Lebanese Subversive Folktales

Najla Jraissaty compiled stories that were orally narrated by Lebanese women to children and other women. This article focuses on telling tales as an oral performance and how these storytellers narrated tales featuring resilient, intelligent, powerful women. Drawing on Jack Zipes’s notion of fairy tales as an art of subversion with a civilizing mission, Joan Riviere’s notion of “womanliness as a masquerade,” and Terry Castle’s argument that female disguises in literature are liberating, this article contends that the tales in Najla Jraissaty’s Pearls on a Branch display subversiveness through multiple strategies such as feminist revisions, satire, sexual innuendo, and female disguise

Argument (complex analysis · Feminism · Oral literature · Oral tradition · Subversion · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · Middle East Politics and Society · North African History and Literature