Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale

by Marina Warner

  The Uses of Enchantment is long, rich, and detailed, and this summary does not do it justice. Besides, the book is so successful that its ideas have themselves become agents in forming the social context in which fairy tales now circulate, shaping the decisions of the entertainment industry and the publishers’ markets, and establishing them as prime conduits of knowledge for the young, the adolescent, and their parents (Angela Carter pungently termed this approach ‘house-training the Id’). Along with many readers and students, I learned a huge amount from Bettelheim, though he enrages me as he has done many other lovers of fairy tales—especially feminists who take issue with the psychoanalytic premises about female nature, destiny, and sexual identity. Carter defiantly closes her riposte, ‘The Company of Wolves’, to ‘Red Riding Hood’ with the little girl happily tucked up with the wolf: ‘See! Sweet and sound she sleeps in granny’s bed, between the paws of the tender wolf.’ And the American artist Kiki Smith, in an enthralling and uncanny sculpture called Daughter, created a dreaming hairy-faced wolf child—the offspring of Red Riding Hood and the wolf.

  The intertwining of psychoanalysis and fairy tale has been tight, and the stories are still trusted to offer a key to understanding the human psyche—regardless of history or social circumstances. Carl Jung, Freud’s former cherished ally, broke away to found his own branch of analysis, which values fairy tales as the creations of humanity’s collective unconscious. His theories about the archetypes encountered in the stories—the Maiden, the Crone, the Eternal Youth, and others—are gaining in popularity and have also profoundly shaped the trust in fairy tales as coded wisdom about how to grow up, how to pass safely through the stages of life, and the ordeals and choices the passage brings. The belief that the stories have the power to lead by example and shape character, especially gender, to engineer social citizens, and inculcate values and ideology has been widely held and is still accepted. Even if we are persuaded (as I am) that fairy tales are somehow ‘real’ documents of the past, we don’t need to know anything about Black Forest husbandry or medieval marriage arrangements to recognize ourselves in the plots of ‘Red Riding Hood’, ‘Sleeping Beauty’, ‘Hansel and Gretel’, or ‘The Boy Who Wanted to Learn How to Shudder’. The trials confronted in fairy tales reach deep into the psyche, even when starvation, forced marriage, or abandonment in a foundling hospital are no longer very likely (though I am aware that there are still many occurrences).

  Making a Man of Him

  Much of the critical thinking, from The Uses of Enchantment to the Jungian analyst Marie-Luise von Franz’s ruminations, shows more interest in the female fairy tales than in the hero tales. All the favourite and famous fairy tales today are girls’ stories—romances, rather than ‘bloods’ as adventure stories for boys were known in the booksellers’ trade. But while the stories’ views of femaleness and femininity have been thoroughly shaken up, assumptions about maleness and masculinity have not been interrogated as enterprisingly—there’s been a reluctance to address the question, and a general retreat from even thinking about boys and fairy tales, probably because doing so leads into very deep waters about what society expects from young men—and these are proving hard to plumb.

  ‘The Boy Who Wanted to Learn How to Shudder’ tells a tale about the making of a man, and it gives an insight into the extent of the problem of maleness and masculinity in fairy tale. Its original title has been translated in many ways: ‘the more common version, ‘The boy who set out to learn fear’, fails to catch the humour and the ordinary, embodied character of his eventual discovery, and, with that embodiment, the story’s double entendre. It is a boys’ initiation story, analogous to ‘Red Riding Hood’, but very different, as lads in fairy tales vividly capture gender opposition. Often a simpleton or Dummling, the hero outfoxes the cleverest adversary and surpasses the strongest; he wins wealth, power, and the princess regardless of merit or effort—many boys’ fairy tales are compensatory fantasies.

  ‘The Boy Who … ’ opens with a hero who’s never afraid. He passes unscathed through a series of fearsome and ghoulish tests, and never shrinks: hanged men from a gallows, a haunted castle, a game of skittles with skulls and bones. Nothing daunts him. Until, that is, the princess he has won by his prowess tips a bucket of minnows over him in bed: ‘The little fish wriggled all over him. He woke up with a start and shouted, “Oh, I’ve got the creeps. I’ve got the creeps, dear wife!”’

