Sally sees Ed’s hand outstretched towards her, holding the empty glass. She takes it, smiling, and turns away. There’s a roaring sound at the back of her head; blackness appears around the edges of the picture she is seeing, like a television screen going dead. She walks into the kitchen and puts her cheek against the refrigerator and her arms around it, as far as they will go. She remains that way, hugging it; it hums steadily, with a sound like comfort. After a while she lets go of it and touches her hair, and walks back into the living room with the filled glass.
Marylynn is over by the french doors, talking with Walter Morly. Ed is standing by himself, in front of the fireplace, one arm on the mantelpiece, his left hand out of sight in his pocket.
Sally goes to Marylynn, hands her the glass. “Is that enough?” she says.
Marylynn is unchanged. “Thanks, Sally,” she says, and goes on listening to Walter, who has dragged out his usual piece of mischief: some day, when they’ve perfected it, he says, all hearts will be plastic, and this will be a vast improvement on the current model. It’s an obscure form of flirtation. Marylynn winks at Sally, to show that she knows he’s tedious. Sally, after a pause, winks back.
She looks over at Ed, who is staring off into space, like a robot which has been parked and switched off. Now she isn’t sure whether she really saw what she thought she saw. Even if she did, what does it mean? Maybe it’s just that Ed, in a wayward intoxicated moment, put his hand on the nearest buttock, and Marylynn refrained from a shriek or a flinch out of good breeding or the desire not to offend him. Things like this have happened to Sally.
Or it could mean something more sinister: a familiarity between them, an understanding. If this is it, Sally has been wrong about Ed, for years, forever. Her version of Ed is not something she’s perceived but something that’s been perpetrated on her, by Ed himself, for reasons of his own. Possibly Ed is not stupid. Possibly he’s enormously clever. She thinks of moment after moment when this cleverness, this cunning, would have shown itself if it were there, but didn’t. She has watched him so carefully. She remembers playing Pick Up Sticks, with the kids, Ed’s kids, years ago: how if you moved one stick in the tangle, even slightly, everything else moved also.
She won’t say anything to him. She can’t say anything: she can’t afford to be wrong, or to be right either. She goes back into the kitchen and begins to scrape the plates. This is unlike her—usually she sticks right with the party until it’s over—and after a while Ed wanders out. He stands silently, watching her. Sally concentrates on the scraping: dollops of sauce suprême slide into the plastic bag, shreds of lettuce, rice, congealed and lumpy. What is left of her afternoon.
“What are you doing out here?” Ed asks at last.
“Scraping the plates,” Sally says, cheerful, neutral. “I just thought I’d get a head start on tidying up.”
“Leave it,” says Ed. “The woman can do that in the morning.” That’s how he refers to Mrs. Rudge, although she’s been with them for three years now: the woman. And Mrs. Bird before her, as though they are interchangeable. This has never bothered Sally before. “Go on out there and have a good time.”
Sally puts down the spatula, wipes her hands on the hand towel, puts her arms around him, holds on tighter than she should. Ed pats her shoulder. “What’s up?” he says; then, “Sally, Sally.” If she looks up, she will see him shaking his head a little, as if he doesn’t know what to do about her. She doesn’t look up.
Ed has gone to bed. Sally roams the house, fidgeting with the debris left by the party. She collects empty glasses, picks up peanuts from the rug. After a while she realizes that she’s down on her knees, looking under a chair, and she’s forgotten what for. She goes upstairs, creams off her make-up, does her teeth, undresses in the darkened bedroom and slides into bed beside Ed, who is breathing deeply as if asleep. As if.
Sally lies in bed with her eyes closed. What she sees is her own heart, in black and white, beating with that insubstantial moth-like flutter, a ghostly heart, torn out of her and floating in space, an animated valentine with no colour. It will go on and on forever; she has no control over it. But now she’s seeing the egg, which is not small and cold and white and inert but larger than a real egg and golden pink, resting in a nest of brambles, glowing softly as though there’s something red and hot inside it. It’s almost pulsing; Sally is afraid of it. As she looks it darkens: rose-red, crimson. This is something the story left out, Sally thinks: the egg is alive, and one day it will hatch. But what will come out of it?
* * *
† Margaret Atwood, “Bluebeard’s Egg,” in Bluebeard’s Egg and Other Stories. (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1983). Copyright © 1983, 1986 by O. W. Toad Ltd. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, of Penguin Random House UK, and of McClelland & Stewart, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited.
1. Christopher Robin’s formal name for Winnie-the-Pooh.
2. Reference to blockheads and numbskulls in folklore.
3. An allusion to “Briar Rose” or “Sleeping Beauty.”
4. A reference to fairy tales that pit a false bride against the heroine, or true bride.
5. A punishment frequently meted out to fairy-tale villains.
6. Baked in paper. “Boeuf en daube”: braised beef.
7. A physician in a television series of the 1960s.
8. Atwood is alluding here to “The Snow Queen” by Hans Christian Andersen.
9. What follows is an abbreviated version of the Grimms’ “Fitcher’s Bird” (see here).
10. Magic Night (French).
EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY
Bluebeard†
This door you might not open, and you did;
So enter now, and see for what slight thing
You are betrayed.… Here is no treasure hid,
The sought-for truth, no heads of women slain
But only what you see.… Look yet again—
5
An empty room, cobwebbed and comfortless.
