Faery Tales and Destitution

Orphans, Homelessness and Fr. Kevin's Capuchin Centre for the Homeless in Dublin

Please Sir, can I have some more? What do the Little Prince, Cinderella, Harry Potter, Pippi Longstocking, Tom Sawyer, Heidi and Oliver Twist have in common?

They are all homeless, motherless or orphaned. Of course you know that. Along with Cinderella. Vaselisa. Paddington Bear. Mowgli. Peter Pan. Tom Sawyer. Pip. Jane Eyre. David Copperfield. Heathcliff. Anne of Green Gables. Emily of New Moon. Bertie Wooster. Lyra. Pi Patel. Frodo. Eragon. Alex Rider. Liesel Meminger.

From Cinderella to Harry Potter, for centuries, the plucky orphan has been a stock character. (Shutterstock)

The Orphaned One is as archetypal as Prince Charming in children’s literature. What about the orphans on our own streets?

This blog is dedicated to the Homeless in Dublin. Homelessness in Ireland has hit a record high of 14,760 people. Destitution is not a thing of the past. It is here, now in Ireland, at record levels. Recent headline in the Irish Times:

Child homelessness rises 17% in last year, Department of Housing data shows

In September 2023 there were 12,827 people in homeless shelters, including 3,904 children in 1,892 families. In August this year, there were 14,486 people, including 4,419 children, in emergency accommodation. All stats from Irish Times, that bastion publication of the middle classes.

If you want to help, please consider doing so by supporting the Capuchin Day Centre in Dublin…if you buy our Away with the Faeries anthology of poems and stories, edited by Julie Ruane, all proceeds go to the Capuchin Day Centre, to provide meals and food parcels for the homeless. https://capuchindaycentre.ie/ways-to-donate/ If you buy the book or not, you can help the Homeless.

The book, Away with the Faeries, grew out of a workshop I gave in Solas Healing on Faery Tales in October this year. Julie came up with the idea of creating an anthology to sell to fundraise for The Capuchin Day Centre. They provide both a breakfast and lunch service Monday to Saturday from 7:30am to to 3pm. In 2023, they provided 313,460 wholesome hot meals between breakfasts and lunch to people at risk of hunger. Many people, including myself, are overwhelmed by which charity to help. We all know about the salaries of the bigger charities, and how money can get siphoned off into the wrong pockets. This is a charity that operates on a smaller scale, doesn’t advertise much, and really helps the homeless. Breakfast includes items such as cereal, porridge, sausages, rashers, eggs, pudding, beans, tomatoes, etc with tea/coffee. Situated in Bow Street, Dublin 7, the Day Centre started out providing meals for the homeless in Dublin and has developed its services over the years to meet the presenting needs of those who come seeking food and support.

“With homelessness rising virtually every month for the last three years, the Government seems to have concluded that this is a problem that cannot be solved and no new measures are needed. Homelessness was not even referred to in the main budget speeches.

We are calling on all political parties make the Housing Commission report central to their manifestos and to clearly set out what measures they will take to tackle the housing and homelessness crisis.”

–Pat Dennigan, chief executive of Focus Ireland

Did anybody vote any differently to change this in the recent elections? No. The same twits are swinging out of the Dáil rafters, relishing in their salaries. But WE can do something! Amazing people like in organisations like Brother Kevin’s Capuchin Centre for the Homeless in Dublin.

IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO ORDER A COPY OF THE BOOK PLEASE CONTACT JULIE RUANE SOLAS HEALING healingsolas@gmail.com and we will organise getting your copy to you as soon as possible!

All proceeds go to the Capuchin Day Centre, to provide meals and food parcels for the homeless. https://capuchindaycentre.ie/ways-to-donate/ If you buy the book or not, you can help the Homeless.

The publication, available for just 7 Euro, all proceeds going to Brother Kevin’s Capuchin Centre for the Homeless in Dublin

I’d like to look at the phenonemon of the Orphan, because it is so relevant today. Although we may not think so. Eva König, in The Orphan in Eighteenth-Century Fiction (2014), maintains that the 18th and 19th centuries were the centuries of the orphan. Yet there are more orphans, more trafficking, more indentured servitude now in the 21st Century than there ever was. (but this blog’s not about that).

Back then in the 18th and19th Centuries there are three types of orphans: the foundling, the heiress and the dispossessed child. Across these three types, the anxieties of the period were explored in children’s literature. In the early 19th Century, the beginning of the Victorian era and the rise of the British Empire, abandoned children in urban areas like London were part of the streetscape- hordes of urchins fending for themselves while their parents worked fourteen hours a day in factories and docks. As you will see in India, today. And many other countries, it’s just that India is where I’ve spent a significant amount of time.

