Evidently, Dave Truesdale has decided to review Ellen Datlow's The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy and has taken a particular disliking to Margo Lanagan's short story "The Goosle", making a fool of himself in the process.
I really don't know where to begin in describing "The Goosle" by Margo Lanagan, except to say it is a retelling of the Hansel and Gretel story. Lanagan turns this traditionally gruesome fairy tale into one of child porn (depending on your point of view) and repeated homosexual rape of a child (Hansel).
With several other stories in this collection aimed at juveniles or teenagers (the Ballingrud and the Cadigan), I find this story highly inappropriate. Would you want your young child to be introduced to science fiction or fantasy thinking a story like this represents, as the cover of the book entices, SF's "finest voices"? One rape scene is fairly graphic, and at one point young Hansel thinks he might even like what is being done to him -- over and over.
Given that there are many versions of this grim fairy tale, and gore and violence abound in the original(s), there must be lines drawn somewhere, folks. Depicting child rape, with the author having the child think he might like to be buggered in his "poink hole" (as the story euphemistically calls it) is where I draw my own line. Editor Datlow has co-edited some six collections of retold fairy tales, with tremendous and deserved success. Has the idea well run so dry, and are authors so bereft of true originality in these retellings that they must resort to shock value of the most depraved sort?
For someone being published as a critic in such well known venues as F&SF and SFSite, Truesdale is here displaying a frankly astonishing amount of naivety. The link between fairy tales and child abuse is by no means a recent invention. Nicole Kassell's The Woodsman (2004) for example drew heavily from the story of Little Red Riding Hood for its imagery and content. In fact, a couple of years ago, my girlfriend appeared as the Witch is a production of Engleburt Humperdink's Hansel und Gretel opera. Her performance included the continued stroking of one of the singers playing one of the children on the grounds that there's more than one way for an adult to devour a child.
One of the most notable facts about fairy tales and these kinds of folk tales is that they nearly always represent an adult version of family relationships. The Grimms always wrote about step-mothers rather than real mothers because they were accutely aware of the frequently ambivalent feelings that adults can have upon enterring into relationships with people who have children via a previous union. Consider a story like Cinderella for example, it is clearly all about the fact that when people remarry, they all too often place their previous life on a shelf and this includes their children. In fact, I do not think that it is beyond the pale to imagine that such stories were all about abuse in the first place. If you consider the role story-telling has as instructional tools in pre-literate societies then it seems pretty clear to me that stories such as Little Red Riding Hood and Hansel and Gretel are about telling children to be careful not to be raped while they are out wandering in the forests. A rather splended article by Anna Roberts explores the frequency of abuse themes in fairy tales.
For a critic to react against abuse themes in a fairy tale strikes me as utterly baffling.Technorati Tags: SF, Fantasy, short fiction, Margo Lanagan, Dave Truesdale
