Untitled - CSUN ScholarWorks - California State University, Northridge
Untitled - CSUN ScholarWorks - California State University, Northridge
Untitled - CSUN ScholarWorks - California State University, Northridge
You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles
YUMPU automatically turns print PDFs into web optimized ePapers that Google loves.
V)<br />
Vl<br />
QJ<br />
-o<br />
·o<br />
0<br />
u<br />
(j)<br />
.::J.<br />
QJ<br />
..!:<br />
......<br />
.8<br />
t:<br />
(j)<br />
u<br />
Vl<br />
(j)<br />
0<br />
70<br />
I am not afraid. Not of another person coming. No one is<br />
coming. It is only myself I face in this silence, my mind<br />
breathing in the whiteness, reflecting it, my mind<br />
expanding to fill the space between the frozen creek bed<br />
and the dark canopy.<br />
As a young girl I dreamed of being the fairy tale<br />
princess so familiar in stories like Cinderella and Snow<br />
White. These tales told me to desire passivity, physical<br />
beauty, the handsome male energy to save me from the<br />
dangers of the patriarchal world. Those were my conscious<br />
daydreams. I didn't know enough to question them. But at<br />
night, it was the goddess herself that called to me from the<br />
matriarchal world. It is I that you want. I am the power. You<br />
are powerful through me. And I saved this information away<br />
deep, buried where no one could see it or contradict it.<br />
Thus it is the shattering of the magical mirror that is<br />
the impetus of the Snow Queen tale, in which the young<br />
male character, Kai, has the unlucky fate of catching a tiny<br />
piece of that sharp glass in his heart and thus begins to see<br />
the world through the distorted perspective of one who is<br />
unloved and unloving. He is easily lured away from his<br />
family when he hitches his sled to the back of the Snow<br />
Queen's sleigh for a ride, She flies away to her palace of ice<br />
far away in the north, leaving his family behind to wonder<br />
at his disappearance. In this version of the joumey myth,<br />
the little boy has become the damsel in distress as his<br />
young female friend, Gerda, begins her joumey as<br />
protagonist to find and save him. But I know that her<br />
joumey lies not outward in the world but rather in the<br />
deep, deep down place of the ice palace, to the goddess<br />
herself.<br />
Gerda first goes to the river where the villagers believe<br />
the young boy has drowned. There she throws her new red<br />
shoes into the river hoping for an exchange. One pair of<br />
new red shoes for her best friend. The river's water carries