For most, the telling and hearing of myths, legends, and fairy tales remain most closely associated with childhood. Author Patricia A. McKillip, however, has made a successful career by taking myths, legends, and fairy tales and reinventing them into elements of her own fairy tale-esque novels. Whether using the legend of Tam Lin, the firebird, the Knights of the Round Table, or the Lady of Shalott, McKillip repeatedly puts her own spin on these tales that may become her entire story or merely a subplot within. McKillip grants newfound agency to formerly damsel-in-distress female characters, allowing them their own hero’s journeys, which frequently results in a duomyth tale between male and female protagonists. She then takes the patriarchal worlds of fairy tales and changes them so that magic, control, power, and knowledge become associated with female characters, abandoning their traditional association with male institutions and characters. In these new worlds, McKillip’s female heroes possess an instinctual understanding for the worlds their journeys take place in, allowing them to more easily deal with the world’s rules and obstacles than their male counterparts, who become blind and unknowing in their new, feminine settings.These patterns in McKillip’s appropriation of her source material become especially clear in her novels In the Forests of Serre and The Tower at Stony Wood. In the Forests of Serre draws heavily from Russian and Slavic folklore. In particular it borrows from the tale Tsarevitch Ivan, the Fire Bird, and the Grey Wolf and the Russian folklore witch Baba Yaga (Pilinovsky 36). The Tower at Stony Wood leans on Arthurian legend for source material and inspiration, reinventing Alfred Tennyson’s poem, “The Lady of Shalott,” and the quests of the Knights of the Round Table in its multiple intertwined narratives.
The first change Patricia A. McKillip makes to the tales she uses is the gift of agency to her female characters, which can be seen especially clearly in her adaptation of “The Lady of Shalott” in her novel The Tower at Stony Wood. In Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott,” the title character resides inside a tower, weaving images of the outside world she sees through a magical mirror. Should she ever directly look upon the outside world or leave her tower she will die from a spell cast on her. The Lady has no control over her situation, never makes any attempt to find a way to thwart the spell, and finally leaves her tower to die when she sees Lancelot ride by. Lancelot, not her, possesses the poem’s agency. The Lady of Shalott has zero agency and never attempts to gain any.
In The Tower at Stony Wood, McKillip disperses her version of the Lady of Shalott into three women, all of whom possess greater agency than the Lady of Shalott. Melanthos, the most prominent of these three women, lives in the country of Skye. A strong-willed young woman, she spends much of her time in an enchanted tower with a mirror showing images of elsewhere, images Melanthos embroiders before tossing out the tower window as directed by the tower’s magic. Unlike the Lady of Shalott, Melanthos may enter and depart from the tower any time she chooses, in the face of objections from her friends and family who want her to stay away from the tower. While the tower does exhibit an unusual pull over her, Melanthos takes important action outside of the tower, going so far as to find Cyan Dag, the novel’s main character and knight, to bring him to her tower when she believes her mother needs him. Like the Lady of Shalott, Melanthos embroiders what she sees in the mirror. Unlike the Lady of Shalott, Melanthos creates images that serve an active purpose to the plot - they guide Cyan on his quest, reversing “The Lady of Shalott” in which Lancelot’s appearance guides the Lady out of her tower and to her death. In the character of Melanthos, McKillip takes and subverts the character of the Lady of Shalott, twisting her actions and identity into someone fully capable of acting in and impacting the world of her story.
After granting agency to her female characters, Patricia A. McKillip allots a myth or journey to the lead female character, turning her into a second protagonist whose path runs parallel, perpendicular, or against that of the male protagonist. According to Christine Mains, a doctoral student at the University of Texas at Brownsville, “The paradigmatic structural pattern of the hero’s quest for identity is Joseph Campbell’s monomyth,” in which, “the hero undertakes many tasks, from battling dragons to answering riddles, receiving aid and advice from secondary characters, and uniting with a powerful figure of the opposite gender in the Sacred Marriage” (25). McKillip takes the “secondary female figures” or the “powerful figure of the opposite gender” and turns at least one of them into a second hero. Princess Sidonie fulfills this role in In the Forests of Serre.
