Now I wonder if I didn’t dream it. This image of a red rose and a white spider curled inside the petals.
Was it a part of this story? Or, does it belong in one of the other books I’ve been reading this week?
Even though I’ve reread “Jorinda and Jorindel” twice, I haven’t rediscovered the rose. If I did dream it, I shan’t tell Irmgard’s father and mother about it.
They don’t want to hear about someone else’s dream. And that’s understandable (it’s unusual for someone else’s dream to hold any meaning for another).
It’s also possible that this entire story turns on their refusal, on their unwillingness to step off the beaten path, even though readers don’t learn of it until the end of the story.
It’s possible that Irmgard’s story is a response to their fixed view of the world. That “Jorinda and Jorindel” is Irmgard’s insistence that nobody can silence the imagination.
Does she wake on this summer morning, caught in the half-truths of childhood? Has she allowed the quotidian detail of who braids her hair and the best swimming hole to mix with the memory of unripe blackberries and polluted waterways and fairy tales read to her by her caregivers? Or does she deliberately mislead readers, draw them into risky territory?
“Naturally no child should go near a strange forest. There are chances of getting lost. There is the witch who changes children into birds.”
In the Grimms’ fairy tale, titled “Jorinda and Joringel” in my childhood copy, there is a witch who changes children into birds, and a boy whose magic rose allows him to break the spell of the witch to reunite him with a girl who has been transformed and caged.
In Mavis Gallant’s story, Mrs. Partridge and the other adults are preoccupied with their own entertainment, but all of them have their own ideas about the best companion for young Irmgard. (And what an evocative name is Mrs. Bloodworth!)
But there are no tidy parallels. Instead, there are echoes of familiar tales. An orphan and a boat, all-night dancing and a straw-stuffed pillow, a poisonous plant and a looking-glass, satin shoes and shed tears. And the overt references of forests and transformations. Of destiny and dreams.
In the fairy tale, the boy’s rose acts as a defense; those who are prevented by magic from uniting are reunited thanks to the power of the rose. In Mavis Gallant’s story, the younger and poor boy who plays with Irmgard at the lake house every summer, does not know the names of flowers and sees blue and green as the same colour, whereas the older and privileged boy who has shown up this summer, has confidence and knowledge which impress Irmgard so much that she forgets her young playmate and confuses him with a paintbox.
At the heart of these stories rests the question of what we dismiss and what we embrace. Sometimes we reside in cages of our own making and sometimes we trust in a rose. Sometimes there is a spider.
I am unfamiliar with the titular fairy tale. I’ll have to go read it. Just finished Gallant’s story. She has a knack for the whims and cruelties of childhood. I have to say I agree with her parents on one thing: dreams are most often only interesting to the person who had them.
This is such a strange little story. I’m not sure what to make of it. Although I do agree about the dream thing too. That’s something Carol Shields wrote about too, somewhere, about how dreams are really only useful to the dreamer (and to use them sparingly, if at all, in fiction)!
As I read this story the first time I thought it felt different from most other Gallant stories, it had a strange almost fey feel, like a fairy tale. The characters are seeming archetypes. There is a lot in this story, an American lady escaping prohibition, a titled lady, her move to California after her dogs are left buried in Canada begs for symbolic ramblings but above all there are children, especially a boy who lives ten months of the year in an orphanage spending two warm months working on his uncle’s farm. (Shades of a cross gender myth of Orpheus?) and his female cousin, they are about eight.
I acknowledge when I read this the first time I did not know that Jorinda and Jorindel was a Grimm’s fairy tale. After watching the video of the story, on my second reading I a was trying to see how the stories are related. In the Grimm Fairy tale, an evil old fairy woman turns beautiful young women into Nightingales and cages them. She has captured the love of a young man’s life. The story turns on how he gets her released, the fate of the fairy and the sevenhundred women she had turned into Nightingales.
In a way, everyone in the story is captured, some by convention and family, some by poverty, some wealth. I wonder is the orphan boy a captured Nightingale waiting to be saved? There is a lot, as there is in all her stories, to think about here.
This seems like an astutely observed tale, in the way that all of Mavis Gallant’s pieces are, but, beyond that, I feel like this is an anomaly in her work. Often, when I finish one of her stories, I have the feeling that I could have recognized her style even if the story hadn’t had her name attached to it. But not with this one. Even after reading it three times, I didn’t really have any greater sense of understanding, just different details (ages and locations, connections between characters clearer, etc.) at hand.
Isn’t it odd, yes, how the story seems connected to the Grimms’ story and, yet, not tightly connected. What are we to make of this, when we know that she is fully capable of having written a proper retelling? What is she searching for when she makes this other not-quite decision to tell it slant? (I didn’t know about the story previously either, although it was in my childhood collection: it clearly wasn’t one of my favourites!)
The idea of the different kinds of confinement does make good sense. Especially with the details you mention, like the question of Prohibition and those dogs confined to their graves. And, I suppose, if the subject is confinement than one must naturally consider what that means for one’s idea of freedom, and, because it’s Mavis Gallant, moving on from the idea of freedom, what it means about belonging and rootedness. What cages did she feel entrapped within and how did she gain her release?
Do you think that, if we continued to reread and think, that we would reach any conclusions? Or maybe we are just meant to settle into the strangeness of it all?