Walking the Wall

“People see what they expect to see. Except for you. You simply see” (39).

“A woman running across the cornfield in her mother’s best dress is subject to human speculation; in the wood, the trees did not care” (43).

I’ve been reading and re-reading “Winter Rose” and “Solstice Wood” by Patricia McKillip focusing on the theme of Truth and Perception and their role in traditional and modern fairy tales. “Winter Rose” is a retelling of the ballad Tam Lin–in which a young maiden is seduced by a young knight who is trapped in the world of the Fairy and if she wishes to get him free, she has to ignore what all her senses are telling her and hold fast until he is turned again into her one true love:

They’ll turn me in your arms, lady,
Into an esk and adder,
But hold me fast, don’t let me pass,
I am your bairn’s father.

They’ll turn me into a bear so grim,
And then a lion bold,
But hold me fast, and fear me not,
As ye shall love your child.

Again they’ll turn me in your arms,
Into a red hot brand of iron,
But hold me fast, let me not pass,
I’ll do to you no harm.

First dip me in a stand o’ milk,
And then in a stand of water,
But hold me fast, let me not pass–
I’ll be your bairn’s father.

They’ll shape me in your arms, Janet,
A dove and then a swan,
At last they’ll shape me in your arms
A mother naked man.

Cast your green mantle over me,
I’ll be myself again,
Cast your green mantle over me,
And so I will be won.

There is an underlying question, in “Winter Rose,” about the line between perception, and truth–or even more closely with expectation and truth, or wishes and truth. The question is do we see what is really there or do we see only what we expect to see, or what we want to see, and what do those expectations, wants, even fears, say about humanity and what did and do fairy tales do for us.

“Perhaps the tale I was unearthing had shed its colorful drama to reveal a misery and dreary cruelty we all lived too close to” (104).

Sometimes fairy are revealed as being cold and harsh and “inhuman” as people put all their flaws onto the “other” and often times in old ballads you can see the world of fairy as a mirror image of how people really perceive themselves. I found it interesting how these ideas were paralleled in the ideas of memory–that often time when we look back into memories, it is very difficult to see where is truth and where is what we wished was there or what we fear was there.

“She rambled through memory as you would wander from room to room in an
old house you once lived in, filling it with stories: This happened
here, and this here. Maybe they did, maybe you only wished they had;
wishes blur so easily into truth” (65).

Anyway, just a lot of rambling as I start to pull together some ideas. Nothing coherent or very useful–unless it is to convince you to read the books as they are gorgeous.