Illustrations for three of the folktales I covered in my graduation thesis, A War in Women’s Lore. I examined these tales through the lens of how they may contribute to or deconstruct patriarchy.
In The Tidy Girl, a Hungarian folktale, a young man travels village to village “selling apples for trash”. All the girls bring out their household waste to get some of the fruit, until the last girl tells him to wait so she can gather more trash. She comes back, almost empty handed, and apologetically confesses to our hero that this is all she could find. He instead is very pleased by her tidiness, asks for her hand in marriage, and they live happily ever after.
In The Slipper-Tearing Princesses, princesses sneak out every night to an unknown place and each morning they return with their slippers completely torn up. The king asks a young man to find out what they do all night. What follows is a series of trials where the lad’s commitment to spying on the princesses and gathering every small detail of their private dealings gets tested, but he perseveres; he finds out that each night the princesses dance in an underground castle with devil-men, and the floor is made out of razorblades where they tear up their shoes. Learning of this, the king imprisons the princesses nightly, and rewards the lad with his kingdom. Interestingly, in some versions, the king imprisons all princesses except for the youngest, whom he marries off to the hero.
A telling of Pirosmalac: There once was a lonely woman who wished for a child. She prayed: “God, you can give me any kind of child, even a puppy, and I will raise it with love!” And so, after she miraculously fell pregnant and gave birth to a baby, she was surprised to see that her daughter was a little piglet. She raised her strange little baby with much love, and named her Pirosmalac. As Pirosmalac grew older, she grew more restless. That’s when the woman’s friends convinced her to send her to school - it was clear she was misbehaving because had a thirst for knowledge! At first, she was disturbing class with her frequent oinking, but once the teacher gave her a book, she was completely captivated. Her little snout followed the lines of text attentively. One day, the kids from class all went out to pick strawberries in the forest. Pirosmalac’s mother made the neighbour’s son promise that he will look after the piglet. As he and Pirosmalac went deep into the forest, he saw that when she thought no one saw her, she took off her pigskin, and the boy saw a sweet little girl under it. She put the skin back on, and he kept her secret. As they were growing up, he and Pirosmalac got closer, as they were very alike, and the boy felt this strange girl became special to him. When they got even older, he finally asked for her hand in marriage. Everyone came to see the weird couple wed. Once Pirosmalac and him climbed up to the bedroom in the attic, she threw down the pigskin, and it was thrown away. As they came down, everyone else finally saw the girl underneath the pigskin and they knew how lovable she is; but they always knew.