Robin McKinley's Rose Daughter

[impulsereader]

In a book in which names tell us who a character is, Beauty is named Beauty and when she meets her Beast he instructs her to call him Beast. 

Late in the book she laments that Beauty is her name because she had no better quality to recommend her to the world, and that her beauty will fade in time – why would someone as grand as her Beast love her?  She is the practical sister, she tells us, and in fact she is; but in a world dense with magic, she is the one who doesn’t think to ask the castle which literally ripples with it to take her to her dying Beast; a little infuriatingly, she just keeps on, trusting that she will come upon him if she just keeps walking.  She has learned to trust only her own honest efforts.

McKinley stays close to the original formula but she weaves a lot of back story into it which sometimes can feel a bit oppressive.  Long before Beauty’s story begins her mother is adopted and raised by a Greenwitch – a term for a practicing female magician who dispenses charms to the local populace – in this world sorcerers and magicians seem to be exclusively male and generally more powerful.  This beautiful but flawed young woman runs off, marries Beauty’s father and produces three daughters before breaking her neck while jumping a horse in an attempt to win a bet.  It is through this connection that her daughters are provided with a home when their father’s business ultimately fails.  The Greenwitch has left her cottage to the three daughters of this family.

So, per the formula of the classic tale, Beauty’s father’s business needs must fail to set things in motion.  The reader gets a detailed view of all this entails for the three sisters in this world.  Beauty’s sisters, Lionheart and Jeweltongue, are immediately dropped by fiances who had previously espoused such honorable sentiments as – dowry optional, my dearest.  The family’s fine, large house is stripped of all furnishings and servants post haste.  The girls’ father is stricken by this ruin he has brought upon his family and retreats into a haze of illness and wretchedness.  Beauty, the practical sister, is left to go through all of her father’s papers in an attempt to sort out all the debts which are owed and keep her father from actually being imprisoned if she can.  During the course of this she finds a document which tells of a mysterious bequest of a cottage – Rose Cottage – to her and her sisters.  This, then, is the only ray of hope for a family which has lost everything.  They will not be homeless, and this will have to – somehow - be enough.

Beauty has always been a gardener.  An unlikely occupation for a well-bred young woman, but she finds dolls dull and the official gardener of her family offers tutelage to this girl who instinctively plants things.  She also routinely rescues animals and finds them new homes.  It is to the friends she has made through this latter enterprise that she goes to learn the skills she and her family will need to survive in a world where a two-room cottage is their new home and pennies must make do where once uncounted and unheeded dollars did so.  One of her friends happens to be a magician and though we do not meet him, we meet his familiar, a salamander who wants to give Beauty a gift such as her other friends have.  He gives her a small ‘gift of serenity’ which only confuses her at this point in the story.

The sisters are forced to travel for many weeks to reach their new home and do so in the company of a merchant caravan which travels back and forth throughout the year.  During the course of their journey Beauty’s sisters continue to nurture and perfect the talents they are beginning to discover in this new life they are leading.  Lionheart cooks and Jeweltongue sews; these skills along with Beauty’s natural tendency to put people at ease endear them to the traders who offer small measures of assistance periodically through the book.

The girls arrive at their new home and find it in suspiciously good condition.  The reader is left to assume magic though the characters seem to deem it luck and don’t think about it overmuch.  They set up shop, each performing those tasks which she is most suited for as well as improving the cottage and shoring up the outbuilding to house their goat and chickens.  Eventually, Lionheart disguises herself as a man and obtains work in the Squire’s stables.  Jeweltongue works as a seamstress, gaining the patronage of the bigwigs in town.  All three find that this life is actually much more agreeable than their old one and they grow very close to one another.  Their father finally begins to rally and regain some of his health.  They are poor, they live in a two-room cottage which desperately needs its roof re-thatched, they own almost nothing and are clad in their former servants’ old clothes, but they are content, even happy.

