Kissing the Witch (or Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins) is a collection of interconnected fictional short stories written by Irish-Canadian Emma Donoghue. Each of the thirteen stories in the collection is an adaptation of a well-known European fairy tale, with several tales featuring feminist and queer themes. The stories are linked together by a narrative structure where the narrator of the previous story becomes the listener of the story that follows. None of the narrators or characters are named, instead being referred to via epithets and aliases. The book, originally published in 1997 by Hamish Hamilton Ltd., was Donoghue's third published fiction novel and first short story collection. Following its release, Kissing the Witch was translated into Dutch (1997), Catalan (2000), and Italian (2007).
The US paperback collection released in 1999 by HarperCollins Publishers Inc. features a cover designed by Christine Kettner. The cover features a simple black and white inverted design and a photograph by Eric Dinyer of a young woman with dark hair looking away from the camera. The publication features a short "Acknowledgments" section that pays respect to Emma Donoghue's agent and others who inspired her to complete the collection.
Story summaries
The Tale of the Shoe (Based on "Cinderella")
Emma Donoghue opens the collection with the story of a young woman who is grieving the loss of her mother. Unlike the fairytale this section is based on, the Cinderella-like character does not have a father who remarries and brings home a wicked stepmother and evil sisters. In this retelling, the narrator's own mind is the torturous force that drives her to completing monotonous tasks and berates her whenever she does not. One day, a woman who claims to be an old friend of the narrator's mother appears at her door and pulls her out of her despair with laughter and magic. The woman—presumably some kind of witch—lavishes the narrator with beautiful dresses and, when the narrator asks to attend a ball, the woman readily fulfills her wish. The narrator attends the ball three nights in a row, each time surprised by how easy it is to speak to the nobles and even the king and prince. At the end of each night, the woman asks her whether she has had enough fun, but the narrator keeps asking to go back until the night the prince proposes to her. It is during his proposal that she realizes she doesn't love him and has instead fallen in love with the witch. She runs away and back to the witch to confess her love, leaving behind both shoes so the prince will never find her.
As with every story in this collection, the tale ends with the narrator asking the woman who she was before their story took place. This is formatted as a short free verse poem, and it often offers clues to the "Happily Ever After" of the narrator.
The Tale of the Bird (Based on "Thumbelina")
The witch from the previous tale becomes the narrator of "The Tale of the Bird." Instead of being small in stature like the original Thumbelina, she is metaphorically small and she feels insignificant in the eyes of those around her. One of her few joys in life is sitting amongst the grass and the little creatures that call it home. While out enjoying nature, she meets a man with whom she falls in love. He ends up asking her father for her hand, and the two are quickly married. They consummate their marriage, and the two live in wedded bliss for some time as the narrator adjusts to her new life of wealth and managing the estate. The happiness comes to an end when she discovers she is pregnant and her husband begins to bar her from leaving the house. As time goes on, it becomes clear to the narrator that her hopes for the marriage are much different from those of her husband, who seems to have married her to produce children. Later in her pregnancy, she finds an injured bird in their home and nurses it back to health. Once the bird has fully recovered, the narrator releases it, as she promises that she, too, will one day be free from her marital cage.
When the bird circles back to her, she asks it who it was before it was a bird.
The Tale of the Rose (Based on "Beauty and the Beast")
Before the bird was a bird, it was a beautiful woman with a merchant father and two vain sisters. In this way, "The Tale of the Rose" closely follows the original fairytale of Beauty and the Beast: her father's ships are lost at sea, the family fortune is lost, and she and her sisters move to a cottage in the countryside with their father. When her father returns to the city after learning one of his ships survived, the narrator's sisters ask for fancy dresses and fur boots for the winter, and the narrator asks for a freshly bloomed rose. The father returns months later, during a harsh winter storm, shaking with nothing but the rose in his hand as the narrator runs to meet him. He explains that he traded the narrator's freedom for the rose, gold, and his life after upsetting a Beast in a nearby castle. The narrator agrees to go to the castle, and she is surprised to find a room with her name on it, endless books for her to read, and a strangely courteous Beast. Despite the Beast's gentle nature, she cannot see the Beast as anything more than a monster. When she learns from a magic mirror that her father is ill, she tells the Beast she is going to go back home to tend to him but she promises to return after eight days. As she leaves, the Beast tells her it is not a man, and the narrator assumes this means the Beast is some other kind of creature, but she leaves before learning the truth. Later, when her father has recovered and she has forgotten her promise to return, she sees a vision of the Beast dying and she hastily returns to the castle. There, she finds the Beast close to freezing but still alive, and she attempts to save it by taking off the mask it wears. This reveals that the Beast is actually a beautiful woman with dark hair, pale skin, and red lips. The Beast explains that she originally donned the mask to scare off undesirable suitors and setting the particularly plucky ones with impossible riddles.
