Vaginal Fantasy Book Club discussion
Apr 2014: Daughter of the Forest
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Official Discussion Thread for "Deerskin" *Spoilers* AND TRIGGER WARNING
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I thought the opening of this book was really interesting. It did seem very fairytale at first with the seemingly idyllic king and queen and their quests but there was a touch of something that was... off. It was like a nagging feeling that something was just not right and I felt as I kept reading, it kept being more and more prominent until the fairytale facade cracked and crumbled. I really liked that about the beginning, actually, because it was really deconstructing that seemingly ideal fairytale couple and kind of allowing us to see how creepy they actually were.
Mod
I have to say this is probably one of my favorite books now. The prose was so gorgeous and the world and the depth of psychology.
I guess the ending is the only thing I was a bit vague on, because the magic was not really established, it was hard to understand exactly what she was doing to her father in that last scene, was it her or the Goddess doing all that, or is she the Goddess herself, incarnate, even after? I loved the end, when she accepted being with Ossin, but it was with a caveat: It might not be for long. And he was okay with that.
SO GREAT!
Also, was it just me, or was the mother character an evil witch, kind of like in the main pick? It seemed weird that everyone in the kingdom was so brainwashed against the main character, even at the end wedding scene. And the scarlet woman chasing her, was that her mother?
I feel like this book could use a thesis paper analysis, haha.
That's heavy reading for a teenager.I agree on the ending - I found that a bit vague and even a bit confusing myself. I hadn't considered that she might have taken on aspects of the goddess herself, which would be interesting considering how everyone assumed her to fill that role while she vehemently denied it. I thought that was one of the sadder parts of the book though, the fact that no on except Ossin (and the dogs) really ever saw her for who she was. If she did take on a goddess aspect, that would be an interesting turn to the story. I also love that she maintained her independence until the end. After all she had been through, she more than deserved it.
There was definitely something sinister about the mother. The effect she had on people was downright creepy and the whole part about how the painting was made and the effect it had on the painter himself was somewhat chilling. It was as though the painting itself had taken on whatever subtle dark magic the queen had. But yeah, the way the whole kingdom seemed to accept the king and queen unquestioningly was downright creepy.
Felicia wrote: Also, was it just me, or was the mother character an evil witch, kind of like in the main pick? It seemed weird that everyone in the kingdom was so brainwashed against the main character, even at the end wedding scene. And the scarlet woman chasing her, was that her mother?I feel like this book could use a thesis paper analysis, haha.
I kept wondering that, too. It felt like Lissar's mother had some sort of spell on her husband and the kingdom. Even after death with how creepy her painting was, and the way the painter reacted to having to paint her!
I mentioned the way people seemed to just always think the King and Queen were right and could do no wrong earlier, and I thought it was creepy then. The more I think on it the creepier it gets. Even Lissar's nursemaid was under their spell. She became her nursemaid just to work for the queen? The unquestioned devotion just gave me the willies.
I felt the scarlet woman was an incarnation of her mother. The sinister feeling around her made it seem that way.
I don't think the queen/mother meant to be a witch exactly. At least, not in the fairy tale sense that we're mostly used to. One of the fairy tale standards is that there is good beauty and evil beauty, and the queen is definitely the latter. Good beauty is wholesome and genuine. Evil beauty is aloof and hypnotic.The witch comparison is apt, though, because her beauty is apparently unearthly, and I wonder if the painter wasn't meant to be somehow under her spell in some way. That sequence reads as if the experience is dark for him. In fact, I thought that whole chapter was Ms. McKinley winking at us by putting herself into the work, and foreshadowing the story arc as well as the whole writer/reader relationship. "This is what it's like to write this story.... This next part is bad, but everyone lives happily ever after."
I thought this was a really beautiful book. I loved the story telling and the way she wrote it like a classic fairy tale, however she had a tendency to go around in circles and it seemed like there were very long moments where nothing was really happening. I found the whole scene in the woods to drag on so much that I was disappointed when she decided to go back to the cabin. I know the author was trying to be very sensitive about her healing time from the rape and I appreciated that it wasn't being taken lightly, but there was only so much grieving I could read before I just wanted things to get to a happier ending.
Felicia wrote: "I feel like this book could use a thesis paper analysis, haha."I actually had found a paper on the book, but I didn't link it because I could only access it through my university. It was also a lot to type out, but now that I see that people are interested, I'll list the most relevant parts!
