Kim Jaxon: Kissing the Witch

There are quite a few quotes that strike me every time I read the last chapter in Kissing the Witch:

“Kissing a witch is perilous business.”

“What simpler way is there than a kiss to give power a way into your heart.”

I like that the last tale seems to be Donoghue’s own. It makes sense, in fact, that she would wind through the story of princesses and end with a story of the witch. We rarely get a chance to see things from the witch’s perspective in other tales, and rarely a nuanced look at good/evil.

Why Kissing the Witch? Perhaps it is an act of defiance to embrace something so scary. In some ways, it could be seen as coming face to face to what scares us the most. I’m not even sure that she isn’t implying that sometimes we have to embrace the “witch” within us. Perhaps we our kissing–embracing–the parts of ourselves that are less than kind, or on a more positive note, parts of ourselves that are defiant or strong. If you take that second quote above in that sense, you could say that kissing the scarier part of ourselves is what ultimately gives us strength. We no longer fear our worst self or our more strong self. We forgive and draw power from all the parts of our identity.

I think my favorite tale, though, would be “The Tale of the Shoe.” I love the images Donoghue creates and the more subtle look at life in fairytale land. I appreciate that she makes problematic the goal of marrying instead of the be all end all of our lives. When she says, “There was no harm in this man; what he proposed was white and soft, comfortable as fog,” I suppose I immediately identify; after all, my first marriage seemed like a safe escape at the time. Good looking guy, big wedding, a couple of kids, until I no longer recognized myself. Its actually only in the second marriage that I actually ended up living a closer version of the fairy tale. Our culture has a way of making marriage the absolute goal of our lives, perhaps particularly for little girls. I often wonder if it’s okay for a little boy to say, “I want to get married and stay home.” Are we okay with that as a culture? And are we okay if we don’t want to marry?

I like that her text provides a less tidy version of our lives as women.