Reflecting futures in fantastic media: who do we think we can become?
Children are frequently asked who or what they want to be when they grow up, and the possibilities can seem pretty endless. Racecar drivers and dolphin trainers, chefs, presidents, sometimes out and out supervillains – but also doctors and teachers, writers and artists. After my experience as a postdoctoral researcher with the European Research Council-funded research project Constructing Age for Young Readers (CAFYR)[1] at the University of Antwerp, I have spent a lot of time wondering what we might hear if we were asked those same questions again while in our thirties, or even our forties. Who would we want to become? Who are we shown as inspiration for who we might be able to become?
Fig. 1 - Jill Murphy’s Worst Witch series.
I’ve often taken the older women who appear across fairy-tale adaptation and fantasy for granted. They help, put young heroes on their path, or otherwise are the challenging force, witches and hags and crones who we are meant to fear or hate. Or maybe they are teachers, stern and foreboding, or perhaps a bit goofy and kindly and not all there in the eyes of the students or children they care for. Perhaps they are otherwise just a part of the scenery, a component of the narrative that helps us to orient ourselves in time and place and space within the stories. As part of the research, I went back to the fantasy works of some of my favorite authors from my childhood reading as well as the source materials for some adaptations I’ve enjoyed lately that use folklore or fairy-tale tropes across the narratives or characters including Neil Gaiman, Philip Pullman and the Worst Witch series by Jill Murphy (Fig. 1). There were a lot of witches, including those who are presented teachers in formal or informal settings. There were several nondescript women defined by their sense of agelessness but simultaneous ancientness. There were a handful of kindly but unremarkable older women. But somehow, across all of them, I noticed more and more how little we get to hear from these often powerful, impressive women with plenty of life experience in their own words in these fantastic settings, rather than through the viewpoints of other characters or omniscient narrators.
Being on a project that was so focused on age in children’s literature from so many different angles really brought to bear how fantasy can both reflect and make us look at the world in different ways, to focalize things we might not pay much direct attention to in the course of our normal, everyday lives. It prompted me to spend a lot of time thinking about how we consider older women in society and the limits and stereotypes that are reiterated, usually through fairy-tale trop adaptation in fantasy media.
I spent a lot of time with the works of Neil Gaiman, and as I re-read through pretty much everything he wrote (other than Sandman), I was struck by how my perception of his stories changed when I was specifically looking at the construction and treatment of older women, or even women at large[2]. Gaiman had been one of my introductory authors to fantasy outside of fairy-tale appropriations, and beyond children’s works like those by Brian Jacques, T.A. Barron, Tamora Pierce, or Robin McKinley. I had loved especially his fairy tales, his mythic appropriations, and had this memory of them as being more feminist, more postmodern play with certain tale types and stories. But I also started to realize that when we expand fairy tales and myths, when we expand stories that use symbolic characters and archetypal figures to fill in narrative gaps, there is a lot that can be done to unlock new potentials in the stories, even though we still run the risk of perpetuating stereotypes. As I was simultaneously reading the works of authors like Kalynn Bayron, Jorden Ifueko, Natasha Bowen, and Namina Forna, who all also draw on or appropriate fairy tales, mythic figures, or folklore in different ways, the disconnect between the complexity that could be possible in representing older women and fantastic tropes was discomforting.
Fig. 2 - Gaiman’s “Chivalry” story adapted as a 2022 graphic novel with artist Colleen Doran’ (image available at: https://www.ft.com/content/a53cf645-f93d-448b-beac-55ecc8f42bbf).