With In the Forests of Serre, McKillip takes the character of Helen the Beautiful and elevates her into the character of Princess Sidonie, the story’s female hero whose quest equals and intertwines with that of Prince Ronan, the male hero. In Tsarevitch Ivan, the Fire Bird, and the Grey Wolf, Ivan seeks to retrieve the firebird and along the way must win a number of prizes for other tsars, all of which he manages to keep at the end thanks to the Grey Wolf’s aid. Helen the Beautiful is one of these prizes, a beautiful girl he wins in order to trade for the Tsar’s golden-bridled horse, but falls in love with instead on their journey to the Tsar. Helen has absolutely no agency in this tale. When Ivan’s jealous brothers kill him and claim her as their own, she does nothing but go along with their demands until Ivan, brought to life by the Grey Wolf, returns in time to stop her wedding. The character of Helen truly functions as no more than the greatest of Ivan’s prizes.
Fig. 1. A. Lopatine, Prince Ivan and the Grey Wolf.
Princess Sidonie of Dacia begins McKillip’s tale a prize of sorts, for she is to marry Prince Ronan of Serre to prevent Ronan’s father from conquering her land. She possesses little to no agency when she helplessly appeals to the wizard Unciel to help her, but as she travels to Serre and then discovers Ronan has gone missing, her agency slowly builds along with her journey. Finding the prospect of living with a heartless Ronan unbearable, she undertakes to escape and deal with the dangerous Baba Yaga for the return of Ronan’s heart. Her action prompts the Queen to force Ronan to rescue her and regain his heart, allowing for a shift in power so that Sidonie, in fact, drives the story and the male protagonist’s actions.In the Forests of Serre combines Ronan and Sidonie’s quests to create a duomyth. Christine Mains suggests that in a duomyth two seemingly separate quests are in fact, “a single quest split between the masculine and feminine aspects of the hero” (29). Ronan and Sidonie both go on journeys that intertwine and become the two sides of a single coin. Ronan must learn to deal with, find, and ultimately heal his heart, which the deaths of his wife and child broke. Sidonie must find herself, seek out Ronan’s heart, and ultimately discover what she is worth. Their potential relationship motivates all of these actions which come together when Ronan tells Sidonie, “‘you’re worth my heart … that’s what you risked your life to get’” (278). McKillip divides the myth between the two characters on each side of a relationship, male and female, Ronan and Sidonie. Ronan and Sidonie can be seen as the masculine and feminine aspects of the hero searching for him or herself as a necessary step on the path to love.
Aside from providing female characters with their own quests in her translation of fairy tales and legends, McKillip also takes the mythical worlds from such stories, which generally possess distinctly masculine qualities, and makes them into what is very feminine, from magic to understanding to power to control. Her main characters are frequently strangers to such worlds, their rules, and their general systems.The worlds of Tsarevitch Ivan, the Fire Bird, and the Grey Wolf and the Arthurian legends primarily exist as patriarchal structures. In the story of Ivan, every character acting to change or drive the story is a man. Ivan’s father sends his three sons on a quest to find the firebird. Other tsars, also male, send Ivan on quests before they will give him what he needs to win the firebird. And last, but perhaps most important of all, the grey wolf, who guides and aids Ivan, is, himself, male. Helen the Beautiful stands as the sole female in the story, and as discussed earlier, she serves as a prize with about the same agency as a trophy or crown.
Men in positions of power dominate the Arthurian legends while women, though significant, hold little sway over their own lives. Arthur, Merlin, Lancelot, and Guinevere stand as the four most significant characters. Arthur rules the land as king, Merlin backs him as the most powerful magic user in the land, Lancelot and all of the other Knights of the Round Table take heroic actions recorded in tales, and Guinevere, as opposed to doing anything like the others, becomes the object of desire that rends Arthur and Lancelot apart, until they fight over her. As though she were the bone and they the dogs. In “The Lady of Shalott,” the Lady possesses absolutely no power, and thus no agency. Lancelot, on the other hand, has such power that his mere appearance in the Lady’s mirror drives her to leave her tower and accept her departure’s accompanying death. The balance of power, control, and magic rests solidly with the male sex.
Magic defines the world of Serre and plays the largest role in creating a female persona for the environment. Magic lies at the heart of Serre, and, “‘Serre’s heart is ancient, wild, and very lively’” (39). The wizard Gyre observes Serre “seemed to be patched together out of children’s tales,” and in fact two figures out of Russian and Slavic folklore, and hence, children’s tales, stand at its center, binding it together (39). One, the witch Brume, based off of Baba Yaga, and two, the firebird.