Beauty’s sisters here are complete departures from their characters in the original tale.  Here they pitch in, give Beauty a reason to pine for them when she is obliged to leave her home, and point out to her that she has fallen in love with her Beast when the moment is appropriate.  They are suitably rewarded for all this good behavior at the end of the story just as their counterparts are suitably punished in the original for not doing any of this, in fact doing quite the opposite.  We still get a nod, though, as the characters are portrayed as being fairly obnoxious before they lose everything.

Rose Cottage, meanwhile, has lived up to its name.  When they first arrive they find the building covered in climbing thorn bushes and the garden similarly adorned.  Beauty has been working her ‘magic’, adding to the family’s food stores with her vegetable garden and finding that her crops are mysteriously left untouched by the pests which you would normally expect to come snack on them.  Even their goat and eventually their new puppy pretend the garden doesn’t exist.  Beauty suffers the thorn bushes for the first few months of their residence, reasoning that they must have been planted for a reason and she wants to see what happens in the summer which would warrant this.  To her delight she gets a riot of roses for her patience.  In this world roses are a rare and precious thing, mostly associated with magic and most often grown only by magical practitioners.

The family has been living quite happily in their cottage for three years when the traders they traveled with bring news of the traditional ship of their father’s which has made it into port.  Doing pretty well health-wise by this time, the man feels obligated to go back into the City and deal with this issue.  His daughters very reluctantly allow him to go.  Again, as is traditional, this is a fool’s errand and he finds himself forced to travel home again with only the company of a borrowed pony during the winter when he really should not be traveling at all.  He encounters a snow storm and is at the end of his and his pony’s endurance when he comes to a point at which the pony steps onto grass which is bare of any snow at all.

So Dad finds he is on magical property now and he finds his way into the castle which obligingly provides him with food for himself and his pony along with a bed to sleep in and new clothes the next day.  We also got the traditional touch of his asking his three girls what each of them would like him to bring back from this little sojourn but the answers they had proffered are a departure.  The two elder girls ask for nothing at all where traditionally they would ask for extravagant jewels or dresses.  This departure makes complete sense because of the departure these characters have already taken from the original.  Beauty gives us the traditional answer of a rose, as hers have not bloomed this particular year due to some wicked bad weather.  Well, it just so happens that the castle has placed a bud vase holding a single red rose on Dad’s breakfast table.  He jauntily tucks it into his buttonhole, thanks his invisible host and sets off on his way home.

Cue the Beast.  He is outraged over the fact that Dad has stolen his rose.  We get a really terrifying description of him, he’s huge and all over fur as you might expect.  Dad tries to explain, and the Beast’s interest is really captured by this daughter whose ‘roses are her friends’.  He instructs Dad to send Beauty back within a month in repayment for his thievery, or he’ll find and kill him.  In a departure from the original, the Beast does not offer Dad any riches in exchange for his daughter.  He does promise that she will be perfectly safe, he will not harm her in any way, and the rose that Dad is now allowed to take away with him is his pledge of this.

A dazed Dad makes his way back and he’s a mess.  He eventually manages to tell the girls what has happened, but falls into a pretty serious illness – they’re so worried about him they spend precious money on a tonic which fails to do anything.  Beauty of course is perfectly happy – well, as perfectly happy as you get in this sort of sitch – to go because she doesn’t want her father to be killed.  She reasons that the Beast has promised not to hurt her so the decision should be clear.  Dad rails against this option and is willing to give up his life for her freedom.  Dad’s sick though and Beauty is starting to wonder if the Beast is behind this and he won’t get better until she goes to him.  So her sisters end up agreeing with her and she leaves, leaving her sisters to soothe her father once he finds out.

In a brilliant moment, Beauty sets off in the direction her father came from, and after a bit she closes her eyes, spins around a few times then sets off on the path which is in front of her when she opens them again.  This is just gorgeous, and it’s one of the only moments that we see Beauty really understanding and using the magic that is all around - and actually in - her.  So, of course, the path takes her to the Beast’s castle.  Their first meeting goes pretty much how you’d expect – he’s terrifying – this is where our salamander’s magical gift of serenity comes in, it gives Beauty the strength to look the Beast in the eye and get on with things.  She wants to see his garden, but instead he shows her to her room.

