Margot Mifflin

This new genre, in which classic stories are revamped or fairy
tale-like narratives are given progressive twists, is not to be
confused with its adult counterpart, penned by authors such as
Anne Sexton, Angela Carter and Margaret Atwood. These are kids’
titles, yet they address adult concerns about fairy tales: that they pit women against each other in struggles for husbands and status; that they’re filled with dead mothers and negligent fathers; that they equate virtue with youth and beauty
and promote a feminine ideal of purity and compliance.

This last complaint is what drives many current reformers, who do their magic by transforming passive heroines into doers or subverting traditional scenarios in order to skewer the values
the original stories reinforce.

One of the most successful contemporary revisions is Frances
Minters’ lighthearted “Sleepless Beauty” (Viking, 1996). Written
in verse and exquisitely illustrated by G. Brian Karas, it stars a
resourceful Beauty who both saves herself and gets her prince.

This Beauty grows up in a swank Manhattan apartment. After she pricks her finger on the needle attached to an “old time vinyl record” player brought by a witch
who crashes her 14th birthday party, she falls asleep. But in this tale, Beauty calls the shots:

Next morning bright and early
As always I awoke.
I saw my parents sleeping
I thought it was a joke.

“Wake up, wake up!” I shouted!
“You’ve slept enough, I’d say.”
“What year is it?” asked Mother.
“Same year as yesterday.”

“We didn’t sleep a hundred years?
The witch did us no harm?”
“She couldn’t,” I said proudly,
“‘Cause I set the alarm.”

Beauty writes a thank-you note to the comely rocker whose
music helped her “fool the wicked stranger.” They meet, and the
rest is fairy-tale history.

What makes “Sleepless Beauty” so effective is that Minters
doesn’t compromise her story in the name of upgrading its sexual
politics: The witch is creepy, the threat is real and Beauty
triumphs romantically in the end. Minters’ tale, of course,
reworks just one popular rendering of “Sleeping Beauty” — a saga
with many incarnations. One of its earliest recorded versions is
Italian Giambattista Basile’s “Sun, Moon and Talia,” (published
in 1636), in which Talia, pricked by a poisonous thorn, falls
asleep and gets raped by an opportunistic king. The story later
morphed into Charles Perrault’s “The Sleeping Beauty in the
Woods,” and later still into the Grimm Brothers’ “Little Briar-Rose.”

Purists may question the ethics of meddling with such time-tested stories, but a bigger concern might be on which “original”
to base a rewrite — since even classic fairy tales sometimes recycle shared scenarios. As Maria Tatar explains in “Grimm’s Grimmest” (Chronicle, 1997), the Grimm
Brothers modified their own stories: Originally collected as
tabloid-style diversions for adults, the tales were later modified to boost sales, and then again to appeal to children. In the originals, for example, Snow White’s
stepmother danced to death in hot iron shoes, Cinderella’s stepsisters got their eyes pecked out by doves and Rapunzel got pregnant in her tower.

One of the greatest risks for writers adapting fairy tales is
sacrificing their mythic elements for the sake of modernizing their
sexual mores. Babette Cole’s heavy-handed “Princess Smartypants”
(Putnam, 1986), for example, opens with a doctrinaire thud:
“Princess Smartypants did not want to get married. She enjoyed
being a Ms.” When her parents pressure her into finding a husband,
Smartypants scares off her wimpy suitors by assigning them
impossible tasks for winning her hand in marriage. Just one,
Prince Swashbuckle, unexpectedly succeeds, so she kisses him,
turning him into a toad, and sends him home.

Witty though it is, “Princess Smartypants” is tainted by its
low-grade male-bashing and its mean-spirited conclusion.
Interestingly, while many fairy tale princesses are plunged into
post-pubescent states of arrested development (one critic calls it
the “jar syndrome,” in which inginues like Sleeping Beauty and Snow
White are “pickled” just as they reach their sexual maturity),
Smartypants secures her own perpetual adolescence: She holes up in
her parents’ house where her only friends are her pets and her TV.
No transformative journey or rite of passage for this materialist
’80s princess.

Less overtly misandrist, “The Paper Bag Princess” by Robert Munsch
(Annick Press, 1980) features he-and-she teen royalty planning to
marry until a dragon attacks them and kidnaps the prince. The
princess, whose clothes are burned — along with her castle — by the dragon,
dons a paper bag and saves her friend by outwitting the dragon.
Instead of thanking her for his life, the prince tells her to come
back when she’s dressed like a “real princess.” She responds,
“You look like a real prince, but you are a bum,” and there the
romance ends.

It’s refreshing to see a fearless and discerning princess, but
this one gets no reward for her courage, and because the prince is
a cad from the start, it’s hard to get behind her rescue effort
(and why, having discovered her true love is a turkey, is she
running exuberantly into the sunset on the last page?). Both
“Princess Smartypants” and “The Paper Bag Princess” indulge in a ’70s
impulse to solve gender inequities by eliminating men from the
picture altogether. Because fairy tales seem to function largely
as romances for many contemporary kids, most recent revisions
preserve a romantic drama.

“Cinderella,” for example, which has more than 500 variants going
back to ancient China, continues to inspire adaptations. In
“Cinder Elly,” Minters updates it ` la “Sleepless Beauty,” but her
heroine is as helpless as her namesake. Cole, meanwhile, arranges a role
reversal in “Prince Cinders,” casting the prince as the younger
brother of three macho guys who frequent the disco. In this send-up, which collapses under the weight of its cartoonish happenstance, the prince is accidentally
changed into a hairy monkey too big to get into the Rock’n Royal
Bash. He frightens a princess while waiting at the bus stop just
before midnight, and when he turns back into himself, she thinks he
saved her from the monkey, and marries him.

