Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale

by Marina Warner

  4

  Potato Soup

  True Stories/Real Life

  The meaning [of the tales] has long ago been lost, but it is still felt, giving the tale its substance, while at the same time satisfying our pleasure in the marvellous. They are never merely the shimmering colours of insubstantial fantasy.

  Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm

  In the 1950s, Italo Calvino embarked on doing for Italian literature what the Grimms had done a century before in Germany. Italian bundles fairy tale, folk tale, and fable into the word fiaba, and Calvino was an impassioned advocate of the whole range of stories, and hunted for them in every source he could find. In the introduction to Fiabe Italiane (1956; translated as Italian Folk Tales), he wrote, ‘Now that the book is finished, I know that this was not a hallucination … but the confirmation of something I already suspected—folktales (fiabe) are real.’

  What did Calvino mean by this assertion? He is the most inspired and fantastical of modern fabulists, author of masterly and complex works of contemporary fiction such as If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller and Invisible Cities, but he had begun his career writing novels and short stories of sensitive Chekhovian observation. His encounter with la fiaba was a revelation to him, and wrought a momentous change in his approach to fiction: as a member of the partisans who fought Fascism and a communist in Italy after the war, he saw fantastic fiction as the literature of the people whom he wanted to reach and represent. When he proclaims ‘Folktales are real (le fiabe sono vere)’ he means that they speak of poverty, scarcity, hunger, anxiety, lust, greed, envy, cruelty, and of all the grinding consequences in the domestic scene and the larger picture. The structures of wonder and magic open ways of recording experience while imagining a time when suffering will be over. Fate will be changed; perpetrators overcome. The wishful thinking and the happy ending are rooted in sheer misery. When he writes that he became obsessed with the fairy tale about a donkey that shits gold, he might have been invoking a symbol for the form itself, a humble, low thing that brings amazement and riches.

  Pins, Lice, Mice, & Want

  Princes and queens, palaces and castles dominate the foreground of a fairy tale, but through the gold and glitter, the depth of the scene is filled with vivid and familiar circumstances, as the fantastic faculties engage with the world of experience. Realism of content also embraces precise observation of detail, and contrasts between earthiness and preposterous fancy sharpen the entertaining effect. Perrault tells us, for example, that the cruel sisters have dressmakers’ pins from England, the most fashionable and most coveted article at the time. In the Grimms’ ‘The Three Golden Hairs’, the Devil himself is the adversary, and hell is a kitchen much like any ordinary kitchen where his granny sits by the stove. When the brave hero appears, a poor lad who’s been set an impossible task by the proud princess to fetch her the trophy (the hairs in the title), Granny is kind to him, and turns the boy into an ant to keep him safe. She hides him in the folds of her apron until she has herself pulled out the three hairs, shushing the Devil as she does so. She then turns our hero back again into human form and sends him back to the world above to marry the princess.

  It is emblematic that the Devil’s kind old granny can pull out the required hairs because she is busy de-lousing him, something that’s comforting even in Hell. Each of the three hairs then brings about a blessing that makes a joke of the story’s roots in toil and hunger: with the first, the Devil reveals that a spring has dried up because an old toad is squatting on a stone that’s blocking it; with the second that an apple tree no longer bears fruit because a mouse is nibbling through its roots; and with the third that the ferryman who’s working day in and day out, poling passengers across the river need only put his pole in the hands of one of his passengers to be free.

  Many fairy tales about golden-haired princesses with tiny feet still address the difficulty, in an era of arranged marriage and often meagre resources, of choosing a beloved and being allowed to live with him or her. Many explore other threats all too familiar to the stories’ receivers: the loss of a mother in childbirth is a familiar, melancholy opening to many favourites.