The Beast’s Castle

The castle is magic personified.  Everything in it is liable to be different from one moment to the next as magic ripples through its rooms like raindrops in a puddle.  Beauty finds this extremely disconcerting and I kept finding myself thinking, ‘Dude, just go with it.  It’s magic.  Why are you so bothered that the pattern on the candlesticks keeps changing?’

Basically, anything you mention wanting appears.  From the sequence with her father it seems to me that you don’t really have to do this aloud, but Beauty tends to converse with the magic which feels perfect because it really is a character completely unto itself, and its personality has a definite bent toward extravagance which Beauty tries to squash at every opportunity.  The first thing she asks it for – unknowingly - is a shelf to put her things on after she’s inspected this grand wardrobe that’s been provided and completely rejected the ornate bathroom which has been conjured for her – she’d rather bathe out of a teacup in front of the fire than use it.  Every night she is provided with an opulent dress and matching jewels for her dinner with the Beast, and on one occasion she jokes that all she needs is a tiara, cloak, and a coach and four and she’s all set – well that sets off an alarming rumble inside her wardrobe and she hastily flees the room insisting to the magic that she was only joking!  This is completely awesome and hilarious.

So back to the story.  Beauty doesn’t wait for the Beast to show her to the garden, she finds it herself.  She finds a large ‘glasshouse’ full of roses which have been neglected to the point where only one is still producing blooms, and just a few of them at that.  So we get an explanation here for why the Beast was so enraged at Dad, and it marks another departure from the traditional.  In the original, the Beast needed to earn Beauty’s love in order to break his curse.  Here, he really is just lonely and wants his roses to bloom again – no ulterior motive in sight on his part.  This is also a similarity to the Beauty and the Rumpelstiltskin Beast that Once Upon a Time is giving us – Beauty has actual work to do.  In the original she was simply wandering around the magic castle discovering all the ways it could delight and entertain her – again, because her only purpose was to fall in love with the Beast in order to break the curse.  In the Perault version we get no clues as to how Beauty spends her days, we are only told that she dines with the Beast each evening.

Anyway, Beauty instantly resolves to bring all the roses back to life, and over the next week she does so.  She awakes each morning to an animal visitor – the first is a bat she believes has mistakenly flown in her window.  She comes to realize, though, that the Beast had sent all animals out of his enchanted plot of land long ago and that they are starting to return now – things are changing here with her arrival.  So after she deals with her new visitors each day – hedgehogs, a spider, etc - she works on the roses, has lunch, works some more then has dinner with the Beast who - as is usual if not completely traditional,though one of the original tales mentions he’s a good conversationalist though he is not witty - turns out to be a pretty sensitive and all-around good guy.  This one in particular has covered the roof of his palace with stunning paintings.  We get the traditional proposal each evening which Beauty initially answers with ‘Oh no, Beast,’ the first couple of times but then softens to ‘Good night, Beast,’ after that.

Dreams

We’ve been getting a lot of heavy dream talk this entire time, because Beauty has this recurring dream where she is walking down a long hallway and a monster is waiting for her at the end of it.  Now, her dreams turn into the vehicle by which she is allowed to keep up with what her family is up to while she is gone.  She doesn’t realize it until much later, but each of her ‘days’ is actually a month back in the real world.  So she finds out that Lionheart has fallen in love with the Squire’s second son who has guessed her secret and knows he has, in return, fallen in love with a girl, not the man she appears to be.  Jeweltongue has similarly fallen in love with the baker in town, but on the way she has fallen afoul of the Squire’s first son who is offended that she prefers another to him.  Her father now writes poetry – which strikes me as sort of lame; when we see him first start scribbling on scratch paper I was hoping McKinley was going for a Bilbo-like epic tale, but, you know – whatever.

