“No mother nor nothing to me”: Excavating the Maternal Figure in Kissing the Witch

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Notes

1When asked in an interview with Helen Thompson if the stories in Kissing the Witch were lesbian fairy tales, Donoghue responded, “I came under pressure from publishers to make it either ‘less lesbian’ or ‘more lesbian,’ but what I wanted was a seamless mingling of varied women’s stories, roughly half of which turned out to be overtly lesbian” (Irish Women Writers Speak Out 175).

2In the interview with Thompson, Donoghue acknowledged the influence of traditional images on Irish literature, noting, “I don’t visualize Ireland as female myself, but the historical traditions are so strong—the wild crone, the wailing mother, the raped girl—I don’t think they’ll be forgotten any time soon” (Irish Women Writers Speak Out 179).

3Martine de la Rochère describes the narrative structure thus: “The dialogic principle which shapes the collection, whereby female speakers of different age, condition, and sexual orientation tell a story which generates the next one, extends to the intertextual dialogue established with various fairy tale authors in the individual tales” (16).

4“The Tale of the Hair,” which is a revision of “Rapunzel,” is the sixth story, positioned almost halfway through the collection.

5The first type of revision is a faithful direct translation with innovation occurring in the artistic realm in the illustrator’s work (358).

6She discusses “The Tale of the Shoe,” “The Tale of the Bird,” “The Tale of the Rose,” and “The Tale of the Kiss.”

7Kissing the Witch was marketed for a YA audience in the United States (see Jen Nessel’s book review for the New York Times).

8See Terri Windling’s “Rapunzel, Rapunzel, Let Down Your Hair” for a discussion of the place of “Rapunzel” in the tradition of Maiden-in-the-tower folklore.

9Dissemination of information about how to obtain an abortion was illegal until 1992 (abortion is illegal in Ireland, except to save the mother’s life); birth control was illegal until 1993; homosexuality until 1993 (although that only covered men—the thought of lesbianism is so far removed from an Irish concept of “woman” that it was never outlawed); and divorce was prohibited until 1995.

10For a fuller development of the ethics of maternal sensuality (as she later terms it), see Traina’s Erotic Attunement: Parenthood and the Ethics of Sensuality between Unequals (2011).

11“The Tale of the Brother,” a revision of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen”; the woman of “The Tale of the Hair” is the Gerda figure.

12The books in the series include Rapunzel’s Revenge: Fairytales for Feminists (1985), Ms Muffet and Others (1986), Mad & Bad Fairies (1987), Sweeping Beauties (1989), Cinderella on the Ball (1991), and Rapunzel’s Revenge: More Feminist Fairytales (1995). Donoghue has explained in an interview that it was Attic Press’s request that she consider writing a collection of fairy tales that originally inspired her to write Kissing the Witch (Interview 174).

13Fogarty, among many others, argues, “The resonant mythography revolving around the figure of Mother Ireland in nationalist representations appropriates maternity in the cause of debates about empowerment and disenfranchisement, freedom and tyranny, community and servitude” (87).

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Funding

I thank the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts and the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame, whose generous support enabled me to present an earlier version of this article at the New Voices in Irish Criticism conference at University College–Dublin.