Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale

by Marina Warner

  Beneath Anne Sexton’s nightmarish vision, you can glimpse the broken trust in families, as well as the suffocating limits on women’s horizons. You can hear the desperation that drove women mad.

  Sexton was in treatment for mental distress most of her life, including long psychoanalysis, and her savaging fairy tales expresses her frustration against her state. But rethinking fairy tales didn’t manage to lift Sexton’s own darkness, and in 1974, three years after Transformations came out, she committed suicide.

  These retellings often take the form of what have been called ‘anti-tales’: they seize hold of the old story and ‘tell it slant’. Yet the magnetic pull of fairy tales, especially on women, could not be resisted, it seems, and the work of subversion gave them added power over the female imagination. Jack Zipes is one of the male writers who joined in the campaign of ideological exposure, with a pioneer study called Breaking the Magic Spell (1979)—a sustained Marxist-inflected invective against commodification and Disneyfication (quasi-synonymous). Beneath Zipes’s tirades, there burns the anger of a lover betrayed, for he is a passionate champion of fairy tales and continued advocate for their intrinsic, emancipatory value. He follows Walter Benjamin, who proclaimed, in ‘The Storyteller’ essay, that the fairy tale has power to set minds free: ‘[The storyteller] has counsel, not for a few situations, as the proverb does, but for many, like the sage. The storyteller is the figure in which the righteous man encounters himself.’

  What does this belief mean? How does it materialize in fairy tales, especially regarding women? The most incandescent work to rise from the feminist explosion is undoubtedly The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter, a stretch of virtuoso imaginative writing and a potent critique. The ten fairy tales—a kind of profane Decalogue—came out the same year as The Madwoman in the Attic, 1979, and have been gaining more and more readers year on year, inspiring young women now who could be Carter’s grandchildren.

  Carter wanted to open up the tales, she said, to reveal their latent, erotic content. In consummately stylish, baroque prose poetry, she picks up stock figures, bright images, plot reversals, and condenses them with hallucinatory intensity. In the title story, Carter seems to have opened the forbidden door for a generation of young women with her vision of Bluebeard as a languid connoisseur of every depravity, half beast, half ancien régime tyrant, who unexpectedly arouses her: ‘For the first time in my innocent and confined life, I sensed in myself a potentiality for corruption that took my breath away.’

  In ‘The Erl-King’, a title which evokes Goethe’s spooky ballad about Death chasing a child, Carter remembers Schubert’s setting, but she folds into the tale Orphic memories, bird metamorphoses (from the Grimms’ ‘Jorinda and Joringel’), murderer bridegrooms, and a trickster heroine who defeats her abductor—all in seven pages. ‘The Snow Child’ is her version of ‘Snow White’; it does not reject the fairy tale’s vision of vicious internecine jealousy between women, but instead pushes it to extremes until the reader can’t but notice the horror of the power relations evoked—and thereby, perhaps, learn to resist them.

  Carter is a knowing old she-wolf leading cubs, like her own feral ‘Wolf Alice’, into the dark and fascinating windings of sexual desire. But her gleeful mischief-making, often in these murkier corners of sexuality, caused many of her sisters in the movement to reject Carter, and she remains a controversial and maverick figure. This is as she would have wished. As she also said, ‘a tale … retains a singular moral function—that of provoking unease.’

  The Bloody Chamber has become the founding charter of modern fairy tale, and the catalyst of a million awakenings for readers (especially girls) coming upon it for the first time. It is not too much to claim that Carter’s writing also changed the landscape of the genre. Certainly, in my own case (and I think I am typical), it gave me new, vital carnal knowledge. However, unlike most fairy tales, and certainly unlike the majority of the erotic fantasies selling fast today, her writing dazzles: her prose is unabashed in its festivity, lacerating scorn, and salty pungency. She puts on a performance of brilliant kinetic energy, displaying masterly handling of register, irony, allusion, phrase, and lexicon. She is playful, richly layered, and exuberantly fearless as she attempts to reconfigure new possible worlds—where the heroines will not submit but will understand their own appetites and act to fulfil them, where social structures will not constrict free spirits. The contents have been much imitated; the imagery of bondage and prohibited female sensuality has given many lesser talents permission to write Mummy Porn, but none of these resonances are the responsibility of Carter herself or of fairy tales themselves.

