Willfulness and Wickedness: Grimm Stories, Magical Girls, and Living a Feminist Life
ISABELLE NGUYEN
Once upon a time in a land far, far away, a mother had a very disobedient child. Whatever the mother told the child to do, the child would do the very opposite. Eventually, God condemned the child for their willfulness and the child died of sickness. Unfortunately for the poor mother, whenever the child’s grave was left alone, their arm would pop up out of the ground and the gravediggers would have to bury it again. One day, the mother had enough of this foolishness and struck the willful arm with a rod. That is how the silly arm finally lay to rest in peace.
I first encountered this Grimm brothers’ fairy tale in Living a Feminist Life, a book by Sara Ahmed about how to live in the face of capitalist patriarchy. Throughout the book, Ahmed describes the various ways that we can “kill joy” by moving against the life path that society expects of us. For Ahmed, happiness is a well-tread path. Happiness looks like the life we are supposed to lead, the role we are supposed to fulfill in the world. In the chapter about the Grimm brothers’ fairy tales, Ahmed explains that storytelling can be used to teach children to enter the role set out for them by patriarchy—that doing otherwise is spreading unhappiness.
This book came to me at a time when I was looking back on and trying to understand my experiences growing up in an evangelical movement, and the consequences that upbringing has had on me as a queer adult. I had been raised by evangelical parents and had become a Christian partly because of their influence, partly of my own volition. In hindsight, it was probably the movement’s message of a loving God that drew me in as a young, closeted lesbian woman. Unfortunately, this message came with a price. According to the evangelical view, God has very specific standards for what is evil, for what begets sadness. And all the things people said God found wicked seemed to draw me in, including magic, fantasy, and loving other women. As an adult, Ahmed’s observations on the moral character of the Grimm brothers’ stories mirrored what I saw going on in the religious messages that I was surrounded by as a kid.
In the Grimm brothers’ fairy tales, willfulness has supernatural effects. Magic is wicked because it allows one to create a life outside of the natural order, to impose one’s will, to create unhappiness. The implication here is that resistance to patriarchy is arcane, evil, or demonic. What would fairy tales look like if we cast willfulness and wickedness in a different light? How can magic in fiction encourage us to think about transforming the world around us?
When I think about magic as a form of agency, I immediately think about the magical girl archetype from Japanese anime. The “magical girl” or mahō shōjo is a genre of comics and TV shows about young girls with magical powers that originated in Japan in the 1960s. In contemporary iterations of the genre, magical girls often use their powers to protect their loved ones from evil and stand up for people who are being treated unfairly. Magic gives the young characters in these stories a handle on these tough situations that they would otherwise lack. Like other fans of the genre my age, the first magical girl show I saw was Sailor Moon, which premiered in 1992 in Japan, and 1995 in North America.
Sailor Moon is an anime about a teenage girl named Usagi Tsukino. Usagi has a superhero alter ego named Sailor Moon, the reincarnated Moon princess who uses her powers to fight evildoers from other dimensions with the help of her allies the Sailor Scouts. A little unladylike, always whining, crying, and stuffing her face with food, Usagi is willful in her own way. She regularly slacks on her school work and chores to read comics, play video games at the arcade, and go shopping with her friends after school. If Sailor Moon were in one of the Grimm brothers’ stories, Usagi’s encounter with magic would teach her that, like the other distractions in her life, her supernatural powers prevent her from integrating into the feminine role she is supposed to fill.
Instead, Usagi never has to suppress her will in order to become a better person. In episode thirty-seven of season one, Usagi decides to take a finishing school class to become more “ladylike” after finding out she is the Moon princess. When the other Sailor Scouts find out that Usagi is taking etiquette classes, they argue among themselves as to whether she should change herself in order to fulfill her potential as a princess. Eventually, the Scouts settle on the idea that Usagi has already risen to her responsibilities of protecting the weak and keeping Earth safe. They like Usagi the way she is and changing her would not make her a better leader of the Sailor Scouts.
I think I was able to pick up on these themes of willfulness at least a little as a kid. Like a lot of children my age, I was burdened with feelings of ugliness, uselessness, and inherent stupidity. I felt like I had too much will, that I made things difficult because I wanted them to be difficult. I’m sure this had something to do with being a latently gay kid growing up in an evangelical household. Although I had not come into my lesbian identity at that point, it was clear to me growing up that I was bumping up and moving against the life path that was expected of me. Meanwhile, Sailor Moon and the rest of the Sailor Scouts seemed to be struggling with something I couldn’t quite put into words. Usagi was pretty bad at, or, at the very least neglectful of, all the things that would make her a proper lady, and I related to that immensely.
