Books like Feminist Fairy Tales

This book was a deeply, deeply unpleasant read.I love fairy tale retelling anthologies, particularly ones that cover a wide variety of cultures and history. But these stories were all dull as drainwater or or very offensive. Each one read like a parody, like fairy tales deliberately written in an overly preachy and silly manner to mock people being offended by actual folklore.The first few stories were harmless enough, if nonsensical. As the stories progress though, they get increasingly disturbing and nasty. It's like Walker sat down to start writing these and got increasingly pissed off at the subjects she was writing against, until the last few stories were little more than her telling the readers directly on her views of religion and politics.Yeah, those come up quite a lot in this series. I know it's incredibly difficult for a writer to keep personal opinions and beliefs out of their works, but Walker doesn't even try. She hammers readers over the heads with the same messages:1.) Women are always good and loving and kind and nurturing.2.) Pregnancy and childbirth are wonderful, special gifts that women have and men all secretly hate women because they think childbirth is the most powerful and awe-inspiring thing ever and wish they could do it too.3.) It's perfectly alright for women to con other people. In fact, women who do so are heroic and have a deeper understanding of the world around them.4.) Threats to harm a person are valid ways to inspire them to change their ways. That's not me jumping to conclusions, incidentally. Walker actually WRITES that moral into the intro of one of the stories.5.) Men are usually viscous, ugly brutes who attack women with no warning and little motivation. If men are good, they are handsome and passive, letting their wives, mothers, and sisters run EVERYTHING for them, regardless of whether or not said wives, mothers, or sisters know how to handle those responsibilities.6.) Religion is a terrible invention that makes people superstitious and stupid. Or rather, mainstream Christianity is. Christianity seems to be the only religion recognized, although Walker seems under the impression that God = Zeus = Odin = Jesus. Also, religion (or, like I said, Christianity) hates sex entirely and teaches people that they should never have sex under any circumstances and should feel ashamed of themselves if they have it. Always. Universally.7.) Paganism (or rather, the neo-pagan New Age hippy beliefs Walker thinks are paganism) apparently doesn't count as a religion so much as a totally peaceful, awesome way of life that puts women in charge and worships a vague Goddess who is really every goddess ever, since this society actually existed in history and we all instinctively remember the Goddess in different forms. But everyone believes the Goddess isn't real or is evil because of Christianity and Men. Not because there's no evidence for it, nope.8.) Going off of that, Christianity and Men go hand in hand. Just about all evils in the "historic"-based fairy tales teach that we used to have a beautiful world run by Goddess-worshiping priestesses, but male Christians took over. Apparently there aren't any truly devout Christian women, because Walker takes it as a given that women are repressed and brainwashed by Christianity.9.) If a woman is a demanding snot or tries to force someone into marriage, it's admirable. It's also admirable if a woman uses magic to forcibly change her entire country into what SHE thinks is the ideal society, without thinking about the consequences or whether or not anyone else wants this.10.) The world would be so much better if women would remember their jobs and take command of their menfolk. Also, women should only marry kind men not for happiness but because of some creepy eugenics-sounding idea that breeding only with kind, intelligent men means all the brutish thugs will die out forever.I get that Walker's idea of feminism is a more outdated version, probably picked up from the 70s (a lot of the aspects of the stories, particularly the ancient Mother Goddess-worshiping society and the vagina envy were, I understand, a major part of 70s feminism). But this was published in the early 90s. Did she not take a minute to see how social views changed? Or notice that it was less acceptable to casually use words like "orientalia" or "gypsy"? I mean, she clearly watched the Disney movies out at the time, judging by some elements she "borrowed", so you'd think she'd pick up from Jasmine or Belle that women can be feminist without being passive whinebags who rely on goddesses to save them.