To name a thing is to have power over that thing. We learn that in fairy tales.

I grew up on fairy tales, like many of us do. Cinderella at the ball; Red Riding Hood trusting a wolf and walking too deep in the woods; Beauty, handed over to a Beast for the price of a rose. And then, midnight struck. I turned away from them. I was too grown up for such things, and I knew I would never be a princess.

Women and stories and power are deeply entwined with the literary fairy tale (and by literary, please know that I am not opining about quality, or where the collected volumes ought to be shelved, but rather borrowing a term of art from the scholar Jack Zipes, who uses the term to distinguish the written-down versions of fairy tales from their oral and folkloric roots). There is a power in taking a story and making it your own, whether by naming it, or by taking its elements and subverting them, turning them inside out so that the seams—and the seems—of the story show, and then putting them back together. Maybe the pieces don’t fit, not exactly. Maybe the princess is now a witch.

Maybe that’s exactly how things should be.

I can tell you how I came back to fairy tales. I read Jane Yolen’s retelling of Sleeping Beauty, Briar Rose, and it broke my heart, and it cracked open my head. There was a list, somewhere in the book, of other books I should read. And so I set about devouring the anthologies edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. I wish I could remember which one I read first, but I suppose it doesn’t matter, because eventually I read them all. I am still reading them.

The literary fairy tale, which arose as a distinct genre in the salons of d’Aulnoy and her compatriots in France at the end of the seventeenth century, has always been part of the literature of subversion, a genre of protest. The writers of these stories were generally people on the edge of the court, who were writing as a way to seek social advancement—Cinderellas, each attempting to be their own fairy godmothers. The Comtesse de Murat was denounced by her family for unruly behavior and lesbianism, and was exiled by King Louis XIV for satirizing his relationship with his mistress, Madame de Maintenon. Madame d’Aulnoy was married by abduction (with the consent of her father, who sold her to her kidnapper), and then fled France due to scandal. She turned to writing (and possibly espionage) to support herself, and continued writing even after she was able to return to France. Even Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier, who was a salonierre by inheritance, was not in a privileged position. Like all these women who wrote and shared their fairy tales in the salons, she was watched by the court at Versailles, tabs kept on her activities and especially on her words. And the salon conversation itself—with its ideals of gender equality in conversation and intellect—was by its nature socially subversive.

Even the aspect of fairy tales that might now seem conventional, too heteronormative, and too problematic for women who have no desire to be saved by a prince and then set up in his castle—the happy ever after, the romantic ending of true love’s kiss and the subsequent marriage—was its own kind of subversion. Love freely chosen, rather than love decreed by a forced marriage.

When I was a little girl, I wanted to be the princess in the fairy tale. Not because I necessarily wanted the prince—he was secondary at best. Even then, I stopped being interested in the Beast when he turned from the gorgeous leonine roar of a beast into the pale, blond, ordinary prince. I wasn’t interested in ordinary. What I wanted was to be the foot that fit the glass slipper, the girl who would wake, still living, and rise out of her coffin of glass. The girl at the heart of the story.

Though men were active in this salon culture as well, the movement, and the genre, was led by women, and it was a movement that shared many of the ideals of modern feminism, including the idea that women’s writing was equal to men’s. Fairy tales were ways for women to write their own stories—to be the princess, yes. But to also be the fairy godmother, to be the witch, to be the old woman in the forest who would get you safely out of the story for the price of a kindness.

Now that I am grown up, I want to be the woman who writes the fairy tales. Because, like the women in those French literary salons, like Margaret Atwood and Angela Carter and Catherynne M. Valente, I have learned that behind the pen is where the power is. That power is with the witch, with her life hidden outside herself, to be the wise woman who knows what cup not to drink from, and who will tell you, but only if you deserve to know. That power is with the woman who tells the story, who changes the shape of things. Magic words.

I do not want to be the princess anymore. I want to be the witch.

Even in the modern day, women writers have continued to engage with the literary fairy tale, have continued to pick up these stories, and pull them apart. To use them in the same way as their earlier writers did—to observe society from its edges and use magic and wonder and strangeness to critique the pieces of it that try to define what happily ever after is, and who deserves the chance at one.

