a gallimaufry

Habetrot

‘Habetrot’ is an Anglo-Scottish version of ‘Rumplestiltskin’ (Brothers Grimm) or the East Anglian ‘Tom Tit Tot’; I read it in The Virago Book of Witches, edited by Shahrukh Husain (the original source is A Dictionary of Fairies by Kate Briggs and if anyone would like to republish this so I could afford to buy a copy please do, I would be so happy). Funny and female centred, it is now definitely my favourite version.

In both ‘Rumplestiltskin’ and ‘Tom Tit Tot’, the heroine is brought to the attention of a king through the vain boasting of a parent, and in both these stories the king is hardly ideal husband material since he threatens the girl with death if she fails to spin either straw into gold or five skeins a day for a month each year. The girl’s saviour demands a high price: Rumplestiltskin wants her first-born child; Tom Tit Tot wants her. In each case, the girl can avoid this price if she discovers the creature’s name – which she does, by accident and via someone else.

‘Habetrot’ is very different. The story has a very domestic and even comic feel to it, with a lassie who hates spinning and instead scampers about the countryside, and an exasperated mother who needs her to earn some money so locks her up until she’s spun seven skeins. After a day of failing to produce anything decent, the lassie escapes and discovers Habetrot, who offers to spin the skeins for her. The price? There is no price. Habetrot swears the lassie to secrecy and tells her to call on her if ever she needs help.

(Illustration by Morris Meredith Williams from Elizabeth W. Grierson, The Scottish Fairy Book; London: Fisher Unwin, 1910; found here)

‘Habetrot’ seems to be either in explicit conversation with one of both of the other versions of this tale, or truncated. The lassie discovers Habetrot’s name herself quite easily, but there is no especial reason why she shouldn’t know it as Habetrot is kind and helpful and never seeks to take advantage of her. So this seems an odd detail to include. Perhaps there was once a longer version where it was significant? Or perhaps it is because the tale is built on one of the other versions, and this detail has persisted.

After Habetrot has spun and delivered the skeins, the lassie, feeling peckish, cooks and eats seven black puddings. On discovering this her mother rushes out and shouts:

‘My dawtie ha’ spun se’en, se’en
My dawtie ha’ ate se’en, se’en
An a’ afore daylicht.’

This catches the attention of the young laird. In ‘Tom Tit Tot’, the mother sings ‘My darter ha' ate five, five pies today’, but quickly changes it to ‘My darter ha' spun five, five skeins today’ out of embarrassment when the passing king shows an interest. The clear difference here is that the East Anglian mother lies out of shame over her daughter’s greed, but the Scottish mother is equally proud of her daughter’s spinning and her appetite. The joke presumably is that the appetite is not for eating black pudding but for another activity which might prove attractive to a young man. And as soon as he sees the lassie he asks to marry her.

But it is the ending that particularly pleases me. The laird never threatens his fiancée but he does witter on about all the lovely skeins she’ll spin for him after they’re married, so Habetrot tells her to bring him down to the burnside. She then lets the couple into a chamber where she and her friends are. The laird is horrified at their long lips, and they explain that although they were once bonnie, their lips have grown long from spinning. Habetrot tells him,

‘Yir ain lassie’ll be the same, bonnie an she is noo, for she’s fair mad about the spinning.’
‘She’ll not!’ said the laird. ‘Not another spindle shall she touch from this day on.’

And so everyone gets what they want. The laird marries the pretty lassie, she can roam the countryside with him instead of spinning, ‘and every head of lint that grew on that land went to old Habetrot to be spun’, presumably enriching her.

(Illustration by John D. Batten from Joseph Jacobs, More English Fairy Tales; London: David Nutt, 1894; found here)

It is hard to know, without being aware of the story’s origins, whether the differences of ‘Habetrot’ from the German and East Anglian tales are intended to be directly compared with them, or not. It is definitely tempting to see this as a consciously female ‘retelling’ of ‘Rumpelstiltskin’ or ‘Tom Tit Tot’ but I don’t have any evidence for this.

In the other versions, there is a real power imbalance between the king and the girl and he threatens with death; in ‘Habetrot’ the laird seems amiable and with the help of Habetrot the lassie can manage him and achieve the life she wants. In this version, laziness (or dislike of domestic tasks) is rewarded – after all, isn’t the point of marrying a rich man to get out of having to do those tasks you don’t like? – and apart from being locked up for a day the lassie suffers very little.