  Behind their gorgeous surfaces you can glimpse an entire history of childhood and the family: the oppression of landowners and rulers, foundlings, drowned or abandoned children, the ragamuffin orphan surviving by his wits, the maltreated child who wants a day off from unending toil, or the likely lad who has his eye on a girl who’s from a better class than himself, the dependence of old people, the rivalries between competitors for love and other sustenance. Unlike myths, which are about gods and superheroes, fairytale protagonists are recognizably ordinary working people, toiling at ordinary occupations over a long period of history, before industrialization and mass literacy. In the Arabian Nights the protagonists belong to more urban settings, and practise trades and commerce. Some are abducted and then sold into slavery, many are cruelly driven by their masters—and mistresses. In the European material, the drudgery is more rural, the enslavement unofficial and more personal in its cruelty. It is fair to say that fairytale heroines are frequently skivvies who take on the housework uncomplainingly, and that this kind of story won favour in the Victorian era and later, at the cost of eclipsing lively rebel protagonists, tricksters like Finette (Finessa in English translation), who turns the tables on her sisters’ seducers, or Marjana the slave girl who pours boiling oil on the Forty Thieves.

  Direct and shared experiences of material circumstances—of the measures that sociologists use to establish the well-being of a given society—are taken up by fairy tales as a matter of course: when the mother dies giving birth, that child will have to survive without her love and protection, and that is a grim sentence. The pot of porridge that is never empty speaks volumes about a world where hunger and want and dreadful toil are the lot of the majority, whose expectations are rather modest by contemporary standards. ‘A fairy tale’, Angela Carter once remarked, ‘is a story in which one king goes to another king to borrow a cup of sugar.’

  D. H. Lawrence famously proclaimed, ‘Trust the tale, not the teller.’ To which Jeanette Winterson retorts, repeating again and again, ‘Trust me, I’m telling a story.’ But in what ways can we trust the tale—and even trust the teller? How can such preposterous fantastic stories be true, as Calvino and others who value fairy tales have claimed?

  One answer is that a story is an archive, packed with history: just as an empty field in winter can reveal, to the eyes of an ancient archaeologist, what once grew there, how long ago the forest was cleared to make way for pasture, and where the rocks that were picked out of the land eventually fetched up, so a fairy tale bears the marks of the people who told it over the years, of their lives and their struggles.

  C. S. Lewis writes that in literature there is realism of presentation on the one hand, and realism of content on the other: ‘The two realisms are quite independent. You can get that of presentation without that of content, as in medieval romance: or that of content without that of presentation, as in French (and some Greek) tragedy; or both together, as in War and Peace; or neither, as in the Furioso or Rasselas or Candide.’

  According to these distinctions, it is possible to see how fairy tales, while being utterly fantastical in presentation, are forthright in their realism as to what happens and can happen.

  Mothers died in childbirth, and large families of step-relations arose as a result, competing for resources. In fairy tales, want stalks everyone, and the word’s double meaning matters: both desire and lack. Measures taken to meet want are often extreme, but injustices are endemic in a society that’s itself unfair, with hierarchies decreed chiefly by blood and accidents of birth. People steal and brawl and cheat—and sometimes the story is on the side of the cheats. The word of fathers, husbands, and even of younger brothers is law.

  Fairy tales from cultures in which polygamy was practised reflect it: rivalry between co-wives over their children’s future caused vicious conflicts, a situation
reproduced in the Chinese ‘Cinderella’ (recorded in the ninth century, and the earliest variant extant): Yeh-hsien suffers miseries at the hands of her father’s co-wife, not under the regime of a new stepmother. Where dowries were crucial for a young woman to get married, dowries figure vividly in fairy tales: in Basile’s sparkling ‘Pinto Smalto’ (Painted Bread), Betta tells her father that if he is so keen she should marry, he must give her a fabulous corredo (trousseau)—jewels, gold, silks, etc. But she also stipulates flour, sugar, and rosewater. She then bakes a cake in the shape of a gorgeous young man, who comes to life. The story continues through various misadventures but ends gloriously.

  Family Secrets

  When the eldest son, according to the law of primogeniture, inherited everything, the younger brother would set out on his adventures penniless, to return fabulously endowed, as in the Grimms’ ‘The Boy Who Wanted to Learn How to Shudder’. The genre’s themes are real-life themes and the passions real-life passions: getting by and getting what you want, knowing the odds are stacked and that all might be lost … Luck is powerful, but resourcefulness, often amoral, is praiseworthy. The situations in fairy tales also capture deep terrors of occurrences common and, mercifully, uncommon.

