I can’t find a single review of Jeanette Winterson’s Frankisstein that isn’t roaring applause. The same goes for Frozen, the Disney-Snow Queen of some years ago, which has now arrived at its sequel. It’s because both ‘ tick all the right boxes,’ as they claim. They say this like it’s a good thing. It makes me wonder whether critics are just google bots, looking for the right keywords for optimal correctness to the current definition of politically correct, and assuming, then, that the thing is good, good to go.
I tried watching Frozen on a flight and couldn’t survive it beyond thirty minutes even in flight-zombie-intertia. The only good thing about it was that it put me to sleep — it seemed so dull that consciousness chose to escape. I hated Frankisstein — it ticked all the wrong boxes, the ones that gave me goosebumps of queasiness, fear and shame.
The story of Frozen is a kind of babble of re-writing. A stolen story, rewritten to make the right number of dolls, the right noisy songs. Enough to sell. And everyone applauds this transformation from the bad old days when fairy tales were about girls needing to be rescued. Because in this story, two girls get rescued by each other, sort of, with the help of a man and the hindrance of another man. Though in the original Snow Queen, it was a girl rescued a boy, even though this was an archaic fairy tale, before the word empowerment became popular. There are a thousand similar archaic fairy tales, where princesses, poor girls, orphaned girls, abandoned girls, trekked through frozen landscapes, visited fearsome witches in dark forests, encountered wolves and humans and both together, though one must admit all their missions were unsuccessful (read unproductive) because they didn’t make salable secondary merchandise at the end.
Anyway, by the standards of capitalist enterprise and profit-making venture, brand-value and marketability, Frozen was the mostest. The empowerment of the fairy tale. Thanks to Disney, womanhood has a hero and a damn shrieky anthem.
The Snow Queen and The Demon’s Mirror
Let’s get distracted, though, for a moment, by the original Snow Queen. Hans Christian Andersen usually likes to tell punishing tales where eyes are sacrificed, little girls who are too attached to their shoes get their feet cut off, and other little girls who’re too poor die in the snow. However, the Snow Queen is surprisingly redemptive, from a man who seems to have believed that redemption should only happen after death.
The story starts with a mirror created by a demon. It morphs the reality it reflects, showing only the bad and the ugly. The demon insists that people could, now, see what mankind and the world were really like. The mirror sounds suspiciously familiar, especially for someone who read other Hans Christian Anderson stories as a child. That tendency to imagine that reality is the grey stuff. The demon and his troll-students take the mirror around the world, but when they try to bring it to the skies to see what angels look like in its distorted view, it shatters and all those mirror bits invade the earth. Small enough to be a speck of dust in someone’s eye, sometimes big enough to make a window pane, the mirror-shards multiply in their capacity for harm. Because from here on, we’re not dealing with a visible enemy anymore. Not a demon, a troll, a visible outside entity. Instead, we’re attacked by infinitesimal bits of devilry, a little speck of something that darkens your vision, a person who was once whole and warm who gets hit by an unseen thing and transforms before your eyes into something cold, a frozen heart.
Image: Painting by Kristian Al Droubi
Imagine those shards of mirror as a thing, an incident, an event, something you heard, something someone did or said — which looks like a thousand other similar things or sayings, but for some reason, freezes your heart or makes the world look grey. It doesn’t seem so impossible. From the wild ride of the troll-mirror, we come down to earth to a village where two pious little children live, as they should, in the Anderson-world. A little boy, Kay, and a girl, Gerda, and they’re best friends. One day Kay sees a shimmering woman made of ice beckoning to him from a wintry landscape. This first vision of the Snow Queen, like a dream, is an intimation of things to come.
Soon after, Kay is struck in the eye by a bit of demon-mirror, and another shard pierces his heart. He is wounded, but no one knows, no one can see. He sees the worm in the heart of the rose ( o rose, thou art sick!). He sees everything that is wrong in everyone. His loss of connection goes unrecognized. Like all people who are never really unhappy or happy, he’s assumed to be unusually clever. And in a way, he is. The demon’s mirror is a clever thing. It doesn’t tell lies, even. Just not the whole truth.
Image: Painting by Kristian Al Droubi
Soon after that, Kay is kidnapped by the Snow Queen. She wraps him in a cloak and kisses him, a frozen kiss that vibes strangely with his frozen heart. No more kisses, after this one. Or I should kiss you to death. Because Kay did feel like he was dying, from that first kiss. Somehow, though, life re-asserted itself. You can live with a frozen heart. You can live in a frozen world. I’m not sure whether that’s because some tiny speck of soul that remains is waiting to be lit, revived and rescued, or because human beings can get used to just about anything.
