13th Congress of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research

Presentation Abstracts

STEPHENS, John

Monstrous Father, Damaged Daughter: from ‘donkey skin’ to ‘deerskin’

Marina Warner has argued (From the Beast to the Blonde, 1994) that the ‘Donkey Skin’ cycle of stories has largely disappeared from modern culture. She suggests this has happened because of the modern turn to psychological realism and a subsequent apprehension of a too great reality/fantasy discrepancy between the incest motif and the heroine’s bizarre disguises (donkey skin, cloak of rushes, etc.). Just a little earlier, however, Robin McKinley’s fantasy novel Deerskin (1993) had demonstrated why and how the cycle could be reinstated to the contemporary folktale ‘canon’. In refashioning the ‘Donkey Skin’ story in combination with a plethora of folk motifs (suitors’ tasks; magical helpers; animal helpers) and folktale narrative structures, McKinley foregrounds discordant elements in order to peel back the ameliorative and Freudian redirections of folktale and hence to lay bare the incestuous violation that underpins this folk tale cycle. A pivotal strategy here is to elaborate the destructively selfish interdiction laid on the heroine’s father by his dying wife by depicting their courtship and marriage: based on the motif of the ‘impossible task’, this pre-history focuses on the paradox that intense love may become obsessively solipsistic and thence destructive. As an extensively elaborated literary folk tale, Deerskin employs sustained character focalisation (not a traditional folk tale trait) and a strong female perspective to bring out the psychological grounding of the folkloric and mythic elements which express the annihilation and reconstruction of the heroine’s subjectivity following her brutal rape by her father.