Fairy-Tale Reflections: Space and Women Host(age)s in Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy, Snow, Bird

Abstract

In her novel Boy, Snow, Bird (2014), Helen Oyeyemi retells the classic tale of ‘Snow White’, relocating the story in 1950s America. In doing so, Oyeyemi attempts to challenge those ideological constructs that have entrapped women for centuries, outlined in the Western conception of beauty. Realism and fantasy intertwine giving way to spaces as rooted in reality as they are in fiction. Through magical realism, Oyeyemi examines gender and race relations to denounce the way in which they cause violence and marginalization. As a fantastic aura lingers over the narration, the concepts of canonical beauty and normative female identity get deconstructed to unravel the dangers they conceal. Through an ethical reformulation of the concept of hospitality and a refigured portrait of contemporary femininity, Oyeyemi produces a modern tale wherein fairy-tale magic takes place against a background of social inequality and political constructs. Throughout the narrative, the protagonists have to overcome the figurative meanings that haunt them to redefine their agency in relation to one another. From Grimm to Disney, Boy, Snow, Bird challenges previous depictions of this classic fairy tale in an attempt to rescue differential womanhood in narrative space. In the story, female protagonists are introduced as hostages of the reality they live in, and it is only in the undoing of racial and gender-based norms that they can adopt a true hospitality and become hosts of their own spaces and masters of their stories.