  This is how the young man learns fear—in bed with his wife, not battling an ogre. This is downhome male banter (with a tinge of the dirty joke), and it shows that the meaning of a tale depends on the audience.

  When the Third Reich identified the Grimms’ stories as national heritage, this comic Gothic tale was taken as a kind of how-to guide to being hard; the Nazis embedded some of their favourites in the school curriculum and encouraged film interpretations. No less than twenty-three live action films were made, and included ghastly and dismaying scenes, including Red Riding Hood rescued by an SS officer from an anti-Semitic cartoon wolf. During the process of de-Nazification, the Grimms were banned from schools and libraries; they had formed part of the propaganda machine for turning out fascists, and the Allies saw them as irredeemably tainted.

  More than half the Grimms’ tales star a young hero. He overcomes ogres, trounces stingy employers, and wins a haughty princess by daring, wit, and wiles (see Figure 11). But he’s not a Terminator. Often there’s no reason for his success—he begins, as in ‘The Boy Who … ’, as a good-for-nothing lazybones. While the fairytale genre generally ignores patient merit, it does concern itself with the downtrodden and the ill used, and a central part of its consolations derives from fate’s twists and turns. The odds are stacked against everyone, more or less equally, and everything can change, suddenly, without rhyme or reason. The impenetrability of destiny and the helplessness of humans in the grip of chance count among the sharpest messages of fairy tale, and the explanatory tools, psychoanalytical or other, blunt themselves on their mystery.

  There are dozens of such Cinderella protagonists—youths as well as girls—and editors, publishers, and film-makers have generally preferred stories of heroic rescue and mayhem. But the Nazis dramatized them in earnest to a political purpose, whereas the Victorians and Edwardians tended to bluff, sometimes grotesque comedy, stressing the silly wishfulness of a story in which a tailor swats seven flies in a single blow.

  The problem of the hero still stirs: in 1990, the poet Robert Bly took it up boldly and caused a furore with his book, Iron John: A Book about Men, in which he argued a new approach to manliness. He chose one of the lesser-known Grimm tales, ‘Iron Hans’, or ‘Iron John’, about a mysterious encounter between a youth and a shaggy giant who lives in the depths of a forest pool where he keeps untold riches. Bly gave the fairy tale an allegorical reading that stresses the need for masculine virtues (bravery, forbearance, and comradeship) and proposed older mentors for youths. For a while, a men’s movement flourished in the US, with Iron John as their role model. Since that attempt was widely mocked, others have stepped in: Arthur Frank, invoking men’s alliances in myths and fairy tales, has developed an ideal of male companionship and bonding in mutual tenderness and support; similarly, a Jungian therapist, Craig Stephenson, in a fine study of madness, draws on alternative mythic and folk heroes, such as the spellbound, metamorphosing Sweeney, an alter ego of Seamus Heaney from the Celtic tradition. Both these writers are highly sensitized to the admiration and encouragement of violence in the public sphere and have been struggling—it is tempting to say, manfully—to foster friendlier and more interesting variants on masculinity than the usual princes, giant-killers, and ne’er-do-wells. Reading Boyishly, a highly original and courageous study by the art historian Carol Mavor, draws attention to the softness and vulnerability of the adolescent male; she even attempts to transvalue the much derided cissy. Looking through her eyes, fairy tales for boys, alongside a great many other cultural products, are indeed bent on disciplining them to be
manly by being tough, just as ideologically as the girls’ stories hold up a vision of female virtues.

