in which I ramble quite a lot about Damar and "Deerskin"

[jacquez]

Just so you know, the following post contains spoilers for: a whole bunch of Robin McKinley's books, including but possibly not limited to: The Blue Sword, The Hero and the Crown, and Deerskin. It also contains spoilers for Charles Perrault's fairytale "Donkeyskin", on which Deerskin is based.

So, I read Deerskin recently. I'd been both saving

Comments

I understand the portrait of the mother.

[wordwitch]

One thing I don't really understand is why McKinley left in so much culpability for Lissar's dead mother; there's a clear implication in the novel that the queen haunts her own portrait, that she somehow mystically drove the painter to paint it as he did, and when Lissar returns her pain to her father, it is in the shape of her mother, wreathed in flame. The mother often gets a lot of blame in versions of "Donkeyskin", and I just don't see why it's necessary to put that in here. It makes it quite easy to read Deerskin as if the king has been driven insane by the evil haunted portrait of the queen, so he's not really responsible for raping his daughter....except that McKinley says that he is responsible, and punishes him for what he has done.

It's been years since I read Deerskin but it resonated deeply with me.

The situation you describe is because of the set of mothers who are complicit. Mine was not - but sometimes I think her mother was.

Mothers as a group pull a lot of blame that they do not deserve, but there is a set of malevolent maters who apparently see their daughters as clones to take their places, live their lives, and keep the men the acquisition of whom has been the goal and pinnacle of their lives enthralled to the mother by enthralling them to the image of the mother.

And the men in question - the word co-operate is insufficient, perhaps the word collude has more precision - in this set-play because they have objectified every single person around them: Their wives, first, as a singularly desirable jewel; themselves, interesingly, as existing with worth only inasmuch as they possess the perfect jewel that is their wives; and then their daughters as the means by which they extend their reign as "The man worthy of possessing this jewel."

It is a particularly horrific situation, and one that is not nearly implausible or unique enough.

Re: I understand the portrait of the mother.

[jacquez]

Well, but "some women are like that" is not, to my mind, adequate excuse for writing one into a story. There needs to be something else behind it for it to work for me. I think miss_pryss's explanation, below, is probably more likely to be why McKinley wrote what she did; but like miss_pryss says, that has it own set of problems.

I should probably take Brighid's suggest and write to her, because it's really bothering me.