A third of all households were run by women who left the slightly older children to mind the children (but as young as six they were babysitting) who in turn had to work sweeping the streets, cleaning windows, making matchboxes and paintbrushes… yet this was the time of the British Empire and the swelling and flourishing of the middle classes who owned those factories. Diptheria, cholera and measeles raged through the backstreets of London, filthy with rubbish, excrement and dead animals. The children lived here, the orphaned ones, in the dark shadow of the British Empire.

Urchins, New York, 1888

Orphanage, London, 19th century

I haven’t even mentioned the Great Genocide (misnomer- the Great Famine) 1847-1851 in Ireland, a phenomenon from which the Irish have still not recovered. With its workhouses, poor houses, death, mass emigration and gene pool reduction, we have never reached pre- ‘Famine’ population, which is one of the reasons why many Irish people resist mass immigration today- most especially those in rural areas. There is a feeling of being subsumed and colonised and potentially battered again. Yet, as usual, the middle classes and the government demonise such people, despite that historically, it makes sense. (Oh no, I’m going to get hunted down by Helen Mac an Tee for saying this sinful thing).

Back in the 19th Century, rent, even for hovels, was so high that when parents were unable to find work, they quickly fell into arrears and were thrown onto the streets. (Does that remind you of anything??) Has anything changed?

Between 1821 and 1851, the population of London doubled and then doubled again before the end of the century. Overcrowding, disease, homelessness were part of city life. It seems many cities are modelled on this.

The orphan as a figure of hope embodies widespread notions of self-improvement. Thus, it does not come as a particular surprise that this type of orphan can be found quite often in the genre of the bildungsroman, whose protagonists frequently embody the notion that success is based primarily on the individual’s intellectual and moral resources.

Adventure novels featuring orphans are generally optimistic. Kipling’s Mowgli in the Jungle Book survives the wild, with all its predators. Kipling set the novel in a British Colony, of course and has been much criticised. Kipling, brought up in India of English parents, held some delusions about the benefits of British colonialism. He seemed to believe that the whole machinery helped relieve famine, provide medical assistance, abolish slavery, and construct the physical and the psychological groundwork for “civilization”. He got it all upside down and back to front.

Nina Auerbach, in Incarnations of the Orphan, studies Moll Flanders, Jane Eyre, Becky Sharp, Heathcliff and Pip.

“He seems composed of alternate layers of glass and steel, and sends out sting rays at those who try to adopt him. He first appears in the eighteen century as a slyly potent underground figure...But even the Romantic waif is brimming with a certain equivocal energy... His solitude energises him as a visionary artist, and silent schemer, his appearance of winsome fragility feeding into his power of survival,” – Nina Auerbach

Being an orphan moves the plot along in quest and adventure stories. It is what lets Viserys Targaryen parcel off Daenerys (13 years old in the Game of Thrones book) to Khal Drogo, setting her on a quest that leads her to becoming the “Mother of Dragons” and changing the course of Westeros.

Photo by Roberto Nickson on Unsplash

Harry Potter goes deeper underground to look for Professor Quirrell (The Philosopher’s Stone) and the basilisk (Chamber of Secrets), ensuring that his best friends, Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger, stay away from danger. In some ways, the children of Boarding Schools are orphaned, certainly emotionally.

Photo by Darshan Patel on Unsplash

The orphan holds the archetype of the lonely one, fascinating to us all because loneliness is unspoken, unexpressed. Many of us are lonely and more than ever in faceless, urban landscapes. Even surrounded by a cackle of family and friends. But to read all about a lonely one on their journey, that will hook a reader in. Oh I know what that’s like, oh I get it, oh I hope she marries that prince so that everyone can be happy again oh god what if she doesn’t what if we are Little Match Girls wandering in the cold looking for a match to light a fire, what if we are all little girls with no parents looking for a pair of red shoes to dance wildly down the street and then we go so wild we have our feet chopped off …

Christian Andersen was brutal in my eyes, a moralistic dictator, a dictator of morals.

What if we are like Vaselisa, wandering in the Dark Forest away from our dysfunctional family, only to find ourselves in the claws of the old witch Baba Yaga… who puts us through unimaginable trials. What if there is no Prince Charming?

What if all of this, the rites of the Dark Forest, is how we learn? To face that absolute and undeniable loneliness in ourselves, that gaping truth of our journey, we must traverse the Dark Forest and all of its unknowns and be trained by the Trials therin?

© Jakki Moore

The young heros and heroines of the Faery Tale do not have a traditional, nurturing family environment. No Faery Tale was ever told about a happy family with no problems. Therefore, do not despair if you feel abandoned in this life, you are the magical stuff of faery tales! Your tale of woe is the very thing that makes a story captivating. For nobody read or watched a movie about a happily adjusted child of the bourgeoisie… everybody marvels at the tail of the Orphaned One, the Destitute One, the Enslaved One. Their circumstances trigger a strong, sympathetic reaction in readers, drawing them into the character’s journey. The deaths of the parents often create a shadowy backdrop, creating tension and raising the dramatic stakes.

