Barrelhouse Reviews: Twelve, by Andrea Blythe

Review by Erin Becker

Interstellar Flight Press / September, 2020 / 62 pp

"The Twelve Dancing Princesses," a Brothers Grimm fairy tale, tells the story of a king's "twelve beautiful daughters." The daughters sneak off each night to a secret underground world where they dance with twelve fairy princes. Their father, seeing his daughters' tattered shoes each morning, becomes more and more disturbed by their unexplained nightly disappearances. The daughters tell him nothing. So the king enlists a slew of eligible suitors to unravel the mystery. The man who succeeds can marry the princess of his choosing and will become the heir to the throne. And any man who fails will face a swift beheading.

Throughout "The Twelve Dancing Princesses," the Grimm brothers leave the characters' internal worlds unexplored. As in most fairy tales, the conventions of the genre––brevity, "flat" characters, third person omniscient point-of-view, little to no interior monologue––put distance between the reader and the characters' innermost desires.

The titular princesses' shared external motivation is clear: to keep their dancing secret. They drug the suitors who come to investigate their whereabouts, even though they know their father will execute the men for their failure. It's a bold choice, telling a story where women willingly send men to their death to protect their own nightly revels. And yet––we never know why the princesses do it. Do the fairies understand them better than their father ever has? Is dancing the only way they can express themselves? Does having a secret, something that's just their own, make them feel human, whole, alive?

These questions go unanswered in the Grimm brothers' version of the story. And behind this lack of interior life, one could argue, is an assumption: that perhaps a fairy tale princess's inner world is not so complex after all.

Andrea Blythe challenges this assumption. Blythe situates Twelve, her slim, impactful retelling of the princesses' story, right at the crux of desire and action. These princesses want. They feel. They do. Picking up where the Grimm brothers' story ends, this book explores what happens after the door to the fairies' underground castle is locked and hidden away. The princesses can no longer escape to the fairy world. So they must find other means to escape.

"They had secrets, selves they kept hidden," the king reflects. And in Blythe's version of the story, this truly means selves, plural. Each princess has a different reason for rebelling, for fleeing, for wanting to keep her secrets. These desires are never very clear to their families or communities. But they are always quite clear to the princesses.

The third sister wants to spend her days in the library, not the "light and airy places" everyone thinks are better suited for young ladies of her stature. The eighth and ninth sisters have a different ambition. They seduce––and steal from––ladies and lords alike, becoming, together, a "trickster god," a walking legend, "the child of Death itself." No one ever suspects them; no one believes two young women could "take and take and take––for no other reason than they knew they could." The second sister, meanwhile, wants only to dance. It's the one thing that takes her "beyond the weight of her obligations," even beyond her pain. She dances without stopping. The ball ends, the fiddlers' fingers cramp, and the servers bus the platters away. But she keeps dancing, twirling out into the fields until––shoes shredding into nothing––her pirouettes lift her into the sky.

These wants are told in dense, textured prose poems, each just a few pages long. The language is heavy with detail that gives life to the princesses' motivations, rooting these desires in a rich and tangible world. Often, it's the world of domesticity––the expected world, for princesses. But it's made, through their agency, into something entirely new. The first sister, married off to the man who uncovered the princesses' secret, sets out to poison her husband, steeping lethal tea and baking "hemlock-seasoned lark into a meat pie." The fourth sister, haunted by all the men who died after she and the other princesses drugged them, stitches the ghosts into blankets and cowls. The tenth sister takes refuge in the castle's kitchen. By day, a pretty cook teaches her to sift flour and fill molds. By night, the women lick "sweetness from each other's flesh."

In the Author's Note, Blythe describes what she calls the "trap" of story: that is, "when one ending is presented as the only true and meaningful" resolution. Her book resists this trap. There is no destiny here, no happily-ever-after sense of the inevitable. Instead, there is a choice: return to the fairy world, perhaps forever? Or move forward to something beyond?

In the book's final poem, the twelfth sister has been searching for a way back into the fairy world. Now, years later, she's finally found the door. The lock's iron nails have rusted with time. Hammer in hand, she breaks them away with "a few stout blows."

But sometimes, going back doesn't mean going back, not really. The boats that bore the young girls across the lake are leaky now. The path to the pavilion is overgrown with weeds. And the fairy prince with whom she once danced is "ragged" and "grey" and "monstrous."

The fairy extends a hand. And the twelfth sister reflects:

When she was a child, she would have gladly taken his gnarled hand, stepping into the twirling flow of the dancing for a night's worth of something wondrous.

But she was no longer a child.

Here, Blythe shows that, yes, knowing what you want is powerful––but knowing what you don't want can be powerful, too. The fairy world is alluring, persuasive. But the twelfth sister's desires are different now. She has grown. She has changed. She does not take the fairy's hand.

"The power comes in the choosing," Blythe writes. And Twelve is, at its core, a story of women choosing. Time and time again, the book gives them space to act on their innermost desires––and does not make them apologize for these radical, layered wants.

Erin Becker is a writer and communications consultant. Her work has appeared in Lambda Literary, MAKE Lit + Luz, and Interstellar Flight Press. She lives between the US and southern Chile, and received her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. You can find her on Twitter @beckererine.