Introducing Rewriting Mary Sue
Next week is the final reveal and grand opening of a website created by a group of indie writers focused around women writers and women as characters in stories. Rewriting Mary Sue was the name decided among us, and its been a roller-coaster over the past few months while we got the project working and Amy cursed at her screen repeatedly while dealing with the coding of the site. Overall the design and subject matter are right up my alley, even if I hadn’t always discussed these topics at large.
This provides the perfect platform to discuss such topics though, and there is nothing more close to my heart than fairy tales. So maybe for the introduction of the site I should explain how fairy tales are connected to Rewriting Mary Sue (RMS). You may have heard it before, but I think its something that needs to be repeated hundreds of times over: Fairy tales are women’s tales.
The background of fairy tales is so often little-known compared to the fairy tales themselves, and there are a number of tales that don’t see an ounce of the spotlight. But on top of female writers being the origins of fairy tales, the storytelling aspect of them gave a voice to many women in times when they were socially and culturally voiceless. Storytelling was decided by men long ago to be the fancies of women and nurses who raised children and we were perfectly accepting of that role because it gave us power; a power men didn’t come to realize til later on.
This is why despite the majority of known fairy tale books today being edited by men, most of the information was recovered from women. The Grimms drew from sisters and others like Dorothea Wild, but you haven’t heard of her name like you have the Brother’s Grimm. Andrew Lang, possibly the greatest collector of fairy tales, drew most of his fairy tale knowledge from his wife Leonora Alleyne, but you haven’t heard of her name have you? These are just some of the fairy tales that were drawn from women.
But this doesn’t seem right though, since most days you hear of women complaining that fairy tales are restricting, and that they don’t want a prince or that fairy tales are limiting to women. But you have to think in the context of the days these tales came from. They were women discussing the problems they faced in the world and the things they wanted. Every women wanted a happy ever after, and not all those happy ever afters were based on marrying a prince; some women became the princes themselves such as with The Girl Who Pretended to be a Boy.
The more you look at fairy tales of all kinds from these times the more you see that they are stories about women’s fears and hopes and dreams. They wanted a good person to marry like in Prince Darling, they wanted to avoid pain from men like in Bluebeard, they didn’t want to lose their children like in Rumpelstiltzkin, and they wanted to have a purpose in their lives like in The One-handed Girl.
The problem is that we haven’t updated these fairy tales, or made new ones that incorporate what women think and believe and value today; because it is much more than just finding a love, raising a family, and avoiding the horrors of men, though it can involve many of those. Instead we should be seeing stories about women facing the challenges of raising a family life and a working life. We should see stories about women of all types loving others, but being their own person.
Women today aren’t sitting in their castles waiting around to be rescued. They are storming the castles with their lovers and friends by their sides, enjoying life to the fullest rather than being held back from all the joys in the world. And we need the stories to represent this.
This is why I write for Rewriting Mary Sue. This is why I write the stories I do. We need our new fairy tales. We need to rewrite our old fairy tales.
