Rachel N. Spear, "Saving Self and Others in Telling: Rhetoric, Stories, and Transformations" (Assay 11.1)

ASSAY: A JOURNAL OF NONFICTION STUDIES
11.1

Rachel N. Spear

Saving Self and Others in Telling:
Rhetoric, Stories, and Transformations

Four sentences filled with emotion and implication. Four sentences that appear early in Patricia Weaver Francisco’s 1999 memoir appropriately titled Telling: A Memoir of Rape and Recovery: “I’ve told this story many times. I’ve never told it this way before. Telling requires a kind of courage that I normally lack. This book is an exertion, a promise I’m keeping, and it’s slow going” (18). Francisco’s narrative reconstruction of her rape and recovery is not like hashing out the exacts for a police report or like journaling the events for herself. Rather, her textual representation, creatively and cleverly, braids together four distinct narrative layers: the narrative of her presently writing her rape story; the narrative of her past rape and the years living in its aftermath; the narrative of her telling a bedtime story to her son; and the insertion of excerpts from that bedtime story—Hans Christian Anderson’s classic fairy tale The Snow Queen.” [1]

Francisco’s memoir has received little scholarly attention—a review here, a footnote there. Scholars briefly acknowledge the author’s style and memoir’s form, indicating that Francisco writes in “an almost halting, episodic style…[that] is deliberately self-conscious” (Gediman and Zaleski 60) and making note that “fairy tale…[is] a central device in telling her traumatic story” (Haase, “Children” 374). However, these quick references limit the significance of Francisco’s rhetorical moves, particularly how her memoir hinges on feminist rhetorics, multiple rhetorical positionings, and a layered narrative structure that transcends the individual-based pitfall of therapeutic rhetoric. Intersecting feminist rhetorical theory with trauma studies, autobiographical studies, and fairy tale scholarship, I illuminate how Francisco fuses her seemingly fragmented narratives together with a storytelling thread not only to implore social change but also to reconstruct her identity. Francisco writes herself as someone who has moved past the trauma, depicting her present self as mother, activist, and storyteller while textually interrupting her (everyday) telling of a bedtime story with the extensive, layered detailed telling of her rape and recovery. Such narrative interruptions rhetorically mirror the return of trauma and its symptoms, surfacing during normal occurrences. Thus, Francisco’s four distinct narratives, in a way, represent fragmented versions of the self, a seemingly fractured identify attempting to make sense out of the insensible and attempting to exist in the present while being interrupted with memories, with sensations, with stories of the past.

Francisco’s fragmentations of narratives coupled with the presence of fairy tales would, at a glance, seem in line with assertions made by Elizabeth Wanning Harries in her article titled “The Broken Mirror: Women’s Autobiography and Fairy Tales.” Engaging with women writers who rely on fairy tales and building on scholar Cristina Bacchilega’s mirror metaphor, Harries argues that female subjectivities are eternally fractured and that “the mirror [does] not pretend to reflect subjectivities or lives as unified wholes” (109-110).[2] Thus, according to Harries, women who have “[f]ractured identities demand fractured forms” within the reconstruction of their stories and can find “a momentary self glimpsed in a remembered scene—or in a fragment of a fairy tale” (110). While valid, I deviate from Harries. Informed by feminist rhetorical theory, I profess that one can be both fractured and whole. Francisco’s fragmentations—melded together by hope and a belief in stories—extend her ruptured identity to that of an identity where healing remains in process and where her emotional wholeness can be, and ultimately is, reclaimed. As feminist theorist Trinh T. Min-ha poetically indicates, “A shattered mirror still functions as a mirror; it may destroy the dual relation of I to I but leaves the infiniteness of life’s reflections intact. Here reality is not reconstituted, I is put into pieces so as to allow another world to rebuild (keep on unbuilding and rebuilding) itself with its debris” (23). Thus, Francisco’s fragmentations of self, much like her fragmented form, play vital roles in her transformation—and her rebuilding of self.

While Harries is justified in asserting that “these [fairy tale] images are refracted in splintered forms of [women’s autobiographical] narratives” and that “[o]ne conventional form, one unambiguous mirror cannot contain them” (109), Francisco’s fractured narrative form and use of fairy tale invite a reflection where she can simultaneously exist within and beyond her trauma and fragmentations. When considering Francisco’s writing process and writing purpose(s) coupled with her evolving identity, her memoir and its narrative layers become a means for her to create order and control around an event that, for so long, had been beyond her grasp. Through writing, Francisco reclaims power over an event where she felt powerless by “fix[ing]” it in a black-and-white, static product (DeSalvo 6-7). With its carefully laid out chapters and multiple narratives cleverly woven together by her storyteller role, fragmented yet fluid, Francisco structures a chaotic past that may otherwise elude her understanding, aiding in her re-identification and helping her to accept an inability to understand all that had occurred and to recognize that some loss may never be recovered. Storytelling, for Francisco, provides a mechanism for her to examine both self and society and to acknowledge her fractures while re-constructing a renewed, and emotionally whole, self.

(Re)Writing Rape, Fragmentations, and Rhetoric

By invoking an urgent need to tell rape stories, Francisco engenders a social call in line with the well-known feminist agenda of speaking out against violence. While writing scholar Tara Roeder recognizes the potential for rape stories, including Francisco’s memoir, to promote activism and recovery, raise public consciousness, and ultimately alter the general understanding of rape (24, 28), other scholars such as Sarah E. Stone Watt have criticized accounts of trauma for relegating transformation to the writer alone through their use of therapeutic rhetoric. However, Francisco’s multiple layers and heightened attention to language blur self-examination with cultural analysis in ways that help her to process her trauma and redefine herself while simultaneously modeling social change. Grappling with psychological effects posttrauma, Francisco uses writing to make sense of that life-altering act and of a society that closes its eyes and ears to rape stories. In this section, I convey how her dual examination of self and society circumvents a sole individualistic view of therapeutic rhetoric and occurs due to her multiple layers at play. Ultimately, Franscisco constructs a text where self and social transformations are intrinsically linked—something that is evident when the memoir and its fragmented structure are read through a feminist rhetorical lens and when acknowledging both her attention to rhetoric and her focus on stories and storytelling.