McKillip bases the witch Brume off of Baba Yaga, transplanting her into the tale of Ivan and the firebird and in doing so creating a dominant female presence that defines her world in a story previously filled by strong male and weak female characters. Brume’s forest domain, in particular, reveals her connection to the witch Baba Yaga from Russian folklore, as well as her importance to a novel titled In the Forests of Serre (Pilinovsky 38). Brume is, obviously, female, and interestingly enough traverses the range of femininity, appearing at one time an ugly, fat hag, and the next a shockingly beautiful woman. She is “the Mother of All Witches,” the first and foremost object of fear in Serre’s forest, the one person who, “with her in front of [Ronan], he had nothing else to fear” (1, 2). Yet, the characters of In the Forests of Serre continually return to her, for they all become wrapped up in the world of Serre, a world that revolves around local magic that all comes back to Brume and the firebird. McKillip adds the character of Baba Yaga to the tale of Ivan and the firebird, and in doing so she creates a dominant female presence in the story, one who overshadows the male rulers, the prince, and every other significant male character from the original tale. At the end of the tale, Prince Ronan even goes so far as to say, “‘leave my father to Brume,’” recognizing in her a force dominant over the powerful King Ferus (291).
The firebird serves as Brume’s counter, a mythical creature McKillip both feminizes and grants greater importance to in her tale. The firebird reveals her female nature when, “She stood at the road’s end, in all her wild beauty of fire and ivory, bird and human” (159). The firebird is the object of desire, the witch Brume the object of fear and repulsion. As Ronan states when Gyre gives the firebird’s egg to Brume, “‘you have given the most beautiful thing in the world to the most hideous thing in the world’” (285). In Ivan’s quest, the firebird lives as the possession of a tsar and is neither identified as male nor female. While Ivan’s ultimate goal, the firebird fails to play a large role in the story, serving primarily as the instigator for a series of adventures. In McKillip’s novel, the firebird not only becomes human, but plays a role just as large as that of Brume, which is to say, Brume and the firebird stand as the most significant characters McKillip’s heroes encounter, the personifications of the world of Serre. The firebird enchants Ronan and other characters, brings Ronan, Sidonie, and others to the witch Brume, saves Ronan from the wizard Gyre, and generally weaves its way throughout In the Forests of Serre. Where Brume exists as a character of opposition Ronan and Sidonie must 
deal with and overcome, the firebird ties the characters and storylines together, bringing them where they need to be how they need to be and changing them through its very presence. Ultimately, the witch Brume and the firebird transform the patriarchal world of Tsarevitch Ivan into a world defined by female magic, the world of Serre, which Brume and the firebird embody as recognized by Ronan when he sees them, “wearing one another’s faces … and their faces became indistinguishable in his heart’s eye” (286).McKillip also feminizes the patriarchal worlds of fairy tales by granting control, knowledge, and power to the female characters who define her worlds, as she does in The Tower at Stony Wood. Her novel The Tower at Stony Wood possesses a single, male main protagonist in the character of Cyan Dag, a knight in the mold of the Knights of the Round Table. The female characters he encounters include Melanthos and Sel, two of the three characters influenced by the Lady of Shalott, both of whom possess greater control, knowledge, and power than the Lady of Shalott. Both Melanthos and Sel can enter and leave
their tower at will, despite its magic bindings. Sel, in fact, destroys the tower when she rediscovers her magic and leaves for the underwater kingdom she came from. Cyan grabs onto her in an attempt to hold her back, only to be dragged with her and ends up, “racked like a fish out of water, trying to breathe” (220). Cyan later tells Melanthos, “‘it was you who called her back,’” and had Melanthos not called Sel back to land, Sel would have pulled him under, drowning him, unaware of his presence (257). The Lady of Shalott, in contrast, cannot even leave her tower, let alone destroy it, and Lancelot draws her so powerfully she leaves her tower to die. In an utter reversal of roles, Sel nearly kills Cyan because she does not notice him holding onto her. “‘Thank you for finding me again,’” Cyan tells Melanthos when she comes to guide him back from a tower he leaves, further reversing the Lady of Shalott scenario and further demonstrating the control, power, and knowledge McKillip grants to the female characters who define her worlds (257).In her subverted worlds of fairy tales, McKillip’s female heroes inevitably grasp the world and its rules more quickly than their male counterparts, who frequently become blind or unknowing along their journey. This becomes particularly clear with In the Forests of Serre, with the duomyth of Ronan and Sidonie. Ronan, unlike Sidonie, has spent his entire life in Serre, so it stands to reason he ought to understand and deal with it better than she. But it is Ronan, not Sidonie, who rides over Brume’s hen and fails to find a way to appease her without endangering himself and his men, so that at the end of their encounter Brume curses him. Ronan, not Sidonie, becomes enchanted by the firebird, and Ronan alone makes the terrible mistake of trading his heart to Brume for his freedom. In his inability to deal with Brume and leave the forest Ronan becomes unknowing and his enchantment by the firebird blinds him even to Sidonie’s presence.
