that more than 500 European variants of “Cinderella” have her winning a share of a kingdom on her own.
And in early versions of “Little Red Riding Hood”, the girl and her grandmother handle things on their own, without need of rescue by a woodsman. And in one version, Red Riding Hood meets and defeats a second wolf.
If you like folktales and/or want to give your daughters, nieces and/or young cousins access to more than just Disneyfied damsels in distress, Fearless Girls, Wise Women & Beloved Sisters is worth a look.
Photo Credit: Artwork showing both the 10th Doctor (David Tennant) and the 11th Doctor (Matt Smith). Courtesy BBC America.
Spoilers follow for the Doctor Who two-part story, “The End of Time”, which marks David Tennant’s final appearance as the 10th incarnation of the Doctor.
The Doctor not only finds himself facing the Master (and other threats), but also must deal with his own imminent “death.” As a Timelord, the Doctor can regenerate when he’s fatally injured or ill (thus permitting one actor to replace another), allowing his body to heal. But it’s a complete change of appearance and personality. A new version of the Doctor will live on, but the man he was will be dead.
The Doctor happens to like his current self and personality, and doesn’t want to “die.”
The Doctor knows he’s soon to come to the end of his 10th life because he’s been told that his “song is ending,” and that “he will knock four times.” Many believed that “knock” to be a reference to the drumbeat the Master hears in his head, but it’s not. It’s his friend, Wilford Mott, knocking to be let out of a cabi
net. Except 1) they’re set up in such a way that someone else has to enter an adjoining cabinet to let the other person out; and 2) the cabinet is about to be flooded with radiation.
Wilf, an old man, begs the Doctor to leave him, saying he doesn’t matter. In a bit of irony, the Doctor agrees, shouting that he, himself, could have done so much more.
And then the Doctor release Wilf and steps into the adjoining cabinet, taking the full brunt of the radiation that then pours in.
The irony refers back to the Doctor’s actions in the previous special, “The Waters of Mars”, in which he goes down a very dark path. In that story, he talked about “important” and “unimportant” people. In the grand scheme of things, Wilfred Mott is not important, but the Doctor realized that because Wilf is unimportant, he had to sacrifice his 10th self for him. If he didn’t, he’d likely have gone even further down that dark path.
And I still believe that the main in-story reason the 11th Doctor will resume traveling with a companion is that because as Donna Noble (Wilf’s granddaughter) said in “The Runaway Bride”, the Doctor sometimes needs someone to stop him. Perhaps the Doctor, even with his new personality, will recognize that he could one day again find himself embracing an “I can do anything I want because I’m the last of the Timelords” mentality (or one of the two last, if the Master’s still alive), and giving in to the temptation to play the God of Time. And so decides he needs someone to keep him grounded.
From the point of view of Doctor Who as a TV series, the reason is pretty obvious: You can’t have your main character talking to himself all the time. Plus, the companion serves in many ways as an audience surrogate.
The 10th Doctor’s need to regenerate because of radiation poisoning was very similar to the situation the third Doctor (Jon Pertwee) faced back in 1974. Not only did the Third Doctor also become exposed to high radiation levels, but both incarnations of the Doctor had to face their fears. In the Third Doctor’s case, it was returning the Metebelis crystal to the cave of the giant spider, even knowing the danger (radiation and otherwise). For the 10th Doctor, it meant sacrificing that particular life, even though he still had so much more he could do.
I’d like to think that, in an ironic twist (for those familiar with the Christmas 2008 special “The Next Doctor”), if the Doctor had run out on Wilf, he’d have tripped over a brick and regenerated anyway.
I won’t discuss exactly when or how the regeneration scene occurs, or what happens between the Doctor’s rescue of Wilf and the actual regeneration. I’ll just say that David Tennant’s final words in the part are, as Tennant himself said in an interview, “perfect.”
Come March, the BBC will begin airing Matt Smith’s episodes as the 11th Doctor. Looking forward to it. But then one of the secrets to Doctor Who’s long run (it first aired Nov. 23, 1963 and ran until 1989 before being put on hiatus (it was never officially canceled), to return for a one-off 1996 TV movie, before coming back in all its glory in 2005) is that things change from time to time. Not only do companions and Doctors come and go (Doctors less often than the companions), but a new production team takes the show in a new direction every few years. All these changes help keep Doctor Who from getting stale.
Matt Smith’s tenure as the Doctor will be helmed by Steven Moffat as producer. Moffat won three Hugo awards (one of the highest awards given for science fiction writing) for Doctor Who scripts he wrote, and was nominated for a fourth. As much as people might miss David Tennant (a poll in Doctor Who Magazine named him the most popular Doctor), I’ve no doubt the series is in capable hands.
Copyright 2010, Patrick Keating
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