(That would actually be the eleventh thing this anthology taught - ripping off Disney is awesome. And if you think I'm saying that based on minute evidence, consider that Walker wrote her little mermaid as being raised by a father who, after a human killed her mother, forbade his daughters to go to the surface lest they be seen by humans and who can't resist the allure of the human world anyway. And the sea witch is huge and black and covered in spikes. Gee, wonder what she was thinking of?)Edit from 11/20/2016: Having re-read this anthology, I would like to report that Disney movies are not the only things Walker plagiarized. I am about 98% certain that Walker ripped off two short stories for her fairy tales.1.) Tanith Lee's "When the Clock Strikes" is an adaptation of Cinderella in which a woman was from a powerful royal house until a duke kills everyone in line between himself and his title. She escapes, goes into hiding by marrying a merchant, and has a daughter who she grooms to follow in her footsteps and share her beliefs as she engages in devil worship. After overcoming her stepfamily and winning the love of the prince (a love that is certainly not requited), the daughter fulfills her mother's wishes, in this case cursing the prince into insanity before vanishing.Walker's "Cinder-Helle" is an adaptation of Cinderella in which a woman was formerly a powerful priestess of the Mother Goddess until Evil Christian Men killed or oppressed everyone. She escapes, goes into hiding by marrying a wealthy man, and has a daughter who she grooms to follow in her footsteps and share her beliefs as she names her daughter after the Ancient Pagan Mother Goddess. After overcoming her stepfamily and winning the love of the prince (a love that comes across as unrequited), the daughter fulfills her mothers wishes, in this case using her new position of power to forcibly ban Christianity and make everyone return to worshiping the Mother Goddess.2.) In Prosper Merimee's "La Venus d'Ille", a bronze statue of "Modest Aphrodite" is found, with a Latin inscription. The son of the statue's owner unthinkingly puts his fiance's wedding ring on the statue, and it curls its hand so that it won't come off. That night, the statue comes alive, goes into the son's bedroom, and holds him all night until he dies, before returning to its original position. The story ends with the statue melted down to make a church bell.In Walker's "Fairy Gold", a statue of the Mother Goddess (illustrated in the style of "Modest Aphrodite") is found, with an inscription in a "dead language". A shepherd unthinking puts on a gold ring, which matches one on the statue and which he can't remove. Around this time, the statue also changes position. After a period of time, the shepherd vanishes and his sister finds him dead, locked in an embrace with the statue. The story ends with the sister deciding that dying in the arms of the Mother Goddess meant he was happier in death than many were in life.HMMM. I don't know, it looks an awful lot like Walker read those stories and decided she could "fix" them.Edit 03/04/2017 - And DAMMIT, it looks like Walker ripped off ANOTHER story, this one for her fairy tale "The Weaver" (which is billed ostensibly as inspired by the "true" myth of Arachne). In this case, it looks like "The Weaver" was ripped off from "The Nettle Spinner" (which can be found here. The fairy tale is about a young, talented spinner named Renelde, who looks forward to marrying her sweetheart, Guilbert. She is pressured by a cruel Count into becoming his mistress and then his wife, but politely refuses both times. Out of spite, the Count refuses to give Renelde permission to marry Guilbert unless she weaves her wedding shift and his funeral shroud out of nettles, as he says she can only marry when he's dead. She manages to do so, despite it seeming to be impossible, and the Count slowly becomes ill as his funeral shroud is made. Renelde halts weaving at the request of the Countess (who is very kind and treated Renelde's family well), but the Count himself later begs her to finish when he becomes terminally ill but can't die until his shroud is made. On his deathbed, he repents his actions and apologies to Renelde. She and Guilbert marry and live happily after.In Walker's version (the one called "feminist", remember), the young, talented weaver Rosette spends the story powerless and threatened by "Baron Wratheschild", who regularly abuses his wife and keeps her servants as sex slaves. Rosette isn't able to do anything to protect herself. She's given a few magical threads by the "fairy queen Arachne, patroness of weavers" (really), which give the Baron a broken leg and a mysterious illness, but he recovers from both and tries to get her executed for witchcraft (and use the opportunity to whip and rape her). Finally, after not doing very much for the entire story, Arachne has a spider give the Baron a lethal bite and Rosette and her sweetheart, Rambow (REALLY), elope.If Walker really was *ahem* inspired by "The Nettle Spinner", that's just disgraceful. It means she removed a heroine who completed seemingly impossible tasks from her adversary while still remaining compassionate, a woman who continuously does good for her people even as her husband is cruel (the Baron's wife in Walker's story has pretty much no presence), and the idea that a villain can be moved by the heroine's compassion enough to repent his actions. Apparently what she thinks replaces all those things as "feminist" is putting in a Mother Goddess who really doesn't do very much at all for Rosette. And considering how much Christianity