Perhaps because subversion has been built into the literary fairy tale from the beginning, it is a pattern that has been born into the fairy tale again and again. Women writers in particular take the stories and say, if you make us a princess, you will discover that we are witches. We can dance in glass slippers, true, but we can also wear out iron shoes walking to get what we want. We may well wear red, but we do so to show the wolves that they should be afraid to walk into the woods with us.

We remember that happily ever after is where the story begins.

And we are still writing.

Sources

Warner, Marina. From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers. New York: Noonday, 1994.

Wonder Tales: Six Stories of Enchantment. Marina Warner, ed. Gilbert Adair, John Ashbery, Ranjit Bolt, A.S. Byatt, and Terence Cave, trans. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994.

Zipes, Jack. The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2012.

Zipes, Jack. When Dreams Came True: Classical Fairy Tales and Their Tradition. New York: Routledge, 1999.

Fencing as sport has its roots directly in fencing for combat, and up until the sword fell out of use in personal combat, the training was the same for both. As sport, fencing has been part of a variety of cultures for thousands of years. The oldest known depiction of a bout is an engraving in the Temple of Madinat Habu near Luxor, and dates to around 1190 BC. The men are wearing masks, judges are keeping score, and the next engraving over is a pile of trophy penises, taken from enemy dead. The last detail, thankfully, is no longer part of the modern sport.

***

Fictional Fencers and Fencing Fiction Writers

Fencing, whether in sport or combat, has been a vibrant part of fiction for almost as long as it has existed. Works like the Mahabharata, Beowulf, and the Chanson de Roland all emphasize swordplay. The natural connection between pen and sword is solidified by the language of fencing, wherein the fencer’s repertoire of movements is called a conversation of blades, or a judge will “read the phrase” of the action before awarding a touch.

Writing and fencing have overlapped more directly, as well. One of the world’s most famous writers, William Shakespeare, trained seriously at the fencing school at Blackfriars Theatre (where his work would later be performed). One of the world’s most famous duelists, Cyrano de Bergerac, wrote science fiction—the posthumously published Voyages to the Moon and Sun(1657). Modern writers who fenced include Robert Heinlein, Mervyn Peake, and Jane Yolen.

***

Fencing as a Sport

Modern competitive fencing is designed to allow two people to hit each other with swords (always referred to as “weapons,” no matter which of the three disciplines), in generally lethal target areas, and not get hurt. Scoring is electronic, though moderated by judges trained in interpreting the conversation of blades. Only épée allows simultaneous touches. Foil and sabre have right of way, and in the case of simultaneous hits, the judge reads the phrase to determine which fencer was controlling the attack before awarding the touch. The judge also enforces the etiquette of the sport—halting the action if a fencer is disarmed (which does not score any points), or if the two fencers make physical contact—the corps-á-corps is illegal in foil and sabre. Fencers may lose a touch for turning their back on their opponent, retreating beyond the boundary of the piste (the long narrow strip of floor that serves to bound the action of a modern fencing bout), or swearing.

There are eight basic lines of attack in fencing, labeled prime to octave, and each comes with corresponding parries and their derivatives. While a fencer may legally come on guard in any blade position, the parry commonly taught as en garde for foil and épée is sixte—this covers the high outside line of the body, wrist supinated, and blade up and to the outside, with the point higher than the hand. (If you imagine the stereotypical “beginning of a duel” image, this is what sixte looks like.) Parries, blocks to stop attacks, may be straight line, circular, semicircular, and may be used in combination with other actions of the blade. It is not necessary to make blade contact in order to parry an attack and in many cases it is desirable to use a circular parry, rather than a straight parry, so as to avoid the movement being read as a beat on the blade (an action which does not give a fencer priority of attack) rather than a parry (which changes the control of the action, and so does give a fencer priority of attack.)

***

Fencing on Film

If you’ve seen fencing on film, chances are you’ve seen the choreography of the great British fencer, Bob Anderson. A successful competitor, he began his film career by coaching Errol Flynn. He went on to coach a variety of actors, including Sean Connery in Highlander. Anderson also coached and choreographed the fencing in the Star Wars movies (including appearing as Darth Vader in a particularly complex scene in The Empire Strikes Back), the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the Pirates of the Caribbean films, and the iconic fencing in The Princess Bride. Anderson’s work is wonderful to watch because he has the ability to choreograph dramatically interesting fight scenes—change of pace, high line bladework and lots of blade contact, and fighting styles that fit the characters.

