Chapter 12 Ashputtle or The Mother's Ghost-1

THREE VERSIONS OF ONE STORY I THE MUTILATED GIRLS But although you could easily take the story away from Ashputtle and center it on the mutilated sisters -- indeed, it would be easy to think of it as a story about cutting bits off women, so that they will fit in, some sort of circumcision -like ritual chop, nevertheless, the story always begins not with Ashputtle or her stepsisters but with Ashputtles mother, as though it is really always the story of her mother even if, at the beginning of the story, the mother herself is just about to exit the narrative because she is at deaths door: "A rich mans wife fell sick, and, feeling that her end was near, she called her only daughter to her bedside."

Note the absence of the husband/father. Although the woman is defined by her relation to him ("a rich mans wife") the daughter is unambiguously hers, as if hers alone, and the entire drama concerns only women, takes place almost exclusively Among women, is a fight between two groups of women -- in the right-hand corner, Ashputtle and her mother; in the left-hand corner, the stepmother and her daughters, of whom the father is unacknowledged but all the same is predicated by both textual and biological necessity. In the drama between two female families in opposition to one another because of their rivalry over men (husband/father, husband/son), the men seem no more than passive victims of their fancy, yet their significance is absolute because it is (" a rich man", "a kings son") economic.

Ashputtles father, the old man, is the first object of their desire and their dissension; the stepmother snatches him from the dead mother before her corpse is cold, as soon as her grip loosens. Then there is the young man, the potential bridegroom, the hypothetical son-in-law, for whose possession the mothers fight, using their daughters as instruments of war or as surrogates in the business of mating. If the men, and the bank balances for which they stand, are the passive victims of the two grown women, then the girls, all three, are animated solely by the wills of their mothers, Even if Ashputtles mother dies at the beginning of the story, her status as one of the dead only makes her position more authoritative. The mothers ghost dominates the narrative and is, in a real sense, the motive centre, the event that makes all the other events happen.

On her death bed, the mother assures the daughter: "I shall always look after you and always be with you." The story tells you how she does it. At this point, when her mother makes her promise, Ashputtle is nameless. She is her mothers daughter. That is all we know. It is the stepmother who names her Ashputtle, as a joke, and, in doing so, wipes out her real name, whatever that is, banishes her from the family, exiles her from the shared table to the lonely heart among the cinders, removes her contingent but honorable status as daughter and gives her, instead, the contingent but disreputable status of servant.

Her mother told Ashputtle she would always look after her, but then she died and the father married again and gave Ashputtle an imitation mother with daughters of her own whom she loved with the same fierce passion as Ashputtles mother did and still, posthumously, as we shall find out. With the second marriage comes the vexed question: who shall be the daughters of the house? Mine! declares the stepmother and sets the freshly named, non-daughter Ashputtle to sweep and scrub and sleep on the hearth while her daughters lie between clean sheets in Ashputtles bed. Ashputtle, no longer known as the daughter of her mother, nor of her father either, goes by a dry, dirty, cindery nickname for everything has turned to dust and ashes.

Meanwhile, the false mother sleeps on the bed where the real mother died and is, presumably, pleased by the husband/father in that bed, unless there is no pleasure in it for her. We are not told what the husband/father does as regards domestic or marital function, but we can surely make the assumption that he and the stepmother share a bed, because that is what married people do. And what can the real mother/wife do about it? Burn as she might with love, anger and jealousy, she is dead and buried. The father, in this story, is a mystery to me. Is he so besotted with his new wife that he cannot see how his daughter is soiled with kitchen refuse and filthy from her ashy bed and always hard at work? If he sensed there was a drama in hand, he was content to leave the entire production to the women for, absent as he might be, always remember that it is in his house where Ashputtle sleeps on the cinders, and he is the invisible link that binds both sets of mothers and daughters in their violent equation. He is the unmoved mover, the unseen organizing principle, like God, and, like God, up he pops in person, one fine day, to introduce the essential plot device.

Besides, without the absent father there would be no story because there would have been no conflict. If they had been able to put aside their differences and discuss everything amicably, theyd have combined to expel the father. Then all the women could have slept in one bed. If theyd kept the father on, he could have done the housework. This is the essential plot device introduced by the father: he says, "I am about to take a business trip. What presents would my three girls like me to bring back for them?" Note that: his three girls. It occurs to me that perhaps the stepmothers daughters were really, all the time, his own daughters, just as much his own daughters as Ashputtle, his "natural" daughters, as they say, as though there is something inherently unnatural about legitimacy. would realign the forces in the story. It would make his connivance with the ascendancy of the other girls more plausible. It would make the speedy marriage, the stepmothers hostility, more probable.

But it would also transform the story into something else, because it would provide motivation, and so on; it would mean I have to provide a past for all these people, that I would have to equip them with three dimensions, with tastes and memories , and I would have to think of things for them to eat and wear and say. It would transform "Ashputtle" from the bare necessity of fairy tale, with its characteristic copula formula, "and then", to the emotional and technical complexity of bourgeois realism. They would have to learn to think. Everything would change. I will stick with what I know.

What presents do his three girls want? "Bring me a silk dress," said his oldest girl. "Bring me a string of pearls," said the middle one. What about the third one, the forgotten one, called out of the kitchen on a charitable impulse and drying her hands , raw with housework, on her apron, bringing with her the smell of old fire? "Bring me the first branch that knocks against your hat on the way home," said Ashputtle. Why did she ask for that? Did she make an informed guess at how little he valued her? Or had a dream told her to use this random formula of unacknowledged desire, to allow blind chance to choose her present for her? mothers ghost, awake and restlessly looking for a way home, that came into the girls mouth and spoke the request for her.

He brought her back a hazel twig. She planted it on her mothers grave and watered it with tears. It grew into a hazel tree. When Ashputtle came out to weep upon her mothers grave, the turtle dove crooned: "Ill never leave you, I'll always protect you." Then Ashputtle knew that the turtle dove was her mothers ghost and she herself was still her mothers daughter, and although she had wept and wailed and longed to have her mother back again, now her heart sank a little to find out that her mother, though dead, was no longer gone and henceforward she must do her mothers bidding.