Marginalised women in folklore, and how I rewrote their stories
Power in the margins
In this piece written by Anna Kovatcheva for Women's History Month, the author explores how the concept of 'monsters' has been used to marginalise the 'outsiders' of society including women, and how she chose to subvert those tropes in her new novel, She Made Herself a Monster.
'It’s not about right. Not about wrong. It’s about power.'
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
'Humans have always needed people like me,' says Yana, my self-proclaimed, fraudulent vampire hunter, 'as long as we’ve needed monsters.'
Socially speaking, monsters are scapegoats. Broadly, they come in two complimentary flavours: those that allow society to shun the undesirable, and those that help to explain the inexplicable. Both exist to be conquered. Both exist to restore order by their defeat. Which is which depends on who’s doing the hunting — the powerful, or the marginalized.
The status quo calls its outsiders monstrous. Those who look, speak, worship, love, live differently — those who threaten a singular, established order that privileges the few. Today, these are the monsters we’re told to fear most often: the immigrant invaders, the queer predators, the noncompliant women.
By comparison, the vampires of Slavic folklore were quite provincial. Their malevolent presence threatened crops, sickened livestock, brought plagues. They personified existential threats that their societies could not comprehend, but unlike accused witches, they were already dead. Their slayers, the “seers” who could identify the revenants amongst the dead, were often undesirable themselves — people of troubled birth, people who might, in turn, become vampires when they died.
The slayer in this story, Yana, is one such person: a young woman, dark-skinned with prominent vitiligo that is sometimes mistaken for leprosy, and an outsider to the insular communities she serves. She could easily be cast as a monster by an ignorant, fearful world, but through compassion, cleverness, and luck, she has fashioned herself into an unlikely hero instead.
'Under patriarchy, women are always too young or too old for agency.'
She Made Herself a Monster is populated by women at the margins: in addition to Yana, we meet Nina, a widow and adulteress accused of witchcraft to cover her lover’s complicity in their affair; Minka and Yulia, a pair of elderly lesbians who traffic in herbalism and poison; and Anka, the “cursed” teenaged girl desperate to escape an arranged marriage to her own guardian, who insists his lechery is for her own protection.
Under patriarchy, women are always too young or too old for agency. Too ignorant, and therefore irrelevant; too educated, and therefore dangerous. Too plain, and so detestable; too pretty, and so succubine. The bounds of acceptable womanhood are so narrow that nobody comfortably fits. But gather enough women at the margins, and they might encircle the world. This is a book about women working together to turn the tables. In solidarity with each other, they shine a light on the monsters they fear: the men who would hurt them, then blame them for their own spilt blood.
After all, as the slayer teaches us: 'You must be able to see a monster before you can fight it.'