Francisco speaks out while adding layers to the silences and the stories told (by whom, to whom, and for what purposes) and constructing her “survivor narrative”—a phrase more readily used today, yet one that is still fraught with tension. According to Wendy Hesford, “Survivor narratives do expose oppressive material conditions, violence, and traumas; give voice to heretofore silent histories; help shape public consciousness about violence against women; and thus alter history’s narrative” (195). Conversely, survivor narratives can run the risk of being viewed as an isolated case that conveys one woman’s strength. Thus, while feminist circles testify to the progress and increased public consciousness, perhaps more recently with movements such as #metoo, of survivors’ stories, they are limited by how their audience receives and responds to them (Alcoff and Gray 268). [3] Engaging with rape narratives and readers’ responses, Sarah E. Stone Watt analyzes how a survivor’s memoir falls short of cultural change. Specifically, she writes, “Positing ‘save yourself’ as the moral of the story, readers (whether they acknowledge additional factors in the process or not) ultimately frame rape as something that an individual must work to survive on their own…rather than recognizing their experience as a shared social reality influenced by larger structures of social power” (73). Stone Watt builds off Dana L. Cloud and Naomi R. Rockler to underscore that “therapeutic rhetoric reframes the problem as something to be addressed privately” and “moves people away from political action and turns their attention inward, focusing on what they can do for themselves to cope with their individual challenges” (76, 71). [4] Thus, despite authorial intentions, readers all too often reduce the traumatic experience as an individual one, removed from social action.

Francisco avoids an isolated implication by centralizing cultural change and refusing to construct one storyline, merging her private world with a cultural critique throughout her layered multiple and fragmented narratives. The emphasis on rhetoric and (rape) stories threads Francisco’s narrative layers together while serving as an organizing component and becoming a significant factor in her transformation. Specifically, Francisco’s healing process becomes woven with her newfound purpose of challenging dominant narratives of rape, and her attention to language fosters opportunities for the writing of her memoir to assist with both her reclaiming of self and pursuit of social change. As Trinh highlights, our stories intersect others’ stories and extend beyond single positioning: “In this chain and continuum, I am but one link. The story is me, neither me nor mine…Each story is at once a fragment and a whole; a whole within a whole” (122-123). Invoking pluralities and multiplicities, Trinh theorizes how “[i]n the honoring of multiplicity, rhetors do not seek to construct messages that are clear, transparent, and reductive; rather, they construct messages that are deliberately ambiguous and that encourage attention to and a valuing of multiple perspectives” (Foss et al. 244). Francisco’s layering of multiple narratives and inclusion of fragmented yet whole storylines that explore her trauma in context of a larger, shared cultural issue link individual and collective stories, emphasizing “healing within the broader context of social and political conditions” (Stone Watt 80). In doing so, Francisco employs a therapeutic rhetoric that continually reminds and revolves around both individual and social change, unpacking her continued silence and a cultural disregard for rape stories.

Francisco’s layered memoir opens with an interrogation of cultural norms and the perpetuation of societal scripts. Stressing that myths engulf the issue while silence swallows cultural and personal stories of rape, Francisco writes,

And one of the myths we live by is that rape doesn’t exist. Not really. Not like baseball and heart attacks and love affairs and taxes. Not like the things we talk about together in the evening and feel the need to understand…These myths keep women and men from having the conversations that might save our lives, our loves. (2)

Drawing attention to the lack of dialogue prevalent in the nineties, Francisco, much like feminist and cultural theorist bell hooks, highlights that dialogue fosters social change. As hooks affirms, “To engage in dialogue is one of the simplest ways we can begin…to cross boundaries, the barriers that may or may not be erected by race, gender, class, professional standing, and a host of other differences” (130). In Feminist Rhetorical Theories, Foss et al. remind us that “[t]he dialogue hooks envisions as enabling growth and transformation for its participants is best practiced through the mediating force of love…[a] love [that] is a politicized force that enables movement against dehumanization, against domination” (88). Juxtaposing conversations that occur with the ones that need to occur, Francisco sets her readers up for her narrative layers, which work together to educate and inculcate change.

Francisco views conversations about rape as transformative, but also underlines that silence is wrapped in a desire to ignore, explaining that “rape survivors are encouraged by a kind of societal magical thinking [meaning that] [i]f we aren’t talking about it, maybe it isn’t happening” (20). Thus, Francisco merges survivors’ silence with a societal refusal to listen—while also acknowledging that such dismissals add to the already challenging task of telling rape stories. As a result, survivors experience internal and external pressures to suppress their stories. For Francisco, factors that weighed into her silences included self-blame, embarrassment, pain, and threats by her rapist (9, 20, 19, 40-41). Francisco fittingly affirms, “Survivors hear the request for their silence, and can be left believing they are the problem and their silence the solution” (20). Ultimately, Francisco’s point rests on the notion that society must extend invitations to receive these stories and must truly listen—without judging and without blaming—while assuming active roles, breaking down harmful representations, and combatting acts and words that dismiss or simplify the issue. Francisco’s testament backs up Roeder’s assertion that public reception and potential change rest in “the complex power associated with not only the telling, but the hearing, of such [rape] stories” (28).

Francisco aims for general reception, and her four narrative layers when braided together become demonstrative of her assertion that rape is not just a “women’s issue” but a social one (64). Focused on multiple audiences, Francisco’s fragmented memoir pushes her social agenda and captures what bell hooks might label “feminist theory that strives to speak to women, men and children about ways we might transform our lives via a conversion to feminist practice” (70; qtd. in Foss et al. 84). By weaving in others’ rape stories when sharing her own, Francisco reaffirms that our individual stories are parts of a larger, communal story and that we are all participants in social change. Insisting that conversations around and about rape are for everyone, including men and children, Francisco hinges her purpose on the power of words, structurally organizing her memoir around storytelling and rhetorically positioning her son in a prominent role of receiving the fairy tale that is woven throughout the memoir as well as witnessing her rape story by the memoir’s end. Doing so suggests an ease in which her theory could be enacted, in general and while crossing gendered lines—such enactment is in line with hooks’s notion that “our lives must be a living example of our politics” (48; qtd. in Foss et al. 85). As Foss et al. reveal, “[Enactment] allows rhetors to disrupt domination at a very personal level simply by acting and engaging in rhetoric that is nondominating, nonexploitative, and nonoppressive…It is directed at other rhetors explicitly—although others may observe the rhetor’s behavior and choose to imitate it—but primarily at rhetors’ own thoughts and actions as they try to live in ways that are nondominating” (94). Thus, throughout Francisco’s memories, small acts, and enactment of her ideas, readers witness the possibility of dialogue across age and genders as well as both individual and social transformations.

