Rebellious Daughters (4 page)

WUNDERMÄRCHEN : A RETELLING OF MY GRAND MOTHER

KRISSY KNEEN

Once upon a time my grandmother won the lotto.

But is this really the beginning of the story? There are actually several beginnings to several stories about my grandmother.

Once upon a time my grandmother fled the former Yugoslavia and lived happily ever after in Alexandria in Egypt.

Once upon a time my grandmother fled Egypt with her two daughters and lived happily ever after in England.

Once upon a time my grandmother migrated to Australia where she lived happily ever after with her two daughters and her two granddaughters.

You see, my grandmother was obsessed by fairy tales. She collected different versions of these stories – by Perrault, the brothers Grimm, Anderson. She liked the tellings and the retellings, comparing one against the other. I am not sure what she was looking for. I wonder if she was trying to find the definitive version. The actual truth.

The problem with fairy tales and real life is there is no truth, no definitive version of events. There are just multiple iterations. In the version I am going to tell here, the ‘once upon a time' part is the night my grandmother won the Lotto. In my grandmother's version, this very moment would be her ‘happily ever after'. Winning the lotto and, as a result, moving to Queensland to open a tourist attraction called Dragonhall was to her the happy end of her tale of displacement, migration and struggle. But for me it was only the beginning.

I was 14 years old, about to turn 15. The three generations of my family lived in Blacktown in NSW. My grandmother, my mother, my aunt, my sister and I all crowded into a relatively small suburban house. My grandfather, the only man in our house, was silent, absent. He was the sound of his piano, muffled from behind the closed door of his room when he came home from work.

My sister and I called our garden The Woods. My grandmother had planted trees and shrubs so close that you couldn't see into or out of it at all. She valued her privacy. She had an unflagging distrust of strangers, and because she refused to make friends, everyone outside the family was a stranger and treated with suspicion. Now, when I think of my grandmother's house, I am reminded of the story of the Selfish Giant who wouldn't let the kids from the village play in his garden and as a result he was lonely and very sad. I believe my own grandmother was also lonely and sad, but she never would have admitted to this as she saw any sign of sadness as a failure of will.

My grandmother made models out of paper. She created life-sized papier-mâché dinosaurs that couldn't fit inside the house and came in sections that could be taken apart, crammed inside my mother's VW van and driven one at a time to be unloaded at the Sydney Museum for its dinosaur display. These were the most impressive of her works, but she was fonder of fairy tale characters. She would look at different artists' impressions of
Snow White, The Little Match Girl, Sleeping Beauty
, then translate these to her own versions. The female papier-mâché sculptures would all look more like a younger version of herself than like the illustrations of Arthur Rackham or Virginia Frances Sterrett. I have inherited my grandmother's small round face, big eyes
and plump cheeks. So when I stepped into our lounge room, a dozen versions of myself stared right back at me.

I related to those paper-made young women in other ways too. Fairy tale heroines were often fragile innocents in need of protection and this is how my grandmother saw us, her children and grandchildren too. She locked us all up in her tower in the woods, surrounded by paper versions of ourselves, frozen in time and space, compliant and uncomplaining.

Forbidden from joining other children playing in the streets, I felt estranged from the rest of them when I went to school. It wasn't just that. I wasn't allowed to watch television as they did, I didn't know the music they listened to and I grew up on a strict diet of fairy tales which meant I was cautioned daily against the terrors of an unforgiving world. I know that there must have been horrors in my grandmother's history that made her frightened of the world, but she never told us the true stories. Instead, the stories that were told to us were dark tales of children cooked in a pot, girls freezing to death after wasting their last match and wives discovering they were married to murderers of pretty young women.

