Book Review: Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister
Posted on | May 25, 2010 | No Comments
Confessions of an Ugly Step Sister
Gregory Maguire
http://www.gregorymaguire.com
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It’s pretty clear what Gregory Maguire’s schtick is – find a well-known story and derivate the heck out of it. He writes a very specific kind of pro-fanfic, which challenges the accepted interpretation of a beloved tale by injecting realism, death, sex and grime and telling it from a different viewpoint.
He’s not the only one. Emma Donoghue’s Kissing the Witch springs to mind, as well as Neil Gaiman’s short stories Snow, Glass, Apples and The Problem of Susan – not to mention countless of examples from non-pro-fanfic writers. Maguire is special in writing almost exclusively within this genre, and for having shot to success thanks to that one musical inspired by his Wicked.
This one takes the story of Cinderella to Holland during the infamous tulip mania in the 17th century. Iris and Ruth are half-English daughters of Margarethe, who arrives penniless from England to her family’s home town and through many travails marries far above her station to the father of a beautiful, shy child who never steps foot outside the house. Iris, the protagonist and the “clever” sister, manages the passions of the people around her and dreams of becoming a painter. Ruth, apparently mentally disabled, hangs around in the background. Clara, the Cinderella sister, is spoiled and wilful, constantly clashing with her mother-in-law and convinced (perhaps accurately – no spoilers) that Margarethe did away with her natural mother. Eventually, Clara must be pushed and shoved by Iris into her happy ending – though the true resolution depends upon a change in Clara’s heart.
Central themes in the novel include aesthetic fascination with both heavenly beauty and deformity, mistaken impressions, riches and poverty, and sexual awakening. They are rather hammered in, and tend to be more noise than signal, but put together, they make a compelling mix.
You could say the novel was too orchestrated, too stylized to flow naturally, but personally I tend to like my fiction stylized. The one discordant issue that most hampered my enjoyment of the novel was the handling of the character of Ruth. Maguire had already raised my ire in Wicked by representing the disabled Nessarose as unrealistically helpless, spoiled, a burden and, in case that wasn’t enough, evil. Here we have the apparently mentally disabled Ruth, who may be some undefined variety of neuroatypical, but she’s presented as monstrous, animalistic, impaired – even beyond that being just how the people around her see her. But wait, she’s also faking it! And dangerous! If that doesn’t get a bingo in some ableist bingo card somewhere, I’d be surprised.
The most compelling character for me was Margarethe. If she was evil, her evil was a very human variety, and Maguire affords her a certain degree of sympathy, pointing out from the start that her anger and her malice arise from fear, and her fear arises from her intimate understanding of poverty, of the basic helplessness of a person without connections. Maguire’s habit of forcing the reader to be critical of the idea of evil and evil in other people is the thing I most appreciate about his writing, and it’s what I keep coming back for.
If only he realized his own ableism and filed his criticism of the concept of evil to an even finer point, Maguire would likely be one of my absolute favourite writers, and this review would have given him at least a star more.
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