Elizabeth Hopkinson's Hidden Grove

  In 2021, I wrote a blog post entitled Unconscious Bias: A Conscious Confession , in which I recognised my own tendency to make first-impression judgements based on names, accents, colour, appearance etc. Well, now I'm confessing to the presence of blind spots as regards my own White Privilege. Specifically relating to my favourite fairy tale, Beauty and the Beast. A couple of weeks back, I made the hideous mistake of posting a plot analysis of Our Flag Means Death based on Beauty and and the Beast in a private fan group. My innocently-meant observations ended up seriously upsetting another fan by tapping into 600 years of colonial hurt. I apologised and took the post down. I don't intend to repeat what I posted there, as that would defeat the object of removing it. But I would like to talk about some of the issues involved and how I could have missed them. The Problem My fellow-fan alerted me to the dangers inherent in casting Stede and Ed as Beauty and the Beast, given that ...

Two mermaid dolls 27th January is the feast day of St Muirgen, also known as Li Ban or Liban. She appears in a number of old Irish annals, such as the Martyrology of Donegal and the Annals of the Four Masters. There's nothing unsual about that: the history of Ireland is crammed to bursting with saints and martyrs. But what's unusual about Miurgen is that she is a mermaid. According to the stories, she was three hundred years under the sea, until the time of the saints. At that time, a man called Beoan was on a mission to Rome, at sea in his curragh (ship) when the ship caught a mermaid (liban) in its nets. She told him she was the the daughter of Eochaidh from Lough Neagh, who was changed to a mermaid when her family was drowned. They brought her to land, where she was baptised by St Comhgall under the name Muirgen (traverser of the sea). The calendar of St Oengus says of her: My God loved Muirgen, A miraculous triumphant being. I love it that there is a mermaid saint! That som...

  “The Origin of Love”, Anna Hopkinson 2019. Yesterday, something happened to me that has not happened before. I had to part ways with an editor on moral grounds. The person in question objected to my explicit reveal that the protagonist and his nemesis were conjoined twins in a former life. The reason? Apparently, two pairs of conjoined twins in one story “stretched credulity” and raised distracting questions about “who gets to move the limbs etc.” Couldn’t they just be normal twins or best friends? No, they couldn’t. I felt honour bound to say these comments sounded prejudiced, and I couldn’t accept the edits. I’m sure this editor did not intend to be prejudiced. It was unconscious bias. * This morning, I watched David Harewood’s documentary for the BBC, “Why is Covid Killing People of Colour?” It contained some shocking statistics; not least the grossly disproportionate number of Pakistani people living in deprived areas (something particularly relevant to my home town of Bradfo...

I recently went to see Rupert Everett's wonderful film, The Happy Prince, about the last days of Oscar Wilde. The story is framed by Wilde telling his fairy tale, The Happy Prince, both in his lost past with his sons, and his down-at-heel present with young denizens of the Parisian demi-monde. I have loved The Happy Prince since childhood but hadn't thought to associate it with Wilde's life until now. In the film, there is a clear parallel between the statue of the Prince being stripped of his gold and jewels until he is finally torn down as an eyesore by the Mayor, and Wilde's fall from his heady period of fame, through scandal and prison, towards derision, destitution and death. This led me to think about our own times, which have seen a large number of high-profile celebrities and "national treasures" brought down through scandal and court cases. Some of these individuals have committed genuinely terrible crimes, unlike Oscar Wilde, who was ...

Travellers in the Third Reich, Julia Boyd This week, I have been reading Travellers in the Third Reich by Julia Boyd.  It might sound like a grim read, but actually it's fascinating.  According to the blurb: Travellers in the Third Reich  is an extraordinary history of the rise of the Nazis based on fascinating first-hand accounts, drawing together a multitude of voices and stories, including students, politicians, musicians, diplomats, schoolchildren, communists, scholars, athletes, poets, journalists, fascists, artists, tourists, even celebrities like Charles Lindbergh and Samuel Beckett. Their experiences create a remarkable three-dimensional picture of Germany under Hitler – one so palpable that the reader will feel, hear, even breathe the atmosphere. And it's true.  You really do feel like you're there, all the way from 1919 to 1945.  What may seem incredible to some is that foreigners (especially British and American) kept on holidaying in Germany...

King Kong: RKO pictures, 1933 I have recently finished reading Black and British: A Forgotten History by David Olusoga , an excellent book, which accompanied a BBC TV series of the same name.  I can't praise this book enough, and I'm not going to say everything that is to be said about it here.  Instead, I'm going to talk about something that came out of my reading of this and another book: The Anatomical Venus by Joanna Ebenstein.   It concerns a recurring image of paranoia, racism and sexism that ends up as the much-remade RKO film, King Kong. Before I start, let me warn you that this blog contains images and text that some people may find distressing and/or offensive. It begins with a painting: The Nightmare by  Anglo-Swiss artist Henry Fuseli.  The Nightmare: Henry Fuseli, 1781 There are several versions of this painting, but it basically depicts a beautiful young woman, asleep or swooning, with an ape-like incubus perched on top of he...