More successful is Charlotte Huck’s “Princess Furball,”
(Greenwillow Books, 1989), an embroidery of the Cinderella story,
similar to the Grimms’ “Many Furs” or “Thousand Furs,” and
charmingly illustrated by Anita Lobel. Huck’s heroine is “strong
and capable and clever, besides being beautiful.” She escapes an
arranged marriage to an ogre, and through her own resourcefulness
wins a king, who surprises the reader by noticing something beside
her beauty: “You are as clever as you are lovely,” he tells her
before proposing.

In “The Glass Mountain” (Morrow, 1999), author Diane Wolkstein
revives the lesser-known Grimm tale of the same name. In this
story a king builds a glass mountain for his daughter’s suitors to
climb for her hand in marriage. She decides to help the one she
likes best, but slips on her way up the mountain and falls captive
to an old gold miner who makes her his servant — dubbing her, revoltingly enough, Mother Houserot. She outwits him and climbs back to daylight, where her prince and
her father await her.

A wonderfully eerie Norwegian folk tale retold and finely
illustrated by Lauren Mills, “Tatterhood and the Hobgoblins”
follows twin princesses, one “fair and mild” (Isabella), the other
“wild and strange” (Tatterhood), who are separated when hobgoblins
steal Isabella’s head (replacing it with a calf’s head) and,
weirdly, mount it on their mantel. After the fearless
Tatterhood saves her sister, the girls go adventuring at sea until
they meet an army of knights and find their royal mates.

Tatterhood is unusual for its depiction of sisterly
devotion and team adventure. But while it undermines the
stereotype of the passive heroine, it reinforces that of the
beautiful one, albeit with a distinctly postmodern twist. The pretty
Isabella snags her prince immediately; not so Tatterhood, that
“bedraggled creature.” She taunts her sister’s royal brother-in-law at Isabella’s wedding, prodding him to ask her why she wears a tattered cloak and weeds in her hair. He guesses that she has the power to appear beautiful whenever she wishes, and she proves him
right by turning into “the most magnificent princess he could ever
have imagined.” With post-feminist relish, Tatterhood reveals
herself to be a beauty who isn’t afraid to show men what she’s got,
when she wants to.

Where are the studies proving that traditional fairy tales damage
girls’ self-esteem or narrow their pantheon of female role models?
There are none. In “Don’t Tell the Grownups: The Subversive Power
of Children’s Literature,” Alison Lurie points out that much
European folklore was originally told by women, and featured strong
female characters, many of whom possessed magical powers. She
calls it “exactly the sort of subversive literature of which feminists should approve.”

But the tales she mentions haven’t survived into the Disney
era, which, until “Mulan,” has enshrined submissive heroines while neglecting assertive ones. Grimm stories “The Robber Bridegroom” and “Fowler’s Fowl,” says Tatar, in which women saved
themselves from danger, “have both undergone a kind of collective
cultural repression in this country and only recently been
recuperated by feminist writers.” Fairy tales may be
decontextualized (“Once upon a time”) on the printed page, but
they are solidly grounded in the values of their age, and evolve
with them. So, hearteningly, we have HBO’s new celebrity-studded
feminist fairy tale series, “Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales for Every Child,” which premiered this summer and continues through the winter. The series casts women as both heroines and villains, and
dispenses with damsels in distress, thereby bolstering women’s
identity as people, not personality traits.

Even so, it’s important to approach reconstituted fairy tales
as a supplement to rather than a replacement for the classics,
which have their own transgressive beauty and irresistible
folkways. I like to think my 3-year-old’s home schooling in
feminist fairy tales complements her experience of the “originals”:
She may run around the house in her nightgown singing, “Someday My
Prince Will Come” in an earnest soprano as she test-drives her
Snow White persona, but she’s also inclined to ask why, for example,
the miller’s daughter in Rumpelstiltskin would marry a king who
wants her only for her money.

After the 2005 release of the film “Capote,” with its frustratingly hazy depiction of Truman Capote’s friend and “research assistant” Nelle (to friends) Harper (to readers) Lee, the door swung open for a biography. “Mockingbird” is the first, arriving just after she turned 80. Though it’s ostensibly about the author, whose Alabama family and Southern racial consciousness inspired “To Kill a Mockingbird,” it’s also about Lee and Capote, childhood friends who grew up to become symbiotic figures, both personally and artistically, during the ’60s. Both were precocious children out of step with their peers, whose slippery grip on gender was a social liability. As Shields puts it, “she was too rough for the girls, and he was too soft for the boys.” Each had emotionally absent mothers: Capote’s was a self-absorbed social climber; Lee’s was chronically depressed, though in her more functional youth she’d played piano at Capote’s 16-year-old mother’s wedding. (To embroider this family quilt, Capote’s father came on to Lee when she was a teenager and she responded by punching him in the nose; Capote hated Lee’s gossipy mother, and parodied her, at age 10, in a story called “Mrs. Busybody.”)

If the two shared what Lee called a “common anguish” and Capote dubbed “an apartness” in childhood, they were inverted artistically as adults: Each was fascinated by crime, but “In Cold Blood,” Capote’s genre-busting “non-fiction novel” about the murder of a Kansas family, exposed a world of random violence, presaging a future of rogue postal workers and murderous schoolchildren, while “To Kill a Mockingbird” painted a moral portrait of good and evil, leaving the reader comfortably nestled in the lap of righteousness. Shields doesn’t frame it this way; his story is more anecdotal than analytical, but he gives you the raw material, neatly packaged, on which to base any number of term papers about the correlations between the two writers and their work. He answers several questions that have swirled around Lee and Capote (yes, the character Dill was based on Capote; no, Capote did not write part or all of “To Kill a Mockingbird”), and he introduces fresh information that puts a new spin on both authors. For example, Lee inspired Capote’s character Ann “Jumbo” Finchburg, (“a sawed off but solid tomboy with an all-hell-let-loose wrestling technique”) in his story “The Thanksgiving Visitor,” as well as the boyish Idabel Tompkins of his novel “Other Voices, Other Rooms.”

