Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale

by Marina Warner

  That is the way fairy tales should be: like the splinter from the spindle, they can enter you and remain for a hundred years of dreams. Hockney’s album, Six Fairy Tales, helped pluck the Grimms out of the Victorian age, and made them our contemporaries, crossing over from the nursery back again to the grown-ups as the brothers had intended from the start.

  Two centuries later, fairy tales, especially the Brothers Grimm variety, no longer appear such innocent amusement.

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  On the Couch

  House-Training the Id

  The Old Man of the Earth stooped over the floor of the cave, raised a huge stone from it, and left it leaning. It disclosed a great hole that went plumb-down.

  ‘That is the way,’ he said.

  ‘But there are no stairs.’

  ‘You must throw yourself in. There is no other way.’

  George MacDonald, The Golden Key

  In 1976, Bruno Bettelheim, a psychoanalyst who had survived imprisonment as a child in Dachau and Buchenwald, published one of the most influential studies of fairy tales ever written, The Uses of Enchantment. It first appeared in the New Yorker magazine, gaining it a far wider readership than psychoanalytical scholarship usually commands, even in the island of Manhattan, and its line of argument was powerfully expressed and very persuasive. It is still the best-known study of fairy tale, though it was and remains controversial and flawed.

  That fairy tales are cast in a language of the psyche, with the forests and palaces, snow, glass, and apples symbolizing deeper, concealed truths, has become widely accepted; psychoanalytical methods provide entry into the stories’ meanings, and, like the hotel maid’s key, can open every door, including those that lead to forbidden chambers, the dark corners of humankind in general as well as the secrets of a particular individual. Fairy tales mean far more than the plots they unfold; they resemble dreams, which unfold as enigmas but can be deciphered. The scholar Maria Tatar has noted: ‘Fairy tales are still arguably the most powerfully formative tales of childhood and permeate mass media for children and adults … The staying power of these stories, their widespread and enduring popularity, suggests that they must be addressing issues that have a significant social function—whether critical, conservative, compensatory, or therapeutic … Fairy tales register an effort on the part of both women and men to develop maps for coping with personal anxieties, family conflicts, social fictions, and the myriad frustrations of everyday life.’

  Charles Perrault added moralités to make the lessons of his tales clear, rounding off his ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ with sly patter about how disobeying Mother will end in tears, and that wolves can be hairy on the inside, smooth-tongued seducers, who inveigle young girls into their bedchambers and ruin them. ‘These young men are the most dangerous wolves of all … ’.

  His tongue-in-cheek morality sets the scene for ‘Red Riding Hood’ (Figure 12) as a fairy tale of initiation, an allegory of carnal knowledge and social prohibitions, about innocent girlhood on the threshold of maturity, with the trackless forest standing in for the dangerous world, the predator for the seducer, the abuser of innocence. The view has since taken on a deep psychological meaning.

  Figure 12 ‘There are real wolves … with enormous teeth … but also wolves who … pay young girls the most flattering attentions … ’. Gustave Doré, ‘Red Riding Hood’, 1883.

  Bettelheim was following Freud in turning to fairy tales, for while the founder of psychoanalysis chiefly drew on myth for his theories, he also invoked fairy tales in order to decipher the language of the unconscious and identify plots that illuminate the imperatives of desire—the drives to love and death. Like so many other children, Sigmund Freud grew up with the tales of the Brothers Grimm, and their themes and symbols offered him a rich and useful lexicon to understand varieties of behaviour and vagaries of fortune. His interest is however a paradox, because fairy tales hardly brush ideas about individual personality or motive, and they never enquire into inner processes. The characters do what they do without question—from themselves or from us.

  The novelist A. S. Byatt, who has revisioned mermaid tales as well as Norse sagas, writes, ‘Their world is full of narrative energy, but there are things they don’t do. They don’t analyse feelings.’ Philip Pullman goes further:

  There is no psychology in a fairy tale. The characters have little interior life; their motives are clear and obvious. If people are good, they are good, and if bad, they’re bad … The tremors and mysteries of human awareness, the whispers of memory, the promptings of half-understood regret or doubt or desire that are so much part of the subject matter of the modern novel are absent entirely.

  One might almost say that the characters in a fairy tale are not actually conscious.

  Yet fairytale narratives are dream-like; they’re disjointed, brilliantly coloured, they overlook rational cause and effect, they stage outlandish scenes of sex and violence, and they make abrupt transitions without rhyme or reason. They also contain significant repetitions and recurrent symbols. For Freud dreams concealed ‘a certain secret quality of your being which it is hard to follow … but in the deepest sense this is not in the least so; indeed, it cannot be so at all—for it is always the same man, whether he is awake or dreaming’.

