Salman Rushdie's attempt at a feminist fairytale reconfiguration in Shame

Abstract

This article explores the extent to which the short story Shame, Salman Rushdie's reinterpretation of the Beauty-and-the-Beast fairytale motif, can be treated as a postmodern feminist subversion of the master narrative of Euro-American androcentric culture.

Introduction

One of the many registers underpinning Rushdie's texts is the consistent paraphrasing of Western and Oriental fairytales. He evidently cherishes the genre not just as a literary category, but as a form that has its own life. Rushdie's transformations of the fairytale are indeed wide in scope; they not only address the complex status of the genre in contemporary culture, but they can also be treated as a coherent fairytale poetics of his oeuvre. One could apply to Rushdie what Stephen Benson writes about Angela Carter, another fairytale revisionist: "If we accept that Carter is, in whatever sense, a quintessential contemporary writer, it would thus appear that her relationship with the fairytale lies at the core of her contemporaneity" (Benson 2001, 30). Various aspects of Rushdie's complicated position within the widely accepted framework of the fairytale may serve as revelatory thematisations of his artistic and political stance. Even more fascinatingly, they testify to the fact that, in Helene Cixous's phrase, "there is something going on between poetry (and prose, for that matter) and power, something almost paradoxical. In some way, power is afraid of poetry, of what has no strength, only the power of words" (Cixous 1993, 202-3, quoted in Suleiman 1994, 225).

Fairytales in the Feminist Lens

As a theoretical groundwork for my analysis I begin by reviewing the general interdependences between postmodernism, feminism and fairytale criticism. Historically, feminist fairytale research resulted from the women's movements in the United States and Europe in the late 1960s, and vigorous attacks on patriarchy. This in turn inspired a heated debate on how specific literary practices affect processes of socialisation. Some of this cultural turmoil affected fairytale criticism and manifested itself by exposing the genre's alignments with patriarchal cultural practices in Western societies and by raising questions about how canonical tales sustain gendered perspectives. According to Donald Haase, it was the "catalytic exchange" between Alison Lurie and Marcia R. Lieberman that highlighted the transition from "the inchoate discourse of early feminist fairytale research" represented by Lurie's articles "Fairytale Liberation" (1970) and "Witches and Fairies" (1971), and "modern fairytale studies, with [their] emphases on the genre's sociopolitical and sociohistorical contexts" proposed in Lieberman's rejoinder "'Some Day My Prince Will Come': Female Acculturation through the Fairytale" (1972). Whereas Lurie stressed that the genre featured powerful women figures who influenced feminist practice, Lieberman argued that it was actually only the most popular and canonical stories that shaped children's psyche. [1]

To uncover the co-option of fairytales into the masculine logos, and the way in which they have become cultural machines that generate and fuel certain desires, feminist critics have set their sights on the sociocultural investigation of the means by which some of these texts inculcate in female readers the conviction that only through marriage can they attain social status and wealth and garner moral plaudits. In 1979, Karen E. Rowe persuasively explained how potently the genre promotes universal models of female dependency, an influence that is particularly felt since fairytale prototypes permeate popular forms of fiction such as pulp romances and tales of horror. As she rightly noted, romantic fantasies of Cinderella, Snow White or Sleeping Beauty, which praise female subjugation to male power, "encourage women to internalise only aspirations deemed appropriate to our 'real' sexual functions within a patriarchy" (Rowe 1986, 211). In the mass media they become fully commodified and paralysed--mass-produced images that can be manipulated to suit various purposes. Therefore, the discussion of such constructions can significantly contribute to "unmaking the power of that crystal" (Bacchilega 1997, 29).

Whereas fairytales glamourise female helplessness, beauty and submission, self-aware and non-conformist women are depicted unkindly; they invariably have to pay for their rebellion by being either ostracised or killed. As Simone de Beauvoir comments on the tradition of Duessas, Liliths, Gorgons, or Ladies of Shallot, for man, woman personifies his dream. She serves as a connection to nature; and, as "the stranger to man and the fellow being who is too closely identical," she is seen as aggressive and dangerous (Beauvoir 1971, 172). In other words, woman is doomed to remain outside culture, no matter whether she is perceived as positive or negative. This in turn means she has no autonomy but can exist only as "male defined masks and costumes" (Gilbert and Gubar 1979, 19). To use Bacchilega's words: "By showcasing 'women' and making them disappear at the same time, the fairytale ... transforms us/them into man-made constructs of 'Woman'" (1997, 9). Perhaps the most eloquent and detailed discussions of fairytales that demand reflection on the stories' sociocultural contexts are studies by Jack Zipes, Maria Tatar, and Ruth Bottigheimer (see Zipes 1979; 1983; 1999; Bottigheimer 1986; Tatar 1992). All these authors are wary of ahistorical approaches to the tales that obliterate their inner ambiguities and marginalise both the significance of the genre for women and their role in its production, dissemination and reception.