Recs: Women Creating Their Story

[rachelmanija]

This is for a possible Sirens presentation. The theme this year is "retold tales."

Can you recommend to me fantasy media or myth in which female characters, in some sense, alter reality by telling stories about it?

This "altering reality" doesn't have to be magic in itself; the ultimate example is Scheherazade, who changes the world by telling stories. There's also Martha's world-changing storytelling in Doctor Who.

The other examples I thought of were magical: Paperhouse (girl creates spooky new reality by drawing it), Fudoki (a dying princess of the Heian court writes a story about a cat who becomes a woman; she may or may not create a reality in which the story is true), The Secret Country (kids create a fantasy world, then travel to it and find that it is and isn't as they imagined), The Tricksters (characters from a girl's lush fantasy narrative show up, again not exactly as she pictured them), Voices (Annals of the Western Shore) (spoilery but sort of fits), Witch Week (the entire climax depends on a girl telling a story which alters reality.)

Can you think of others? Especially, examples from myth and folklore, and examples which aren't about white girls?

ETA: If you rec something, please explain how it fits.

Comments

[marfisa.livejournal.com]

Although in "Liar," by the end of the book there seems to be a distinct possibility that Micah is at least intermittently insane, instead of (or as well as) suffering from the particular "illness" to which she ultimately attributes most of the teen-angst-bullshit-with-a-body-count that she's been involved in one way or another. So the fantasy element that supposedly explains much of what happens (in different ways depending on the different ways she retells it) may be just a delusion on her part, which could make this story somewhat problematical for Sirens purposes.

[evalangui.livejournal.com]

I actually wrote an essay for uni in which I read the novel with the idea that Micah was insane and it was all her delusions. That does not change the fact that she's shaping her narrative. I was analyzing two other characters, canonically insane (Septimus from Mrs Dalloway and Paul Michel from Hallucinating Foucault) who are controlled by the narrative and give up, Micah's vision of reality, whether it matches physical reality or not, is absolutely under her control. So I think that does count as 'altering reality in some sense by telling stories about it'.