  The same can be said about fairy tales, projected on to a collective psyche across time. Freud also saw them as rubble from a primitive stage of humanity, which remains chaotically strewn about during infantile development: phylogenesis (development of the species) was recapitulated in the growth of each individual from infant to adult (ontogenesis). Fairy tales, like dreams, used a vernacular of motifs that could disclose latent and hitherto unacknowledged preoccupations and desires. He gives as his example Hans Andersen’s story, ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’. The end, when the emperor walks out naked in procession before the whole town, is just like a common dream—when you find yourself in public without any clothes on. ‘It is in this human content that our interests lie’, he writes in 1913, and five years later, in his famous analysis of the Wolf Man (1918), he recognizes his patient’s terrors as the predator in ‘The Wolf and the Seven Young Kids’ and ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, in which the animal embodies a traumatic childhood encounter.

  Freud also explores, more illuminatingly, one pre-eminent quality of fairy tales and their dream-like atmosphere. He called it the Unheimlich (literally, the unhomely), and it has been influentially translated in English as ‘the Uncanny’. ‘Unhomely’ catches better the way reality is transfigured into weirdness in the stories, how they act as a peculiar looking-glass into family relations or bare survival.

  Box 4 Sibling Rivalry v. Sibling Love

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  Freud’s method of interpretation looked for latent significance of a story’s symbols: in ‘The Theme of the Three Caskets’, he analyses the riddle test that Portia’s father set her suitors in The Merchant of Venice, and fastens on the figure of the youngest sister, the selfless, put-upon child, who is ultimately vindicated. He says she represents Death, the last of the three faces of the Mother, when she takes you in her arms and you are laid in earth. She is the most ‘inexorable of the Fates’, he adds, and he chooses for his example the Grimms’ fairy tale ‘The Twelve Brothers’.

  Twelve sons are born to a king and queen. The king then swears that if a girl is born, all the boys will have to die. The decree seems a bit extreme, but this is one of those baffling horrific oracles that drive fairytale plots. The power of it lies in its ineluctability: nobody asks why things should be so.

  The queen hides her sons deep in a forest, and they swear they will kill any girl they meet.

  Their sister grows up with a golden star on her forehead, in oblivion of their existence, until one day she sees her mother hanging out twelve shirts on the washing line. When she asks whose they might be, her mother shows her the twelve coffins already prepared for the boys.

  This
heroine is another brave heart from fairy tale, selfless and good. She’s prepared to die to save her brothers, and she sets out with the shirts to find them.

  The story takes another dramatic turn when, after she has discovered them deep in the forest, she picks lilies to give them, and they’re instantly turned into ravens. It then becomes her task to save them—and the condition for doing this is silence. She must not speak for seven years.

  Terrible ordeals follow … she is condemned for a witch and tied to a stake and the fire lit … but the ravens fly down and save her in the nick of time.

  For Freud, her muteness makes her the representation of Death itself, the goddess of death. He comments: ‘Such a displacement will surprise us least of all in relation to the goddess of death, since in modern versions and representations, which these stories would thus anticipate, Death itself is nothing other than a dead man.’

  Freud’s insights are often poetic, but his identification of the Grimms’ mute heroine with the goddess of death might strike us as having little to do with an exciting, mysterious fairy tale about infanticide, bird metamorphosis, and a brave girl rescuing twelve young men.

  When I was young this was one of my favourite stories and I did not see its heroine as standing for Death, rather she struck me as proving the strength of love that can exist between siblings, not only lovers.

  The Uncanny (1919) explores a terrifying bogeyman figure from German folklore: ‘He [the Sandman] is a wicked man who comes when children won’t go to bed, and throws handfuls of sand into their eyes so that they jump out of their heads all bleeding. Then he puts the eyes in a sack and carries them off to the half-moon to feed his children. They sit up there in their nest and their beaks are hooked like owls’ beaks, and they use them to peck up the eyes of the naughty little boys and girls.’

  Freud was reading The Sandman, a turbulent Gothic tale by E. T. A. Hoffmann, a haunted and self-destructive writer and composer who drew on popular folklore—fears, superstitions, and stories—for his motifs, but wrought highly original fictions from his sources. In the course of an intensive close reading of Hoffmann’s original, Freud gives a master class in the symbolic interpretation of fairy tales. As in dreams, the story condenses fears and repressed desires, and in order to decode them, the series of substitutions and displacements must be unpicked. The Freudian Uncanny does not arise from lurking monsters or witches or other fantasy threats from fairy tale, but is primarily an effect of profound disturbance sparked by something familiar, that is homely, which awakens a repressed memory of forbidden desire or trauma: ‘something which ought to have remained hidden but has come to light’. The forest, so bright with dancing sunbeams and fresh flowers, seems homely, but its uncanny ominousness grows as it tempts the little girl off the path. Jack Zipes observes that the secondary world of fairy tale is uncanny per se because it ‘involves dislocating the reader from his/her familiar setting and then identifying with the dislocated protagonist so that a quest for the Heimische or real home can begin.’

  Among Freud’s dramatis personae the Sandman figures as another tyrant father, and his scary offspring carry the threat that another child—a sibling—might be loved more, while the gruesome putting out of the nestlings’ eyes stands for the terror of castration.

