This is part of a weekly series that centers on offering a research and opinion based view on Holly Black’s Modern Faerie Tale’s series. Through this analysis, I offer insight on her work as a book within the urban fantasy genre, as a feminist fairy tale that subverts tropes and gender roles, and as a fantasy story that offers a much more diverse cast of characters. Her works of fiction offered me a world to escape to when times got rough, and this is my way of celebrating them.
Modern revisions and retelling of fairy tales are a chance to critically rethink and subvert character tropes to reflect modern social ideas. It underlines the importance for readers to identify with characters and be represented in popularized Western fairy tales that largely favored white heterosexual roles.
Holly Black’s Modern Faerie Tales is a three-part series aimed at a young adult audience. In 2002, Tithe’s publication plunged its readers into the abandoned structural landscape of New Jersey juxtaposed with the fantastical realm of faeries, and follows Kaye as she navigates through the ancient conflicts of the Seelie (light/good) and Unseelie (dark/evil) faerie courts. In 2005, the second installment, Valiant, was published. Unlike its predecessor, which Holly Black labeled as more of a suburban fantasy, this book fell into the subgenre of urban fantasy with Valerie, the protagonist, escaping to New York City and becoming entangled with the exiled fey. Ironside concluded the trilogy in 2007, with the characters resolving the struggle for power between both faerie courts. The importance of the binary representation of good and evil by the two faerie courts is vital to one of Holly Black’s biggest overturning points: the interplay between attributing both good and bad qualities to both courts. Goodness is not solely found in the Seelie court, just as evil is not purely found in the Unseelie court. Instead, we are presented with a nuanced representation of right versus wrong, which complicates the story and offers depth to the narrative and sensible lessons to be acquired from it.
Emily Lauer, in her review on MythPrint about Holly Black’s Tithe wrote that her “characters seem realistic — they are teenagers with seedy, imperfect lives, who inhabit a world of disappointing parents and not fitting in.” Her characters are well-read fantasy geeks and refer to popular culture from literature, film, TV and video games (similar to Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s characters), making them relatable. As Lauer writes, this is beneficial for two reasons: readers have an easier time identifying with the characters and are simultaneously introduced to the very same sources that influenced the author. This opens an intertextual channel of communication between author, reader and the quoted source materials. By using allusions to popular fairy tales, such as her allusions of Beauty and the Beast within the Valiant narrative, tropes are subverted and morals of the tale take on new meaning. The simultaneous nod throughout the story to popular and classical works mends the rift between both, creating a bridge of accessibility to these two worlds of literature. The classics are no longer unreachable and outdated, and the popular is no longer seen as being lesser.
Going back to the “imperfection” of Holly Black’s characters’ lives, that is to say the moving away from castles and mansions to a more urban and lower income setting, throughout the series is a very important element of representation. As Holly Black writes in her introduction to the anthology Welcome to Bordertown, “reading about Bordertown was the first time I saw people like me in speculative fiction. Messed-up kids, making messed-up choices. I couldn’t be a magician’s apprentice or a pig keeper who might or might not be a king’s son or a princess with a prophecy hanging over my head.” The urban landscapes in Holly Black’s novels show a juxtaposition of the industrial, abandoned and gritty with the organic and fantastical of faerie, just as the characters demonstrate this same combination of messed-up kids, making messed-up choices thrust into a world where they can also be magician’s apprentices with a prophecy hanging over their heads.
Rabkin points out two stylistic traits of fairy tales in his essay “Fairy Tales and Science Fiction.” First, that fairy tales tend to externalize inner states and deal in extremes when it comes to characters, “beauty is not just skin deep but represents superior worth. Cinderella is not merely good but also beautiful,” and ugly becomes synonymous with evil, with the stepsisters being not just ugly in spirit, but in body as well. And second, that fairy tales rely on clear, elemental colors and cleanliness: “when blood is mentioned, as when Snow White’s mother pricks her finger, exactly three drops fall, each purely red- and they never dry brown.” In Holly Black’s Modern Faerie Tale, these stylistic traits are destabilized by her making the beautiful evil and the ugly welcoming. Both binaries are mixed and cross-matched to the point of becoming meaningless categorizations when faced with reality. The lesson becoming that there is no clear cut good and evil, and there is no way of defining it based on external physical appearances.
(to be continued…)