Interestingly, Sailor Moon was initially banned in my house. Like other magicbased media such as Harry Potter or Dungeons & Dragons, right-wing evangelical parents turned a critical eye to Sailor Moon when it first came to North America. My parents were swept up in this movement. When the first season aired in Canada, my older sister had to go over to her friend’s place to see it. It wasn’t until I was old enough to watch the show myself that my parents chilled out and let some moon magic into our household.
When I got older and pressed my parents about why they had banned Sailor Moon over other television shows, the only answer they could give me was that it had magic in it and they thought it was weird. I think there is something interesting about how the presence of magic in stories for kids can inspire so much outrage from the evangelical right. What is it about magic that conservative Christians continue to hate so much?
At the churches I attended as a teen, magic was considered dangerous because it is at best spiritually empty and at worst opens us up to satanic influences. There are a lot of Bible verses about magic, but whether the book’s condemnation of magic is relevant to modern Christianity depends on personal interpretation. People at the churches I went to might point to this Isaiah verse to explain their problems with magic: “When someone tells you to consult mediums and spiritists, who whisper and mutter, should not a people inquire of their God? Why consult the dead on behalf of the living?” (Isaiah 8:19). What is happening in this passage is that God is teaching and reinforcing monotheism through the prophet Isaiah. The evangelicals I knew at the time would have interpreted this passage to
mean that magic compels us to look for a higher power outside of God. This is dangerous not only because magic can never measure up to God, but because this power most likely has evil origins.
With regards to fiction, I think that the evangelical parents who have a kneejerk reaction to magic in kids’ stories are also concerned with media that legitimizes life paths outside of their own. The Isaiah passage explains what certain Christians believe concerning practicing magic, but it doesn’t really explain why they oppose it in fiction. After all, the types of magic used by characters in books or on TV obviously looks very different from magical belief systems in real life. When I would press adults about why they didn’t like magic-based content even though it’s clearly make-believe, they would sometimes answer that these media encourage disobedience. When talking about the Harry Potter movies with my mom as kid, she would sometimes say that she didn’t like them because of how angry the characters are. I’m not a huge fan of Harry Potter so I can’t say for certain, but I think that what my mother identified as anger was the righteous indignation Harry and his friends had toward some of the authority figures at his school. That indignation can illuminate how our social mores don’t make sense, that there are alternative ways of governing ourselves.
I have tangibly felt the consequences of the church members’ close-minded worldview. When I was a born-again Christian, I attended a variety of churches across the evangelical/Pentecostal/non-denominational spectrum. What all these churches shared was an interpretation of scripture that upheld capitalist patriarchy. While they would never self-describe as transphobic, homophobic, or misogynist, their interpretation of scripture helped establish unspoken rules with regards to gender, relationships, and sexuality. What started out as silly disagreements with my parents and other people at church over whether anime was satanic evolved into topics that would be a lot more relevant to my adult life. When thinking about serious stuff like gender and sexuality as a teenager, I started to realize that a lot of the base assumptions of the evangelical Christian worldview came from a place of patriarchal domination and colonialism. I wanted to vocalize my disproval with this at my church, but was afraid of being interpreted as disobedient, as willful, as speaking from a place of wickedness. I worried that I was speaking from a place of wickedness. If the stories about magic I enjoyed as a kid had crafted a window into other worlds and other ways of living, then the worldview I had been raised in shut
tered that window like a set of heavy blinds. It’s for this reason that it wasn’t until several years after I had stopped being an evangelical Christian that I started feeling comfortable identifying as a part of the LGBTQ community: I couldn’t think of myself as belonging to the other, the different, the wicked.
As a kid, I identified with the magical girl archetype in part because of an implicit connection between secret identities, magic, and queerness—but as I got older, I started to wish that these stories were more explicit in their critiques of patriarchy and heterosexism. Re-watching Sailor Moon in Japanese as a teenager, I realized that some of the characters were intended to be either queer or trans—only to be censored during the North American localization process. The most notorious victims of this censorship were Sailor Neptune and Sailor Uranus, a lesbian couple who featured prominently in Sailor Moon S but were depicted as “cousins” in the North American dub.