  You could say that the fairy tale grew up in 1979. That same year, Angela Carter issued a deliberate and outrageous provocation, an essay called The Sadeian Woman; in it, she upheld the pornography of the Marquis de Sade as a feminist tool of illumination. It was published by the new feminist house, Virago Press. What Carter had found in fairy tales of Perrault, Grimm, and (later) D’Aulnoy were profoundly disturbing symptoms of men’s assumed hegemony and women’s collusion with their oppression and sexual exploitation; yet she loved the stories and spent time translating them as well as responding to them.

  Later in her writing career, Angela Carter became a collector of stories. She didn’t re-vision the tales or indeed edit or retouch them. Instead, she collected from all over the world. The resulting two volumes radiate a far jollier spirit of resistance than The Bloody Chamber. She mustered a gaggle of unruly, bold, clever, trickster girls (not a Snow White victim among them) as well as a band of incorrigible powerful older women: she loved a beldame. She brought them in from the corners of folklore’s cobwebbed attics, dusted them down, and arranged them in sections called ‘Good Girls and Where It Gets Them’, ‘Strong Minds and Low Cunning’, and ‘Beautiful People’. As a woman and a writer, she wants to have it both ways: the tale shadowed by the anti-tale, the hope trailing a weight of irony.

  That period of excitement and protest still carries a powerful charge: Angela Carter’s name, more than twenty years after her death, can still fill a hall like a rock star. But she was herself very sceptical about the difference she or anyone else could make, and acutely aware of the warnings sounded by philosophers, such as Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno, that under the present arrangements of markets and media there can be no subversive act or work that will not end up absorbed, and de-fanged. Yet she did not give up the struggle. Just as love of fairy tales drew her to them irresistibly while loathing of their values roused her to disfigure their sweetness, so romance and cynicism are entangled in her ferocious refashionings. She was a utopian and a satirist, and a fight between idealism and despair flourished, unresolved, inside her.

  The contrary spirit of the feminist fairy tale has also enlivened the growth of Young Adult fiction, with unflinching fantasists exploring the lives of girls—and some boys—through revisiting ‘Rapunzel’, ‘Snow White’, and other classics. The furious feminist protests of the Seventies have become axioms of children’s publishing and of film producers’ brainstorming sessions. Hungry film companies in the vast global entertainment industry commission women screenwriters like Linda Woolverton, who has written the scripts for Disney’s Mulan, about the Chinese warrior princess, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin. Featuring upbeat, spirited, and physically vigorous heroines, such films are clearly answering the demand for positive role models. Often they show the strain, however, producing ideology even as they bend backwards to avoid it, for example in Tangled, in which the heavily ironic opening song, ‘Mother knows best’, continues unequivocally to uphold teenage rebellion and cast blame on older female authority figures. But overall, the critiques of both psychoanalysts and feminists, as they probed the dark secret loves at the sick heart of fairy tale, have transfigured the genre.

  Patriarchal Attitudes by Eva Figes was in the vanguard of the post-war feminism when it was published in 1970; a whole generation later, Figes wrote Tales of Innocence and Experience (2
003) a compelling and tender account of her relationship with a granddaughter. They read fairy tales together, and Figes observes the complexity of the little girl’s responses and shades these loving, perceptive observations with another story, about her own childhood long ago, and then, less personally, about the dilemmas that fairy tales still set women. The author’s memories of Berlin before the war, of her family’s persecution as Jews, of her father’s imprisonment and lucky—extremely lucky—reprieve, and their departure for exile in London in 1939, ebb and flow through her mind as she watches over and cares for her granddaughter. Her own grandparents died in the camps: this knowledge alters, deeply alters the impact of the fate of the granny in ‘Red Riding Hood’. She does not tell her grandchild this story.