Connected to this strategy, Francisco’s awareness of language and attunement to rhetoric, which surface throughout the memoir, encourage her audience to pay attention to the implications of words. For Francisco, even small changes in diction hold ripple effects, altering meaning and promoting greater understanding—in self, the world around her, and even the purpose of her memoir. Francisco insinuates that her memoir is far from self-indulgent and that her self-growth has led to this larger mission. She writes, “I am no longer interested in the death inherent in rape. I am interested in the death of rape” (15). The first speaks to her personal loss while the second transfers her purpose to social activism. The switch in preposition demonstrates her transformed self posttrauma, a self who holds to the belief that our choices in selecting and receiving words make differences. For Francisco, that latter death is possible when conversations around and about rape become as standard as other discussions. When stories are shared and traumas are named, society holds a responsibility to listen and to foster positive changes. She moves her purpose beyond the self and positions her memoir around her idea that stories will be our saving grace and should be woven into our daily lives.

Francisco further affirms that stories tap into a shared humanity, connecting and creating empathy for others. She reveals that her words and stories literally kept her alive on August 14, 1981, underscoring the interplay of conversation between people and power relationships that may unfold: “My most deeply held belief about my experience of rape is that, by talking, I saved my life. Here’s how the story goes…” (Francisco 17). In that retelling, Francisco stresses that it was her storytelling that liberated her from the clutches of death: “Tell. Talk about yourself. Spill it” and “Talk, tell, everything. If he’s thinking about killing you, which he still is, let him know just exactly whom he is killing” (18, 21). [5] However, she complicates this idea with a recognition that words may also oppress and divide, highlighting their distinct differences as well as his threatening words to return and cut off her nose if she did speak to anyone, which caused her to exist in a “continued silence” (Francisco 40, 41). Thus, she reminds her readers that words and stories may build bonds but may also break our belief in others, and even in ourselves. Writing her memoir, in many ways, is Francisco’s ultimate act of shattering her silence while simultaneously (re)positioning responsibility and (re)asserting control over her story of rape when social ideas and ideals, all too often, work to shame victims and to minimize the issue.

Throughout the memoir, Francisco’s complicated relationship with language works not only to shed light on her healing journey but also to establish reliability as a narrator. Francisco garners credibility as someone who has experienced the trauma and who has worked through different stages of her own recovery—even trying out traditional and alternative therapies—while learning more about herself, her traumatic experience and its aftermath, and the implications of our words and others’ words on both social constructions and internalized images of the self. Such credibility aids in making Francisco’s memoir “accessible to audiences,” which for bell hooks comes with “the potential to intervene in structures of domination” (Foss et al. 85). Moreover, Francisco further gains readers’ trust by unpacking her changing comfort level with language and by sharing that her own rape story took years to work through to arrive at to this level of open, public disclosure. To explain, Francisco recalls the moment when she first attempted to tell her mother about the rape. She writes, “I found it impossible to speak” (Francisco 19). Engaging with her avoidance to name the trauma and her inability to speak, Francisco found herself caught in what Herman identifies as a “double bind,” wanting to tell, yet desiring to forget. [6] She even narrates how she lacked the ability to assign the very word to the event at that specific time. The word itself was too much to say, too much to bring into reality. Francisco notes, “I didn’t use the word at this point. I was still saying assaulted, attacked” (19). Unable to assign the word “rape” at this moment highlights that her identity was once more fragmented, more traumatized than she is at the point of narration.

Her narrative distance, coupled with her decision to layer her storylines with an analysis of her own rhetoric, enacts the need to examine how language shapes identity and interpretations of cultural issues. In doing so, Francisco shows her recovery process, developed consciousness, and heightened attention to and assessment of language. She writes, “I am learning not to say I was raped but a man raped me. Grammatically, this is the difference between the passive and active voice” (14). This switch within the statement, while known in most feminist circles, becomes a rhetorical move to make the perpetrator the subject, placing the act on the actor, but it doubles as a rhetorical lesson for readers. When active voice is avoided, the person who committed the crime vanishes, and the focus remains passively on the victim, rhetorically removing the responsible party and perpetuating a social script of self-blame, self-guilt, and lack of action. Thus, Francisco’s awareness of language and decision to unpack her reasoning textually aid in her moving past self-blame and sole responsibility—situating the deed on the doer and helping her to recognize that she had no control over his actions. In doing so, she progresses with her healing, renewing self awareness and strengthening her consciousness, but her inclusion of this examination also serves to model these shifts for others to adopt (hooks 48, 70). Furthermore, through writing out the nuances, she drops the monolithic label of victim, conveying that she is more than her past.

Francisco’s interest in rhetoric may result from her role as a writing teacher, and her analyses of what we say and how we say it serve as overt calls for others to alter our wording. Her decision to include her breakdown of passive versus active voice was a conscious effort to transform cultural norms—much like her detailed examination of the word rape itself. Francisco reveals how the very word holds potential to shut down conversations. When writing her memoir and questioned about her book’s topic, Francisco stresses the word “rape” often resulted in avoidance or retraction. She writes, “I’m often aware of causing discomfort, of the conversation collapsing into embarrassed silence” (Francisco 20). While her reflective stance articulates an attunement to others’ emotions and reactions, Francisco also demonstrates how that one word could, and often did, inflict pain and pity when disclosing her personal experience: “I felt I was carrying a bomb. Every time I told someone that I had been raped, I caused a small explosion” (19). Francisco’s reflections outline yet another reason why victims tend to remain silent or to share only when situations invite discourse. Even then, society tends to ignore the issue or to remain at surface levels. Her transparency works to educate her readers on not only silences but also their role as listeners.

