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Wylie Stephenson

Jessica McCort

Feminist Fairy-Tales

9 October 2019

A Woman’s Woman

Dear Editor,

I have come across a selection of eye-opening femenist readings by Olga Broumas, titled

Beginning With O. Broumas work is valuable and should not only be considered but be fully

implemented into the publishing house. Below, I have outlined for you how her work speaks to

the femenist voice. I have included reasoning behind my support of acquiring Broumas work. I

hope you enjoy.

Beginning With O, published in 1977, is Olga Broumas first collection of poetry. This set

of fairy-tale revisions is a groundbreaking femenist text, containing themes in the likes of female

sexuality, identity, and female voice. Beginning With O offers major contributions to feminism

and to the literary world by celebrating female sexuality, utilizing language and poetry to convey

a message, and reframing the detached fairy-tale narrative into an intimate point of view of the

psyche and female experience. Broumas was a pioneer of feminist revision and was on the

frontier of femist critiques and continues to inspire by dismanltiling monolithic traditions of

storytelling. This collection is not written for a mere revision of original tales but as a complete

reconstruction of the feminine experience.

Broumas work is idiosyncratic in the sense that she rewrites the age-old narrative of

fairy-tale storytelling. She digresses from conforming to the prescribed versions of plot that most

revisions tend to follow, whether one is critiquing the work and making a femenist revision or
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simply re-writing the tale. What is individual to Broumas is that she takes a different perspective,

writing in first-person point of view to let the reader experience her very small portion of the

fairy-tale. In her work “Cinderella”, for example, the reader can assume that the subject matter is

the traditional character Cinderella, and may expect yet another dry, scarcely modified version of

a glass slipper, fall in love with the prince, happily ever after story. However, Broumas makes

the choice to reveal to her readers a new plot, loosely based on the original tale. In Broumas

“Cinderella”, she writes the tale as a continuing thread from the original, opening doors for the

first time into the psyche of Cinderella after her happily ever after has already taken place. In the

work, Cinderella is perplexed with guilt, shame, boredom, and spite. She is reaping the

consequences of foregoing female solidarity to live her HEA. Opening in the first stanza with the

lines “Apart from my sisters, estranged from my mother, I am a woman alone in a house of men /

who secretly / call themselves princes / alone” (lines 1-5), Broumas is already letting her reader

have insight into the female psyche, which is a unique aspect that traditional fairy-tale

storytellers hardly implement. In these tales, female characters are usually written as voiceless

and void of any individual characteristics besides the physical. Broumas undertakes writing in

first-person to create the personal monologue of the main character, rather than seeing them as

nothing more than a common fairy-tale trope. She gives the women in her work an identity, she

gives them a conscience, she gives them a voice. Speaking on the female voice in fairy-tales in

The Classic Fairy Tales, Maria tatar offers a critique by Karen E. Rowe titled "To Spin a Yarn:

The Female Voice in Folklore and Fairy Tale”. Rowe writes: “But to speak about voice in a tale

so singularly about the voiceless is immediately to recognize that to tell a tale for women may be

a way of breaking enforced silences” (Tatar 297). Broumas tells a new kind of tale for women,

one that can empower their lives. She utilizes the silence that Cinderella lives, in her estranged
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castle. Only in her revision, she gives women a chance to voice their true emotions. In her work,

Broumas breaks down monolithic traditions of storytelling by using the voice of the female

character as her means of expression. She shows the internal struggle that Cinderella will

withstand for the rest of her days in the castle. In “Cinderella”, Broumas illustrates the emotion,

condition, and inner workings of the female mind in comparison to the patriarchal ideals which

are both apparent in the original tale and Broumas revision. She breaks the mold here which is

something that is not seen quite often in revised fairy-tale work. In the work, Cinderella is

ruminating on her naive past. She is grappling with the choice to be apart from the women in her

life to be “the one allowed in / to the royal chambers” (lines 6-7). Broumas writes her as being

particularly hard on herself, as seen in lines 10 and 23, Cinderella repeats the phrase “I know

what I know”, signaling that she was always aware of the choice she was making but she was

lured in by the chance to become a woman in the palace. She finalizes her inner struggle by

stating: “what sweet bread I make / for myself in this prosperous house / is dirty” (lines 24-26),

noting that whatever she succeeds in doing will be tainted because she has left the women in her

life for a man who lured her in with charm. Broumas uses this poem as an example to illustrate

not only the loneliness and hardships women face in the patriarchy but also to show the effect of

foregoing female solidarity. It is apparent in this collection that Broumas writes women as

individuals with a conscience, and not as physical objects.