  Every story can be retold differently: Eva Figes is rawly aware, throughout, of the effect of fairy tales, as Lang was when he selected and edited and recast the material, as Carter was when she so gleefully exposed it. Figes pictures the enraptured attention she can command as she reads, and the emotions—the anxiety, the identification, and the sympathy—which flare up and then die down again: the scenes of reading and telling here can lead to consolation, to gratified desire. Yet throughout, Eva Figes is alive to the perils on the way:

  It is part of the story-time ritual that I put my right arm round her, giving comfort and security, whilst I turn the pages with my left hand. Daylight beyond the window, slanting across the page. I stop to point out incidental details in the coloured illustration, an owl perched on a branch, the roof of the gingerbread house, which looks deliciously edible. I reiterate, as I have done on previous occasions, that witches do not exist in real life, only in stories.

  The deaths of mothers, the wickedness of stepmothers, the appetite of ogres, the complicity of their brides, the parents who abandon their children: all these harsh features of fairy tales throw up one storytelling challenge after another. Figes pauses on ‘Snow White’:

  I continue with the sad tale of Snow-White, conceived in midwinter, with her black hair and her unearthly skin, her mother duly dying as the child was born.

  Alarm bells ring in my head even as I read out the words. Hastily I explain that in the olden days, long, long ago, women did occasionally die when they had a baby, but not now, definitely not. My daughter is expecting her second child, and her first-born is beginning to show quite sufficient signs of childish insecurity as it is, without worrying about losing her mother entirely …

  The bedtime ritual, as the child nestles with her granny, mitigates—melts—the iciness of the threat in the tale; but it might also not be sufficient, not provide enough warmth. As Figes remarks, ‘Fright is fun, but only up to a point. Where the point is: that is the mystery.’

  The brave assault which feminist writers led against fairy tales did indeed lay bare the latent contents, but with unforeseen consequences. The problems of female heroism are open to all questers, male and female, but they are now equipped with different knowledge and expectations than before, when they set out to cut a new trail through the rose briars.

  8

  Double Vision

  The Dream of Reason

  … the most private and ignorant wishful thinking is to be preferred to any mindless goose-stepping; for wishful thinking is capable of revolutionary awareness, and can enter the chariot of history without necessarily abandoning in the process the good content of dreams.

  Ernst Bloch

  The tradition of fairy tale has lent itself to some of the most acute intellectual creations in the name and interest of rationality. Writers have wrapped themselves in fairytale themes and motifs in order to communicate political and philosophical thinking, sometimes in conditions of censorship, sometimes in the interests of amusing their audience and so persuading them more effectively. This seems a paradox, but it is the case that satire, comedy, polemic, and sexual critique have adopted features of the genre as a cloak for their deeper intent; a literature of enchantment has flourished since the eighteenth century alongside mimetic and realist modes, as a distinctive but no less lucid mirror of mores and manners.

  The generic characteristics of fairy tale are not introduced in earnest but in a spirit of play and parody. A plethora of stories knowingly mocks the conventions of the genre; with sly tongue-in-cheek, writers have adopted the form even while they are communicating a story with an urgent message. Occupying this playful double register, the fairy tale invites adults to experience it knowingly, their responses lying athwart the pleasure a child takes in the same material. The effect is to draw the carpet away from under the fantasy so that it remains enjoyable, but stops being believable. By this unexpectedly frequent manoeuvre, fairy tale becomes a prime vehicle of reason, as Angela Carter declares in the visionary concluding sentence of The Bloody Chamber. Wolf Alice is grooming the rank beast, licking the filth off him like a cat:

  The lucidity of the moonlight lit the mirror propped against the red wall; the rational glass, the master of the visible, impartially recorded the crooning girl.

  Like a vampire, the Duke has no reflection. But, according to the active and punning metaphors of fairy tale, both girl and monster will become capable of reflection when they finally become visible to each other:

  As she continued her ministrations, this glass, with infinite slowness, yielded to the reflexive strength of its own material construction. Little by little, there appeared within it, like the image on photographic paper that emerges, first, a formless web of tracery, the prey caught in its own fishing net, then in firmer yet still shadowed outline until at last as vivid as real life itself, as if brought into being by her soft, moist, gentle tongue, finally, the face of the Duke.

  The beast bridegroom materializes under the motions of the heroine’s tongue, which is the writer’s tongue too, her language, which makes visible what fantasy invents. The fairy tale acts as a rational glass, and its impartial reflection (‘as vivid as real life itself’) brings the secondary world back to earth, beaming epiphanies about our own possible state of existence.