So now it comes time to start pulling all these threads into a whole and frankly – things get weird.  In the real world, Jeweltongue and her father are attending a meeting of their little literary club.  In the enchanted castle, Beauty has decided she wants to solve the mystery of what the weather vane on top of her glasshouse takes the shape of and the Beast obligingly magics up a ladder.  When she manages to get to the top she discovers the weather vane is a woman holding a rose – Cue Magical Storm of the Ages – actual storm with rain and epic winds – Beauty is thrown into her dream world and she becomes a ghostly attendee of the real world literary meeting where her interaction with the household’s cat prompts the hostess to tell us the story – or at least her version – of why the Beast was Cursed.  Okay, I’m not even going to – this is so weird, because we get two competing versions of this right on top of each other and it would just be confusing to try and lay them out here.  Basically we’re talking about a love triangle of sorts with two sorcerers and a greenwitch.

Alright – the hostess’s version is sympathetic to the Beast and then Jeweltongue’s jilted lover comes in and tells a version that is just vicious and he’s clearly trying to stir up trouble for the sisters.  I’m confused about a couple of things here, because the jilted lover’s surname is Trueword which implies to me that his version is more accurate, but when we momentarily get yet a third version of this story from one of the actual participants, he still isn’t telling us the actual ‘Truth’.  Also, this is where – and as far as I can tell, this is the only reason at all to have put this bit in – we get payoff from the fact that there’s this ‘curse’ that the sisters have been nervous about for the entire book – that when three sisters live in Rose Cottage some towers are going to fall.  Obviously with Lionheart in disguise as a man they’ve avoided actual discussion of it with anyone, but here jilted lover reveals that little tidbit and Beauty gets all worried that her father and sisters are going to be run out of town on a rail because of the curse combined with rumors caused by her own disappearance.

So Beauty’s body, perched at the top of a really tall ladder and now experiencing gale-force winds has to be rescued by the Beast, and I really wanted him to pick her up and just carry her down, but instead he just shelters her with his body as they climb down together.  He claims he needs both hands to climb, but – I don’t know – I wanted this scene to be a little more romantic than it was.  I was also a little exasperated by how much time I was spending reading about Beauty going up and then down a ladder, text heavy with meaning aside.  Anyway, having successfully gotten down they take refuge in the glasshouse and – miracle of miracles – all the roses are in bloom.  Woo hoo!  Beauty, however, is in a frenzy of worry for her family and tells the Beast that she must go home – she has made his roses bloom, surely he has no further need of her.

Gravely he tells her that she is free to go, he will not hold her against her will, but that he can no longer live without her.  He gives her a rose and tells her that if she plucks a petal and puts it in her mouth she will be instantly transported home, and that if she does so again she will come back to the castle, but once the final petal falls from the rose he will be dying and it will be too late for her to come back as she can’t accomplish this trick with an already-fallen petal.  She is distressed, but he plucks a petal and sends her home.

Back in the real world both of Beauty’s sisters find themselves drawn home to Rose Cottage – more about cats in this book at the end – to find Beauty there, wet, bedraggled, and more than a little out of it – she doesn’t remember the Beast telling her about the petals on her rose and his dying.  She is distressed to learn that seven months have passed here and confused to find that all her dreams had been real.  She is reassured by Jeweltongue that the townspeople aren’t concerned about the curse and each sister is well on her way to happiness via marriage.  Jeweltongue also points out that from what Beauty is telling them of her time with the Beast that she sounds like she is also in love.  Too late does Beauty recall the Beast’s parting words to her – the last petal has just fallen.  This next bit strikes me a bit wrong – I was reading it as the Beast having enchanted the specific rose he gave Beauty, but to be fair the Beast doesn’t really enchant anything in this story, The Magic sort of handles that aspect of things.  Before leaving home, Beauty had split the rose her father had brought home from the Beast’s castle and now she rushes into her garden to find that there is one bloom from which she can pluck a petal.  This petal successfully takes her back to his castle.  Here is where she plods through magic corridor after magic corridor and I kept thinking, just say it out loud – say, ‘take me to my Beast’ – just try it for heaven’s sake.