After this realization, I wanted to find magical girl shows that were for a teenage audience and featured more explorations into romance between women—which is how I discovered another nineties magical girl anime called Revolutionary Girl Utena.
Revolutionary Girl Utena is an anime series about a teenage girl named Utena Tenjou who attends an eccentric boarding school called Ohtori Academy. Early on in Utena’s life, a prince saved her from the loneliness she experienced after her parents’ deaths. This experience leaves such an impression on her that she decides to become a prince herself; to Utena, this means living chivalrously. She dons a boy’s school uniform and uses her popularity and athletic skill to stand up for social outcasts. When a popular boy from the student council starts bullying her friend for having a crush on him, she challenges him to a sword fight. What Utena doesn’t realize is that by doing so, she is entering ‘the duels,’ a tournament between the members of the student council for the hand of the Rose Bride: another student named Anthy Himemiya. Winning the tournament and being with Anthy entails entry into a castle of mysterious significance floating above the school.
In episode thirty-four of the show, Anthy and Utena attend a play put on by the school drama club that turns out to be a reflection of Anthy’s childhood. The play goes a little something like this: Once upon a time, all girls were princesses. The world was a dangerous place for these girls to live in but, thankfully, the prince
was always there to save them. This situation worked for a time, but eventually the prince became exhausted from having to save every girl in the world. The prince’s condition troubled his sister greatly, and so—because she could not become a princess through marrying her brother—she became a witch and cast a spell to seal him away from the rest of the world. This event caused a great amount of unhappiness, because the princesses of the world no longer had a saviour.
In this fairy tale world, girls who cannot become princesses are doomed to become witches. Anthy is the sister of a fairy tale prince, and therefore cannot become a princess through him. In fairy tales, the pure, self-effacing and goodhearted female protagonists are often princesses. On the flip-side, the female villains are witches—their arcane powers a result of the absence of the qualities that make princesses ‘good’ (i.e., docility and a willingness to embrace a passive role). This relationship between princesses and witches makes willfulness and wickedness explicit. In this dichotomy, Anthy is innately suspect because she is a girl who cannot become a princess. Her decision to seal away the prince is a natural progression from being blood relatives with the prince. As a consequence, the patriarchal relationship between the prince and the other princesses is broken: Anthy is full of so much wickedness that her actions reshape how men and women relate to one another.
In Revolutionary Girl Utena, willfulness points to the possibility of renewal—of restructuring, or revolutionizing, the world. An odd couple, Utena and Anthy are assigned willfulness in their own ways. Utena assumes the male role of the prince, while Anthy takes on the antagonist role of the witch. They inhabit these roles in order to resist the power structures in the patriarchal fairy tale world they inhabit— but they are still a part of that world. True resistance comes when willfulness turns the world upside down, when the force of our sheer wickedness warps social relations. The world changed once when Anthy sealed away the prince, and it can change again.
The revelation that entire ways of being can die and be replaced with something else was profound to me when I first watched Revolutionary Girl Utena. At the time, I was a teenager dealing with the aftermath of losing a belief system I had dedicated myself to at a young age. From the religious bigotry I had faced at my church, to the more secular forms of patriarchal domination I was becoming aware of at school, life was unfair. Revolutionary Girl Utena’s message that a cruel world can
end through our willfulness was an uplifting one. To live a feminist life is to work toward the end of a world that is unfair.
At different points in my life, the figures of the willful child, the magical girl, the witch, and Ahmed’s feminist killjoy have encouraged me to look at the world around me differently. These feminist archetypes were like a sword that cut through the fog produced by patriarchal forces trying to convince me that living and behaving a certain way was natural and inevitable, and revealed the machinery underneath. Through them, I have been able to understand where patriarchy failed and succeeded in shaping me as a subject—namely, I’ve been able to understand how I was judged as willful growing up and how that judgment stifled my thoughts and actions.
Willfulness and wickedness are magical, alchemical processes. They allow us to see the systems of domination that surround us and suggest ways that we can liberate ourselves from them. They teach us that not all authority is legitimate and that authority figures can be wrong. They show us that the status quo is not fixed or natural and that other worlds and ways of living are possible. When we take up willfulness as an assignment, it is our job to encourage this different way of seeing things until people are absolutely sick of us—until we are described as wicked. The magic in this assignment is that, through our willfulness, we reveal other ways of relating to the world.