Anyway, this is Kay. Hurt, trapped, kidnapped. Waiting to be rescued. And Gerda does the rescuing. Gerda the traveler, the adventurer, the maker of relationships and friendships. Gerda the renegade soul that chooses its own path. That lives neither in the fantasy of Disney princesses nor in the heartless reflected world of the demon’s mirror (I can’t always see the difference between the two). And finally, even though this is a Hans Christian Anderson story, both get to live, without any limbs amputated. Gerda’s tears melt Kay’s heart, if you’re wondering. And that makes him cry, washing the mirror-shard out of his eye. Whole again, in the world again, he suddenly realizes that he’s been sleepwalking alone in an icy world all this time.
I’m relieved. I wish Anderson had been as kind to the little match girl. I’m not sure what kind of retelling Frozen has done — looking at the plot line, I’d say it’s not a lot of things. Not better, not modernized, not deconstructed, not decoded, not even connected. It feels a little like the story itself was kidnapped and stuffed into the devil-mirror.
I don’t remember a single frame of Frozen. However, the image of the mirror carried by a gang of trolls, that shook with laughter halfway to the heavens, fell down to the earth and broke into billions of pieces is manic, surreal, beautiful, unforgettable.
Image: Priyadarshini John
Reviews, retellings, fairy tales and the heart of things
A hundred years ago, a review or not even of one more ‘new’ Red Riding Hood by John Patterson in The Guardian made mention of the film-makers’ being unacquainted with the ‘late, great Angela Carter’s The Company of Wolves ‘ and spoke about how that entire industry of child-tween-cleaned movies was in need of her subversive, galvanising presence.
A hundred years later, when nobody writes reviews like this anymore, because they don’t tick the right boxes, when Frozen 2 comes out and everyone pretends to like it, or at least not to hate it, I feel a mad yearning for Angela Carter’s subversive presence. Not just because it would make films and life more fun. (Or in this case resurrect what has become a series of clones of corpses.) But also because she actually researched fairy tales, dug down to their roots, even if that meant walking a long and winding road as the story repeated itself in a thousand different ways across the world. These days, I think that Angela Carter didn’t re-write fairy tales — she just cut them open at the heart, and let the colour red dazzle you.
I also thought about that other great decoder of fairy tales — A S Byatt, whose eldest princess (from The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye) abandons her mission to save her country, wanders off into the forest, bypasses a few other stories, and finds an old woman, a weaver of webs of narratives, and chooses to live with her in a hut full of strange and not-so-pretty creatures. An unproductive version of Elsa? Much more. The eldest princess simply makes a different choice. She chooses story-making over storying. It’s not a hermitage she needs to be rescued from. No-one rescues anyone. Things don’t happen, one after the other, until one arrives at the heart of the forest, where stories are spun. Life is not a succession of happenings. Life is as much paths diverted as paths followed. If you’re going to remake a story, this is how you do it.
Frankinstein Being Kissed to Death
Frankisstein, on the other hand, lies in the place of paths crossed, rather than paths followed. Mary Shelley writes her story in the company of sort-of friends in the stillness of a lakeview. Ry Shelley, a trans-evolved-human-not-woman, meets a very traditional mad scientist called Victor Stein, who inhabits a post-Elon-Musk post-feminist post-human world but scans the brain by, well, scanning brain. Ron, a sort-of-evolved-incel, solves the problem of women by making female-bots. Or should you say the problem of men? Or just the collective problems of incels?
I loved Jeanette Winterson’s lyrical writing about love, once upon a time. Also, her constantly-mutating descriptions of bodies. Now, she seems to have coalesced into a final-stage evolution description of one body, that of Ry Shelley.
If I were to collect the repeated keywords/keyphrases in Frankisstein, they’d be:
three holes (mouth, pussy, vagina)/two-inch clitoris/sex/penis/three holes/sexbots/women/trans/AI/trans/three holes/two-inch clitoris/flat chest/muscled chest/xx-inch breasts/flat muscled chest/trans/Shelley/Shelley/Mary/Ry/Victor/Stein/Frankinstein
These are the characters as I remember them:
- Mary Shelley, who is given the pat on the back of being a feminist in the dark times, and hence can be sympathized with as a potential trans person of the lit times who just hadn’t arrived at the light yet.
- Victor Stein, who always talks like a TED talk.
- Ry Shelley, of the flat muscled chest, two-inch clitoris, evolved-to-be-better-than woman
- Hypocritical Female 1 — a church-feminist-capitalist/bitch (though we can’t really say that, just sort of imply it)
- Hypocritical Female 2 — a stalker/journalist/abuser of boundaries
- Numerous sex-bots who’re mostly demo-ed in the book. We don’t really see them in action.