Fairy tales come from an oral tradition. They began as cautionary tales, warnings passed from mouth to ear, generation to generation. There is a shocking tale in the Grimms' collection called
Wie Kinder Schlachtens
Mit Einander Gespielt Haben
or
How Some Children Played at Slaughtering
. In this tale, while the mother is upstairs giving the baby his bath, her two older children are replaying their father's slaughtering of a pig. The child who plays the butcher slits the throat of the child playing the pig. The mother runs down at the sound of screaming. She sees her son bleeding out and takes the knife from his neck and stabs her other child in the heart. Realising that she has forgotten the baby in the bath, she runs upstairs only to find it drowned. She hangs herself and the father, coming home after selling the slaughtered pig, finds his whole family dead and dies soon after of grief.

The moral of this tale is that nothing good will come of murder. Perhaps it is also a warning to parents to be more aware of what they, sometimes unwittingly, model for their children. I imagine that when my grandmother told me this story, she meant for me to see it as a call to never kill an animal. We were raised as vegetarians, carefully protecting the life of every bird, beast or bug. But as a child I saw a coded message in the story that I should not blindly repeat the actions of my parents or my grandparents. Read in this way, the tale is a call for us to eschew the teachings of previous generations, to make our own decisions, to rebel.

Many fairy tales explicitly call the younger generations to rebel. At their heart, they are about metamorphosis.
The rebellious actions of a princess, beggar girl or wife can transform the world.
Bluebeard
is another tale about a rebellious woman. In this story a young woman is chosen by a king as his bride. She wants for nothing. His castle is brimming with gold and jewels, food and furs. The only restriction her husband gives her is that she is not allowed to open the door to one particular room. Of course the woman is overcome by curiosity and disobeys. As she opens the door, a river of blood rushes towards her and she is shocked by the sight of her husband's former wives hanging dead like the carcasses of cows.

The story of
Bluebeard
is a palpable warning for women against any men, even those men who seem at first to be benevolent. I remember my grandmother reading and rereading the story of
Bluebeard
, a tale reimagined by so many different storytellers in the hundreds of fairy tale collections that she owned. It resonated with her fear of men. As a child, I saw all men painted as beasts and bogeymen by my grandmother. My sister and I were not allowed to visit our friends' houses. When we begged for a sleepover at someone else's house, we were told that it would be too dangerous. Our girlfriends had brothers and fathers, all potential Bluebeards, each and every one of them.

Masculinity was my grandmother's most hated and feared thing. Even her own husband, my grandfather, was treated as an outsider to the family. My father was
a person of suspicion. He was the boy next door and it was easy enough for him to move across the fence to live with my mother, but when I, the second child, was born, he made the mistake of trying to move out of the family home, buying a house a couple of streets away, a house we rarely lived in, spending every evening eating at my grandmother's table. That marriage was destined to fail and it was no surprise when it did. The divorce just proved the point that my grandmother had been making. Men were not to be tolerated. Even our dogs knew that. When one of them barked at a passing man, she would say approvingly,
she doesn't like men
. In fact, none of our dogs ever liked men and she was proud of this fact. As an adult I have begun to read stories about the former Yugoslavia, all tainted with violence and, often, rape. Lidia Yuknavitch's
The Small Backs of Children
, William Vollmann's
Last Stories and Other Stories, Fatherland
by Nina Bunjevac – all of these narratives are equally distressing and paint a grim picture of my grandmother's homelands. I don't know what had happened to my grandmother in her younger years. All I know for sure is that she would never open our door if a man knocked on it, waiting in silence until he walked down the path and away.

You can only interpret fairy tales in the context of current societal norms. My understanding of the
Bluebeard
story differs from that of my grandmother. For me the story of
Bluebeard
is all about breaking rules. The woman in the story succumbs to her curiosity, takes the magic key and boldly opens the forbidden door. Breaking the rule leads to her seeing the world as it really is instead of blindly accepting a fabrication of reality.

When our family moved to Queensland, to Dragonhall, I, like Bluebeard's wife, was given everything I wanted, within limits. I had my own room at last. I had a desk to write at. I had 40 acres of land to explore. My grandmother collected a menagerie of exotic animals to play with. Apparently, the alpacas and miniature horses and peacocks were to entertain the visiting public who would be flocking to Dragonhall to see my grandmother's papiermâché fairy tales at seven dollars a head. But as paying customers rarely found their way to this isolated property, off the main highway and down a bumpy dirt road, the menagerie became pets to entertain the captive daughters and granddaughters.