  The Uncanny also arises, Freud discusses, when the dead return or something inert gives a sudden sign of life—when a skeleton dances or a doll gets up and walks towards you, singing, as the automaton Olympia does in Hoffmann’s story—and it’s released by unexpected animation, that fundamental feature of magic, the catalyst of the frisson delivered by many illustrations as well as narratives. But the psychoanalytical school of interpretation is not content to leave the effects of articulate body parts—skulls, a horse’s head, a severed finger—to simple biological responses to threats. Rather, the shivery effects of the Uncanny, writes Freud, are produced by Oedipal desire and castration anxiety. Eros and Thanatos, oral fixation, Oedipal conflicts and their corollaries—castration anxiety and sibling rivalry, penis envy, repression—the whole gamut of Freudian concepts unfolds in the later explorations of Bettelheim and others.

  Freud did not in fact write a great deal about fairy tales, but his large shadow falls aslant Bettelheim’s famous book, in which he declares himself the champion of fairy tales as useful educational, emotional, and ethical instruments for helping a child pass through the anxieties and guilt and confusion of infancy and adolescence. He disregards historical changes and contexts, including his own frame of reference and point of departure, and treats his selected tales (principally Grimm) as a book of life written in cipher about everyman, everywoman, and everychild.

  The Abuses of Enchantment

  Bettelheim took three decisive steps: he declared, first, that fairy tales arise in the unconscious, encode universal human experiences, especially from infancy to adolescence, and offer adults as well as children a blueprint for understanding the feelings and problems of growing up. Sexual symbolism pervades the stories, in a form that communicates states of maturity and helps adjust to them. Secondly, he affirmed that analysing the tales as if they were an individual’s dreams can uncover the latent material buried under the narrative about the development of a person—their ‘maturation’ from childhood to adulthood in relation to family members and objects of desire.

  For example, he comments on ‘Red Riding Hood’:

  All through ‘Little Red Cap’, in the title as in the girl’s name, the emphasis is on the color red, which she openly wears. Red is the color symbolizing violent emotions, very much including sexual ones. The red velvet cap given by Grandmother to Little Red Cap thus can be viewed as a symbol of a premature transfer of sexual attractiveness, which is further accentuated by the grandmother’s being old and sick, too weak even to open a door … Little Red Cap’s danger is her budding sexuality, for which she is not yet emotionally mature enough.

  And again, about Cinderella’s slipper, he writes:

  However Cinderella may have felt about dwelling among the ashes, she knew that a person who lives thus appears to others as being dirty and uncouth. There are females who feel this way about their sexuality, and others who fear that males feel this way about it. That is why Cinderella made sure that the prince saw her in this state also before he chose her. By handing her the slipper to put her foot into, the prince symbolically expresses that he accepts her the way she is, dirty and degraded.

  Thirdly, and most importantly, Bettelheim maintained that the chilly brutality and bloodthirsty vengeance of Grimm fairy tales are ultimately good for children. They can project themselves into the plots, which then provide an outlet for the feelings of hostility and rage they have towards their parents and their siblings—enchantments can be used to overcome the ravages of the Oedipus complex.

  The psychoanalytical theory that Bettelheim applied most resonantly to Grimms’ Tales is known as splitting. Splitting assumes Freud’s theory, which he called ‘the family romance’, that children often fantasize their parents are impostors, and that they have been stolen by them from a far better, kinder, richer, grander family.

  Bettelheim sees fairy tales expressing

  the child’s hopeful expectation that one day, by chance or design, the real parent will appear and the child will be elevated into his rightful exalted state and live happily ever after.

  These fantasies are helpful; they permit the child to feel really angry at the … false parent without guilt.

  The evil stepmother comes to embody all the sides of a mother that the children kick against, while the good mother, whom they love and who loves them, remains untouched by their angry, rebellious feelings, and the turmoil of their Oedipal desires (see Figures 1 and 16). When the wicked queen is made to put on red-hot shoes and dance till she drops down dead, she absorbs all the bad feelings children may have, especially towards their mother, and so their guilt and misery are alleviated, and they can exult in the just punishment of their foe. Through such splitting, th
e end of the Grimms’ ‘Snow White’ becomes therapeutic, not gloating or cruel.

  Apart from the universalist assumptions about society, the family, and male–female relations, which make him overlook cultural differences over time, this tolerance, even enthusiasm, for cruelty has led to Bettelheim’s book coming under attack.

  His own horrific ordeals in the camps had brutalized him, his detractors argue. His career as a doctor included harsh treatment of his patients, it has been further alleged, and his views about the value of violence in imaginative make-believe overlook social conditions. For example, stepmothers occur for real, and it is not helpful to them, or to their stepchildren, that their evil avatar haunts so many fairytale films as well as books, and has been established as a natural, and useful, device to help a child grow up.

  With regard to the fathers, brothers, and lovers, Bettelheim shows a bias, born of his time and place, of which he seems to remain entirely unaware. Discussing the close of ‘Little Red Cap’, when the huntsman arrives in the nick of time and cuts the little girl and her grandmother out of the belly of the wolf, Bettelheim approves strongly of this ending: ‘The male is … all-important, split into two opposite forms: the dangerous seducer who, if given in to, turns into the destroyer … and the hunter, the responsible strong, and rescuing father figure’ (see Figures 8 and 13).