  The language of symbols is more mutable and arbitrary than common parlance, and words and terms are always shifting in meaning likewise. Although the premise for Freud’s analysis is that the stories have universal meaning, most decodings remain subjective and, being subjective, are shaped by a mesh of circumstances (personal and social), contradictory and as numerous as their makers and inconsistent with one another. One way to answer the problem about boys and fairy tales is to look at the context in which a particular story was told—psychoanalysis itself forged its interpretive keys according to presumptions of gender and value, and they are now being recast in response to changing conditions. Another necessary line of enquiry looks at the history of selection. Any anthology will yield little-known tales which present a different picture of maleness, just as they will reveal plucky, witty, trickster heroines. But historically over a long period of cultural artefacts, gallant, loyal, and loving characters have been eclipsed.

  Psychological readings are far more popular than any socio-historical analysis, and have excited a vast secondary literature of therapy, self-help and how-to books, the personal growth industry and academic literary criticism. Any one of us could mention titles—many of them huge bestsellers—that throw a psychoanalytic light on fairy tales—Women Who Run with the Wolves, by Clarissa Pinkola Estés, a wildfire bestseller after it came out in 1992, unfolds fairy tales as potent elixirs for female self-renewal.

  The stories provoke and enrage, as well as inspire, enlighten, and entertain. It is really up to us—what stories we choose to tell, what we see in them, how we tell them. Not everyone is happy to agree with Red Riding Hood when she tells herself, ‘You’ll never stray from the path into the forest by yourself again, not ever for the rest of your life, when your mother has told you not to.’

  Feminists were prominent among those who began talking back. They identified—and identify—strongly with the tradition, as its prime subject matter and as its voices. Aroused by Freud’s question, ‘What do women want?’, which lies at the centre of conjectures made by (mostly male) analysts, they seized hold of fairy tales and shook them till the stories choked, spat out the poison, and sat up ready for a different day.

  7

  In the Dock

  Don’t Bet on the Prince

  ‘Is it dark down there, Prince Horrendous?

  Dark down there with Betsy Skull?

  Is it dark down there

  Where the grass grows through the hair?

  Is it dark in the under-land of Null?’

  Helen Adam, ‘Down There in the Dark’

  In the post-war period, women who had been brought up on fairy tales, and who had been taken to the Disney animation classics Snow White (1937) and Cinderella (1950), rose up and protested against the lies and stereotyping in the stories, the wishful thinking, the distorted values, the beauty queen fantasies, and the pervasive bad faith of the promise, ‘and they lived happily ever after’. They further attacked the way re-tellers and films sanitized the original stories, taming them in order to indoctrinate small children and adolescents even more deceitfully. Fairy tales were denounced as a blunt tool of patriarchy, the bourgeoisie, cosmetic surgeons, the fashion industry, and psychoanalysts bent on curbing girls’ energies and desires.

  In Basile’s fairy tale, ‘Sole, Luna, e Talia’ (Sun, Moon, and Thalia), the heroine is a Sleeping Beauty (Figure 13), and is raped while she lies unconscious—but Perrault draws a veil over this side of things.

  A favourite heroine, such as the Grimm Brothers’ Little Red Cap, fails to use her wits and escape from the wolf, whereas the spirited, but much less well-known Dalila the Wily from the Nights runs rings around her adversaries, and the beloved of the Ram, in D’Aulnoy’s tale, rejects him till he expires of grief. By contrast, the deep malice of the witches and evil stepmothers, the unrelieved spite of some sisters, and the murderous jealousy between mothers and daughters were left to stand, unchallenged. These portraits of female evil supported male interests, too. The tales were not merely symptoms but also instruments of a strategy: divide women against one another the better to lord it over them. Furthermore, in a more settled and prosperous world, the longing in fairy tales for a safer, more comfortable life looked like rank consumerism and cynical upward mobility, cost what may. Such materialistic values stuck in the craw of women determined to build a world in which marriage was not a business transaction, and their inner well-being and nourishment mattered. Subversion became the battle cry: the tales were to be turned inside out and upside down.