For fans of both Capote and “Capote,” Shields’ most salient revelation will be that Lee’s contribution to “In Cold Blood” was much greater than the film conveys. First, Lee served as a social lubricant for Capote, who impressed Kansas Bureau of Investigation detective Harold Nye as “an absolute flake” in contrast to his assistant, who “looked like normal folk.” Lead detective Alvin Dewey said, “If Capote came on as something of a shocker, she was there to absorb the shock.” (He also called her a “good looker,” though she was known for being frumpy.) More significantly, Capote relied on Lee not just for research, but also for characterization. “Nelle’s gift for creating character sketches turned out to complement Truman’s ability to recall remarks,” writes Shields, reporting on the duo’s first trip to Holcomb, Kan., to research the murders in 1959. “Many times over the next month, Capote’s telegraphic descriptions of a conversation would end with ‘See NL’s notes’ to remind him to use her insights later.”

Lee noted that Dick Hickock’s face, disfigured in a car accident, looked like someone had “cut it down the middle, then put it back together not quite in place.” Capote wrote, “It was as though his head had been halved like an apple, then put together a fraction off center.” Capote paid the murderers $50 each to meet with him and Lee. In her notes about Hickock’s demeanor during the interview, Lee wrote, “Never seen anyone so poised, relaxed, free & easy in the face of four 1st degree murder charges. He gave the impression of being completely in the moment, with no concern about tomorrow’s troubles.” Capote observed Hickock in prison: “Outwardly, Hickock seemed to one and all an unusually untroubled man.”

Capote left out unflattering details about the Clutter family, some of which Lee had collected, because he needed his victims to look good. For example, Lee reported that the two surviving Clutter daughters showed up the day after their entire family was murdered and argued over who would take what, down to the kitchen utensils. Lee spoke to a family friend who recalled Nancy Clutter breaking down and crying about her mentally ill mother. And she wrote about how lonely and isolated Nancy was, asking, “How did she maintain the outward semblance of a wholesome, extremely bright and popular teenager without cracking at the seams? Her family life was ghastly.” Capote sought the emotional truth of the Clutter murders, but, partly because of his careerism, he and Lee seem to have found two different stories.

Shields’ chapter on “In Cold Blood” is almost worth the price alone, and makes you wonder why the film’s producers didn’t comb Capote’s papers for material with Shields’ thoroughness. He also draws compelling points of connection between Lee’s own childhood and the events of “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

For practical purposes, Atticus Finch was A.C. Lee, Harper Lee’s father, a respected Monroeville lawyer who had defended two black men accused of murder, and lost. (Nelle’s maternal grandfather was named Finch.) But the book’s plot was based on a case in which a white jury convicted a black man of raping a white woman in Monroeville in 1934, causing local citizens to question the fairness of the decision. Shields notes, however, that A.C. Lee “only gradually rose to the moral standards of Atticus … Like most men of his generation, he believed the current social order, segregation, was natural and created harmony between the races.” He didn’t become a civil rights advocate until the ’50s. As a father, too, A.C. Lee was Atticus: firm, moral but never sanctimonious, and a bit old for fatherhood by the time Lee, the youngest of four children, was born. Gregory Peck met and studied him in preparation for the role of Atticus, calling him “a fine old gentleman of eighty-two, and truly sophisticated although he had never traveled more than a few miles from that small southern town.”

And, of course, Scout was Lee. Her apparently bipolar mother, who died when Lee was 25, was a cipher (Lee dispensed with Scout’s mother by killing her before the start of the novel). Like Scout, Lee was a precocious kid who called her teacher by her first name as she did her father, and brawled with boys. Capote claimed that the first third of the novel, in which the children taunt Boo Radley, was “quite literal and true.” In some sense, Lee preserved her Scoutness into adulthood: She never advanced artistically beyond her first novel, and never had an adult relationship — or at least a public one. She lived by her own code, refusing to join the social whirl of literary New York. For years she spoke of writing a second novel, and in the ’70s, when it failed to materialize, her sister Alice claimed, straight-facedly, that a burglar had broken into her apartment and lifted the manuscript.

“Mockingbird: A Life of Harper Lee” is compelling for the reason “Capote” was: Both chronicle the creation of a great book, but Shields, a former high school teacher, pays closer attention to the writing than to the research process, tracing the nucleus of “To Kill a Mockingbird” as far back as Lee’s college days. In this sense, “Mockingbird” is more a biography of a novel than an author, and Shields would have done better to skip the hermetic second half of Lee’s life instead of forcing it into 13 grasping and uncertain pages at the end. Only Harper Lee can say why Harper Lee never wrote another novel — or, for that matter, anything beyond a few hackneyed women’s magazine articles in the ’60s. Only Harper Lee can say whether Harper Lee was gay, or whether, as Capote suggested in a letter, she was “unhappily in love with a man impossible to marry” (possibly her married literary agent). Though Shields can’t begin to answer the big questions about Lee’s personal life, his analysis of her novel’s inception and impact almost fills the gap, but even there, he’s neglected an important aspect of her artistry: a discussion of Scout, Lee’s 6-year-old narrator, as an icon of American girlhood.

For thousands of postwar American women, Scout is a touchstone of childhood authenticity. In some Mary Pipheresque prelapsarian state, we were all Scout once: unfiltered, free-ranging, with a physical confidence rooted in a prepubescent androgyny — qualities inevitably poisoned by the idiotic affectations of adolescence. (When she senses the feminizing agenda her stuffy aunt has in store for her, Scout feels “the starched walls of a pink cotton penitentiary closing in” on her.) Lee’s magic (which some early critics perceived as a failure) was in ventriloquizing the experiences of a 6-year old in the voice of a grown woman, offering a bridge back to childhood. As a motherless child, Scout demonstrates how children treat life’s curveballs as what happens, not what shouldn’t happen, and adjust their expectations accordingly. She’s unlike other girl characters, filmic or literary, of her age: Who even remembers the name of Mary Poppins’ wide-eyed female charge or the girls in “The Railway Children”? Even the more heroic contemporary preteens who’ve followed, like Hermione of “Harry Potter,” are not protagonists. What other girl character has Scout’s open grace, her left hook, and the narrative to herself from beginning to end?