Francisco’s rhetorical lessons continue when she further highlights how language affects the internalization of identity as well as others’ perceptions. Words like “victim” and “traumatized” leave marks, relegating individuals to static positionings, reinforcing the occurrence of the trauma when one is attempting to rebuild and redefine a shattered self. Evoking these ideas, Francisco presents to her reader that “survivor is the word currently preferred to victim” (14). However, she is quick to question even that term, a term that feminist circles often glorify:

The modifier missing in our use of the word survivor is physical. Indeed, my physical body survived, but for a long time, I felt like a woman in mourning. Spiritual, sexual, and affectional death is less visible than the death of a body and not necessarily final…I died a different kind of death, I wrote a month after I’d survived. I went into hiding and can’t be found, not by you, not by anyone. (Francisco 15)

She wrote the italicized words after her rape, perhaps in a journal, although exactly where is unclear. What is clear is that writing her memoir allowed her to analyze her previous writings while comparing her more fragmented self with a changed identity at the point of writing the memoir. This passage equates her survival with death, albeit a death that is of a former self, a death that is “less visible,” less recognized by others. While she had physically survived rape and had been assigned the label “survivor” by social standards, she could not yet identify with the term. Even that term is problematic. As Stone Watt insists, these “victim” and “survivor” terms “bracket out women’s stories of sexual violence by denying them the complexities of such an experience…[and] simplify[ing] the outcome of the narrative—the victim is to be pitied while the survivor is celebrated for courage” (71). Francisco’s disassociation with and interrogation of the term “survivor” yield insight into her psyche and healing process, acknowledging the role language plays in perceptions while also revealing trauma’s aftermath on her sense of self. She could not feel anything but a life-shattering loss that fractured her identity and view of the world—one where classifications fall short of trauma’s complexities. Furthermore, Francisco’s focus on the missing modifier that should stress “physical” survival amplifies the importance of rhetoric—in her own healing, in her own self-understanding, in her interrogation of cultural norms and problematic silences, and ultimately, in needed societal transformations.

While this memoir with its various layers is a social call for cultural awakening, in true narrative therapy form, it also offers a space for personal transformation. Engaging in what literary scholar Suzette Henke has labeled as “scriptotherapy,” Francisco “[writes] out and [writes] through [her] traumatic experience in the mode of therapeutic reenactment” (Henke xii). [7] Such therapeutic factors of narrative have been readily recognized by others as a means to “organiz[e] trauma” (Pennebaker 185) and “to make order out of the chaos” (Harris 7). Yet Francisco moves beyond simply ordering and organizing; she rewrites her past experiences through the lens of a new present self in a layered narrative where she assumes multiple roles, from victim to survivor to activist to mother to storyteller, rhetorically refusing static labels and singular stories—in line with Trinh’s notion that “a rhetoric rooted in the stability…reinforces ideologies…[while] the creation of messages that [disrupt] expectations and honor multiplicity” breaks patriarchal structures (Foss et al. 249). While Francisco’s reflections, written in past tense, serve as a means to narrate who she once was, they also stress who she has become, representing that she has moved beyond that traumatized position and has rewritten her identity, better integrating her trauma into this new self—a self with the purpose of writing this memoir, of working to fix what she views to be a broken structure, and of making strides to end rape.

With these new purposes, she performs an essential move in healing, one that is part of her “never-ending processes of healing” (Spear 66). She recreates and reestablishes her relationship with herself and with others. Re-identification of self is intertwined with mourning the loss of her former self, creating a new self, and often the telling and retelling of one’s story of trauma. Herman explains that with repetitive tellings of the trauma story, survivors begin to view their experiences as only portions of who they are currently and as events that exist in their pasts (Herman 195). Herman continues,

Having come to terms with the traumatic past, the survivor faces the task of creating a future. She has mourned the old self that the trauma destroyed; now she must develop a new self. Her relationships have been tested and forever changed by the trauma; now she must develop new relationships. The old beliefs that gave meaning to her life have been challenged; now she must find anew a sustaining faith. (196; qtd. in Spear 66)

This is just what Francisco depicts throughout the memoir itself, with her layers, rhetorical choices, and structural decisions.

Francisco layers her multiple identities, textually disrupting the stories and threading together her past and present selves to designate how far she has traveled. Allowing her readers to see her as both victim and survivor enables her readers to journey with her as she struggles, fluctuating between the two, making progress only to fall back. Throughout the chapters of her rape and recovery, Francisco demonstrates the complex process of searching for what she lost, of fearing darkness, of being unable to embrace her (at the time) husband’s touch, and in short, of trying to live in the aftermath of the rape. In an interview conducted by Anastasia Faunce, Francisco shows that she is aware of her rhetorical choices, explaining her decision to weave together storylines and to rely on both past and present tense:

The past tense says, ten years from what’s happening here, I'm O.K. I’ve lost a lot. I’ve gained some things. But I am not in that moment anymore. That moment has passed. There are many, many layers on top of that moment that allow me to stand here and tell you about it. And the layers are as important for me as the moment of the rape itself.

Her words highlight that she considers herself to have recovered and to have moved beyond a traumatized, shattered self, indicating that the wounded self and “[t]hat moment has passed.” Her two different identity positionings unfold due to structure and tense, where both past and present storylines rupture the other while together offering a fluid yet cohesive narrative of recovery.

Francisco reaches what Herman labels as the third stage of recovery by rewriting herself from victim to survivor to activist to storyteller. The last role encompasses all of her other labels, and Francisco’s memoir showcases her new identity and a newfound social purpose posttrauma. Her re-creation of her self is not solely depicted with past and present selves; rather, her memoir takes her readers on a journey with her as she “develop[s] a new self” and “find[s] anew a sustaining faith” through her textual agenda of saving lives by telling or narrating her story. While taking on these new identity labels, Francisco shares her personal recovery work with her readers—down to the very details that make her story hers and that will challenge readers to interrogate social structures—all in hopes of “a different world for women, for men, and for the children who inherit what we make of it” (3). Structurally, Francisco employs her role as a mother and the framework around a bedtime story to her son to organize the writing of her memoir, and through writing, she begins to view herself not as a wounded raped individual but as an activist-storyteller. This rhetorical positioning of activist-storyteller deepens her healing and establishes the unifying thread that amplifies self-understanding and narrative purpose while allowing the memoir to be a textual venue for her to reassert agency over who she is after the rape and who she is to become.

Story/Telling the Layers of Change

Francisco’s most prominent move as activist-storyteller connects to the layering of the bedtime story. Specifically, Francisco frames her rape and recovery with a bedtime story and relies on the fairy tale genre as an enactment of her belief that telling stories yields social change and should be shared no matter the audience. In this section, I show how threading together her rape and recovery stories with that of the bedtime story further asserts her present and layered positioning of storyteller, to her son, her readers, and herself. Moreover, I contend that her inclusion of the multiple, fragmented storylines organized around the fairy tale motif intervenes in existing scholarship that asserts that women’s autobiographical writings turn to fairy tales and fragmented structures in order to reflect their own fragmented identities, as Harries suggests. Rather, I insist that Francisco’s reliance on storytelling and inclusion of the selected fairy tale work together to enable her to move toward her purpose of social change, to reclaim her agency, and to redefine herself as “whole” even within her fragmentations—while the tale selected illuminates another purpose for her memoir, one driven by her continual process of recovery.