As they sit together, the narrator asks the Beast who she was before she wore the mask and drove away all her suitors.
The Tale of the Apple (Based on "Snow White")
The Beast becomes the narrator and takes us back to the beginning of her tale, when her sickly mother was pregnant with her. Like the original tale of Snow White, her mother shares a quasi-prophecy of a child born with ebony hair, snow white skin, and blood red lips. The narrator is born with all these qualities, but her mother dies soon after her birth and she is instead raised by her maid. While she is not close to her father, the narrator tells us he makes a point of always making sure she is the first to receive an apple from the castle's orchard, signifying her importance to him above all else. When the narrator has her first period, her father gets remarried to a woman not much older than herself. While the two originally get along, her father's treatment of her new stepmother begins to drive a wedge between them. Her stepmother grows weaker as her father prioritizes producing a male heir before her health, but in the end he becomes ill and dies before an heir is born. Realizing her position as queen is in jeopardy, the stepmother demands that the narrator declare her queen, but the narrator refuses. The stepmother threatens to have her killed if she refuses again, but the narrator escapes the castle before the stepmother can fulfill any of these threats.
The narrator does not make it far in the forest by herself, but she is saved by a group of woodsmen. She settles in with these men in a cabin in the forest and achieves a certain level of domesticity as she cooks and cleans for them. Eventually, her stepmother appears at the cabin and asks to be let in. Though the narrator refuses at first, she eventually lets her stepmother in and they spend some time together. When she leaves, the narrator is left in an unexplained stupor that the woodsmen blame on a curse left by the stepmother. It leaves her unable or unwilling to cook or clean for the woodsmen for a period of time. Just as she has recovered from this, her step mother returns. The same stupor follows, and the woodsmen tell the narrator not to let the stepmother in again if she returns. However, the narrator doesn't listen. During the step mother's final visit, she brings a half-ripe apple. She takes a bite of the green side and offers the red half to the narrator who readily takes it. The narrator chokes on the first bite and faints. When she awakes, she finds herself in a coffin being carried by the woodsmen. They are surprised to see her alive, but they tell her to continue to rest in the coffin and they will carry her to a different kingdom where she will be safe from her stepmother. She realizes that the apple was not poisoned, tells the woodsmen to put her down, and turns to walk back toward the castle where her stepmother awaits.
The stanza that follows the story seems to imply that she has returned safely, as she and her stepmother are walking through the apple orchard when she asks her stepmother about who she was before marrying the king.
The Tale of the Handkerchief (Based on "The Goose Girl")
In this tale, the stepmother explains why she was ready to kill the narrator of the previous tale to keep her place as the queen. Now the narrator, the stepmother reveals that she was not born into nobility or royalty. Instead, she was the daughter of a queen's servant. This queen had a daughter who was opposite to the narrator in every way—joyful and fair—but the two were born in the same month and year. Eventually, the narrator became the princess' servant, and she was sent away with the princess when the queen arranged for the princess to be married to a distant prince. The queen sends the princess off with her prized white horse and a handkerchief stained with her blood. Along the journey, the narrator becomes disillusioned with her role as a maid and begins to disobey the princess' requests. This culminates in her demanding the princess strip, and she swaps clothes and threatens the princess into silence as she takes on the role of princess. The horse is the only one who protests.
When they reach the kingdom, the narrator insists that the princess be tasked with taking care of the geese on the castle grounds as to keep her away from the prince and in a position where she would be unable to tell anyone the truth about the narrator. For some time, this is enough, but the narrator soon becomes paranoid that the horse's refusal to cooperate with her will give her away. She lies to the prince, telling him that the horse hurt her, and the prince has the creature killed. The head of the horse is placed on the arch of the castle gates and left to rot. The paranoia builds further as the wedding date approaches, and the narrator fears that the queen will attend and discover what she has done. However, word comes of the queen's death in battle, and the narrator must pretend to grieve even as she feels relief. The relief does not last long, though, because she is convinced the princess is going to reveal her true identity during the wedding. When she goes to confront the princess about this—driven to near madness by guilt and asking her to end the charade sooner rather than later—the princess refuses. She tells the narrator that she has found peace in her new life—something she never had before as she never felt comfortable in her role as the princess and the narrator seems to fit the title with an ease and grace she never had. The narrator marries the prince with a new sense of relief and closure, but during their reception he coughs up blood and she realizes that her position as queen will not last long.