A Grimm updating – Margo Lanagan’s Tender Morsels

Margo Lanagan’s Tender Morsels is a remade fairy tale which explores and updates the Snow White and Rose Red fairy tale. In the Brothers’ Grimm tale, Snow White and Rose Red, daughters of a widow, look after a bear during the Winter and encourage it into the house. They do this for a couple of winters but also come across a dwarf who is in trouble and free him, earning his abuse. In the heat of the moment, the dwarf is killed and the bear is revealed as a prince who had been enchanted by the dwarf.

The somewhat hysterical coverage from the Observer (earlier post here) illustrates the still potent power of fairy tales in dealing with issues and social comment. The reporting of the story overshadows the way that Lanagan develops the story to deal with the issues that it raises. The remade fairy tale, as I currently understand it, is largely an American invention stemming from Baum‘s Wizard of Oz and popularised via James Thurber and Gregory Maguire. Rather than using the revisionist view of the fairy tale to either update the form for a newer audience, in the case of Baum or Thurber, or exploring a new perspective of the story, in Maguire’s case. Tender Morsels is written from a clear, perhaps oblique, perspective that makes the reader work at getting to heart of the story.

Lanagan explores the story from the mother’s perspective, changing her from a widow to a teenager, Liga, who has been abused and raped, giving borth to her first daughter, later named Branza, at the beginning of the book. Shortly after her father’s death, she is caught trapping in the woods and when she mentions that she is following in his footsteps but is told by the woodsman: “He had the right or maybe he didn’t. What I’m asking is: You. Do you have any dispensations?” (p. 47) Despite her obvious distress, it is made clear that she has no rights and it is implied that her father may or may not but to some degree it does not matter. She comes across a moon stone and creates her own heaven, retreating into the woods where she gives birth to her second daugher, Urdda. Liga lives happily in the woods bringing up the girls for several years.

In the nearby village, the boys coming of age ceremony, dressing up as a Bear, is being readied for its periodic change. Dressing up as the animal gives the boy licence to feel sexually mature. Whilst being readied, one of the boys announces “I’ve a rod on me like a pike” (p. 134). One of the bears runs into the wood and meets Liga and her daughters who take care of him before he returns to the village. The ceremony is a socially licenced way of the young boys achieving some sort of adulthood which is ended by the flour boys beating them up to protect the boundaries. There is the story of Davit who is taken in by the women and comes to the story as person who rejects the sexual licence and concentrates on caring for the women rather than seeing them purely as sexual objects.

What Lanagan is getting to is that each character creates their own heaven and their own version of the role. When Urdda is chasing the Bear, she discovers that the cave wall she follows him into is malleable: “Sometimes, sometimes her self and her desires will be of such material that worlds will move for her.”(p. 197) The boys inside the Bears change each time the ceremony is enacted and each one makes the licenced time their own. (As an aside, this does sound like underlying Mediaeval carnival where normal rules are overthrown for the duration.) Collaby, who styles himself Sait Collaby, comes into the forest world to call the girls “whore-daughters” (p. 124) and is killed. The witch calms the girls later when she mentions that he died in heaven but his heaven is clearly  a mysogynistic one where he focusses on his beard which is analguous to his genitalia when Urdda frees him from near death by cutting it. Branza finds herself as being closer to the Earth and animals and preferring a quieter life in stark contrast to Urdda’s active life. Both girls reject Liga’s desire for being separated from the world.

The world though cannot be healed until Liga begins the process. The witch gets Liga to begin talking about her experiences and begins to understand that she is not responsible for her father’s actions as “she sobbed rage and grief in the little old lady’s arms” (p. 357). That moment of recognition allows the worlds of the forest and village to become joined again. The healing is done on so many levels though.

Lanagan’s use of colloquial language through the novel gives it a folksy charm. It echoes the exaggerated folk background of the Grimms’ tales but remains wonderfully readable like the stories in Red Spikes (earlier post). She never takes the reader for granted nor does she patronise them. Rather Tender Morsels engages with current issues in a non-sensationalist way. She is direct about the father and the village boys actions, drawing them out on many levels but she avoids sentionalism. Instead she explores a variety of aspects and responses to the original horror and works them out.

Tender Morsels is not an easy read or a comforting one. It does however remake the fairy tale as something relevant to a social issue. Whether this is intended as a children’s book or not, frankly is a moot matter since that issue has existed in children’s literature for years. What it is is a sensitive and moving book which doesn’t try to run away from itself.