I’d often wondered if modern fairy tales sound like their stereotypical predecessors, with wicked stepmothers, dashing princes and beautiful dresses, and now that I’ve [re]read Cassandra Golds’ The Museum of Mary Child (2009), I can say that’s a definite maybe, albeit with a few twists.
Where one expects to find a wicked stepmother, there is a wicked
godmother (quite contrary to the Fairy Godmother found in Cinderella)
whose isolated existence and ban on all things creative, fun and, above all,
loving, are all our young heroine, Heloise, knows. Like Rapunzel, she can only observe
the rest of the world enjoying things which are forbidden to her like games, fancy
clothes and, especially, dolls. These, according to her Godmother, are a ‘Waste of Time’; even
her questions are labelled as such and dismissed with a command to ‘lower your
voice’. Her entire world revolves around one room (except when taken out for walks)
and as she grows, she is filled with a sense of unease and desire to know more.
And then there’s the museum which, along with the clothes
she and her godmother knit and sew for the village orphans, helps pay for the
roof over her head: it seems to affect those that visit. Heloise’s fear surrounding
the museum – ‘that something from the museum would escape, find its way into
the cottage, drag itself up the stairs, and come for her’ – lends a Tim
Burton-esque tone to the otherwise classic fairy tale beginning. In fact, every
small detail omitted from or altered in Heloise’s life, from a defaced copy of
the Bible to the lack of mirrors in the house, makes for a slightly unsettling
read. There is even ‘something eerie’ about Heloise herself, as the narrator
remarks.
So when she finds a doll, one she must keep secret from her
godmother, one who teaches her what love is, the whole inevitable truth begins
to unravel before her and she must run away, allowing a new chapter in her life
to start.
It is a chapter filled with talking birds, music, imagination
and, finally, love. She learns she can sing, she can wear pretty dresses, and
she knows what a kiss feels like. But it is also a chapter of fear and deceit
as, isolated with her godmother for so long, and now so frightened of being found
out, she must hide her doll and play the game of pretend, all the while being
drawn into ‘the heart of things’. When news arrives that her godmother is dying,
she must make the decision to return or to stay. Thus every little event and
dream seems to happen by fate/magic, drawing our heroine on through the story.
There is definitely something of last week’s reviewed book, Jane
Eyre, to this cute little tale, as both tell the story of a young girl,
raised by a guardian who doesn’t love her, who eventually finds herself among friends,
only to have to be tragically torn away. There is even a man/boy who becomes
almost the centre of our heroine’s universe, the disorientating and foreboding world
of dreams, that ever present feeling of dread, uncertainty, and eeriness that
comes in the dead of night and, if that wasn’t enough comparisons, there’s also
a burning building. How’s that for eerily similar?
I love every scene involving the ‘Society of the Caged Birds
of the City’, the way their wingbeats and flight are described, and how
benevolent they are. I love the individual personalities of the girls Heloise
meets in the ‘Choir of Female Orphans, Waifs and Strays’, from the exuberant
Melancholy, to the resonant Esther, and the hen-like Old Mother. And I love the way that love, so often at the
heart of every fairy tale, finds itself unwittingly front and centre in this story
too.
I picked this book up from a charity shop for a mere 50p but
it’s now worth so much more in my heart.
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