If we look at the opening of one of Anderson’s pieces, the duel between the Man in Black and Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride, we can see the similarities and differences to sport fencing. Both men are standing in the customary stance—the back foot at a ninety-degree angle, legs bent, weight evenly distributed. Inigo comes on guard in sixte, and the Man in Black in a very casual septime (blade down and to the inside, wrist supinated.)

Because Inigo comes on guard first, the Man in Black’s choice of line is puzzling—it would be much more efficient to be on guard in the same line, as there would be less distance for the blade to travel to successfully parry. The position was probably chosen to showcase the Man in Black’s casual attitude when compared to Inigo’s more traditional and vigorous approach. Then the men trade identical actions—beats on each other’s blades, and a slashing motion. While possible, it would be exceedingly rare for this action to open an actual bout—it is slow, serves no purpose except showing off, and neither of them actually hits the other before pausing the action. They then go through an extended exchange of attacks and parries in sixte, with an occasional counter-sixte beat. It looks impressive, and sounds complicated, but in an actual bout would be a needless waste of time and energy.

It is important to point out that many fencing scenes on film are not this easy to translate. Both actors are reasonably competent, enough so that it is possible to see what moves they are attempting. This is not always the case, and so credit should be given to the movie and actors for making the duel watchable and translatable.

***

Fencing on the Page

Dramatic and interesting fencing in written fiction is a bit trickier to pull off, because without the actual flash and clang of the blades, “attack in sixte, parry counter-sixte, feint, riposte to quarte, remise and touch” is hardly compelling for the reader. At the same time, unless the writer is trying to describe the technical action of a bout, there’s no need to rely on this language to write a good fencing scene. Tolkien wrote a terrific description of fencing in The Lord of the Rings by focusing on the sound of the fight. This is more familiar to readers, because they have at least watched action movies, and so adds a visceral component that lends the scene dramatic tension. Kushner’s fencing scene in “The Swordsman Whose Name was Not Death” is primarily interested in the emotional effect on the characters. Any uncertainty about whether an action with a blade is possible or likely is best addressed by focusing the reader’s attention somewhere other than the blade itself.

Or research the sport by taking a class, and make your own decision on the relative merits of pen and sword.

***

Note: The revised edition of Richard Cohen’s By the Sword was of great use in writing this article, and I highly recommend it.

As the story opens, every ending is equally possible, every path unwalked, every question not only unanswered, but unasked.

The unread story is infinite possibility. Yet the ending is already written, and though you be clever, though you be brave, there is no outwitting it.

Are you brave enough to begin? If so, turn to page 1. If not, remain safe. Close the book and return it to the shelf. No one will think any less of you.

***

Page 1: You find yourself standing in a beautiful garden. It teems with all the birds of the air, and all of the creatures of the Earth, and every good thing that grows. As you explore, you feel an incredible sense of peace and rightness, as if the garden had been created just for you.

This is the place you belong. Still, you are restless and lonely. You begin to explore your surroundings. At the western edge of the garden, there is a gate. Do you walk through?

If yes, turn to page 37. If no, turn to page 19.

***

Page 19: You wish to see more of the garden before you leave its bounds. Soon, you are glad you have chosen as you did, for you find the perfect companion for all your days and nights. You come to believe you have found a new Eden, as well. It seems impossible for a place so perfect to be other than Paradise. When they are born, you name your children Kane and Abelle.

This will prove to be a mistake.

***

Page 37: Gates, like books, are meant to be opened, and you would never be truly content if you did not know what lay on the other side. You pass through the gate and enter into a dark forest. You hesitate for a moment, look back, but the forest stretches behind you as if the garden had never been.

You continue on.

Shadows deepen. An owl calls. Something cries out at a distance and is silenced. You grow chilled, and your feet develop a talent for finding uneven spots of ground, tree roots, and rocks. After the third time you fall, you lean against the very tree whose roots last tangled your feet.

The bark prickles and rubs against your back, but it is a welcome distraction from your bruised knees and skinned palms. Your bones are weary and your muscles ache.

You crave sleep. A brief rest to fortify yourself for your journey. Do you close your eyes?

If so, turn to page 3. If not, turn to page 25.

***

Page 3: You close your eyes, and drift into sleep. When you awaken, you are in your own bed. The previous events were a dream, which has already begun to fade.