Shields does an excellent job of tracing the evolution of Lee’s book and tracking its success; less so of parsing its cultural value. Still, “Mockingbird” lays a strong foundation for Lee scholarship, and turns up some marvelous ephemera. (Mary Badham, who played Scout in the movie, blew her lines repeatedly at the close of filming because she didn’t want the experience to end.) Despite some overextended metaphors, the writing is taut, briskly paced and sometimes lovely: Shields describes A.C. Lee’s arrival in Monroe County, Ala., where “sawmills were chewing into the piney woods, filling the air with their ear-splitting whine and the vinegary smell of fresh cut lumber.” And he’s highlighted a side of Lee that’s subtly evident in her novel, though wholly absent from the film “Capote”: her wry and sometimes cutting sense of humor (honed, apparently, when she was the editor of the humor magazine at the University of Alabama, where she studied law). When she was told her book had great appeal for children, for example, she deadpanned, “But I hate children. I can’t stand them.”

Lee was — is — a quiet nonconformist whose rejection of celebrity is almost unimaginable in today’s media culture, especially for a bestselling author. Fame caught her by surprise; she hoped her book would meet a “quick and merciful death” and instead it achieved immortality. As a fellow Alabamian who knew her as a fledging writer in New York noted, “Here was this dumpy girl from Monroeville. We didn’t think she was up to much. She said she was writing a book and that was that.”

Love her or hate her, you probably don’t know her at all. Nee Martha Canary, she was less — and more — than she’s cracked up to be: She was a cook and a laundress, a dance hall girl and a prostitute, an abject alcoholic and a devoted nurse, an abused wife and a mother who said of her daughter, Jessie, “She’s all I’ve got to live fer; she’s my only comfort.” She knew Wild Bill Hickok, who was newly married, for a mere six weeks before he was shot down in Deadwood, S.D. Legend has it — wrongly — that they were lovers. And let the record show: Though she sometimes donned men’s clothes, Canary typically wore a dress.

In “Calamity Jane: The Woman and the Legend,” McLaird, a professor emeritus at Dakota Wesleyan University, sets out to correct the errors that plague Canary scholarship and, more significantly, to explain how her life was recast to fulfill a romantic vision of frontier life. Some of the tall tales about her spring from dime novels in which she was written into fabricated exploits; others were plucked from her own falsified autobiography (“I was considered the most reckless and daring rider and one of the best shots in the western country”). But weirdly enough, a major source of misinformation about her came from her impostor daughter, Jean McCormick, who popped up in 1941 with a forged memoir, itself spun from popular fictions, that crystallized Canary’s myth and went unquestioned for decades. McCormick claimed her parents were Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickok, and because so little research had been done on Canary, the forgery, which McLaird debunks in a few deft and convincing strokes, was long accepted as fact.

McLaird all but apologizes for writing a book whose somewhat piecemeal narrative (chunks of Canary’s story are lost to history) is further fractured by the rebuttals necessary to defending its accuracy. No family records survive, and her 1896 autobiography was propaganda. “Sadly,” McLaird notes in his introduction, “after romantic adventures are removed, her story is mostly an account of uneventful daily life interrupted by drinking binges.” But the myth-making (much of which Canary orchestrated herself through newspaper interviews) is as interesting as the myth, and through the host of colorful quotes McLaird has unearthed both by and about her, Canary emerges as a character worth mythologizing. (If only McLaird weren’t so resistant to paraphrasing: In some passages, the book reads like a Zagat’s restaurant guide, with multiple partial quotes crammed into one chop suey sentence after another.)

Born in Mercer County, Mo., in 1856, Canary was the oldest of some unknown number of siblings. Her father was a farmer; her mother was, by one account, an illiterate prostitute whose husband, taken by her beauty, tried to reform her, and failed. After some legal wrangling over land, the family sold their property and left Missouri in the early 1860s, heading for Montana gold. But they fell on hard times; her mother died in a mining camp in Blackfoot City, Mont., when Canary was about 9. After taking the children to Salt Lake City, her father died soon after.

Canary was presumably taken in by an adoptive family, but by the time she was 14 or 15, she was on her own, working at a boarding house in Piedmont, Wyo., and dancing with soldiers at night, until the owner kicked her out for appearing at a party in a soldier’s uniform at a time when women could be fined for wearing men’s clothes. She followed freighting teams along the railroad, worked as a laundress, dance hall girl and prostitute or “camp follower,” though she later claimed she spent her teens engaged in military campaigns against Indians in Wyoming. She was one of the first white women to enter the Black Hills of South Dakota — but not as a soldier. One wagon train captain heading there from Cheyenne recalled seeing her, then 20, driving a team and wearing a buckskin suit. “The first place that attracted her attention,” he said, “was a saloon, where she was soon made blind as a bat from looking through the bottom of a glass.”

Canary’s notoriety evolved into respectability in 1876 Deadwood, when she met Wild Bill Hickok, the legendary desperado who was both admired for his courage and despised, says McLaird, “for his showy dress, his itchy trigger-finger and his compulsive gambling.” For all executive producer David Milch’s claimsfor its veracity, HBO’s “Deadwood” got Jane wrong: She wasn’t an idle drunk in buckskins; rather, she was a dance hall girl in the early days of E.A. Swearingen’s Gem saloon, which was, at the time, a lumber and canvas construction where three women and a man dressed as a woman entertained customers. A Deadwood bartender claimed Swearingen sent Canary to “white slave” for him in Sidney, Neb., and that she brought back 10 girls she’d lured with stories of the vast wealth in the region. By one account, she followed Hickok all over Deadwood and wailed when he was killed; by another, her crush was Hickok’s partner, Charley Utter, a local dandy. Though she called Hickok her friend in her autobiography, she later told the press he was her “affianced husband.”