“Orphans come without family commitments and can answer the call to adventure without the emotional mess of leaving anxious relatives behind. [It lets] the writer to create credible characters born with a secret identity that no one around them knows. That’s why many superheroes are orphaned characters,” –Stephen Chamberlain, the Cathar Grail Quest Saga

Along the way, in the Faery Tale, we have strange mirrors that are portals and portents, poisoned apples, wolves, dragons and evil stepmothers… we would never learn anything READING a Faery Tale if it were not for what the hero/ heroine meets in that strange twilight world.

Of course, although we are delighted to read these stories to ourselves and our children, we often don’t look at the nightmare Faery Tales that surround us.. and this is why we decided to fundraise for The Capuchin Day Care Centre for the Homeless in Dublin. Please, if you can, help the Homeless by either buying a copy or two of our Away with the Faeries Anthology.

IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO ORDER A COPY OF THE BOOK PLEASE CONTACT JULIE RUANE SOLAS HEALING healingsolas@gmail.com and we will organise getting your copy to you as soon as possible! Or you can contact me letters@siofraodonovan.com.

IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE FAERY TALE AS A GENRE AND TO DECODE THEM AND TO WRITE YOUR OWN IN A FANTASICALLY CREATIVE ENVIORNMENT, PLEASE JOIN MY AWAY WITH THE FAERIES WORKSHOPS IN JANUARY. MORE DETAILS HERE

https://siofraodonovan.com/away-with-the-faeries-writing-workshops/

FROM SNOW WHITE TO SELKIES AND OGRES

Fairytales tap into universal themes of transformation, resilience, and hope, featuring characters overcoming great odds. The symbolic nature of fairytales allows us o explore complex emotions and situations in a safe and imaginative way.

https://siofraodonovan.com/

WHEN AND WHERE:

8 WEEK WORKSHOP SERIES ON THURSDAYS 7-9PM GMT,

IN PERSON (LIMITED) IN DELGANY, WICKLOW AND VIA ZOOM

ALL ZOOM RECORDINGS AVAILABLE TO THOSE WHO SIGN UP FOR THE WORKSHOPS

WEEKLY EMAILS AND GUIDANCE FOR YOUR CREATIVE WRITING AND READING MATERIAL

FROM THURSDAY 16TH JANUARY FOR 8 WEEKS 7-9pm

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EXPLORE MARIE VON FRANZ, KARL JUNG, CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTES, EVA KONIG, SHARON BLACKIE, J.R.R. TOLKIEN, JACK ZIPES, JOSEPH CAMBPELL, THE GRIMM BROTHERS, HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN, PERAULT, GIAMBATISTA BASILE, LEIGH BARDUGO AND MANY MORE…

TESTIMONIALS

“I found this course to be extraordinary. I thought it would be useful to help me find a structure to the stories I write. It was much more, it was quite a personal journey; challenging, rewarding, inspirational. Siofra creates an atmosphere of such creativity, a safe space to write, a place where we could push past boundaries and self-doubt. After one session, I felt inspired to write at home, so I sat and wrote a short story called A Dance with Time. Subsequently, that story was longlisted for the Colm Tobin Short Story.” Zandra C, The Hero’s Journey

‘Siofra’s writing workshops are easily described as the emotional metamorphosis so many seek and can never find. hic sunt dracones, here be dragons, says the world, and “here be dragons, close your eyes and feel the calm…”, she says. Beautiful journey this was!’ Ishwari, Sri Lanka, The Hero’s Journey and the Heroine’s Journey

‘The Hero’s Journey in person was my first proper foray into writing, and was a wonderful journey into adventure. The second I attended The Heroine’s Journey online, over two years and pandemic later. It was such a rich experience I will be forever grateful. The places opened by Siofra’s gentle yet powerful guiding light are almost beyond words – and yet words come, and it is our duty to listen. It is alchemy in action. I will return for more once I am sure!’ Fiona, Greystones, The Heroines and The Hero’s Journey

“I can’t speak highly enough of Siofra or the Heroine’s Journey course – salve for the soul I didn’t know I needed! It allowed space for a wonderful way to look at the world, one which never failed to land with surprise and delight (even when dark). It has borne me gently around and left me facing the other way – the way that I maybe needed to face all along – and always with lightness, laughter and a great deal of support, very lightly worn so you don’t even know it’s been there until later. Thank you Siofra!” Delia, The Heroine’s Journey, 2023

“Siofra’s writing course “Heroine’s Journey” opened up for me another world of metaphores, myths and stories that gave me language and symbols to write about my own inner process of re-connecting with my inner feminine. I love how the course was laid out, each step taking me deeper and closer to myself. The meditations that Siofra offered each week took me gently yet immidiately right into that place within where my head has no access. From there the words were just pouring onto pages effortlessly. I feel deep gratitude for this journey. ” M. Szpilka, The Heroine’s Journey