The Wilful Eye by Isobelle Carmody Page B

sorrow to live in a hovel in one of the lands beyond the sea. Some foolish people must have a tragedy, for they cannot believe in happy endings.

C ontrary to the popular notion that fantasy is an escape from reality, every story I write must enable me to explore life questions that interest me. The whole point of writing a story is to allow myself to find out what I think, all the more so when the story I am about to write is to be inspired by a fairytale, for these old tales express themselves and work most strongly through the subconscious. For that reason, I wanted to choose a fairytale that plucked deep chords within me.
    Rumpelstiltskin was among the fairytales that resonated, though it was not first on my list. But the thing about writing is that no matter how good and clear your intentions, how deep and brilliant your aims, a story can live or die in the main character or, more importantly, in the voice of the main character. For me, finding that voice is profoundly important. I set aside one fairytale after another because none of the voices was vivid or visceral or original enough to captivate me, so how would it ever capture a reader? The first person who must be interested in a piece is its creator.
    Finally I came to Rumpelstiltskin. The thing that always struck me about this fairytale was the unfairness of it. I felt this dissatisfaction again when I read the original. Indeed the strength of my irritation told me the story was definitely getting to me.
    I read the story closely.
    The girl who is the main character – the miller’s daughter in more than one version – is surrounded by knaves. Her father lies about her being able to spin gold from straw in order to win himself prestige. He must be a fool as well as a liar to lie to the king. That the mother does not protest means she is weak or foolish or under the thumb of her husband, or that she does not care for her daughter. She is not a character who features in the original, but the weakness of mothers and the effect this has on daughters and their characters is territory I often visit, and doubt I will ever exhaust.
    The fact that the father is a liar and risks his daughter interested me too, because whatever my own father’s failings, he died when I was too young to see him as anything but a hero. So while as a woman grown I recognise his flaws, the little girl in me forgives him everything. The father in the story may be many things but his daughter will go on loving him and her mother both, while fully aware of their weaknesses.
    These thoughts were beginning to form the character of the girl.
    The king in the story is a proud, greedy man who locks the girl in a room full of straw and commands her to spin it into gold as her father boasted she could do, or her head will be chopped off. Caught between the stupidity of her father and the greed of the king, if greed it is, the girl is helpless. She would not be helpless, I reflected, if she denounced her father as a liar, but she would no more consider this than I considered not letting my father in after my mother locked him out when he came home late after a night’s drinking. So the girl in the story is morally superior to her father and the king, because she will not appease one by sacrificing the other. In fact, her moral superiority is the reason she is helpless.
    The third man who appears in the story – Rumpelstiltskin – offers to help the girl spin the straw into gold, but at a price. There is a slyness to the dwarf, for the bargain he strikes is to spin the straw into gold for a trinket worn by the hapless girl. But if Rumpelstiltskin can spin straw into gold, what need has he of a trinket? His true desire is concealed. The fact that the girl does not wonder at the dwarf’s motives might suggest that foolishness runs in the family, but I felt my character was desperate rather than foolish: the alternative to accepting his proposal is, after