  The first step was critical reading, to expose how the tales are not primordial, intact vessels of peasant wisdom, but expressions of the collectors’ and authors’ values, which are both time-bound and class-bound. The scholar Ruth Bottigheimer, in her book Grimms’ Bad Girls and Bold Boys (1989), demonstrated how Wilhelm Grimm’s endless tinkering tended to excuse the men and blame the women, whittling down heroines’ words and granting boys more and more to do and to say. For example, besides introducing a father figure to save Little Red Cap, he progressively altered ‘Hansel and Gretel’ to explain away the father’s conduct altogether. In the 1812 version, both the natural mother and father agree to abandon the children; by 1857 and the final edition, the father pleads with the woman, who has become a stepmother, and she overrules him. In the most notorious example of Wilhelm’s interference, he censored the story of Rapunzel. In the first version, Rapunzel lets down her hair for the witch, and when she has climbed up into the tower as usual, Rapunzel asks her why her clothes are getting so tight. The witch realizes that in spite of keeping Rapunzel locked up and out of sight of man or beast, the young girl has been seeing someone … so she cuts off her hair and throws her out, to have her babies—for she is having twins—alone in the wilderness.

  Figure 13 ‘She was so lovely she seemed, almost, to shine … ’. ‘Sleeping Beauty’, from Household Stories from the Collection of the Brothers Grimm, illustrated by Walter Crane, 1893.

  Through all the fantastic and extreme details, the truth-telling of this story, about teenage pregnancy, is plain—and eloquent.

  But the frankness was too much for Wilhelm, and he changed Rapunzel’s question to ‘Tell me, Dame Godmother, how is it that you are much heavier to draw up than the young king’s son, who only takes a moment to reach me?’

  The scene turns Rapunzel into a ninny, whereas before she was clearly a victim of ignorance, and the tale an unapologetic call for sex education for the young.

  Wilhelm’s prudishness contrasts his toughness, however, when it came to savage and cruel actions: he could argue that it was a good thing to tell a dreadful story about murder in order to warn children about the consequences of their actions, but he withdrew from communicating the facts of life to little girls and boys through fairy tale. Yet this function must be one of the most deep-rooted of all.

  Feminists grasped this role of the fairy tale: sexual education in the broadest sense became the aim of their subversions.

  Awakenings

  The Madwoman in the Attic, by the American literary scholars Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, was a path-breaking study of Victorian women’s writing, and it came out in 1979, four years after Bettelheim’s Uses of Enchantment. Gilbert and Gubar put feminist readings centre stage as the supreme lens for understanding women’s situation. They did not oppose Bettelheim altogether, but built on his insights. The evil stepmother in ‘Snow White’ inspired them to a blazing assault on the presuppositions Bettelheim shared with the Grimms, and a defence of the active, mobile, powerful older woman, so often vilified in the stories.

  After critical close readings of fairy tales, the strategies feminists devised ranged from furious satire, irony, and parody and, at the other end of the literary spectrum, romancing on their own terms, in inventive and witty re-visionings—to use the term of the poet Adrienne Rich. Re-visioning the tales as scriptures for t
he women’s revolution involved combining and recombining the elements to galvanize them into new life.

  Box 5 The Anger of Anne Sexton

  ...................................................................................

  The American poet Anne Sexton blazes with scorn of fairytale promises in her 1971 volume Transformations. In a series of scalding twists on the best-loved heroine tales, delivered in a vivid mixture of slang and poetic metaphor, she invokes a Cinderella turned Stepford wife, condemned to a life of utter banality:

  Cinderella and the prince

  lived, they say, happily ever after,

  like two dolls in a museum case

  never bothered by diapers or dust,

  never arguing over the timing of an egg,

  never telling the same story twice,

  never getting a middle-aged spread,

  their darling smiles pasted on for eternity.

  Regular Bobbsey Twins.

  That story.

  With her version of Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty) she touches darker depths:

  Little doll child,

  come here to Papa.

  Sit on my knee.

  I have kisses for the back of your neck.

  A penny for your thoughts, Princess.

  I will hunt them like an emerald.

  The response then insinuatingly indicts this fatherly voice from an omniscient angle, coincidental with ours, the readers’, looking on:

  It’s not the prince at all,

  but my father

  drunkeningly bends over my bed,

  circling the abyss like a shark,

  my father thick upon me

  like some sleeping jellyfish.