The seeds of her legend planted, Canary became a dime-novel heroine, inspiring writers to work her into their stories of frontier bravery, even though her daily life involved a string of low-paying jobs and bouts of heavy drinking. She lived all over the Northwest, marrying at least three men (one of whom was jailed for attacking her) and working — intermittently — as an attraction in Wild West and dime museum shows. She bore a son who probably died in infancy (she called him “muzzie’s yittle snoozey darling”) and later Jessie, who, before she was given up for adoption at around age 10, was taunted at school because of Canary’s reputation. Wherever she could, she sold photos of herself for extra cash.

As a public figure, Canary was the Courtney Love of her day: A talented pioneer in a man’s world, she was a chronic substance abuser prone to outrageous behavior and forever linked in the public mind to a dead man whose fame overshadowed her own. The difference between them is found in Canary’s private acts of kindness. In a 1924 book, two pioneers who wrote about the Black Hills gold rush attempted to debunk Canary’s myth, claiming she was “nothing more than a common prostitute, drunken, disorderly and wholly devoid of any conception of morality.” Still, they said, she deserved recognition as a Black Hills luminary because of her humanitarian gestures: When hundreds of Deadwood residents were struck by a smallpox scourge in 1878, for example, other women in the camp refused to help them for fear they would contract it, but Jane cared for them, day and night, over the course of weeks. She was also, said a man who knew her in Spokane, Wash., “the last person to hold the head of and administer consolation to the troubled gambler or erstwhile bad man who was about to depart into the new country.”

The challenge McLaird faces in telling Canary’s story is resolving — or, at least, acknowledging — its many contradictions: Some said she was beautiful, others called her repulsive, and the book’s photos show her to be striking at best, homely at worst, with bottomlessly sad eyes in every shot. One reporter called her “an ignorant woman of mostly unwomanly habits”; another said she was “generous, forgiving, kind-hearted, sociable, and yet when aroused, has all the daring and courage of the lion or the devil himself.” She got her nickname because of her calamitous past (as an orphan), or because she caused her lovers venereal calamity, or because she was always in trouble, or because she cried “What a calamity” when she lost at poker, or because of the way she nursed people during epidemics. (To becloud things further, there were several other western women named Calamity Jane, all prostitutes and alcoholics.)

McLaird has done vast and careful research, digging up juicy anecdotes and providing important correctives to the Calamity Jane myth. But he doesn’t quite deliver on the promise he offers at the start of the book, which is to explain why, if she was not much different from other frontier women, her life was spun into legend. He doesn’t even discuss “Deadwood,” nominated last year for 11 Emmy awards (as much a marketing oversight as an editorial lapse), which features a Jane who seems to fascinate viewers (and polarize opinion) just as the real one did. Historically thoroughgoing as his book is, it tracks but doesn’t fully illuminate the half-life Calamity Jane has enjoyed since Canary’s death, at 47, from “inflammation of the bowels” (no doubt brought on by alcohol abuse), when her body, lying in state, had to be guarded against women who clipped locks of her hair to take as souvenirs.

Who knows why we still thrill to her badness? She was a maverick, outsize and free-spirited, seemingly self-reliant yet vulnerable, who gave men a run for their money through her cursing, drinking, riding and gunmanship (which may explain why McMurtry cut her down to size by making her half a woman). Like so many pop culture icons, she lived fast, died young and was quickly canonized, yet her fictional self so quickly preempted the real one that it’s almost impossible to say her legend is anything but fiction. In the end, a cowboy who knew her in Spokane (where she was the “keystone around which all the excitement and life of the new town was reared”) provided the most concise eulogy for Calamity Jane: “She was a good woman [,] only she drinked.”

She held my gaze a few excruciating seconds longer. “Actually, I am,” she said. My moral compass began spinning wildly. I was suddenly sitting with someone new. The levelheaded sage in whom I’d confided for nearly a year had been replaced by an off-the-rack ideologue.

There were five minutes left in the session, and I felt like running. “Well, this could devolve into a whole political discussion, so I’ll just finish the story,” I rallied.

For the next week, I struggled with an overwhelming sense of betrayal. It was as if she’d been rooting around in the drawers of my mind under false pretenses. I had entrusted her with my darkest secrets: We’d covered the deaths of my father and stepfather; family troubles; career worries, everything from nightmares about rape to — even worse — a recent dream in which I was sleeping with the man I considered to be the epitome of 20th century masculinity gone wrong: John Wayne. And he was paunchy.

My shrink was fair in her thinking, focused in her probing, able to see all sides of an issue. Yet she considered Rush Limbaugh to be an acceptable human being? An arrogant, small-minded, hypocritical bigot? The family-values man who’s been married three times and blames the divorce rate on liberals? The soapbox patriot who didn’t vote until he was 35, and then only because a journalist outed him? I couldn’t square her sensitive touch with the knowledge that she bought into Rush’s bone-headed binarism and uncivil discourse.

When I told one of my sisters about my discovery, she responded flatly, “You can’t see her anymore.” She didn’t see how my therapy could succeed if I didn’t trust my therapist’s judgment. “Well, we all have our quirks,” my other sister said. “I watch ‘Survivor’ every week.” She shared my misperception that educated people don’t listen to Rush — except as a form of cultural slumming in the ill-mannered freak show of talk radio. “Maybe her interest in Rush is ironic,” suggested a friend who, like me, listens to shock jocks now and then just to see what the radical right says the liberal conspiracy is up to, and to marvel at how much air time they devote to bashing Democrats, exposing their own ideological unease. But my shrink’s Rush habit wasn’t an ironic posture or an idle tour of enemy territory. She was serious; her admission was unqualified.