The juxtaposition between rape stories and bedtime stories is first mentioned in her prologue when she writes, “If the occurrence of rape were audible, its decibel level equal to its frequency, it would overpower our days and nights, interrupt our meals, our bedtime stories…” (Francisco 2). To emphasize this, she enacts this interruption by beginning her memoir with the telling of a classic fairy tale as a bedtime story to her son in present tense, textually disrupting that narrative with the narratives of her rape and recovery. Such narrative rupture is significant due to temporal difference alone, but the genre selected and the tale told extend her narrative purpose of social transformation and link to her healing process.

By dedicating so much textual space to the telling of the bedtime story, Francisco conveys that the fairy tale is a calculated move. The memoir opens with her and her son Andre settling into his bed for a story, and both Andre and Francisco’s readers realize that this tale will be a lengthy encounter with repeated interruption (5). Specifically, the bedtime story returns in chapters eight, eighteen, and twenty-one. Francisco shares with her readers that she is “willing to force this tale on [her son] for [her] own purposes,” aiming to use the story and its words as catalysts to instill lessons (5). Thus, like the children in fairy tales who enter the forest and come out changed, he, too, by listening, will undergo a sort of transformation “[b]y the end” when he knows “the whole story” (5). [8] Told in fragments, the tale exists as much in its parts as it does in its entirety while bringing the fragmented narratives together by the memoir’s end and explicitly emphasizing her son’s acceptance of her rape story and this idea that he “seemed a full human being in that moment, a young man” (Francisco 222). This last phrase indicates that Andre is transformed, following suit with the purpose of the fairy tale genre, having heard the tale and having grown due to its moral.

As the primary recipient of both stories, her son represents all children and future change. Turning to storytelling, Francisco refuses to perpetuate social silence and demonstrates that sharing uncomfortable stories with men and children is possible and needed to make the world a better place “for women, for men, and for the children” (3). Ultimately, her inclusion of the fragmented fairy tale answers bell hooks’s call for methods that “[help] individuals integrate feminist thinking and practice into daily life” (70). [9] Storytelling, for Francisco, becomes a strategy that weaves personal and social stories of rape into accessible daily habits for all.

Andre is not the only recipient. The textual inclusion of excerpts from the bedtime story ensures that her readers are exposed to the classic tale while simultaneously receiving the other narratives about her rape and recovery intertwined with her research related to both. [10] Francisco’s layered storylines enable her to further adopt the role of storyteller, positioning her as the teller of each narrative fragment, acknowledging the story being told, and making explicit references to her writing process. Calling attention to the flaws of memory and to authorial selection amplifies this idea of the memoir’s textual reconstruction of the past. Francisco states, “I have done my best to tell [you] the truth, and to acknowledge the layers and distortions that time can contribute to memory. I have not included everything that occurred since August 14, 1981” (2). As storyteller, she welcomes us into her memories filled with intimate details contextualized within this larger, social frame, constructing a layered memoir that is whole despite and because of its fragmentations. Her position of storyteller with an explicit acknowledgement of her memoir as “a story” strengthens her relationship with her readers. Her overt revelations that memory fails and that the trauma of her experience may have even blocked memories write her as a trustworthy teller. Moreover, the oral nature and feminine position of storyteller work to close the gap between her and her readers. [11] As literary scholar Kevin Smith aptly explains, storytelling’s orality “place[s] author and reader within the same imaginary world space as folkloric storyteller/listener” (97). Thus, as readers, we enter into the world in which Francisco creates, where she lays out her limitations and her right to authorial selection, and where we, like her son, read/listen to her stories. [12] As part of this process, for Francisco, readers become vital in her personal growth posttrauma, witnessing and validating her rape story while acknowledging her existence beyond the trauma, aiding in her redefinition of self, and, hopefully, joining in her collective call for cultural change. [13]

Throughout her memoir, Francisco’s storytelling enters what has been called a “survivor discourse” and engages with survivor rhetoric by revealing her thoughts, confessions, and recovery process. Alcoff and Gray stress, one of the main goals of survivor discourse is to speak out, to tell one’s story, and doing so “serves to educate the society at large about the dimension of sexual violence and misogyny, to reposition the problem from the individual psyche to the social sphere where it rightfully belongs, and to empower victims to act constructively on our own behalf and thus make the transition from passive victim to active survivor” (261-262). [14] Francisco refuses to shift the focus solely to labels such as victim or perpetrator. Rather, her narrative structure and storyteller positioning force readers to view her as both victim and survivor, both participant and activist, both mother and child. Francisco’s role of storyteller coupled with her emphasis on cultural change establishes a memoir that clearly prioritizes the teller and its audience and the world in which they live, a world that the tale helps to construct and, in this case, deconstruct (Smith 103).
Francisco’s role of storyteller also embodies the roles of writer and scholar, of subject and researcher, and the telling of her personal story extends to a shared cultural and theoretical story of rape. Francisco’s storytelling her way into survivor discourse includes additional layering of historical, cultural, and theoretical contexts—from rape cases to literary references to research on trauma. Specifically, Francisco inserts statistics in her text: “one in four women one every six minutes” is raped (1) and “[e]ighty percent of marriages don’t survive rape” (119). She also engages with scholars such as Herman, citing her in her memoir (135), using a quote as an epigraph (39), and expressing that “Herman’s book gave [her] immediate relief, a perspective on symptoms whose persistence had seemed a personal failure” (78). Turning to literary scholars who write on loss, rape, and trauma, Francisco further conveys her expertise by intertwining citations, quotes, and poems from a range of authors such as Tim O’Brien (35), Virginia Woolf (89), and Audre Lorde (117). [15] Doing so enhances her testimony by grounding her personal experience in cultural and theoretical contexts. As Alcoff and Gray explain, drawing on bell hooks, “[T]he realm of the personal can become politically efficacious and transformative and need not obscure the conditions of the production of experience, if women do not merely ‘name’ their experiences but also ‘place their experience within a theoretical context’” (283). When such occurs, the act of telling becomes not only an example of where the personal becomes the political but also a catalyst to foster empowerment for self and others. By telling her story and by weaving her storyteller role with that of an informed theorist, Francisco asserts more agency over her trauma while strengthening her ethos and positioning her experience within larger contexts. She writes herself not only as someone who unpacks dominant structures and mainstream narratives through the lens of her personal story but also as an expert who is aware of the research in the field, a cultural critic who rejects the silences, and a mother who relies on the telling of fairy tales to foster positive change.

