The Trouble with Princesses

Joan McGrath is a Toronto Board of Education library consultant.

The princesses who were the heroines of almost all traditional European or Eastern fairy tales were usually beset by many and varied troubles: unwanted suitors; threatening monsters; jealous relations; and fathers who offered them as prizes for valour, speed, cunning or for ridding the kingdom of some form of exotic nuisance.

Christie Harris’s princesses of the New World resemble their Old World counterparts in many respects. They too are lovely, marriageable, and beset by troubles. These princesses, however, are clad not in silks, satins, and diamonds, but in robes of finest sable, decked out in ornaments of polished shell and bone. They live in great houses of carven cedar, as magnificent in their way as any cold stone castle. These princesses too are sought by the bravest and handsomest princes in the land, who must win the hand of the beloved through feats of strength, cunning, and endurance. The Western princesses seem less resigned than the more traditional heroines to sit waiting to be claimed: they initiate a good many adventures of their own and show a fine fighting spirit. These fairy tales, adapted from West Coast folklore, have the same magical fascination as the well-loved “once upon a time” favourites, with a refreshingly vigorous flavour of sea and cedar to add piquancy.