In my fairy story, just as in the tale of Bluebeard's wife, there was one secret door that must not be unlocked. It was the door to my virginity. As long as my grandmother's girls were virginal, we would remain in the bosom of our family, protected and provided for by our matriarch. I feel for my mother who returned home from her marriage to a kind of half-banishment. She was never again treated as a full member of the family after she brought her children home.

In my grandmother's eyes, a childlike state was equated with goodness. She banned any hint of sex in our house. If a film featured passionate kissing, she would turn it off. If a book had a whiff of sex, she would have the pages cut out. My sister, rebellious by nature, stole books that had erotic passages in them from the library. She let me read them under the covers of my blankets, the words lit deliciously by torchlight, jumping and shining on the quivering page.
1984, A Kestrel for a Knave
. Forbidden books that I gobbled up in the dark, emerging in the morning tired and ravenous. I lost my innocence to literature but none of the adults ever knew.

Just like Bluebeard's wife, I was itching to open the locked door, which in my case meant to understand the true, and somewhat horrifying, nature of my life. I knew that to do so would lead to my expulsion from the paradise that was Dragonhall, but Dragonhall – just like Bluebeard's castle – was, in reality, not a paradise at all. At Dragonhall, my mother, my aunt, my sister and I never had to cook for ourselves, because my grandmother always provided. We did not need to work, because we had a free roof over our heads. We were free to play or read or write. We were not to know that my grandmother's finances were stretched. That the new shiny plumbing had already begun to crust over with rust, that eventually the cheap new furniture would break, never to be replaced. That even here in the free-flowing landscape
of a Central Queensland property, her granddaughters, seemingly running free in the bush, were actually caged.

In her book
From The Beast to The Blonde
, a study of the history of fairy tales, Marina Warner mentions the word
Wundermärchen
, which was used before the term
fairy tale
emerged. This German word translates to
wonder tale
, and stands for both folk and fairy tales. ‘To wonder', Warner suggests, ‘communicates the receptive state of marveling as well as the active desire to know, to inquire'. My grandmother's stories were full of wonder, wondrous creatures, wonderful worlds, and, like the wife of Bluebeard who wondered what would be behind the one locked door, her
Wundermärchen
set me to wondering. I was filled with a powerful and dangerous curiosity.

I absorbed my grandmother's
Wundermärchen
s and learned the family trade, becoming a proficient sculptor and artist, creating fantastical wonder tales of my own. I began to write. I wrote tales of horror, of beastly transformations. Fairy tales are all about transformations and I practised the act of transforming in the stories I wrote. I was a caterpillar, filled with the knowledge of wings not yet formed. I didn't begin to write about sex till years later but I was preparing for another change which would soon come. I wanted to lie down with beasts, like Beauty from the Grimms' tale, I wanted to flirt with danger, court uncertainty, and so my life-long fascination with sex began.

Sexual longing is inherent in many
Wundermärchen
s. Even in the seemingly innocent tale of a girl who loved her grandmother,
Little Red Cap
, or
Red Riding Hood
, we are creeping towards the idea of sexual innocence lost. All the many retellings of this story begin with a granddaughter whose love for her grandmother is as clear as my own love for my
mumumu
. But the grandmother's power is waning. She is frail, ill, old. The granddaughter must bring food and drink to sustain her, but the wolf has arrived before her and the grandmother is dead by the time Red Cap knocks at her door. In one quite gruesome version of the tale, the wolf feeds pieces of the grandmother to the unsuspecting Red Cap. The girl ingests the old woman's flesh and, filled with her wisdom, realises she is in danger. The wolf, disguised as Grandma, invites her into bed. The sexual undertones are clear. The girl tries to escape by telling the grandmother-wolf that she needs to pee but the wolf demands she urinate in the bed. This strange, dark version of the tale sees the wolf eating the girl. Luckily the huntsman cuts the wolf open and Red Cap escapes unharmed.