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

[mz_bstone]

You should write McKinley and ask her. I wrote her a comment, once, and she responded in a thoughtful, rather crisp way. It was cool.

B

[keelieinblack]

Ooh, I was happy to read this--I love Deerskin in a wonderful, painful way, so to see anyone else talking/thinking about it makes me glad. I even wrote a paper in college specifically so I could talk about how well it works as a fairy tale for modern rape survivors, as so much of the story is relevant to the real world--the court's 'blame the victim' mentality, the realistic traumas Lissar suffers, the intense focus on healing process, and the uncertain but hopeful ending.

The issue of the mother has always bothered me too, and not just in "Donkeyskin"/Deerskin; in so many fairy tales the mothers get quite a bit of blame while the fathers are often excused often to point of ridiculousness. (I know in some versions of "Donkeyskin" the princess's father gets invited to her wedding, which is horrifying.)

[jacquez]

The first time I ran across a version of "Donkeyskin" where the father comes to the wedding, I just stared at it blankly. I couldn't understand why anyone would let him be there. Gah!

And I'm glad to know I am not the only one bothered by the mother issue; not that I think Lissar's mother was a good mother, but one can be a bad mother and not be malevolent.

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

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.

[miss_pryss]

Just a couple scattered thoughts, with the caveat that I haven't read Deerskin in years

[jacquez]

1) it's true that malak is probably not specific to Damar, but there's also clearly shared mythology/historical knowledge, for Aerin and Maur to have come up. I don't quite know how the geography is meant to work out in McKinley's world; it takes a sea voyage and a train journey from Home to make it to Damar...I suppose that would work, for an Afghanistan-analogue, and then the Deerskin kingdoms could be Eastern Europe-to-Turkey-ish.

2) That's an interesting way of looking at it; it seems more plausible to me than that the mother herself is malevolent, and it makes a certain amount of internal sense in a way that the mother herself being malevolent doesn't. For example, there's that rumor that the queen is dying because she's somehow lost some of her beauty, and then there's the mad portrait painting where the beauty kind of ....takes over, and becomes more beautiful than the queen herself ever was. (And the portrait is clearly sentient, as well; possessed by something....the text says it is the queen, though, which acts against