While working at Barnes & Noble for many years before starting on my PhD, I passed by, rearranged, and restocked Robin McKinley’s many books over and over. The titles always interested me, but I never took the chance to read them. Now, I’m analyzing McKinley’s Deerskin (1993) for my dissertation as an adaptation of Charles Perrault’s “Peau d’âne” fairy tale (1693).
And so, for research purposes of course, I’m reading some of her children’s books. I’ve started with a collection of titles that I was lucky enough to get for very cheap as ebooks: Sunshine, Rose Daughter, The Outlaws of Sherwood, The Hero and the Crown. Although I’m certainly interested in her work as adaptations, I decided to start with the one book on this list that I didn’t think was an adaptation, The Hero and the Crown (1984).
I was very pleased to find structural similarities between Hero and Deerskin. The protagonists were both princesses whose mothers had died, who were not well known or understood by their father’s court, and who eschewed the usual upbringing of a princess. Deerskin was marketed as an adult novel due to the mature and graphic nature of the plot’s main catalyst in which the protagonist almost dies; however, the young adult Hero‘s Aerin almost died in a heroic fight of her own choosing. Both young women then spend much time taking care of their wounds, mental and physical, while in seclusion with only their closest companions (a dog and a horse, respectively).
Hero, written a decade earlier, seems to have provided McKinley with a structure for her more adult and more elaborated development of “the father who wants to marry his daughter” type tale. The “big bad” shifts from a mythical creature to a very real father, and the violence takes on a more surprising and taboo quality.
The magic that becomes a part of both protagonists’ lives after they have healed their wounds varies quite a bit in the two tales, although, once again there is a parallel in that both heroines become magical in the latter half of their tales. In Deerskin, the protagonist takes on the magical qualities of a mythical person called the Moonwoman. This is a means for the character’s continual mental healing and hiding from her father. In Hero, Aerin is healed by magic, and finally learns that she has magic within her. The otherworldly nature of McKinley’s narration as Aerin experiences magic made it a pleasure to read. This hero gets caught up in duties to her kingdom, gets lost in time, falls in love, and then fulfills her role as a princess of her kingdom in an unforeseen way.
My favorite element of this story is the gender discrimination that Aerin must and does overcome, since the struggle is real for young women (including readers) in our world. The impetus for Aerin’s interest in “manly things”–like sword and dragon fighting–comes from knowing that she, as an only daughter, is not to inherit her father’s thrown. Feeling undervalued and underestimated works hard to create her own worth and then surpasses even her expectations as she learns truths no one in her own household was aware of. It’s an empowering story for young readers of all sorts who feel held back because of who they are or who they are expected to be.