is hated in this anthology, I also suspect that Walker may have been trying to "correct" "The Nettle Spinner" as well, since that fairy tale implies that Renelde's miracle of spinning nettles was granted by God. As made evident in other works, Walker HATES God and the idea of God doing anything good for people. She doesn't seem to think it's possible.I really, really hate to say this, because I don't like to suggest that there is a right or wrong school of feminism, but this is just backwards. The heroines are not independent or brave or self-sufficient. They don't even go the Disney route of showing kindness and compassion in the face of great adversary. Walker is one of those writers who mistakes "rude" with "feisty" and not in a deliberate character flaw way. It got to the point where in some stories, I honestly wasn't sure who I was supposed to be cheering for. In "Barbidol" (really), Barbidol is written as an incredibly judgmental airhead who has no friends and only dresses up as her occupations. She gets involved with an abusive GI Joe doll who has some punny name I can't recall. GI Joe is a violent thug and I guess the idea is that Barbidol is a fool for leaving the more gentle Kenndall (...) but Kenndall is just as much an airhead (and tries to manipulate Barbidol by dating her friend, hello?) and we're told that Barbidol actually starts thinking about things while trying to get Joe's attention then falls back into her materialistic life and WHO ARE WE SUPPOSED TO EVEN BE ROOTING FOR? The airhead? Her cardboard love interest? Neither? And really, Walker, do you want to teach your readership that their Barbie dolls secretly sneer at them for having underdeveloped breasts?Even worse, the characters are just STUPID. If any of them rubbed two brain cells together and did anything remotely logical, the stories would be over in two minutes. A good example would be in the tale of Snow Night. The huntsman stalks Snow for a period of time and she clearly doesn't like it, then he tries to rape her when she refuses his advances. She proceeds to tell nobody about this, after fighting him off. Okay, I could buy she was traumatized (even though she seems to get over it pretty quickly), but then the huntsman tries to get the queen to condone him killing Snow and the queen, obviously grasping what he wants to do, calls the idea "obnoxious" and orders him to leave, summoning seven dwarfs to look after Snow until the huntsman tries to kill her. Because that makes much more sense than calling the guards to arrest him for talking about killing a princess.It's even worse in stories involving deities, since Walker doesn't seem to get that gods and goddesses can do some pretty cool stuff in mythology. Here, they do virtually nothing. The Goddess characters are especially bad. In "How the Sexes Were Separated", the Great Mother is infuriated to see that Sky God ripped the formerly-hermaphroditic humans in half so... she gives him a tongue-lashing and lets him proceed to teach men to abuse women and hate sex. She doesn't try to stop him, she doesn't try to teach the men differently, she just hangs around hoping that one day, the humans will see God Sky God is a terrible, unreasonable deity and learn to ignore him.Each story comes with an introduction and an illustration. The illustrations look nice enough, although I'm a bit disturbed that whoever drew them saw fit to include four or so topless women for the young audience to look at (or, in the case of the Empress's New Clothes, show a COMPLETELY NAKED empress). The introductions are completely laughable. Reading Walker's attempts to educate on folklore and mythology is like listening to Lucy Van Pelt explain that leaves fall from trees so squirrels can't eat them. She rambles through incredibly wrong "facts", held together by the flimsiest logic.I'd like to finish by saying that I'm not sure what age range Walker had in mind when she wrote this. My copy was labeled for the library's juvenile fiction section, so definitely it was marketed for a younger crowd. I doubt any teenagers would like the dull, depthless prose though, and I REALLY am sure the kids would not care for or understand the religious or social arguments Walker tries to make (for example, Cinder-Helle's stepsisters being thinly-veiled representations of the federal government and Church and their mother is named Christiana DO YOU GET IT?!) There's also Walker's love of using incredibly gruesome fates, which...yeah. Kids can handle a lot, but do you really want to end a story with an old lady splitting a guy's head open and feeding his corpse to wolves, accompanied by her granddaughter? Or fairies thinking it's reasonable revenge for a gardener to nearly die from asphyxiation when he's attacked by a swarm of wasps (which he's allergic to)?I suppose the two good things that came of this story were that I had a desire to seek out genuinely good retellings and I learned a lot about 70s feminism. As for the fairy tales themselves, I got nothing of any value out of them. Do yourselves a favor and skip this one. There are plenty of better talking fish in the sea.