SOURCE: Robin McKinley's "Deerskin": Challenging Narcissisms Author(s): Amelia A. Rutledge Source: Marvels & Tales, Vol. 15, No. 2 (2001), pp. 168-182
The flat depictions of her parents
"McKinley's depiction of Lissar's parents appears one-dimensional to the point of demonization, but this detail is explicable by the dynamics of narcissism implicit in the Catskin tale, both in the husband/wife relationships and in the father's egregious demand that his daughter take her dead mother's place. Flat characterization and extreme polarization between protagonist and antagonists in "Deerskin" can be attributed to McKinley's allegiance to her fairy-tale sources, but a consideration of the relationship of Lacan's mirror stage to narcissism can also explain these characterizations. "Deerskin" is a nightmarish exemplum of relationships warped and destroyed by self-absorption." (173)
Lacan's theory of the mirror stage
"Central to Lacan's theorizing is the subject's transition through the mirror stage, which cannot be reduced to any particular moment in time. Likened to an infant's first noticing its image in the mirror (with which it has an "Imaginary" bond similar to its imagined oneness with its nurturer), this awareness is also the first glimmer of the separation between perceiver and perceived, and it can be the focus both of affection and of aggression (Sarup 102). This phase precedes recognition of the more complex relationships that represent insertion into the Symbolic order of "I," "you," and "s/he," relationships without which the subject cannot function as a social being. The mirror stage is crucial in the development of self/Other differentiation. Of necessity, entering the Symbolic (social) order ruptures the Imaginary bond; a residual desire (objet a) for the primitive nondifferentiated state persists, but can only be fulfilled by new bondings that are substitues, "signifiers" of that earliest desire, to be the desire of another. The rational adult recognizes and values others as distinct from the self, but the absence of such recognition leads to persistence in narcissistic relationships.
Lissar and her parents
Although Lissar and her parents operate in the Symbolic order as king, queen, and princess/daughter, the parents' relationship is regressive and exclusionary, and she suffers from its effects. The conflict from which Lissar must extricate herself turns primarily on her father's failure to move beyond his narcissistic attachments, first to his wife and then to his daughter. She must also move beyond a condition of forced infantilization by her self-absorbed and mutually obsessed parents; her regressive upbringing has demanded, above all that she be "biddable"." (173)
"Even when she was with her parents, they could see only each other. If one's identity "crystallizes" from internalized ideal images reflected back, so to speak, from the parents (Fink 36), then Lissar's first "self" is based, for the most part, on the storybook image she perceives her parents weaving about themselves. With each seeing only an image of the self in the partner, Lissar is "invisible" to them. Although the child is excluded from the parents' mutual bond in the normal course of affairs, there is no evidence that Lissar has received positive "reflections" of herself from either parent." (174)
The portrait
"[...] inwardly she is tyrannized by the idealized mother-image which becomes a source of terror. [...] Lissar must confront maternal tyranny in the haunted self-commemorative portrait her mother commissioned during her last illness. In an action resembling that of the folktale figures who gain invulnerability by isolating their life into a body part or an object kept separate from their persons, Lissar's mother continues to "live" in the portrait, a quintessentially narcissistic ploy.
McKinley makes the portrait in "Deerskin" embody maternal malevolence. A counterpart to paternal violence, its ambiguous ontological status intensifies Lissar's peril and serves as the objective correlative of internalized maternal idealization.
The portrait is intended to insure the king's constancy, ironically, his desire is transferred to Lissar, in whose eyes he hopes to "see" himself as he had in his wife's eyes. Unwilling to step outside his immediate family relationship, he is arrested in a condition analogous to Lacan's infantile mirror stage." (174-175)
The Scarlet Woman
"In this novel however, the mother is an independent agent of malice even when she appears simultaneously with the father in the hallucinatory sequence as her rage reaches out to engross itself with Lissar: "What [Lissar] saw instead of snow and tress and the cold dawn sky as she ran from the man-dragon, looking fearfully over her shoulder as she stumbled and wavered and dragged herself along, was the great woman's face rising up even higher than the man's tall figure; and the woman was laughing too, and her headdress was made all of fire, as were her scarlet finger-nails as she reached around the man-dragon, toward Lissar [...]"" (176)
The Moonwoman
"The daughter has become a rival to be destroyed [...] The mother has not offered her daughter to her husband, since she wanted no successor. [...] Since Lissar's current ego-ideal, her mother, is the one most dangerous to her, the daughter must be rapt away forcibly and inserted into another symbolic system, that ruled by the benign aspect of the Moonwoman. [...] In a "second round" of the mirror stage, finding herself in an imaginary/Imaginary oneness with the Moonwoman, Lissar is transfigured, her inherited maternal dark hair taking the albino hue of Moonwoman's; she becomes, in effect, a photographic negative of herself. The change in her eyes from transparency to apparent opacity [...] also figures her need for a new "sight" of herself, since she cannot look inward at the self she fears that others might see." (176)
"Lissar is not allowed to remain in the comforting surrogate mother/child bond with the Moonwoman, however positively it contrasts with her biological maternal relationship; instead, her work in Ossin's kingdom gives her new subject positions. Until she can decisively free herself from destructive bonds - to articulate her own "No" to her father and resist being engulfed by her mother - Lissar must experience only incomplete Symbolic relationships in her kennel work with Ossin and her worker associates. All of these relationships are - paradoxically - real but also illusory, since they are posited on the borrowed identity she receives as the Moonwoman's gift.
