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Paper short abstract

This paper reads T. Kingfisher’s Nettle & Bone (2022) as a reworking of fairy-tale wonder that entangles humans and nonhumans. It critiques social norms while imagining alternative forms of survival and interspecies kinship beyond anthropocentric paradigms.

Paper long abstract

T. Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon)’s Nettle & Bone (2022) has been described as a dark fairy tale. Drawing from fairy-tale tropes, plots and motifs, particularly “Bluebeard,” this fairy-tale novel utilizes a fantastic setting to thematize domestic violence, abuse and trauma. In doing so, it both cites, subverts, and expands fairy-tale structures. The goal of this paper is twofold: first, to explore how Nettle & Bone plays with the characteristics of the fairy tale to advance a critique of anthropocentric hierarchies. The novel shows an entanglement of multiple entities—human, nonhuman, inanimate—that foregrounds an ideal of multispecies kinship. The principle behind this type of kinship lies in a conception of wonder as a relational force.

The second goal of this paper is to contextualize Nettle & Bone within the larger production of fairy tales in the twenty-first century. I will argue that the themes explored in this novel participate in a general trend towards using fairy-tale magic and wonder as tools to describe and criticize society. The result is an alignment between fairy-tale retellings and fairy-tale scholarship, particularly regarding contemporary theories around environmentalism and posthumanism. If the assumption is true, then the interpretation of Nettle & Bone is a key indicator of both scholarly as well as societal interests; following this conclusion, it then means that Nettle & Bone is ultimately a novel about our entangled futures.