  Unspeakable—unbelievable—acts are also always taking place. Terrible family violence: a father cuts off his daughter’s hands, because the Devil wants to carry her off; another daughter disguises herself in a coat of animal hides after her father wants to marry her. Small children are damaged: Hansel and Gretel are abandoned by their mother and father to die in the woods and then narrowly escape a cannibal witch. And so on. These are acts which contradict all ideas of natural feeling. But these situations, however horribly they beat belief, have been spoken of in the stories, and they are echoed, week by week, in the news. When a child dies at the hands of parents who have starved and tortured him, as in the case of Daniel Pelka, and nobody moves to help him; when young girls are kidnapped and held prisoner by an apparently ordinary man in an ordinary American suburb; and when Josef Fritzl imprisons his daughter in a cellar and keeps her there for twenty-four years, fathering seven children on her until he was discovered in 2008, then fairy tales can be recognized as witnesses to every aspect of human nature. They also act to alert us—or hope to.

  Starvation and infanticide are recurrent dangers, and their victims devise ways of opposing them, avenging themselves on the perpetrators, and of turning the status quo upside down. The plots convey messages of resistance—a hope of escape.

  The siren function of the form, saying the unsayable and tolling a warning in the night, has been lessened in recent years, when child abuse has come to be recognized, and appalling cases of cruelty, involving incest, enslavement, and rape, are made known by other means. Fairy tales used to be a rare witness to such crimes, and encode them cryptically for the younger generation to absorb, but they can now watch them unfold in the media. However, recognition and familiarity with the possibility does not seem to have sharpened sensitivity or produced change, only increased a general fear for children’s safety. Fairy tales used to transmute the horrors by setting them once upon a time and far away, and in this way did not directly raise the spectre of a killer next door but smuggled in their warnings under cover of magical storytelling.

  Social historians have drawn on the tales for evidence about conditions of life in the past. Eugen Weber wrote ‘Fairies and Hard Facts: The Reality of Folktales’ (1981), an article which proved very influential. Robert Darnton, in a chapter of his sparkling book The Great Cat Massacre (1984), also emphasizes the true witness of Mother Goose. Weber’s title is echoed, for example, by Maria Tatar in her study The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales (1987). Jack Zipes, the most industrious scholar in the field, has developed a politically committed, cultural materialist perspective which explores the multiple ricochets between historical facts and mentalités (including class and gender values) with fairytale scenarios. His extensive criticism, from Don’t Bet on the Prince (1986) to the recent The Irresistible Rise of the Fairy Tale (2012) has simultaneously helped give fairy tales greater stature as literature and led to sharp controversy about their pernicious or liberating influence on audiences and readers, especially the young. This opens one of the most charged questions about fairy tales: not, do they carry the evidence and reflect what happens? But do they interact with reality and shape it? Are they addressing the future as well as the past?

  The French novelist Michel Tournier (who is steeped in fairy tale), has distinguished between the French terms conte, fable, and nouvelle (this last meaning a short story as well as a news item) regarding their relation to reality. Fables, as in Aesop and La Fontaine’s animal parables, are ‘transparent’ in their explicit moral lessons, while nouvelles report on the facts. Both destroy all interest in the stories they tell by what he calls their ‘brutal opacity’—their obviousness. By contrast, contes, Tournier declares, have ‘crystalline translucency’, which allows glimpses of truths but does not state them—this is the seduction and power of fairy tale.

  Tournier has frequently revisited monsters and ogres in his fiction, including Bluebeard, who offers a fruitful test case for his concept of fairy tale as a vehicle of translucent insights.

  Figure 8 Serial killer, jealous husband, or regular patriarch? La Barbe bleue, from Le Cabinet des fées, ed. C. J. Mayer, illustrated by Clément-Pierre Marillier 1785–9.