Through an analogous relationship between the fairy tale and her rape and recovery, Francisco deepens her healing. Specifically, her selected fairy tale, “The Snow Queen,” revolves around a female protagonist on a journey in search of a lost friend—and we know that the rape had Francisco feeling lost. [16] Thus, the narrative structure that layers this particular fairy tale within her storytelling invites that personal purpose, allowing her to take advantage of the classic transformation that occurs by the end of the fairy tale while simultaneously engaging with the therapeutic benefits of writing.

In the interview conducted by Faunce, Francisco explains her reasons for her selection of “The Snow Queen”:

It’s the only story I could think of in which the one who does not give up, who sets out on a quest, taking roads that go nowhere, is female. She needs all kinds of help. She gets completely diverted: at the old woman’s house with all those flowers jabbering on about their stories, and a whole winter is lost and she’s gotten nowhere. I loved it as a model of a journey that doesn’t happen easily. And yet, if you keep after it and keep getting help and keep taking the advice, you might get there.

During that interview, she further emphasizes that this classic tale represents a “collaborative effort” aimed at trying to “get back to where we want to be,” implying both individual and collective efforts to open and sustain conversations around rape. In essence, Francisco’s layered stories, including the selected fairy tale, stress a collective journey where “[t]he heroine makes mistakes, finds help in strange places, never stops looking for what’s been lost” and where readers, by the end, are also (hopefully) transformed and invested in her cause (6). Such a journey is possible due to multiplicities at play—layered stories that force Francisco to assume roles of both storyteller and heroine of her own tale.

While Francisco never explicitly claims that she has aligned her personal story with the fairy tale or asserts that Gerda, the fairy tale’s heroine, acts as a stand-in for herself, textually, readers discover links. Francisco affirms she’s been on a “long journey back, but not back to the same place” (220). Like Gerda, her journey was not isolated. She had help, namely friends who stood by her (96). Yet in each story, there is “a bit of a fairy tale [that] gave [her] what fairy tales can offer—images stripped to their essence so we can carry them with us as we shape our own stories” (Francisco 112). These overt references to the fairy tale genre’s effect on identity suggest that her storytelling is as much for herself as it is for others (6). Thus, much like the child who hears the fairy tale, Francisco inserts herself in the tale and comes out transformed by its end. Such an equation of her rape story to this fairy tale assists in reclaiming agency over her life while accepting that some pieces of herself will remain lost and that she is forever changed.

However, I assert that equating Francisco to only Gerda falls short—as Francisco, in line with Trinh’s affinity for multiplicities, seems to be both Gerda and Kay, the boy for whom Gerda is searching. In fact, Kay is the one who undergoes transformation, first when viewing all things negatively due to the glass splinters in his eyes and second when saved at the end of the tale. [17] There is even a moment when Francisco acknowledges that she, too, lived “[a]s if [she] [had] gotten a piece of splintered glass in [her] eye” and “view[ed] the world through the narrow lens of rage” (115). Rape, like other traumas, “shatter[s] the sense of connection between individual and community, creating a crisis of faith” and “forces the survivor to relive all her earlier struggles over autonomy, initiative, competence, identity, and intimacy” (Herman 55, 52). Thus, neither solely Gerda nor Kay, Francisco conflates the two, ultimately drawing connections to Hans Christian Anderson’s tale on love, courage, and childlike innocence.

In addition, Francisco, as the storyteller, selected a tale where love, tears, and hope save the lost character. Similarly, her story of rape and recovery is one that is layered with how pain changed her and how love restores. She writes, “Opened up by experience and disappointment, heroes in fairy tales learn how to recognize and make use of gifts. These stories argue that pain is a transformer…Some of what was stolen came back to me, but, as in a fairy tale, in an altered form. The transformation required love, patience, and the help of companions” (155). Thus, her pain has been and can be transformed with the sharing of her story coupled with layers of love and hope and links to others.

Healing often involves telling and retelling the story of rape, reestablishing connections, redeveloping basic faith in others, and relearning understandings and associations of love. Francisco constructs a venue not only to (re)tell her story but also to (re)work through her emotions and to (re)establish who she is and how she loves. As Herman affirms, “[The survivor] tells [her story] completely, in depth and in detail. This work of reconstruction actually transforms the traumatic memory, so that it can be integrated into the survivor’s life story” (175; qtd. in Spear 64). Literary scholar Kalí Tal extends the process by stressing that “[l]iterature of trauma is written from the need to tell and retell the story of traumatic experience, to make it ‘real’ both to the victim and to the community. Such writing serves both as validation and cathartic vehicle for the traumatized author” (21). This extension to catharsis revolves around narrative therapy’s assertion that storying assists to ascribe meaning, and as narrative therapists Michael White and David Epston explain, “[I]n order to make sense of our lives and to express ourselves, experiences must be ‘storied’ and it is this storying that determines the meaning ascribed to experience” (10). Rape took Francisco’s identity as she knew it and ruptured her understanding of the world, and part of Francisco needed the fairy tale story and its connection to her life situation as much as she needed to redefine herself and her life purpose. [18] As Kevin Smith, engaging with Peter Brooks, suggests, postmodern fairy tales, intertextuality, and the storyteller trope offer a psychological framework “in order to understand one’s life” (106). [19] Thus, Francisco’s emphasis on social change and call to tell rape stories with a fairy-tale ease should not overshadow her own transformations.
After its publication, Francisco speaks of how assigning language to her past and writing her memoir assisted in her healing. When talking with interviewer Faunce, Francisco shares that her writing and claiming her story were important for her healing process. She explains,

I think what sustains pain is when the source remains unidentified. Unarticulated. When it’s not been given expression or shape. That process of shaping is transformational. An experience goes from something that is disturbing or limiting or isolating, to something that you can stand, that stands outside of you. You can claim it, or you can put it away.

Her memoir allows her to do both. In fact, it is her, not her son, who wants to hear the end of the fairy tale. Andre quickly dismisses the conclusion, declaring that “[t]here’s always a happy ending in these stories” (Francisco 214). Yet she continues, and she does so for her son, for her readers, and for herself, that inner child who needs comforting, who needs to come out changed, who needs to finalize the ordering of her chaos, to restore and recover her love and belief in others, and in herself.