- Ron the sex-bot maker, who’s actually pretty funny.
- Ron’s mother, who is unseen but very much a part of the sex-bot-making industry.
- Irrelevancies like Byron/Shelley/other characters who don’t mean much.
- The monster. A shapeless thing. A thing that sometimes looks like Frankinstein himself, at other times AI, sometimes like a sex-bot, sometimes like Ry Shelley. At one point like some sort of brain attached to nodes or wires or whatever it is mad scientists use.
Clits, dicks, breasts and vaginas
I’ve got Ry Shelley’s two-inch clit on my mind. The inches maketh the man? And yet, Ry Shelley asks, is manhood dickhood? It seems to me that the two-inch clit is more about womanhood than manhood. The dickhood of womanhood. The two-inch clit separates Ry Shelley from the sexbots, who are, after all, just three holes and a head which is often bashed in. We’re not sure if the heads are bashed in because the bots are recipients of male aggression towards women, or because incels realized at the end of the event that they were sleeping with bots, and therefore still technically incels.
Ry Shelley, without large breasts, or breasts at all, with a repetitively mentioned flat-muscled chest, with a vagina that can be penetrated but might possibly disappear and be replaced with even more inches, stands taller/bigger/more inched, not among men, but among women. Ultimately, what seems to be communicated, through these repetitious statements about sex-bots and two-inch clits, is that there is an inherent physical problem with a body that is composed of three holes. This body, since there is no visible phallic element to it, seems to be viewed as inherently passive, by being structurally receptive. Ry Shelley, while open to penetration, does not orgasm through penetrative sex. Sex-bots do. And if women do? Does that make them sex-bots?
Questions.
What is womanhood? Clithood? Breasthood? If breasthood does not the woman maketh, then what does? Why is a two-inch protuberance of a clit more powerful, more relevant, more real than, say, the inches of its depths, because the visible clit is, after all, only the tip of the iceberg? What makes a woman? Three holes? Why is the modern woman (as we meet her in this book) so annoying, as opposed to the modern transman? Why does the transman’s body count as the transfiguration, the transformation, the making of the self?
What then does one make of that less surgical transformation that all of us have to go through, after each spell of suffering, after each spurt of growth, after each evolution of the soul, after each resurrection from the icy winter of self-destruction? What do our relentlessly mutating selves make of the idea that some of us were cast in stone at birth? Of course, I do wonder, do semi-visible or invisible transformations count? Does a non-surgical amputation count? Does a mutating lover who is male and female but doesn’t remove the necessary appendages count? Because, as Roy says, only what counts, counts.
Which brings me back to the bloody chamber of Angela Carter’s Bloody Chamber. All fairy tales, to me, are stories of transformation. That’s why they’re not stories of success, or successful production (until they became that). The colour red is dazzling. The Bloody Chamber is the red beating heart of the fairy tale.
When Red Riding Hood finds the wolf in her grandmother’s bed, this is the moment of transformation. The discovery of internal beasthood, the encountering of it. When Beast licks the skin off Beauty and finds glistening fur, tiger-striped, beneath. These are also transformations. They’re not surgically verified. They don’t hold trans-authenticity. They are, however, familiar. They make you feel like something more than three holes. They make a distinction between receptivity, responsiveness and passivity. They don’t shame your holes, your breasts, your lack of inches, or whether or not they protrude. They make you sense the movement beneath your skin, the terrible, gravitational pull of the bloody chamber, they walk you down the lonely path in the darkest part of the forest and find the part of you that runs with the wolves. That runs like a wolf. That is wolf.
This time, also, Jeanette Winterson’s lyrical writing about love is the thing that stays with me that is not measurable with a tape measure. This time, though, I say these words to myself, not to a real or imaginary other. To remove the shard of mirror that freezes the heart:
I wanted to know you — in the gnostic sense of close experience of what would otherwise be unknown. What are you?
What are you?
Angela Carter writes intimately about a woman who is not a woman — Fevvers, of Nights at the Circus. The hole she is missing is the navel. The bit she has added is wings — not angel-wings so much as circus-wings that sweep the roof, uncomfortable wings that itch, tremble, make it hard to lie down and dress up, that are never really real nor a sham, that always bridge the in-between. Jack Walser, former clever-frozen-boy, newly hatched by a towering bird-woman into a new man, looks at the creature straddling him, and asks, What is your name? Have you a soul? Can you love?
This is an ending and a beginning. That’s how you start an interview, laughs Fevvers. A laugh that spirals to the skies.
Author: Priyadarshini John
