Muriel Maidenhead
- CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR...Book One
You Woodn’t
I hate wooden puppets and ventriloquist’s dummies. My use of “hate” there isn’t hyperbole. If you’ve read Book Three then you’ll see just what kind of treatment I think these abominations deserve.
So it won’t come as a surprise to learn I regard most wooden carvings with a realistic face slightly unnerving. As a child I saw the Jason and the Argonauts film on TV and the figurehead of Athena from that film gave me nightmares for weeks.
In the film Pufnstuf – which I recall seeing at a Saturday matinee in Stratford when I was very young – the fish-shaped boat Jimmy and Freddy the Flute hop into has a face and speaks. Here the boat isn’t actually as disturbing as Freddy, who I find as creepy as he is cloying.
You Wood
Mash together Athena, the fish-boat, plus Freddy Flute and BOOM, you get the character of Muriel Maidenhead, a talking figurehead with a Southern-US accent and judgemental attitude.
The practice of adorning the bows of ships goes back thousands of years. Actual figureheads – statues attached to the boat’s prow – are a more recent decoration. They’re visually very striking and something I’ve always found fascinating. But Muriel did not exist in the first draft of The Mythic.
Initially, Henry, Lucy, and Mr Twist hopped into an ordinary sail-boat that Henry had stashed near the doomed town of Port. But as I grew to understand Aedea, I realised that I was missing a huge opportunity to show off some of its more bizarre elements and the boat trip in particular benefitted from me adding layers to the story.
Wooden You?
For Muriel, I leaned upon the Pufnstuf aspect of a talking boat, where the craft has a degree of self-determination and direction. Muriel’s personality is based upon the Scarlett O’Hara template of Southern belle. She is at once charming but prickly, big-hearted yet narrow-minded.
Mr Twist, trying to connect Muriel to the Pinocchio story, mentions a fairy with blue hair and Muriel confirms that this is her “magic mother” also noting that “We maidenheads, the marionette mariners, the toy soldiers, and all of mah other wooden brethren owe our existence to that great lady”.
In other words, there are lots of other creepy wooden beings out there in Aedea. Watching. Waiting…
Bonus Round
Muriel’s surname isn’t intended as the inspiration for our word “maidenhead”, meaning virginity. Instead it’s meant to showcase one type of literal naming convention used in Aedea. She was a maiden who acted as the boat’s head. I chose “Muriel” purely for the way it paired with the surname and the feeling the name gives – friendly, homely, and a bit old-fashioned – just like some of Muriel’s attitudes.