In contrast, Sidonie enters Serre for the first time in her life and avoids Brume until she decides to trade for Ronan’s heart. When Sidonie does decide to find Brume, the firebird guides her to Brume’s cottage, instead of enchanting her as it did Ronan. Sidonie enters and attempts to bargain for Ronan’s life. Failing in that, Sidonie remembers a “scene from one of Auri’s tales” and tricks Brume into demonstrating how to cut her own hair before pinning Brume to the floor with her own scissors (274). Ronan could have remembered a tale to help him; he tells his mother, “‘you used to tell me tales of her; that’s how I recognized her’” (11). Sidonie only fails to escape from Brume because Ronan runs in to rescue her as she runs out, and the two collide in the process. McKillip’s female characters possess an instinct and understanding that allows them to handle the magic, power, and knowledge of their worlds, all characteristically female after McKillip’s subversion, in ways her male characters simply fail to use.
McKillip’s appropriation and reinvention of fairy tales possess importance outside of her work as well as inside. Fairy tales, though fantastical and unreal, inform people’s worldviews as they grow up, frequently teaching lessons and morals even as they fill children’s heads with wondrous tales. While many tales have one specific lesson in mind, they all teach many more unconsciously. If the traditional gender roles of fairy tales are subverted so that female characters gain greater agency, it should benefit society as the unspoken lessons regarding gender become more balanced and reflect the understanding of gender society possesses today. McKillip’s own work undoubtedly remains too advanced for little children, but the potential remains for her to be at the forefront of a new trend in fairy tales, and even with older audiences the potential for impact remains.
Ultimately, McKillip’s use and changing of fairy tales, their female characters, journeys, and worlds reflect some of the modern world and attitudes society possesses today. Tales play a key role in shaping perceptions of society and the world, continually adapting as time goes by. McKillip serves the natural progression of tales by relocating many old tales often forgotten today and putting her own spin on them. The end results include many fine novels that capture much of the feel of the tales they originate from, despite the changes they undergo. For that, at the very least, the literary world owes a debt to Patricia A. McKillip, as it does to everyone who contributes to its ever-growing body of literature.
Works Cited
Heiner, Heidi Anne. “Tsarevitch Ivan, the Fire Bird and the Gray Wolf.” SurLaLune Fairy Tales. 10 July 2007
Lopatine, A. Prince Ivan and the Grey Wolf. 14 Nov. 2008
Mains, Christine. “Having It All: The Female Hero’s Quest for Love and Power in Patricia A. McKillip’s Riddle-Master Trilogy.” Extrapolation. 46.1 (2005): 25-35. Proquest. Leavey Lib., Los Angeles. 4 Nov. 2008
McKillip, Patricia A. In the Forests of Serre. New York: Ace Books, 2003.
McKillip, Patricia A. The Tower at Stony Wood. New York: Ace Books, 2000.
Pilinovsky, Helen. “The Mother of All Witches: Baba Yaga and Brume in Patricia A. McKillip’s In the Forrest of Serre.” Extrapolation. 46.1 (2005): 36-49. Proquest. Leavey Lib., Los Angeles. 4 Nov. 2008
Tennyson, Alfred. “The Lady of Shalott.” The Lady of Shalott. 13 Nov. 2008