Textually, Francisco offers her readers a memoir where by its end, she, too, finds her happy ending: “At the West end of the island in Rainy Lake where I write these last words….I’ve marked this fifteenth anniversary privately, in the company of women…My dreams have been quirky and mild…I’m at home in my skin, warmed by the August sun, cleaned out by the edge of winter in the wind” (222). She, like in the fairy tale, is cleansed of her wintery life—and is living in warmth, believing in her own abilities and embracing a return to her childlike trust and hope in both herself and humanity. She concludes her memoir with her “push[ing] off into the cold black water and swim[ming] for the rocky shore of the next island” (222). This final sentence shows peace and serenity while simultaneously acknowledging that the road ahead may not be smooth, nor is she where she wants to be.

Francisco’s attention to language, feminist rhetorics, and reliance on stories, specifically the fairy tale genre, enables her to (re)assert control over her own life (story) while simultaneously enacting social change. Such a claim forefronts the emphasis of writing and interrogation of rhetoric and social norms that occurs throughout the distinct narrative layers before focusing on her storytelling as a layered and stylistic organizer and the telling of the bedtime story as a rhetorical move. This essay departs from Elizabeth Wanning Harries’s argument that women’s autobiographical writings imply fractured subjectivities with their use of fairy tale metaphors; rather, Francisco’s ruptured narrative and intertextuality take the form of a carefully woven collage with the purpose of creating peace and a sense of wholeness with the broken pieces. For Francisco, such disruption of narrative linearity moves beyond being just a backdrop for her fragmented identity, allowing her a space to embrace her multiple roles—a survivor who has lived to tell her tale, an advocate against rape and rape culture, a mother determined to inculcate strong moral values in her son (and in her readers), a heroine who is on her own healing journey, and a storyteller capable of examining individual and collective pasts with hope for better futures. Assuming the role of storyteller and engaging with this storytelling motif, Francisco employs feminist rhetoric to underscore that healing is layered, that rewriting oneself is ongoing, and that fostering social change can, and should, begin with our children.

I would like to thank Courtney George, Grace Wetzel, Christine Masters, Eric Tribunella, and journal reviewers for their feedback and recommendations. I would also like to recognize the Northeast Modern Language Association, where I have presented on earlier ideas; Francis Marion University for awarding a summer research stipend and sabbatical, both which allowed for research and writing; students in multiple Creative Nonfiction classes, who participated in discussions about the memoir; and my partner, Brad Cole, for his assistance and encouragement.

End Notes

[1] Francisco uses this same translation of “The Snow Queen” in her memoir.

[2] Harries explains that “the controlling metaphor of recent women’s autobiographies is the broken mirror, the mirror that does not pretend to reflect subjectivities or lives as unified wholes” (109-110, her emphasis). Donald Haase elaborates on Harries’s claims: “Harries argues on the basis of women’s autobiographical writings that fairy tales act as broken mirrors for women who use them to construct incoherent and unknowable images of themselves, thereby confirming the complex and problematic relations between the classic tales and constructions of female subjectivity” (“Feminist” 25).

[3] While acknowledging the progress made and value of survivors’ testimonies, Alcoff and Gray unpack ways in which survivor speech has been and continues to be silenced and elaborate on restrictions and limitations related to survivor speech (264-268).

[4] Stone Watt’s article focuses on readers’ responses related to one text, examining rape narratives as a genre and implying her findings are applicable to the dominant discourse. Thomas West also focuses on the individualistic implications affiliated with therapeutic rhetorics, albeit with a pedagogical association. Citing Cloud, he writes, “By individualizing the effect of alienation, exploitation, and oppression, much rhetoric of therapy discourages public, collective forms of protest against the broader conditions of human alienation, exploitation, and oppression that are in reality social and political” (West 43-44).

[5] Hesford might claim that Francisco assumed a “deferential posture (a pattern common among victims of domestic violence),” enacting a “familiar gendered script” (201). Explaining that women “mimic socially learned and acceptable female behavior” in efforts to “[not] upset violent men,” Hesford expands on how such acts and posturing enable the victim to (re)assume agency (201).

[6] Literary and trauma scholar Judith Harris further notes, individuals who have experienced trauma often find themselves “calling attention to the existence of some secret while simultaneously trying to protect themselves by deflecting attention away from it” (21; qtd. in Spear 63). Leigh Gilmore aptly highlights the paradox of trauma being removed from language yet “language is pressed forward as that which can heal the survivor of trauma” when the traumatic experience was “self-altering, even self-shattering” (6; qtd. in Spear 61). Furthermore, individuals who have experienced traumas are often victim to extreme and contrasting emotions, specifically, to wanting to remember yet trying to forget, desiring to tell yet trying to avoid, reaching out to others yet withdrawing away. Such oscillations commonly connect to coping mechanisms, feelings of shame and guilt, and manifestations that the trauma story will be too painful for others to witness (Herman 56, 52-53, 138).

[7] Similarities related to the therapeutics of writing exist in “‘Let Me Tell You a Story’: On Teaching Trauma Narratives, Writing, and Healing” (Spear). Referencing Henke, autobiographical scholars Smith and Watson affirm that trauma narratives “can work as therapeutic intervention” and explain that “[s]peaking or writing about trauma becomes a process through which the narrator finds words to give voice to what was previously unspeakable” (22).

[8] As pioneer scholar Bruno Bettelheim notes, fairy tales enrich both adults and children, serving children more, allowing them a chance to learn “about the inner problems of human beings, and of the solutions to their predicaments in any society” (270). Jack Zipes also highlights using this genre for instructional purposes for children (16, 23). Additionally, I acknowledge that fairy tales have been critiqued by scholars and the general public for reinforcing societal and gendered norms. See Karen E. Rowe, “Feminism and Fairy Tales,” Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. 6 (1979), 237-257; Elizabeth Segel, “Feminists & Fairy Tales,” School Library Journal, vol. 29 (1983), 30-31. While a detailed explanation of feminist approaches, critiques, or contemporary feminist tales is out of this article’s scope, Elizabeth Keyser’s review titled “Feminist Revisions: Frauds on the Fairies?” (1989) serves as a useful resource on earlier scholarship, citing Zipes’s edited collection Don’t Bet on the Prince: Contemporary Feminist Fairy Tales in North America and England. More recent scholarship includes Donald Haase’s edited collection titled Fairy Tales and Feminism: New Approaches (2004).

[9] Moreover, as Foss et al. explain hooks, “In order for theory to have the potential to intervene in structures of domination in people’s daily lives, it must be accessible to audiences; it must be translated into forms understandable to audiences that vary in age, sex, ethnicity, and degree of literacy” (85).

[10] See Patricia Pace, “Tellers and Tales (Review).” When reviewing Zipes’s Creative Storytelling: Building Community, Changing Lives, Pace indicates that Zipes “believes in the power of art, in story or drama, to transform lives and communities” and quotes Zipes to explain “there is somehow a ‘genuine storyteller [sharing] his or her story with the listeners…for the benefit of the community’” (273).