Eventually, near the end of her strength – isn’t this always the case? – she climbs out a window and finds him, lying on the ground, not quite dead yet.  Now we get the third version of why he was cursed, told to Beauty by the Greenwitch involved – the same woman who raised her mother.  She has been watching over the Beast during his imprisonment and she tells Beauty that the Curse is coming to an end, and that she is the one who must choose – all on her own – how this ends.  Either the Beast can be restored to the man he was and together he and Beauty can live grandly, raise up the rest of her family with them, and their names will be spoken far and wide – or the Beast can remain Beastly and they can return to Rose Cottage and live humbly as they have been.  Now, considering how worried Beauty was about the curse – which the Greenwitch now reveals was never anything more than a skipping rhyme for children – honestly, I’m confused as to why this other curse is in here – I would think that Beauty would be a little more worried about living just outside of town with a great hulking Beast.  This seems to be inviting the traditional pitchfork behaviour we’re used to seeing from townspeople.  However; this is the path she chooses, because when she asks exactly what people will be saying about them far and wide, the answer is something along the lines of, ‘fear and awe because you cannot really help those you don’t understand’.  Which – again – Beauty has lived humbly now, wouldn’t she be able to handle this?

Anyway, Beauty makes her choice and awakes some time later in her room at Rose Cottage, her Beast at her side.  Her sisters’ double wedding is imminent and everything will be very happily sorted with Lionheart going to live with her husband, Jeweltongue and their father going to live with her husband to be closer to their little literary group, and Beauty and the Beast tending the roses at Rose Cottage forevermore.  Oh, and right after they’re married they’re going to go out and buy all sorts of art supplies so the Beast can keep up with his hobby.

Cats

McKinley writes cats surprisingly well for someone who seems more of a dog person.  The Beast’s only companion before Beauty comes along is a cat he calls Fourpaws who is presumably a powerful sorceress.  When Beauty is dreaming about her family she is a ghostly presence in the real world visible only to cats, and the cats she appears to later lead each of her sisters home to find her when she is transported from the castle.  Fourpaws also produces kittens on Beauty’s last morning in the enchanted castle and brings them along to live at Rose Cottage at the end of our tale.

Rose Daughter tells a densely beautiful and intricately woven story.

Comments

[impulsereader.livejournal.com]

Coming back to it, I definitely wanted to like it more than I did. As I was writing this I realized how many times I got impatient with Beauty and the way she just refuses to really utilize all the magic. McKinley has just dipped her world in a pool of magic and it's dripping off in great drabs but Beauty is just completely oblivious. She and her sisters are probably all to some degree magical themselves but every time someone suggests Beauty might be a greenwitch she just dismisses the idea out of hand. It ends up coming off a bit ridiculous.

It was interesting to note the touches from the original fable that she weaves in and the way she just sort of gave the characters of the sisters a quarter turn to make the story work better for her purposes.

[litlover12.livejournal.com]

"McKinley has just dipped her world in a pool of magic and it's dripping off in great drabs"

That's a nice bit of imagery!

I know what you mean about people in books who refuse to accept what's been proved to them, like, ten thousand times. After a while it's like OH MY LORD WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU? ARE YOU BLIND??

[impulsereader.livejournal.com]

Oh thanks. I'm not sure drabs is a word but I'm taking creative license - refusing to google it - and using it instead of drops because it sounds cooler. :-)

This obliviousness on the part of a character is such a fine line. Sometimes an author has to inflict it on them, but what really has to be taken into account is the differing viewpoints of the reader from the character, especially in Fantasy novels. Things are so much more exciting when your reader is making discoveries right along with the character. When your reader and your main character end up on completely different planes of understanding you're in trouble and I think Rose Daughter suffers on this count. The atmosphere of the entire book is so suffused in magic it's really hard to read its main character as almost ignoring it completely. She makes an effort to explain it by saying the Father refused to have anything to do with magic after his wife's death - he blames some seer for not having warned her - but it just doesn't end up cutting it.

I think what you're aiming for - as an author - is to make things tickle on the edge of your reader's consciousness and then when you finally make the reveal to your character everything clicks into place for the reader - oh, that's what I was feeling, yes, that feels exactly right now. McKinley was more than a little heavy handed in this story. And you're right, the ending is definitely off. From Beauty's climb up the ladder things go ponderous and a bit tedious.