I've talked a lot about Katherine Paterson's newest book, The King's Equal. I tell friends it's a "feminist fairy tale". This intrigues but, sterotyping is an injustice to the story and the author.
Katherine Paterson has twice won the Newberry award and is an author that young adults can count on. I imagine her writing process as freezing a sterotype into an oversized sculpture so that she can walk around it leisurely. She would take special care to peer in chips and cracks to see down to the depths. She knows that the backside of the sculpture probably holds more promise and intrigue than the front. It's this way of seeing that lets Katherine Paterson chip away at modern myths. She has sculpted real women of all ages in her books. Her heroines cover a huge range. Among others, there's the daughter of a Samuri in Of Nightingales that Weep, a bitter foster child in The Great Gilly Hopkins, a young woman trapped in the machinery of the Industrial Revolution in Lyddie, an imaginative young girl who takes on rural Southern narrowness in Bridge to Teribithia. Paterson's women aren't always physically beautiful, or perfect...they are true women. Women who won't be simplified.
Now, fairy tales are sterotypical by nature, but Paterson can bring truth even to those. and Katherine Paterson does not chose to depose commonplace vision through destroying convention. She sets The King's Equal in a kingdom where ancient laws rule, where occurances and tests come in threes, and peoples her story with royalty. Soon after, she breaks with conventions and begins to challenge typical thought. The main character, Raphael is a greedy, egotistical prince whose inheritance rests on finding a woman whose beauty, intelligence and wealth match his own. Enter Rosamund, a genuine woman who is greater than his equal. Turning the tale upside down, it is Raphael who must prove his equality through humility, honesty, and hard work. The mystique, the author's splendid word choices, and dedicated design and detailing by Vladimir Vagin elevate the principal of equality to new heights. (Ages 6- adult; HarperCollins, $17.00)
Part of the way that Paterson breaks the mold is by acknowledging the motivation by human feeling. For me the turning point of the story comes when Raphael tests Rosamund's knowledge. She tells him she knows one thing no one else does. "I know," said Rosamund quietly, so that only he could hear, "I know that you are very lonely. That small quiet action is a giant turning point. In this miniscule moment of fiction, Paterson lets readers see the depth of Rosamund's wisdom. Superficial knowledge is irrelevant to wisdom of knowing the human heart. It also has to do Rosamund's looking below the surface. It has to do with her delivery. If she had shared this information stridently and loudly, holding the ruthless prince up for public ridicule, she would never have shifted his reality. Her compassion allows Raphael fall hopelessly and eternally in love, see a way of life he'd never imagined and shift forever his values.
Feminism seems to grow in complexity. We need characters like Rosamund to enter fairy tales and show our children, male and female, models of humanity.