“Climb / through my hair, climb in / to me, love” (line 1). In Broumas “Rapunzel”, the

language of the poem encapsulates the reader into the moment. The use of form and language is

apparent in her work as Broumas’ words wrap and twist around the reader with powerful

imagery. Reviewing the first stanza of the work, Broumas uses visual and tactile imagery to

connect the reader to a specific moment of lovers tangled in intimacy, tangled in hair. The
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mention of women's hair is a recurring symbol in this work, seen twice again in the poem

alongside connotations of growth. Importantly, hair is one of the only themes in this poem which

connect the original “Rapunzel” and Broumas revision. However in this revision, Broumas

makes an intentional choice of diction when writing “climb through my hair”, rather than the

original work where Rapunzel's hair is used as a tool and eventually cut off as a means of

punishment. Broumas focuses on hair in this work as a main theme which when viewed through

the feminist lense takes into account the fact that women are often defined by physcical traits

such as long hair, which defines the original Rapunzel’s existence. Here, Bourmas makes hair an

integral aspect of her work but not as a defining factor. Broumas introduces the theme of hair in

tandem with the theme of plants, symbolizing sexual organs, fragility, and natural growth. She

speaks of hair not as a character defining quality, rather she speaks of hair as an intimate, natural,

part of the sexual experience. Another defining factor of this poem, is the sexual connotations of

the work, specifically in relation to female anatomy and female sexuality. The original works of

fairy tales are overtly sexualized and women in the tales are often forced into sexual coercion.

Although “Rapunzel” is engorged with sexual imagery, the tone of the work shifts the sex from a

coerced, forced, heterosexual experince, to a passionate, consensual, homosexual experience.

The use of a lesbian sexual experience is often not written about in such softness and with

such celebration. The poem opens with obvious sexual imagery and the work has countless

references to sex and intimacy such as phrases like: “Every hair / on my skin curled up, my spine

/ an enraptured circut, a loop of memory, your first / private touch. How many women / have

yearned / for our lush perennial…” (lines 9-14). Broumas writes the experince of sex as visceral

and as true. She uses the word “perennial” to paint an image of a sexuality that is in constant re-

birth. She uses imagery here in an interesting way; she almost leaves a mystery to the experience,
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letting her readers fill in the blanks. This is unique to other femenist writers because Broumas

writes so that the reader can feel the connectedness and the affection that is happening here. She

does not use sex as a catalyst for punishment, rather as a catalyst for love. She is using her

language to convey the message that sexuality in women is valuable, which is radical to the

fairy-tale world, and she surely gives female sexuality a chance to be empathised with or even

experienced through her words. In a scholarly text written by Angela Smith titled “Letting Down

Rapunzel: Feminism's Effects of Fairy Tales,” Smith notes that in the work of fairy tales, it is

important to decipher the linguistic choices made by the writer: “It is here that the linguistic

choices that a writer makes are particularly significant since they can serve to promulgate

particular points of view.” What Smith is saying here is that the lexical and grammatical choices

of a writer reflect the ideologies that they are implementing. In the traditional fairy tales, the

authors write or allude to sex as punishment. The linguistic choices that are made are used to

reinforce the idea that women do not own their sexuality. Broumas’ choice of language gives

back the power to the woman. Her linguistic choice shows that as a woman, one can be in control

of their own sexual experience. Broumas uses clear and precise word choice and the choice of

poetry as her form to both break the barrier of modern tales and build new ones. To Broumas,

poetry holds her power.

Broumas is a distinctive writer and the work that she has done in Beginning With O is

quintessential to feminist fairy-tale revisions. Her poetry collection is groundbreaking. If it was

not for her voice, many may never learn to use theirs. Broumas use of imagery, perspective,

theme, form, and language continues to challenge the way feminist revison of fairy-tales are

viewed. Many women writers, although writing an important revision with valuable critiques,

use the passive voice or tone, only hinting at what is missing from the original texts. In many
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revised works, we see the woman writer utilizing satire which plays on the original tales in such

detail that it is almost as if they are not brave enough to swim through the stormy waters of

tradition to emerge on a groundbreaking shore. Broumas not only reworks the entirety of the tale,

Broumas dives in.

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Works Cited

Broumas, Olga. Beginning With O. Yale University Press, 2019, pp. 57-60.

Rowe, Karen E. "To Spin a Yarn: The Female Voice in Folklore and Fairy Tale," in Fairy Tales

and Society: Illusion, Allusion, and Paradigm, ed. Ruth B. Bottigheimer (Philadelphia: U

of Pennsylvania P , 1986) 53-73. Copyright © 1986. Reprinted by permission of the

University of Pennsylvania Press.

Smith, Angela, angela.smith@sunderland.ac.u. “Letting Down Rapunzel: Feminism’s Effects on

Fairy Tales.” Children’s Literature in Education, vol. 46, no. 4, Dec. 2015, pp. 424–437.

EBSCOhost, doi:10.1007/s10583-014-9239-6.

Tatar, Maria. The Classic Fairy Tales. New York: W. W. Norton & Co.; 1999.