The Girl without Hands: From Folktale and Fairy Tale to Contemporary Novel By Melissa Jane Ashley Abstract The major component of the thesis is an extract from the manuscript, The Girl without Hands, a novelised interpretation of the folktale and fairy tale, The Maiden without Hands. The novel is composed of three books, with point of view structured as shifting third person; most of the story is narrated by the central character, Marina Fischer. The manuscript deploys a variety of fairy tale and folktale related literary techniques, including magic realism, intertextuality, framing, and fantasy. Events span a period of eight years, the action set in rural and urban parts of Queensland and Victoria. On an unsupervised picnic with friends, fourteen year old Marina Fischer’s twin sister Sonia suffers a fatal head injury. Grief-stricken and self-blaming, Marina reacts to the trauma by losing all feeling and movement in her hands. Six months following the accident, Marina seems on the verge of recovery; she attends regular therapy and is protected by her loyal friends, siblings Amelia and Sammy Jones. However, the patina of stability begins to crack when Marina is confronted at the year ten formal by Sonia’s former associates, Kylie Bates and Jody Cutter, also present at her death. Distraught and upset, Marina flees the dance in Jody’s older brother’s car. Seven years later Marina meets Matt Soverign, a gifted hypnotist, who tries to help her regain movement in her hands. They sleep together and Marina unexpectedly falls pregnant. Their son Tristram is born while Matt attends an interstate conference. Thinking a child would help her hands to heal, Marina becomes depressed when she continues to suffer from paralysis. She begins to dwell on memories of her sexual assault the night of the school dance, slowly losing touch with reality. But a phone call from her estranged friend, Amelia Jones, shakes Marina out of her stasis. Her close mate Sammy, who now lives in Melbourne, has fallen dangerously ill. With her relationship in pieces, Marina purchases train tickets for herself and Tristram and embarks upon a spontaneous—though much delayed—journey to reconcile the past. The critical component of the thesis is an essay entitled “The Maiden without Hands: From Folktale and Fairy Tale to Contemporary Novel”. Chapter one, “The Tale is Not Beautiful if Nothing is Added to It,” is a literary survey of cross-cultural folktale and fairy tale variants of the 1200 year old narrative, The Maiden without Hands. I explore academic debate regarding the literary fairy tale’s indebtedness to the oral folktale, discussing Susan Stewart’s notion of the ‘distressed text’ and Lewis Seifert’s theory of ‘nostalgic recuperation.’ Chapter two, “Then the Devil Will Take Me Away,” undertakes a close reading of the Grimm Brothers’ influential but controversial 1857 re-write of The Maiden without Hands narrative. I suggest that Wilhelm Grimm’s suppression of the ‘unnatural father’ episode, found in the traditional folktale, aided the story’s survival in and beyond the nineteenth century, when such themes became taboo. I explore how the Grimms’ aesthetic revisions of folk material—to make them appeal to a middle class audience, including children—helped proliferate stereotyped representations of females and femininity in classic fairy tales. These depictions, I argue, often cause ambivalence in contemporary female readers, however they also instigate creative revisionary projects (such as my own), which seek to explore the residual energy contained in fairy tale texts, while at the same time destabilising their sexual stereotyping. In the last chapter, “The Only Thing She Doesn’t Have is Arms,” I discuss how extensive research into the many incarnations of The Maiden without Hands altered my understanding of the narrative’s symbols, tropes and metaphors, leading to significant changes to the plot of my novel. Citing examples from my text, The Girl without Hands, and comparing and contrasting them with excerpts from variants of the folktale and fairy tale, I analyse my creative interpretation of The Maiden without Hands’ major themes: loss and lack; sexual assault and violation; creativity and writing; and, finally, healing and wholeness.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/287425 |
| Creators | Melissa Ashley |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Detected Language | English |
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