At the next session, I told her that her disclosure was a huge problem for me, and we spent the hour talking about Rush, who had just entered rehab. I enjoyed saying the words, “It doesn’t bother me that he’s a drug addict,” before explaining that I couldn’t reconcile his ideology of snarling intolerance with her professional persona. I granted her that I didn’t even find his recent Donovan McNabb gaffe worth losing his ESPN gig over, and neither did most of my black journalism students, but I wouldn’t forgive him for telling a black caller, years ago, to take the bone out of his nose and call back later, among other cracks. She’d never heard this. I didn’t mention that he’d called 13-year-old Chelsea Clinton the White House dog, or that he’d claimed that all composite illustrations of criminals look like Jesse Jackson, or that he’d joked about AIDS.

When I told her that — with all due respect — I had never met an educated person who listened to Limbaugh (a college dropout), she insisted that many of his callers are educated. “I think he’s a very intelligent man,” she said.

“He may be very intelligent,” I said, “but his mind is a corkscrew.” I mentioned that Limbaugh’s diatribes, heavy on ad hominem attack and logical fallacy, embody the sort of faux-reasoning I trot out for my composition students to illustrate how not to write an argument. Then there are the Stephen Glass-caliber fabrications, which both filled a 1995 book published by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting and helped Al Franken land a bestseller. (Quoth Rush: “There are more acres of forestland in America today than when Columbus discovered the continent in 1492.”)

But mainly, I said, I couldn’t understand how my shrink, a champion of civility and personal accountability, could buy the vitriol of hate radio — not to mention the self-serving sanctimony of a rehabee who advocated jail for all drug addicts. (“If people are violating the law by doing drugs,” the pill-popping pope of WABC has opined, “they ought to be accused and they ought to be convicted and they ought to be sent up.”)

She listened patiently, then said she didn’t hear the hatred or lies I heard on his show. She wasn’t defensive. She didn’t care if I detested Rush, and she didn’t see why I cared that she liked him, though she did admit that she should never have revealed it in therapy.

“Do you think I’ve helped you?” she asked.

“Absolutely,” I answered.

“Does the knowledge that I listen to Rush change anything you’ve learned here?”

“No.” But secretly I feared it would now. I felt like Larry David in the season finale of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” an episode in which he’s happily being seduced — until a photo of Bush 43 on the woman’s dresser kills his passion and turns his stomach.

The next week we picked up where we’d left off two weeks earlier. Rush faded into history but continued to haunt me. There were moments when my shrink warned me about the dangers of taking responsibility for too many people around me, and I thought, “Is this just the selfish, boot-strapper, I-got-mine Republican approach to human interaction? Is it what Dr. Laura would advise?”

Outside of therapy, I wondered, Would my shrink condone Laura Ingraham’s adolescent on-air mockery of people like Terri Gross? If Ann Coulter were sitting in my shrink’s office saying she wished Timothy McVeigh had blown up the New York Times building, would my shrink suggest she start coming twice a week? Would the words “danger to society” come to mind?

And how would my shrink, a successful professional in New York, counsel Rush, who believes that “feminism was established so that unattractive women could have access to the mainstream of society”? Would she tell him that his dismal marital history might be rooted in his infantile belief that “if you want a successful marriage, let your husband do what he wants to do”?

Professionally, she counseled against virtually all of Rush’s rhetorical techniques: name-calling, “provocative” language, finger pointing and mudslinging — diversions, she would say, from the project of self-realization. Privately, she got something from Rush. I would never know what it was — but by now it hardly seemed worth pondering, if it hadn’t affected my therapy. Week after week, my shrink impressed me with her insights. She may have been a hate radio subscriber, but in the cloister of her own office, she didn’t judge. She met me on my own terms, which required precisely the kind of tolerance Rush rejects. And she taught me lessons that changed my life.

I only wish she could do the same for Rush.

But in this sea of media attention, one small detail seems to have gone unremarked: Has no William Steig fan noticed that “Shrek” is not Shrek? That the book on which the movie is based does not feature a sensitive hero, an incarcerated princess or a host of abused Disney characters fated for “resettlement”? That the directors have traded the subversive misanthropy of Steig’s 1990 book for a Hollywood ending? That the animators jettisoned Steig’s wonderfully loopy illustration style so they could join the digital race to realism? Or that the film doesn’t feature a single line of Steig’s crotchety dialogue? Not even Shrek’s masterful ode to his blue-lipped mistress: “Your horny warts, your rosy wens/like slimy bogs and fusty fens/thrill me.”

Why even call this movie “Shrek”?

The beauty of Steig’s story is in Shrek’s devilish enjoyment of his hideous world. When his parents kick him out of “the black hole in which he’d been hatched,” Shrek, “giving off his awful fumes,” sets out to do “his share of damage.” Steig writes, “It delighted him to see the flowers bend aside and the trees lean away to let him go by.” (Animate that.) Along the way, in exchange for a few of his “rare lice,” a witch tells his fortune:

“A donkey takes you to a knight/him you conquer in a fight/Then you wed a princess who/Is even uglier than you.”

He meets a peasant (“You there, varlet … why so blithe?”) and steals his dinner, then dispatches a dragon with a blast of putrid blue flame between the eyes. His darkest moment comes during a nap in which he dreams he’s in a field of flowers with children frolicking around him. “Some of the children kept hugging and kissing him, and there was nothing he could do to make them stop. He woke up in a daze, babbling like a baby: ‘It was only a bad dream … a horrible dream!’”

Shrek finds his “jabbering jackass” and rides it to the castle of the repulsive princess, where a knave greets him: “Magician’s mercury, plumber’s lead/I smite your stupid, scabby head.” With a blast of fire, Shrek overwhelms him and enters the castle, where he sees a hall of mirrors containing hundreds of appallingly hideous creatures. He regards his many selves, “full of rabid self-esteem, happier than ever to be exactly what he was.”

Fortified, he meets his stunningly ugly princess, and they exchange fetid compliments. (“Oh ghastly you/With lips of blue/Your ruddy eyes/With carmine sties/enchant me.”) When they marry, she wears a cloak covered in spiders and carries a cactus, and they live “happily ever after, scaring the socks off all who fell afoul of them.”