Gaiman’s short story “Chivalry” (later released as a stand-alone illustrated book in 2022) has always been one of my favorite stories (Fig. 2). I loved the ironic set up of a knight from Arthuriana wandering into a small English village, of the Holy Grail being treated like an ordinary object. The main protagonist of the story, Mrs Whitaker is a widowed pensioner in a British village who stumbles across the Holy Grail in a local charity shop. She takes it home, and is then visited several times by the knight Galaad of King Arthur’s Round Table (Galahad) who is trying to fulfill his quest for the magical object. Reading the story again recently, I was struck by how much Mrs Whitaker is also an object for the narrative. She inhabits the figure of “old woman” and we never really hear her commentary on the surreal events she is facing. We never hear why she refuses power, youth, immortality, and this is something that occurs across works of what might be considered more established or classic fantastic media. Aside from examples from more contemporary pieces such as Cinderella is Dead by Kalynn Bayron[3], it is rare that a woman of obviously advanced age is allowed space and agency to give voice to her motivations and feelings. These women so often become part of the backdrop, the setting, the ambiance, or if they have a modicum of agency it is often used in the service of the self-realization of younger, often male characters. Sylvia Henneberg notes in her influential article on ageism in children’s classics that “in the absence of stories portraying viable aging women, the distance between generations increases, creating a destructive gulf in which ageism and sexism freely reinforce and confirm each other, virtually unnoticed and unchecked” (2010, 126). If we look at Gaiman’s take on an Arthurian story, and others, through this lens, we can start to question more how we think about where aging women fit in our world or imaginations.
I find myself wondering now, what if Mrs. Whitaker had kept the Grail, or taken one of the other objects she had been offered in exchange to use instead of just keep as ornaments? What if she had been given a first name? Or a voice to talk about how she felt about her daily life? What if she had been given a chance to have an adventure? What if we imagined older women as people who might still have adventures, and not just aid others on their way?
Fig. 3 - The 10th Kingdom (Simon Moore, 2000).
Going back to the fantasy works and facing that discomfort also made me think about the older women in my life and how literary works rarely reflect the vibrant lives and personalities and drive of the real people around which I am lucky to be surrounded. My world is especially peopled by women who view aging as inevitable as the passing of the seasons but “getting old” as a choice. I’m saddened that there are so few of these figures in the imagined spaces of fantasy I inhabit, and that I also know more women who feel that society has no use for them past a certain age or usefulness. I think this lack of imagination does a disservice to how we treat adulthood and has an impact on how we conceive of our societies and communities. Adulthood, is, as Vanessa Joosen notes in relation to children’s books, “constructed as a stage in life” (2018, 7). As such it does not have to be an end point, with wonder left behind in childhood and adolescence, but to seize upon the potentials for growth and change and adventure, we have to be able to first imagine that there are still potentials for us when bodies have aged and changed, and we’ve had some more life under our belts to inform how we might act. I would love to see more second and even third act stories in fantasy media, maybe Cinderella as a Grandmother, Jack at age 70 finding another beanstalk and seeing where it might go, or Beauty at the end of her reign with the Beast, finding a new story after the kingdom has changed hands. While fairy-tale pastiche series such as The 10th Kingdom (Simon Moore, 2000) (Fig. 3), or the more recent and Disney-focalized Once Upon a Time (2011-2018) do touch on the afterlives of fairy-tale characters, these are still handled as interwoven plots featuring characters more in their prime, rather than seeing where their lives might have gone several decades after their first adventures. There is so much potential in fantasy to imagine new ways of being and new ways of seeing our world, who belongs in it, and who we might yet become, especially around futures for women, for anyone really, as we all continue to age.
**Article published: January 20, 2023**
Notes
[1] European Research Council grant agreement ID: 804920.
[2] Critical work relating to this piece was presented at Once and Future Fantasies in Glasgow in July 2022, and is forthcoming in Marvels & Tales 37, no. 1 (2023).
[3] Critical work under the remit of the CAFYR project was published in Humanities in 2022 by myself and Vanessa Joosen: DOI: 10.3390/h11010025.
Bibliography
Henneberg, Sylvia. 2010. “Moms do badly, but grandmas do worse: The nexus of sexism and ageism in children’s classics.” Journal of Aging Studies, 24: 125-134.
Joosen, Vanessa. 2018. Adulthood in Children’s Literature. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Biography
Michelle Anya Anjirbag is an affiliated researcher at the University of Antwerp where she completed a postdoctoral fellowship with the Constructing Age for Young Readers project under Professor Vanessa Joosen. Her research interests include adaptation, fairy tales and folklore, Disney, magical libraries, the intersection of literature, media, and culture, representations of gender and age, and cross-period approaches to narrative transmission across cultures and societies. Her work has appeared in a variety of journals and edited collections. More information on her and her work can be found at michelleanjirbag.com.