Animal Bride, Runaway Wife: Women Between Worlds in Nineteenth-Century Fairy Tale Literatures

​Abbey Dobbin
English PhD Student
University of Guelph

​From “Beauty and the Beast” to “The Little Mermaid,” one of the most enduring fairy tale traditions centres the marriage of a human character to an animal spouse. This talk introduces the intricate web of interspecies fairy tale marriages in their earliest print forms and how they, with hybrid brides at the helm, are uniquely able to stage the performativity of consent. Through representations of courtship rituals that entangle captivity and violence with intimacy and desire, we will discuss how women tale-tellers throughout the Victorian period used popular narratives and motifs to test new visions for companionate marriage.

​Together, we will analyze a selection of fairy tales and folklore excerpts that center the experiences of brides who take an animal form. We can then ask: how did their print lives encounter a fraught social landscape wherein the question of consent is itself transformed, and how do they continue to do so in a post-#MeToo participatory culture?