{"id":17611,"date":"2019-02-16T10:22:43","date_gmt":"2019-02-16T18:22:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/?p=17611"},"modified":"2019-02-16T10:22:43","modified_gmt":"2019-02-16T18:22:43","slug":"sisters-in-_rose-daughter_","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2019\/02\/16\/sisters-in-_rose-daughter_\/","title":{"rendered":"Sisters in _Rose Daughter_"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p>I\u2019m reading Robin McKinley\u2019s <cite>Rose Daughter<\/cite> (1997), for the first time. I\u2019m sorry to say that it\u2019s not quite grabbing me yet, though it\u2019s growing on me as it goes on. (I\u2019m nearly a quarter of the way through it.)<\/p>\r\n<p>But there\u2019s one thing I love about it: the portrayal of the three sisters who love and like and support each other, and have different and complementary strengths that they all respect. I haven\u2019t done a comprehensive study or anything, but I feel like having a set of supportive sisters is very rare in fairytales and fairytale reworkings\u2014I feel like in these kinds of stories, siblings in general (and maybe sisters in particular) tend to range from ignorable to outright evil.<\/p>\r\n<p>(In the original 1740 Villeneuve <cite><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Beauty_and_the_Beast\">La Belle et la B\u00eate<\/a><\/cite>, according to Wikipedia, the merchant had six daughters and six sons; in the 1756 Beaumont abridgement\/revision, it was three daughters and three sons. I\u2019m not sure, but I gather that in neither version did Beauty have supportive sisters. Nor are they particularly supportive or well-delineated in the 1889 Andrew Lang version.)<\/p>\r\n<p>Anyway, I\u2019m really liking the three sisters and their interactions in the McKinley book.<\/p>\r\n<p>\u2026While I\u2019m here, a couple of quotes that have caught my eye so far:<\/p>\r\n<blockquote>\r\n<p>[Beauty] would much rather scrub a floor\u2014not that she ever had scrubbed a floor, but she assumed it would be hard, dull, unpleasant work\u2014than attend a ball, which was hard, dull, unpleasant work that didn\u2019t even have a clean floor to show for it afterwards. [p. 8]<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n<p>And:<\/p>\r\n<blockquote>\r\n<p>[The salamander talks to Beauty.] Listen to me, my friend. I give you a small serenity. I would give you a large one, but I am uncertain of human capacity, and I furthermore believe you would not wish it. This is a serenity you can hold in the palms of your two hands\u2014even smaller than I am. [p. 18]<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n<p>And:<\/p>\r\n<blockquote>\r\n<p>[Beauty holds roses near her father\u2019s face as he\u2019s waking up, to remind him of her dead mother\u2019s rose perfume.] He murmured her mother\u2019s name, but gently, knowing she was gone but happy in the memory of her[\u2026] [p. 46]<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17611","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17611","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17611"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17611\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17612,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17611\/revisions\/17612"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17611"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17611"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17611"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}