You spend the rest of your life trying to return to the winding path in the dark forest. You never will.

***

Page 25: You scrub your hands across your eyes and push yourself back to your feet. The path takes you on a short, downhill curve, and winds around to the door of an inn. The Quill and Ink, reads the sign over the door. You smile, and enter.

Inside, there is warmth, the hearty scent of food, and a group of people singing songs both off-key and bawdy.

You slide seamlessly into the small community, and feel refreshed after you have shared a meal and stood a round of drinks.

Eventually, you notice the singing has died down, replaced by a rapt silence. There is a knot of people wound tight around the fire, telling stories. At first, you simply listen, but then you are asked to tell a tale of your own. It is the tale, not the coin, that will pay your shelter for the night.

Do you tell a story?

If yes, turn to page 47. If no, turn to page 62.

***

Page 47: You are warm and happy, and just drunk enough to think that telling a story is something you can do. You invoke the muse, and she speaks through you. When you finish, only the crackling of the fire breaks the silence. You watch as, next to you, a single tear trickles down a perfect cheek.

It is the last story you will ever tell.

***

Page 62: The only story you know is your own, you say, and you must continue on to know how it ends. You make your excuses, and stand one more round before you leave to ensure there will be no hurt feelings, and, more importantly, no knives in the back as you walk through the door.

The air is crisp, and you are refreshed. The moon limns the trees in silver, and makes clear your path. You hear music, so beautiful that at first you wonder if you are dreaming. The pound of the drums speeds the pulse of your heart and the skirl of the strings pulls you through the night.

By the time you reach the standing stones, you are very nearly dancing down the path. Inside the ring of stones, the dancers spin and leap, a bright chaos of form and shape, carried along by an exultation of song.

You want, as you cannot remember wanting anything, to cross into the stone circle and join the dance. Do you?

If yes, turn to page 56. If no, turn to page 72.

***

Page 56: As you step through the ring, every hair on your body stands as if electrified. Your feet begin to move in a complex pattern you were never taught, but now know in your blood.

You do not wish to ever stop dancing. It is unlikely you ever will.

***

Page 72: You linger, just for a while, held by the unaccustomed beauty of the music. You watch the faces of the dancers, and wonder if it is joy that holds their mouths wide, burns their eyes bright. You cannot tell.

You decide you would rather choose your own steps, and so you turn away. At first, your feet seem heavy, not quite your own, but as you continue to walk, your steps become easier.

You believe that you are lucky, that you have continued to escape fates you would rather not own, and so you do not concern yourself with the rain that has begun to fall.

But the soft trickle becomes a pelting, and you duck into a crevice in the hillside. The interior of the hill opens up before you like a dark cathedral. A staircase, worn into the rock by millennia of pilgrim feet, rings the edge of the space and spirals downward.

You walk down the stairs, and as you do, memories unweave inside your head. The best and worst moments of your life play out, with a clarity they did not have when you first experienced them.

But there is something else. Perhaps. A second set of footsteps on the stairs. A whisper, a bare rustle in the dark. Easy enough to dismiss, to pretend that you do not feel the weight of a presence in the darkness behind you.

The spiral of the staircase becomes tighter, inexorable. The following tread impossible to ignore. The steps come a half-beat after yours, a shadow’s echo.

You pause, hoping whoever—and, oh, how you hope it is a whoever, here in the dark under the hill—will continue on past you, but the steps pause as well.

Surely, you think, if it had meant to hurt you, surely it would already have done that. Knowing would be better than imagining an expanding catalogue of horrors.

Do you turn to look back?

If yes, turn to page 89. If no, turn to page 114.

***

Page 89: You’ve been reading the alternate endings, haven’t you? Of course I know. I know everything that happens in all of the stories I hold.

Did you think I wouldn’t notice that you’re cheating?

Do you not understand that stories have rules?

You feel a pulling, and then are buffeted by a whirlwind. You hear something tear, feel a page come loose from your bindings.

You find yourself back at the beginning, holding a book.

You open the cover. Once upon a time.

***

Page 114: You continue walking, three steps more. Then a hand slips into yours, and the story ends as all stories must: with the snip of a thread and the crossing of a river. You pay the ferryman with coins plucked from your own eyelids.

You pass beyond the realm of the page.