'Murderer's House' - University of Victoria

Chapter 3: Storytelling and Memory in Deutschland, bleiche Mutter
Storytelling as a Female Art
For centuries women have told stories to each other and to their children. The
female narrator of Margaret Atwood‟s story, “Significant Moments in the Life of my
Mother” (1984), conspiratorially reports that there are always “some stories which my
mother does not tell when there are men present: never at dinner, never at parties” (11).
The reader learns that these stories are usually told in domestic settings: “usually in the
kitchen, when [the women] are shelling peas, or taking the tops and tails off the string
beans or husking corn” (Atwood 11). They are melodramatic tales telling of “romantic
betrayals, unwanted pregnancies, illnesses of various horrible kinds, marital infidelities,
mental breakdowns, tragic suicides, unpleasant lingering deaths” (Atwood 11). These
stories of women‟s lived experience are received by the female company with reverent
attention: “The women, their own hands moving silently among the dirty dishes or the
husks of vegetable, nod solemnly” (Atwood 11).
The tales to which Atwood refers are the legacy of a narrative tradition in which
women are the primary storytellers. In Europe, this tradition flowed down through the
generations primarily through women‟s oral retelling until the stories were appropriated
by male collectors and editors who channelled them into print culture. The history of the
fairy tale in France and Germany illustrates how stories once recited by women were later
co-opted and disseminated by men. Fairy tale scholar Warner claims that while in the
eyes of posterity Charles Perrault (1628-1703) has become the most famous French
pioneer of fairy tales, he was greatly outnumbered and in some cases preceded by women
authors whose work has faded from view (xii). Le Cabinet des fées (The Fairy Library),
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