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I was not raised to think that some day my prince would come. I did not even see the Disney Snow White until I was working on my BA. I didn't identify with princesses. I was two and a half when my grandmother gave me my first folktale book, Fairy Tales from Many Lands (Herda). Frankly, I found some of the illustrations quite frightening. I loved it, though, perhaps because it was almost princess-free. I did identify with the younger sisters, being one myself. And like the younger sisters in the fairy tales, I watched my older sister make all the mistakes and then I learned from them. What I discovered, as in the stories, was the importance of being secretive, not disclosing to authority figures what you knew or what you did. Like the parents in the fairy tales, mine always seemed to be trying to shield me from knowledge and experience-what I most desperately wanted.
My favorite stories, whose main characters I wanted to be, were "The Boy Thirteen" and "Clever Brother Hare." The title character in "The Boy Thirteen," the youngest (of course) in his family, starts out as a cowherd, becomes the king's singer, outwits a jealous courtier by performing three impossible tasks, and gets the king's crown and the princess in the end. Let me be clear; I didn't want to have a man like that, I wanted to be a man like that.
But the best fairy-tale character was Clever Brother Hare. He's a bit of a dandy. Preparing for a meeting with Brother Lion, who plans to eat him for dinner, Clever Brother Hare "washed himself very carefully, put on his best suit, chose his prettiest tie, twirled the ends of his moustache, put his walking stick under his arm and left the house" (Herda 199-200). The central color illustration for this story-which, I must say, was my very favorite visual image in the book-has no textual reference (fig. 1). This depiction of Clever Brother Hare's self-scrutiny evokes the Lacanian mirror phase, when "the child imagines itself to be a whole and powerful individual by identifying with its own more perfect mirror image" (Thornham 54). In this scene, clearly about Clever Brother Hare's imagining, appreciating, and enjoying his...