When she encounters in Ossin's palace a portrait of her former self [...] she simultaneously discovers, as does the infant in Lacan's classic example, that she is Other than that portrait. She is thus precipitated from the second mirror stage begun with her rescue by the Moonwoman [...]" (177)
The meaning of the ending
"When Lissar learns, after fleeing from Ossin at the ball, that her father has agreed to marry Ossin's young sister, Camilla, she moves with Moonwoman's power, rending time and space to denounce him in a primal rite that forcibly reminds the reader that Hecate is also an aspect of the Moonwoman. The blood that at first seems to be the stigmata of her palms gashed by her frenzied nails becomes a phantasmagoric flood figuring menstrual flow, deflowering, and miscarriage. [...]
Returning her shame to her father is only half of Lissar's task. In both blood and flame (a witch-burning in effigy), Lissar also confronts the spectre of her mother and the uncanny portrait. By thus confronting her own demonic, internalized image of the mother she idealizes and fears, she is freed to enter the fluidity and uncertainties of social identity. The queen is expelled, and her visionary image (along with, one assumes, its physical counterpart) is destroyed; in other words, when the desired object rejects its role, the aggressive narcissism of the mother perceives, and in this case experiences, rejection as annihilation. At the same time, Lissar/Deerskin's physical resemblance to her mother is restored, and Moonwoman's power, the return of her repressed feminine rage, is dispersed. Because this is a fantasy, the "badness" vanishes; but can the fairy tale of exorcism, of banishing the "wicked witch," convey the complexity of working through trauma the novel has presented?" (177-178)
"Lissar is not the Moonwoman, nor is she an unscarred innocent like the virgin Camilla she has just rescued. It is not as a child, and no longer as Moonwoman, nor yet as fully realized mature woman, but as a puella senex, a child aged in wisdom, that Lissar enters the realm of social exchange." (179)
This is my first book and post for this group. I started reading this book strictly because it was at my library. I really have a hard time dealing with graphic scenes in books and so I wasn't thrilled but I thought I would give it a go. I'm glad that I did because I loved this book!I enjoy fairy tales so as soon as the book started I was hooked. I loved the dark undertones that the first part of the book had. It seemed to start subtly and then grew. There was always something not quite right about this great fairy tale King and Queen.
As much as I dislike having to read rape scenes in books, I didn't feel as if this was just thrown in to continue the story. It was more that the whole first part of the book was leading up to this point. The wheels were already set in motion from the moment her father won her mother.
I do agree with some that her time in the cabin was a little slow. I couldn't begin to imagine what a traumatic event like that would do to someone, but I found myself willing Lissar to continue, to snap out of her daze. Then when she decided to return to the cabin, I found myself upset that she still didn't think herself strong enough. I felt that she had grown and started find herself and who she wanted to be but she wasn't permitting it to happen.
I definitely didn't get much of the end when she confronts her father. I somewhat got what the author was doing, but the magic in the book was just so vague and strange when it did show up.
So I enjoyed the book. I'm glad that I read it despite the warning. While I was reading this book, I thought about a book I had read when I was in middle school called Beauty which I later discovered was also written by McKinley. I might have to go reread that now.
Robin McKinley's Beauty is probably my favorite take on Beauty and the Beast ever. I wonder if Disney was influenced by it, actually. I also love a lot of her other fiction like The Blue Sword and The Hero and the Crown.
I read Daughter of the Forest immediately after finishing Deerskin. I'd read the comments about it being a downer, but in some ways it seemed like sunshine and butterflies after Deerskin! The brutality to Ash really upset me, but in a way it prepared me to not be quite as disturbed by the scenes with the dogs in DotF.