Kissing the Witch (Jaurele’s Blog Post 4)

My favorite is actually a combination of “The Tale of the Voice” and “The Tale of the Kiss”, or how they connect. This is partly due to personal bias. I’ve always loved (to hate) Ursula from The Little Mermaid and wondered what her story might be. There is a line in the Disney movie where she says something like, “when I lived in the palace we had the greatest parties”, and I’ve been curious about that since I was 10. Donoghue gave me some closure with her version with the Ursula figure as a woman who more or less fell into being a witch. Ia lso found it interesting that in this version the witch tries to talk the girl out of the bargain several times. Mostly, though, I loved the last tale because it’s so well written. I think The Voice best captures the situation of women today. Just like the girl gave up her passion of singing with the loss of her voice, so many young women today struggle to balance their own personal fulfillment with the quest for romantic love.

I think Donoghue titled the book Kissing the Witch for a few reasons. First it’s a juxtaposition to almost every other fairy tale convention regarding witches; they are evil and if not asexual then at least romantically unavailable. Witches are to be feared, not kissed. But in this book Donoghue challenges the very idea of evil and what makes a person conventionally good or bad. Just when you think you know the villain of one story she sheds light on that woman’s past in the next. This humanizes the characters and creates empathy on the part of the reader. By the end of the book it’s not so hard to imagine a witch as a person like any other who just wants to be loved.