  In the Know: Anti-tales and Parody

  It would be easy to imagine that the parodic games of rational fabulists have arisen over time, as a result of familiarity with original fairytale material, and that they mark out contemporary rational scepticism and knowingness, even cynicism or misanthropy. Modern re-visionings certainly assume knowledge of the sources, as Carter does, and rekindle the old stories’ fires. In this sense the modern or contemporary avatars of the genre are meta-fictions, and often absorbed into definitions of the postmodern. They quote, they parody, they pastiche, they masquerade in well-known guises: one of the twelve dancing princesses works as a transvestite croupier in Winterson’s The Passion (1994); an ugly sister becomes a heroine in A. S. Byatt’s ‘The Eldest Princess’ (1998); and in Snow, Glass, Apples, a ferociously cruel tale by Neil Gaiman, the wicked queen is sucked dry by the vampire child Snow White. But to see this as a modern form of metamorphosis is mistaken. The further back one goes, self-mockery and fairy tale have been deeply interwoven. Apuleius undercuts his own romancing in ‘Cupid and Psyche’, first by giving the story to a disreputable old bawd to tell the poor abducted bride ‘to make her feel a little better’, and then by dramatizing her ghastly death at the hands of the bandits in contradiction of the tale’s consoling promises: the framing turns his beautiful allegory of love into a mocking illusion. One of Apuleius’s sources for The Golden Ass was a ribald fable, The Ass, by his Greek predecessor Lucius of Samosata. Lucius is the author of the brilliant short meta-fiction The True History, a fiercely comic and inventive story that probes, with unsurpassed acuity, the fictive nature of literature—and this, in the second century bc. Shakespeare, responding to Apuleius, grasps this duplicity of fairy vision (in A Midsummer Night’s Dream) when Titania and the lovers become rapt in dreams but then wake to see reason. He gives us in the theatre the delight of entering enchantment and the comfort of returning to the reasonable ground of disenchantment—but not altogethe
r. Shakespeare issues a manifesto for fairy tale’s illusion when his Hippolyta rises to the defence of fancy:

  For all the story of the night told o’er,

  And all their minds transfigured altogether

  More witnesseth than fancy’s images

  And grows to something of great constancy.

  (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, V.i.23–6)

  Tzvetan Todorov has memorably divided fantasy into three kinds: supernatural, which offers divine intervention as explanation of wonders (myth, generally speaking); scientific, which posits astonishing and unexplained events and then uses them to illuminate and rationalize their mystery (sci-fi, as in Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and Ursula Le Guin) and fantasy, his third and most resonant expression, which Todorov defines as a debatable land, a form of the Freudian Uncanny. Uncanny fantasy is enigmatic; it leaves the causes unexplained and the reader in doubt (Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw is a tour de force in this mode). In their modern transformations, fairy tales can be sited in this version of the Uncanny, which then opens on to the possibilities of full-blown magical realism. But this is not the complete story, and the Todorovian categories fail to take account of the way fairy tale is poised, not between knowing and not knowing the causes of the wonders and enchantments, but between accepting them (as the ideal child reader does) and rejecting them (as the adult reader can be expected to do). The form however draws the latter into the stance of the former: we are not always placed in doubt as to what to believe, but rather invited to return to an imaginary state of trusting fictions, and this carries a special pleasure. The duality lies partly in the tale itself, but chiefly in ourselves as readers.

  Chris Warnes, in his fine study Magical Realism and the Postcolonial Novel (2009), focuses instead on the polarity between faith and irreverence. He argues that writers of fantastic tales such as Miguel Angel Asturias, Gabriel García Márquez, and Isabel Allende draw on a body of vital indigenous folk beliefs, and appeal to a national community, identified with a particular mythical past in Latin America. He contrasts this use of enchantments very convincingly with the rational, demythologizing approach of other magical realists such as Robert Coover, Salman Rushdie, Angela Carter, and Ali Smith, who disenchant the belief systems they draw on with multiple instruments of irony, satire, and burlesque. The Latin Americans, broadly speaking, do not undermine the structure of magic they create, whereas the North Americans and Europeans make a show of their scepticism (superiority to the very conventions they are using).