The lone male imp or little man of the other two stories is replaced in ‘Habetrot’ by a small community of women who are ready to help the lassie rather than exploit her. While we might not be delighted at the reinforcement of the primacy of female beauty as currency in the world, the sly way in which Habetrot uses it against the laird to help the lassie feels like a victory. So too does the idea of a secret group of magical little women hidden on the other side of a self-bored stone who feel no need to aspire to beauty. With female characters driving the story and with humour, ‘Habetrot’ strips out the darkness of the other tales to give our female characters a more unequivocally happy ending.

Yellowface, by Rebecca F. Kuang

I love a novel about the publishing world! This dark comedy was catnip for me and it absolutely lived up to expectation.

June Hayward is a writer whose only published novel fared poorly. She is sort-of friends with Athena Liu, who is beautiful, successful and rich, author of novels that not only sell well but are critically acclaimed. Ultimately, though, Athena’s luck runs out and she dies in a freak pancake-related accident. June has the chance to steal her next manuscript – and she does, passing it off as her own. Soon she has a deal with a massive advance, an attentive publishing team who throw money at development and marketing, and a buzz attached to her name – everything she ever wanted. Can she keep her secret?

June is funny, clever, manipulative, jealous and self-absorbed; she wrestles with her guilt mainly by casting herself as a victim and by weaving sophistries about honouring Athena’s memory. One of Kuang’s great skills is to make her really quite sympathetic; spiteful one moment, anxious the next, and then buckling under the onslaught of social media hate the next. We see the US publishing scene through her eyes, and Kuang gleefully portrays it as venal and cynical, pitting authors against each other, feigning its interest in diversity and only concerned with the next bestseller. For June, reviewers are driven by their biases and Twitter is a mob dominated by extreme emotions, quick to turn even on those they adored five seconds earlier. In other words, everyone in this novel is enjoyably awful.

Yellowface gets its title because June allows her editor to persuade her into using her full first name and her second name as her nom de plume – Juniper Song – which of course sounds Chinese or Korean when June is actually white. This is significant because Athena’s novel is about the Chinese Labour Corps, recruited by the British Army to serve on the Front during the First World War, now largely forgotten. On discovering that June has no East Asian heritage, many readers are disappointed. Others are angry: if you are not at least part Chinese, what right do you have to tell this story?

June’s reply (to us, not her critics as it would give her away!) is that Athena’s ethnicity gives her no special insight into the experiences of the Chinese labourers she wrote about, which were so very different from her own privileged twenty-first-century life in the US. She had to do just as much research as June did, and exercise her imagination just as far:

Can a Black writer not write a novel with a white protagonist? What about everyone who has written about World War Two, and never lived through it? [...] I think writing is fundamentally an exercise in empathy. Reading lets us live in someone else’s shoes. Literature builds bridges; it makes our world larger, not smaller.

But June’s point is undermined by her lack of understanding of the ethnicity and culture she is taking over, which she struggles to distinguish from other East Asian cultures. She makes crass changes to Athena’s book, such as softening the white characters, whom she considers ‘almost embarrassingly biased ... cartoonishly racist’ and adding a trite epilogue. For her, publishing’s commitment to diverse writers discriminates against her; she never considers how much discrimination gets thrown at non-white writers.

Kuang sprinkles metafictional jokes throughout the book, and at one point teases us with the possibility that what we are reading is itself June’s next manuscript. Sometimes it feels as if she is taking a cheeky wink at us. And she asks: stealing a manuscript crosses a line, but are there not degrees of appropriation here? Athena is always on the lookout for new material for her fiction, which she takes from other people. June calls her ‘a vampire [...] She collected true narratives like seashells, polished them off and presented them, sharp and gleaming, to horrified and entranced reader’. She uses an experience of June’s for a story. Her ex-boyfriend says:

Sometimes, when we fought, she would give me this very cool, narrow-eyed look. I knew that look, because it was the same look she got when she was drafting a scene. [...] Sometimes she would say things that made me upset, or ask about things I’d been through – and as time went on, all I could think was that she was mining me, using me as fodder.

Isn’t Athena, then, as parasitic as June? Whether the words you rewrite are a manuscript written by a dead author or the painful secret your friend tells you, is creating fiction inherently exploitative, vampiric? And where does that leave the publishers who make money from them and the readers who consume them and enjoy the suffering of others vicariously?