  Extreme Crimes: Bluebeard, Serial Killer

  Bluebeard (Figure 8) has become a familiar character, whatever the medium, whatever the date: in opera, cartoon, X-rated film, or graphic novel, he is an archetypal serial murderer, terrifying and yet alluring. Men and women have responded equally, showing strong identification from different vantage points.

  ‘When he was gone she walked about the house from top to bottom, inspecting everything. At last she came to the forbidden door. She looked at the key, she put it in the lock. But what did she see as she went in? A huge blood-stained basin was standing in the middle of the room, and in it there lay human beings, dead and chopped in pieces.’

  But is Perrault’s La Barbe bleue a tale of thrilling terror, born of fantasy, or could it have roots in fact? Could such extreme tales really have a basis in history, in the lived experience of men and women?

  The Bluebeard figure who appears in Grimm is a less ambiguous villain. The emphasis falls squarely on the dangers of marriage, and the tales feature a plucky trickster heroine who gets the better of her would-be murderous groom. He figures in two of their most mysterious and powerful stories, ‘Fitcher’s Bird’, and ‘The Robber Bridegroom’, one of the earliest stories the Grimms collected.

  A rich man turns up and asks to marry a miller’s beautiful daughter. She doesn’t take to him, and when she’s making her way to his house, deep in the heart of a dark forest, her forebodings grow very heavy. A friendly bird sounds the alarm:

  ‘Turn back, turn back, my pretty young bride,

  In a house of murderers you’ve arrived.’

  But she goes in all the same, and finds every room entirely empty, except for a doddery old woman in the cellar, who cries out, ‘The only wedding you’ll celebrate is a wedding with death.’

  When her fiancé returns with his gang, they’re dragging another young woman with them, and our heroine watches from her hiding place as they make their victim drink—‘three glasses full, one white, one red, one yellow, and before long her heart burst in two. The robbers tore off her fine clothes, put her on the table, chopped her beautiful body into pieces, and sprinkled them with salt.’

  They also chop off one of her fingers wearing a gold ring, but it flies through the air and lands in our heroine’s lap. She makes her escape, and in the perfect dénouement, she tells the guests at her own wedding feast how she has suffered from a terrible nightmare, and describes the horrors she witnessed. When she reaches the end, she presents her groom with the severed finger. He realizes he’s been unmasked, and tries to run. The guests seize him and
turn him over to the law; he and his robber band are executed for their dreadful deeds.

  This grisly tale communicates, beneath the Gothic scenes, several different layers of historical truth. It reveals many aspects of marriage in Europe in the past, and expresses resistance to the usual customs, conveying the apprehension of the girl who leaves her home to live far away in her husband’s house; it takes for granted the power and attraction of money, and it confronts her lack of choice in the matter. The picture of a cannibal gang goes much further than the serial murders in Perrault’s La Barbe bleue, but by stacking the evidence against the bridegroom, this version makes a very strong case for giving power to decide to the bride.

  In the other Grimm Bluebeard tale, called ‘Fitcher’s Bird’, the murderer is a wizard, or, in some translations, a warlock; a very close variation, ‘Silver Nose’, is also included by Calvino, and both feature spirited heroines who are possessed of mother wit—and a ferocious instinct for survival. Their defiance of the tyrant should be read in school assemblies to help young people to resist older men—and sometimes women—who get them in their clutches.

  Historians have looked for connections beyond ordinary conditions, to identify actual events and known individuals at the root of a certain fairy tale. Two of the best known of all—‘Bluebeard’ and ‘Snow White’—have been linked to individuals whose lives reveal deep causes for tensions in private and public arenas.

  Most prominently, Bluebeard has been identified with Gilles de Rais, the Breton commander who fought alongside Joan of Arc in the Hundred Years’ War and was condemned to be hanged for sorcery and satanic abuse—the ritual murder of scores, perhaps hundreds, of children at his castle (he was spared burning because he was a nobleman). George Bernard Shaw even included him under that name in his play, Joan of Arc.