Abstract
Two of Kate Morton’s most popular novels are driven by recurring motifs of a maze and red hair, and how both are intertwined as themes of dangerous subversion of sexual mores. Red-haired men and women proliferate Morton’s Forbidden Garden (2008) and The Clockmaker’s Daughter (2018), often referring to the redheads in fairy tales, in particular, Grimm Brothers’ version of “Rapunzel,” which this chapter explores. Also discussed (minimally) is Morton’s The House at Riverton (2008).
Oh, what a tangled web we weave
When first we practise to deceive!
—Sir Walter Scott, Marmion 6.17
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Notes
- 1.
See my discussion about the history of Eve’s red hair in Chapter 2 of Vindication. Most artists have depicted her with long flowing red hair.
- 2.
For example, 1 Timothy 2: 12–14 reads: “But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. For Adam was first formed, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression.”
- 3.
- 4.
Galia Ofek argues that “loose hair equaled loose sexuality” (2009, 148).
- 5.
Quoted in Logan 1998, 36 from Acton 20–21.
- 6.
Quoted in Logan 1998, 36, from The Magdalen’s Friend 44. Logan recommends a deeper treatment of this subject in Mariana Valverde’s “The Love of Finery.”
- 7.
Quoted in Rankin 219 from Brown 73.
- 8.
The hideaway was created during the reign of Henry VIII to conceal priests and other Catholics during the Reformation.
- 9.
See Hylas and the Nymphs (1896) by John William Waterhouse at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nymph#/media/File:Waterhouse_Hylas_and_the_Nymphs_Manchester_Art_Gallery_1896.15.jpg
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Ayres, B. (2021). Tangled Webs of Red Hair from the Grimm Brothers to Kate Morton. In: A Vindication of the Redhead. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83515-6_7
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