[11] In fairy tale scholarship, storytelling has been identified as “a female art” (Rowe qtd. in Haase 16). Trinh, too, associates storytelling with a feminine quality in her chapter titled “Grandma’s Story” (125-127).

[12] Francisco employs direct discourse and gives attention to readers’ possible resistance of receiving her trauma story: “I resist, and you who are reading may want to resist” (55). In doing so, she, much like Kevin Smith’s assertions on the storyteller trope, does not “[present] [her reader] the narrative as product…but as process” (103).

[13] Like other trauma scholars, such as Shoshana Felman, Dori Laub, and Julie Rak, I recognize the importance of readers’ witnessing trauma and have argued the importance of readers’ roles in authors’ healing processes posttrauma (Spear 67).

[14] Like all survivor speech, there remains the danger of survivor rhetoric being counterproductive with potential “charges of delusion, hysteria, and madness” or the possibility of focusing solely on the “confessional itself, which is organized around locating the problem within the confessor” (Alcoff and Gray 273).

[15] While these lists are not exhaustive, they demonstrate that Francisco relied on historical, theoretical, and literary works in the construction of her memoir. In addition, her insertion of poems as chapters adds to the fragmentation of the narrative while further developing her ethos and enhancing bibliotherapeutic elements.

[16] Hans Christian Anderson’s tale opens with the Devil and a magical mirror breaking, “splintering into billions of pieces…and fly[ing] into people’s eyes to make them see only what is bad in the world” (Francisco 6). Two sibling-like friends, Kay and Gerda, are impacted when fragments of the mirror end up in Kay’s eyes and heart; changed by the splinters, Kay also forgets his friend as well as the Lord’s Prayer, vanishing with the Snow Queen (Anderson 236). Gerda sets out to find Kay, who is physically, emotionally, and even spiritually lost. Along her journey, she encounters obstacles and assistance, ultimately, finding and helping Kay to remove the splinters from his eyes and to melt the cold from his heart (Anderson 238, 269).

[17] Other scholars have focused on gendered roles and implications of “The Snow Queen.” For example, see Wolfgang Lederer, The Kiss of the Snow Queen: Hans Christian Anderson and Man’s Redemption by Woman (Berkeley: University of California, 1986). Keyser’s review points out that Lederer’s psychoanalytic analysis hinges on children’s developmental stages and gendered roles where “woman need not become a hero” (“Feminist Revisions” 166-169, 169). However, informed by Jack Zipes, I view the tale to be one of love and empowerment where Gerda’s journey proves to be a testament to her bravery and affection. Hans Christian Anderson stresses Gerda’s courage and unwavering Christian commitment (264, 265). Anderson overtly references Gerda’s independence, heart, and childlike innocence when he writes, “I can’t give her greater power than she has already! Can’t you see how great that is? Can’t you see how she makes man and beast serve her, and how well she’s made her way in the world on her own bare feet? She mustn’t know of her power from us—it comes from her heart, it comes of her being a sweet innocent child. If she can’t find her way into the Snow Queen’s palace and free little Kay of the glass splinters all by herself, then we can’t help her!” (264). Furthermore, Gerda may find Kay physically, but it is love and tears that save him—hers as well as his: “Gerda wept hot tears that fell upon his breast and penetrated his heart. They thawed the lump of ice and destroyed the little splinter of glass inside it…Then Kay burst into tears, he wept so desperately that the grain of glass was washed out of his eye” (Anderson 269). Gerda’s belief in her friend and her tears lead to Kay’s transformation—one that he actively plays a role in, as his tears, too, help to remove the splinters from his own eyes. Zipes contextualizes Anderson’s tales explaining that “the fairy tale [was coming] into its own for children” with the “rise of the middle class” during the 1800s (20). He further indicates, “It was exactly during this time, from 1835 onwards, … that Hans Christian Anderson began publishing his tales which became extremely popular throughout Europe and America [and which] combined humor, Christian sentiments, and fantastic plots to form tales that amused and instructed young and old at the same time” (Zipes 20-21).

[18] Scholars identify therapeutic benefits of fairy tales. Bettelheim affirms that they offer children the chance “to make some coherent sense out of the turmoil of [their] feelings” (270). Bettelheim further contends, “The fairy tale is therapeutic because the patient finds his own solutions, through contemplating what the story seems to imply about him and his inner conflicts at this moment in his life” (qtd. in Jordan 2). Zipes notes that “fairy tales are now widely used in therapy” and that they are used “particularly with disturbed or abused children because they enable a child to gain distance from trauma and deal with it on a symbolic level that enables the therapist to understand and work with the child” (24, 24-25). Furthermore, associations between fairy tales and trauma narratives have been made in literary studies; one such argument appears in Barbara Tannert-Smith’s article “‘Like Falling Up into a Storybook’: Trauma and Intertextual Repetition in Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak” (2010), where she draws on scholar Donald Haase to assert that the narrator in the “young adult trauma fiction” relies on “the fairy tale as ‘a device to interpret [her] surrounding and as a psychological survival tool to transform [her] environment into a hopeful utopian space’” (397, 404).

[19] Smith outlines four functions of “the fairytale intertext in postmodern ‘storyteller’ texts” (104). These categorize fairy tales to act as “an easily recogni[z]able form of discourse used in opposition to written forms,” “a schema or template which m[o]lds one’s interpretation of one’s own life,” “[a suggestion of] an alternate view of the world from realism (magic realism),” and “allusively, to suggest parallels between characters” (104-105). For a review of Smith’s text, see Gemma López, “Review of The Postmodern Fairy Tale: Folkloric Intertexts in Contemporary Fiction,” Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy Tale Studies, 23.1 (2009), 188-191.

Click here to download a printable PDF with Works Cited.

Rachel N. Spear is the Director of Gender Studies and an Associate Professor of English at Francis Marion University, where she teaches a range of classes, including Literary Nonfiction, Trauma Writing, and Gender Studies. She received her doctorate from Louisiana State University, blending writing studies, trauma studies, and pedagogical studies. Selected publications include “‘Let Me Tell You a Story’: On Teaching Trauma, Writing, and Healing” and “Honoring Contemplative Pedagogies in the Writing Classroom: A Personal and Pedagogical Exploration.” She is currently working on an edited collection themed around women writing illness and wholeheartedly believes in the healing powers of story.

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