Just finished this and hopefully it makes some sense! So we can look at and see that both in plot and in style, Stardust more closely
resembles Oscar Wilde's or George MacDonald's windingly complex fairy tales
than unambiguously lesson-oriented stories such as John Ruskin's "The King
of the Golden River," or William Makepeace Thackeray's garrulous "The
Rose and the Ring." With relation to the Victorian fairy tale, Stardust,
in its political complexity and sophistication, is an especially appropriate
companion piece to MacDonald's "The Day Boy and Night Girl." We can
see "The Day Boy and the Night Girl" plays with a number of
traditional fairy tale elements, focusing on gender and cooperation. The story
concerns a witch who experimentally raises two children: a boy, Photogen, who
only ever experiences Day, and a girl, Nycteris, who only experiences night.
All parts of their lives are oriented around this difference; they are
socialized and educated towards characteristics she finds compatible with day
and night. However, when they begin to mature, they discover their respective
foreign times without the witch's knowledge and encounter one another. After a
period of fear and adjustment, the two learn to work together and decide to
escape the witch. Through their respect for each other and cooperation they are
able to function in either day or night. Their travels only cease when they
accidentally kill the witch in her wolf form, whereupon they return to her
castle and more justly rule her domain together. George MacDonald's writings,
including this story, are known and studied for his active feminism. His
stories show interdependence between the sexes, and frequently highlight the
capability of his female characters. While MacDonald takes a fairly
essentialist view of gender, what makes him unique is his valuing of traditionally
female associations and qualities. He does not believe that women are inferior
because of their differences, but instead his fairy tales consistently describe
women as superior. Describing Nycteris in relation to Photogen, MacDonald
writes, "But she was the greater, for suffering more, she feared
nothing". This clearly fits into Zipes's description of fairy tales
as a genre for socially optimistic or utopian writing. We can see some
immediate similarities between MacDonald's and Gaiman's tales. Both concern a
male/female pair of characters forced to act outside of their native settings.
In each case, the male is associated with day, the sun, health, and activity,
and the female character is affiliated with night, the moon, frailty, and
melancholy. Over the course of each story the pair confronts these differences,
at first with mistrust and later with greater mutual appreciation. Each male
character acts from a position of assumed and unearned advantage until
corrected. In "The Day Boy and the Night Girl," Photogen has been
raised as a hunter and outdoorsman, expressly trained to be fearless. His first
experience with night terrifies him, but Nycteris finds and comforts him. In
the morning, when their situations are reversed, he scorns her fear of day
because he imagines it to be a parody of his night fear. Similarly, in Stardust
Tristan finds the Star for the first time only because she hits him in the face
with a mud clod. She is already defensive, throwing dirt and insults because
she was injured in her fall. He would never have noticed her as the goal of his
journey without being told of her identity. He does not understand that a star
can also be a sentient creature. She reveals herself, removing a major obstacle
from his path, but as soon as she does, he chains her to himself so that he can
bring her to Victoria Forrester, the object of his romantic pursuit and the
reason for his trip into Faerie. Tristan does not truly understand the Star's
subjecthood, just as Photogen does not understand Nycteris's. Tristan and
Photogen have to be taught how to understand that other beings are separate
from masculine assumed privilege and are complete unto themselves.
No comments:
Post a Comment