AAWP 2016: Authorised Theft

If asked to think about female characters in fairy tales, a number of popular classics spring to mind: Snow White and the Wicked Queen who attempts to have the girl murdered; Cinderella who endures the bullying of her stepmother and stepsisters and is rewarded for her patience; Gretel who saves her brother by pushing a child-eating witch into an oven. The antagonism between girls/women in fairy tales has been the subject of much discussion, particularly among feminist researchers and theorists, in recent decades. However, significantly less attention has been paid to the critical absence of collaborative female relationships both in traditional fairy tales and their retellings, an absence that is reflected in wider cultural narratives and which we might well regard as an ‘unauthorised theft’. In this presentation, I explore the idea that the cognitive sciences, and schema theories in particular, may offer insights as to why these types of positive female relationships receive such scant representation in contemporary re-visioned fairy tales, and why such tales often – though by no means always – continue to replicate the common narrative dynamic of acrimony among girls/women. It is useful to consider the ways in which story schemas and person schemas might intersect in the unconscious of the creative writer to influence her intuitions – or feelings of ‘rightness’ – that accompany story creation and development. The adoption of new frameworks through which to reflexively interrogate our tacit storytelling knowledge, however, can lead to real cognitive change and subsequent advancements in our creative practice. A case study of the writing of “Burnt Sugar”, a novelette produced as part of my ongoing creative PhD research, is presented as an ‘in practice’ demonstration of the possible effects of schemas upon narrative creation.

There is a stark disparity between how multicultural characters and mainstream characters are portrayed in young adult literature. Portrayals of non-mainstream groups often perpetuate harmful stereotypes, essentialist viewpoints and negative clichés that re-inforce the minority status of many groups. Multicultural literature is an effective means of countering the harmful rhetoric surrounding women and minorities that is often present in young adult literature. Multicultural literature should attempt to normalise non-mainstream groups. As such, narrative focus should be placed on aspects other than a protagonist's race, culture, ethnicity or gender. In this excerpt I have attempted to create a female multicultural protagonist that avoids these trappings. It is informed by the professional literature as well as a textual analysis of two novels with female multicultural protagonists, Born confused by Tanuja Desai Hidier (2002) and Does my head look big in this? By Randa Abdel-Fattah (2005).

Abdel-Fattah, R. (2005). Does My Head Look Big In This? . Sydney: Pan Mcmillan.

Philip Levine and Bruce Springsteen have regularly been credited for their delineations of ‘familiar’ and ‘authentic’ (Rauch 1988: 33) characters, whose individual struggles to negotiate their identities are exacerbated by the pressures arising from workplaces, social and familial expectations, and notions of cultural propriety. Nevertheless, in asserting that Levine and Springsteen render naturalistic characters who conform to their respective social structures, current scholarship has neglected the multitudes of liminal characters in their narratives, particularly their marginalised female protagonists. By undertaking an analysis of their songs and poems from the framework of liminality discourse, this paper demonstrates how Springsteen’s and Levine’s females are routinely situated outside of dominant, male-oriented structures, and enact the transgressive and inversive attributes of liminal identity. Extending the liminality paradigm established by anthropologists Victor Turner (1967; 1969; 1974; 1978) and Arnold van Gennep (1960) to contemporary scholars exploring liminal identities from manifold disciplines, including social anthropologist Mary Douglas (1970) and spatial scholar Doreen Massey (1994), this paper contests the evaluation that either Levine or Springsteen articulate female experience in ways material or verisimilar. Instead, it applies theoretical concepts of liminal identities, outsiders, and relationality to a close comparative reading of Levine’s verse and Springsteen’s lyrics, positing that their female characters denote an infraction of dominant male structures, while occupying a peripheral position that promotes the definition and delimiting of normative masculine identities. 

According to Reid, story structures now describe a diverse range of human activities and, “we make our word go around chasing our tales”. But, do these story structures dictate our lives or just describe them? How does the process of re-writing life (in memoir or biography) work to “reclaim” or “reshape” lived experience and, does this matter?
      In this paper I draw on the personal experience of establishing a tourist, float plane, business on Magnetic Island to investigate the relationship between dominant cultural narratives and lived experience. The establishment of the business was the subject of public debate and many of these events have been reported in courts of law, television media, newspaper articles, the internet and academic journals.
      The story reported in the press drew on two dominant, western male, cultural narratives; the “hero” and the Aussie “battler”. The framing of our personal struggles within these narratives was successful in gaining public support for our business because the audiences were able to easily identify the moral and cultural issues that underpinned them. Over time, however, they became the way in which the public related to my husband Paul and myself and our roles in the business.
      This paper explores the concept of dominant cultural narratives can operate as authorised theft by the co-opting of stories to exclude others. It argues that women can re-claim agency through re-telling their lives. It highlights the importance of writing as a resistance to dominant cultural narratives and posits that unless we tell our stories the status quo will remain the same. As Ker Conway advises, “we should pay close attention to our stories” (1999, p. 177); for it is only in the telling and re-writing of stories to claim agency, we make space to shape our lives and the lives of others.