At The Bottom Of The Garden

[liadnan]

Currently reading At the Bottom of the Garden: a dark history of fairies, hobgoblins, and other troublesome things by Diane Purkiss (fellow and tutor in English at Keble). It's a fascinating book, and written in a surprisingly personal tone, describing the riddle posed to Gawain in The Wife of Bath's Tale ("what do women want") thus:
This was the question which notoriously baffled Freud, and Gawain seems less well-equipped than he to find out the answer. He goes from house to house desparately accumulating answers: it's rather like reading six feminist polemics in a weekend
and talking about the fears of childhood and motherhood from her own experience as a mother of two living and one dead child:
To this day, fairies are considered a girl's thing. My son's ballet teacher refused, at his first lesson, to let him dance with a tinselly, spangly wand like the rest of his class, issuing him with a sword and the stern injunction 'little boys can be princes, not fairies

Reads more like a tutorial than the fairly well-researched and academic work it is: I'm not sure I could cope with all academic or even soft-academic books being written like this but it's a refreshing change.

Plus she ends by talking about X-Files and Buffy slash, which amuses me.

Comments

[nikandra.livejournal.com]

I'm now hoping she's the nice English Felllow and not the other one so that I might read the book someday. The nice one is a friend's supervisor, the other one is an English fellow (probably at Keble), with whom I had argued about feministic readings of ancient Greek myths.

[liadnan]

Ollie, you can't refuse to read books just because you've had arguments with the author. Where would academia be: no one would read anything.

[nikandra.livejournal.com]

Yes, I know that! LOL. After all, I read books even when I know I won't like them.

I should have deleted that post last night; after 2 my brain refuses to function very well (especially when most of it is occupied with tracking down references for another discussion).

I think what gets me is that sometimes I feel totally unable to react to things I don't like. Unless I do actually end up writing a book/article about re-examining myths and stop imposing various modern/irrelevant readings on them. But until then, I'll just get frustrated and --

Sorry - I won't make much sense if I continue. You're absolutely right and I was trying to make a bad joke. I might read it someday, when I have time.