Granted, Steig’s 30-page bildungsroman isn’t plot heavy enough to sustain a feature film — embellishments were needed — but that’s no reason to trash the original.

Steig’s story is gently menacing, unsentimental and harmlessly deviant from start to finish. The movie is winking and cynical. (What is a kindergartner to make of a gingerbread man yelling “Eat me” at a man torturing it? My daughter hated this scene for its meanness. I hated it for going over her head in the service of a bad pun.) But once the sardonicism is exhausted, “Shrek” winds up in a bog of emotion, cheapened by what came before.

While Steig’s romance hinges on the lovers’ mutual appreciation of their inverted values, the movie restores traditional values and, worse, tacks on a threadbare moral that Steig never inflicted on his readers: You can’t judge a book by its cover. If there’s one thing a Steig book will never do, it’s preach. This kind of stop ‘n’ shop sanctimony is, to paraphrase “The Toy Brother” — another fine Steig book — a first-rate pain in the pants.

Children love Shrek’s upside-down world for its pure illogic; overlaying it with pedagogy just drags a good story down. And the moral isn’t even consistent: If looks don’t matter, why is Lord Farquaad’s (John Lithgow) towering ego offset by his short stature, and why does Fiona (Cameron Diaz) immediately disdain him for his size instead of his cruelty?

And the characters are all wrong. Mike Myers’ Shrek, charming as he is (OK, those expressive, tuberlike ears slayed me), is a sensitive guy in ugly casing; the storybook Shrek is a bumbling brute inside and out. And Fiona isn’t ugly, even when she’s supposed to be. Even at night when, because of a spell cast on her as a child, her ogre self emerges, she looks more like an overfed Cabbage Patch doll with the drowning eyes and apologetic expression of a Hummel figurine than like Steig’s confidently wretched crone. (On the other hand, that she farts and burps, fights and talks back, and remains an ogre in the end is something for the history books.)

Consider the landmarks of animated film history and their female content: “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” (1938), the first animated feature and a spectacularly beautiful film, introduced a helium-voiced heroine who apologizes for crying after being kicked to the curb and nearly murdered (Deborah Tannen, white courtesy phone); her defining moment comes when she sings “Someday, my prince will come.” Next, “Toy Story” (1995), the first computer-animated feature, chock-full of memorable characters and madcap adventure, and witty, well plotted and funny, yes, in that “all the females on earth are inexplicably missing” way.

And now “Shrek,” the first computer-animated movie starring human characters, a feat of realism that marks the flowering of the digital age, which offers … an imprisoned princess, in cold storage for marriage. Radical. Even 93-year-old Steig didn’t write a damsel in distress into his story when he penned it over a decade ago. While Fiona’s dramatic bust-to-waist ratio is certainly an animation coup, shouldn’t a computer age princess be free?

Finally, the Disney jabs in this movie generate as many problems as laughs. Once producer Jeffrey Katzenberg gets his revenge on his former employer through the Mauschwitz opening scene, the conceit of the homeless characters and their predicament is dropped, leaving a conspicuous loose thread. And if memory serves, Eddie Murphy already did that jivey, ingratiating sidekick routine as Mushu in “Mulan.” One wonders first why DreamWorks used a secondhand minstrel show — and second, why Disney’s?

“Shrek” has its moments — Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” and Fiona’s hilarious ear-scraping vocal solo among them — none of which are remotely connected to the book. It even features some tender scenes of natural wonder that seem to have wandered into the script out of other Steig books, like “Gorky Rises.”

But while Steig’s Shrek spoofs European fairy tales, the movie skewers Disney fairy tales — a pasteurized genre unto itself that would need more than bathroom humor for really stinging satiric effect. The idea that because parents have wearied of fairy tale earnestness kids need a good dose of postmodern irony is just wrong. At the ripe old age of 5, my child doesn’t need her icons smashed just yet, thanks. And call me hopelessly altruistic, but I’m willing to sit through a movie with her even if it isn’t outfitted with a meta-narrative for my jaded-boomer parallel enjoyment.

Instead, give me the 1996 Children’s Circle Video “The William Steig Library.” It doesn’t have the promotional machine behind it that made “Shrek” a monster hit, but it does include four animated Steig stories (two featuring Lithgow), with plot, dialogue and visuals intact, and an interview with the author in which he extols the importance of talking to kids on their level.

“You have to write for children,” he says. “If you don’t write for children, you’ll end up writing ‘Moby-Dick.’”

Or schlock like “Shrek.”

In the next few weeks, I became acutely aware of how often I was not addressed as Ms. socially. School officials, car mechanics and telemarketers all used Mrs. or Miss, hitching it arbitrarily to my surname or my husband’s.

I began asking friends when and by whom they are called Ms. For most, it happens only at work. An administrator at my daughter’s elementary school told me that although many teachers choose Ms. as a courtesy title, most students call them Mrs. whether they’re married or not. And so it seems that Ms. — popularized in the ’70s and intended to elide marital status as Mr. does — has become the norm in the professional world. But it hasn’t stuck socially. Why?

Certainly, Ms. carries ’70s feminist baggage that’s anathema to post-feminists and anti-feminists alike: To them, it’s not just the name of an eye-crossingly boring magazine, it’s a title only fist-thumping proselytizers adopt.

They might be surprised to learn that modern feminists did not come up with Ms. in the first place. The title’s earliest documented appearance was on the 1767 tombstone of a Massachusetts woman named Sarah Spooner. Some scholars have theorized that it was first used, like Miss and Mrs., as an abbreviation for Mistress, a 14th century translation of the French maitresse (a term of respect for women of prestige).

In the 17th century, Mrs. was used for adult women, married or not; Miss was used for girls. Only in the late 18th century did these titles begin to denote marital status, possibly as a result of the Industrial Revolution, during which women began working outside the home, and needed their sexual availability clarified.

