The Girl Who Can’t Grow Up

Jan 07, 2014 00:11

I’ve been thinking more about Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child, specifically about the ending. What makes the first two-thirds of the book so interesting is Ivey’s ability to hold possibilities in suspension. Is Faina a snow child, magically born out of the snowgirl Mabel and her husband Jack made? Or is she just a normal girl, living alone in the ( Read more... )

l. m. montgomery, fairy tales, feminism

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asakiyume January 7 2014, 12:37:19 UTC
I've thought about this a whole lot. There are so many issues here, but I find myself thinking about it in terms of the craft of storytelling, and this is what I come up with: that if you create a character (or a place) whose main identifying feature is their strangeness or illusiveness or mystery, then that's a character that you can--so far as I can see--*never* get close to without sacrificing the key trait. How (sincere, not rhetorical question) can you become intimate with the alien and otherworldly without having it lose its alien otherworldliness? The Moorchild did it pretty well--though, interestingly, I thought it did better with Saaski in our world than with Moql in faery. And I think it did it by making not her strangeness, but her fierce efforts to cope, to love in her own manner of loving, the main trait. Then that's a struggle we can understand, because even if we're not changelings (though, as Ivy says in The Changeling, more of us are changelings than know it), lots and lots of us deal with incorporating our ( ... )

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osprey_archer January 7 2014, 18:31:59 UTC
I think your first paragraph is spot on: if a character's appeal is defined by mysteriousness, then the reader can't get too close. To try to empathize with the character is to completely miss the point.

(The sequel to Stargirl actually illustrates this point well. Stargirl becomes the narrator, and she suddenly seems like a very normal girl - strangely obsessed with her boyfriend from the previous book, but still, pretty normal. It's hard to connect her narration with the kind of Manic Pixie Dreamgirl way that Leo presented her in the first book ( ... )

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asakiyume January 8 2014, 15:01:33 UTC
Yes, I think this is exactly it! (What you say about MPD) As a kid (and even now), I loved these fay, beautiful characters, I wanted to be like them--but when I would play imaginary games, I found that I was imagining about them rather than in them: "she flitted lightly over the grass" rather than "I flitted lightly over the grass." I was objectifying the character I wanted to be. Kinda sad ( ... )

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osprey_archer January 8 2014, 17:13:21 UTC
Yes, I think Ivy is a fairly good midpoint between this enchanting, fay, unknowable character - because she's trying to project that persona, to distance herself from her home life - but having hints of this real person underneath, too.

It's probably a difficult balance to pull off.

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