Though Ms. has been attributed to first-wave feminism, its use and specific meaning during the late 19th century are unclear. In the 1940s, however, it was appearing in secretarial handbooks as a counterpart to Mr. Second-wave feminists embraced it, and in the debut issue of Ms. magazine in 1972, the editors explained the title: “Ms. is being adopted as a standard form of address by women who want to be recognized as individuals, rather than being identified by their relationship with a man.” By the 1980s, according to public opinion polls, about a third of U.S. women endorsed its use.

In an increasingly egalitarian culture, with more women marrying later (or not marrying at all) and retaining their birth names after marriage, Ms. is more fitting than ever. It’s equally useful for divorced women who shed their married names.

But for a courtesy title intended as a neutral counterpart to Mr., Ms. is larded with sticky, often contradictory associations. For example, a 1998 survey of 10,000 Midwesterners revealed that women who use Ms. were perceived as better educated and more independent, outspoken and self-confident than those who use Mrs. or Miss. But they were also presumed by the respondents to be less attractive and less likely to be effective wives and mothers.

Of course, the resistance of traditionalist folk to Ms. comes as no surprise. What stumps me is the schizoid use of the term by female professionals. How does one explain the career women who use their birth names at work and their husband’s names socially? What about the divorced businesswoman who told me that her teenage son’s friends call her “Miss Thompson,” which she considers to be a nice conflation of Ms. and Mrs. Or the New York Times weddings page, which is filled with female lawyers and executives who “will use [their family names] professionally.”

Neoconservatives, socialites and the pre-feminist generation aside, why would a 21st century woman choose to identify herself foremost as a wife? And if she does, why only away from work?

Hoping for illumination, I turned to an arbiter of social etiquette, Miss Manners (columnist Judith Martin), and found my identity crisis theory immediately confirmed. I dialed her number wondering whether to address her as “Miss Manners” or “Ms. Martin,” but found that her secretary referred to her as “Mrs. Martin.”

In print, Miss Manners has called Ms. “a clever, useful invention.” But she wisely cautions that “in this period of transition, it is courteous to address people in the fashion with which they feel comfortable.” When I asked her if this transition would conclude with the exclusive use of “Ms.,” she said: “If we’re lucky, ‘Ms.’ will eventually become the standard female title.”

Miss Manners is usually a champ when it comes to balancing good sense with good form in tidy explanatory packages. But when I asked her about her personal choice, she let me down. “In the spirit of tolerance,” she answered, “I use them all: Mrs. for my married name, Miss for my pen name and Ms. for anyone who cares to apply it to either. Out of pity for those who are sick of hearing explanations, I will refrain from offering any.” So much for the imminent standardization of the clever, useful title.

One impediment to our widespread acceptance of Ms. is the cloud of misunderstanding that still surrounds it. A 1998 study by Barbara Kelly of “folklinguistic attitudes” to the use of the term Ms. showed that many people link it to marital status. They assume it refers to a divorced, widowed or unmarried woman; that it deliberately conceals marital status, highlights single status or shows that a woman is not committed to her husband.

How ironic that a title created to neutralize the issue of wedlock came to be so elaborately misconstrued in that very context. And let’s not chalk this up to men: Fully 49 percent of the women interviewed by Kelly didn’t understand how Ms. should be used.

Stranger yet is the fact that many interpretations of female courtesy titles directly contradict each other, indicating that each has its own social Rorschach effect. One woman told me that Ms. makes her think of “a stuffy socialite who lunches at Le Cirque.” Another said, “I do know some women who ‘tolerate’ being called Mrs. (with the husband’s first and last name) in social circles. This is common among the wealthy, where for some reason they can’t break tradition and give women individual identities.”

One woman who uses Ms. surmised that some people use Mrs. because they don’t want their husbands to think they’re “passing themselves off as not married.” (Would we ever suspect a Mr. of doing this?) Some women change their titles by the hour or the year (Ms. until 5 p.m., Mrs. after hours; Miss to people who knew them before they were married …), suggesting multiple personalities fragmented along the lines of work and marriage.

The contradiction I see has nothing to do with taking a man’s name, nor does it apply to befuddled youths who misuse Ms. simply because courtesy titles in general are in decline. It’s the conditional use of Ms. that jars, implying that sexual/marital neutrality is suitable in the workplace but not in the outside world.

Working women who shift to Mrs. once they are away from their desks assuage a distinctly Victorian fear: that professional achievement will magically unsex them. As Carl Jung put it: “In taking up a masculine calling, studying and working in a man’s way, woman is doing something not wholly in agreement with, if not directly injurious to, her feminine nature.”

So the Ms. who socked it to the district attorney at work and goes home to become Mrs. proves that she hasn’t sacrificed her marriageability on the altar of her career. Her feminine currency is validated with every utterance of the title, because at its crudest, Mrs. trumpets sexual status: taken.

In the context of women’s history, the fortification of this home/work divide is a dangerous business: It contradicts the logic underpinning some of the most important family-friendly initiatives on the public table: flextime, parental leave, job sharing and on-site day care — all designed to allow personal and professional identities to overlap by strengthening connections between them.

This division reinforces the Midwestern stereotype that an independent woman (Ms.) and a good wife (Mrs.) can’t be the same person, and it’s the reason Hillary Rodham, lawyer, was reborn as Hillary Rodham Clinton, wife, when her career became a potential liability for her husband’s. At its most extreme, this work/home, public/private dualism drives every repressive patriarchy in the land, from the Mormon Church to the Taliban.

On its evolutionary journey from feminist red flag to Everywoman courtesy title, Ms. still roils with semiotic undercurrents churned up during feminism’s second wave. But that’s no excuse for using it selectively. Tell me you reject Ms. because you’re not a feminist, or that the title is tethered to a movement that overlooked you, or that your mother shoved it down your throat. Tell me that your marriage is your greatest accomplishment, or that you were married in 1956. But don’t say Ms. describes you at work and not at home. It’s just so 20th century.