Yet this alone out of my life I kept
Unto myself, lest any know me quite;
And you did so profane me when you crept
Unto the threshold of this room to-night
10
That I must never more behold your face.
This now is yours. I seek another place.
* * *
† From Edna St. Vincent Millay, Renascence and Other Poems (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1917), p. 73.
INTRODUCTION: Tricksters
In real life, every unhappy family may be unhappy in its own way, but in fairy tales unhappy families are all very much alike. Children square off against evil stepmothers and contend with cowardly fathers. Lacking any promise at all, they are called blockheads and dummies and must prove their mettle by leaving home, conquering monsters, and looting their homes. The child protagonists of fairy tales do battle with dark forces, but, more important, they begin as victims of hostile powers at home.
It may well be that the harsh social realities of a past era, when life was nasty, brutish, and short, account for some of the cruelty found in fairy tales. But fantasy, more than fact, seems to serve as the basis for that vast class of stories in which the central figure is a victimized innocent—abandoned by parents in the woods, sent out on the road with little more than a crust of bread or a few pennies, or subjected to constant humiliation at home.
Magic tales concerned with harsh family conflicts typically take place in a domain where the supernatural is accepted as part and parcel of everyday reality. The appearance of witches, gnomes, or ogres may arouse fear, dread, or curiosity, but it never evokes the slightest degree of astonishment. Fairy-tale characters rarely marvel at the marvelous, and instead embark on adventures taking them from the drab world of everyday reality—a place of suffering, deficiency, and lack—to a shining new reality. They are the underdogs who turn
the tables on their oppressors and establish, out of the least promising materials imaginable, a new social order characterized by measured abundance and amiable good will.
Food—its presence and its absence—shapes the world of fairy tales in profound ways, particularly when the protagonists are young, vulnerable, and dependent on parental protections. It is not at all uncommon for a peasant hero, faced with three wishes, to ask first for a plate of meat and potatoes or to be so distracted by hunger that he yearns out loud for a sausage while contemplating the limitless possibilities before him. “What shall I command?” asks the hero of a Greek tale when told he can have anything he wants. Without a moment’s hesitation, he responds by asking for “Food to eat!”1 Wish-fulfillment in fairy tales often has more to do with the stomach than with the heart. As Robert Darnton has pointed out in his study of the fairy tale’s origins in an adult peasant culture, “To eat one’s fill, eat until the exhaustion of the appetite (manger à sa faim), was the principal pleasure that the peasants dangled before their imaginations, and one that they rarely realized in their lives.”2 The same could be said about small children. While many folktales take us into the rugged and often brutal world of peasant life, where survival depends on getting your next meal, fairy tales with child protagonists often take us squarely into the household, where everyone seems to be anxious, not only about what’s for dinner but more important about who’s for dinner. The peasants of folktales may have to worry about famines, but children in fairy tales live perpetually under the double threat of starvation and cannibalism.
“I’ve got to kill you so that I can have something to eat!” a woman cries out in desperation to her two daughters in the Grimms’ story “The Children of Famine.” Happily, this tale cannot be found between the covers of most standard editions of the Grimms’ Nursery and Household Tales, but that it was ever included at all is telling, for it makes clear that the threat of being devoured was not seen as arising from supernatural monsters alone. The sheer number of cannibalistic fiends in fairy tales is impressive. Giants, ogres, stepmothers, cooks, witches, and mothers-in-law all seem driven by a voracious appetite for human fare, for the flesh and blood (in some cases the liver and lungs will do) of the weak and vulnerable. The victims, both potential and real, are often children: a boy is chopped up and cooked into a stew eagerly devoured by his father (“The Juniper Tree”), siblings are served up to their grandmother in a sauce Robert (Perrault’s “Sleeping Beauty in the Wood”), and a child is fattened up for a feast of human flesh (“Hansel and Gretel”).
Like many fairy tales, the Grimms’ “Hansel and Gretel” is set in a time of famine. While the parents in Perrault’s “Little Thumbling” take their children into the woods because they cannot bear to see them starve to death, the stepmother of Hansel and Gretel is driven to abandon the children by brutish self-interest. She urges her husband to lead the children deep into the forest and is glad to be “rid of them” (see here), for their needs jeopardize her own survival. A look at the version of “Hansel and Gretel” first recorded by the Grimms reveals that the children’s cruel stepmother was in fact a creation of Wilhelm Grimm’s fantasy. The tale, as the brothers first heard it, featured a biological mother who conspires with her husband to abandon the children. To be sure, Wilhelm Grimm may have made the change in order to align the tale with the realities of nineteenth-century family life, but more likely, he transformed the mother into a stepmother simply because he could not bear to pass on stories about mothers so intent on surviving a famine that they are willing to sacrifice their own children.
The villainous stepmother in “Hansel and Gretel” reemerges in the woods as a monster equipped with powers far more formidable than those she exercised at home. In the woods, the children are no longer pitted against a hostile, human adversary, but locked in combat with a superhuman opponent armed with daunting powers. Just what is at stake in the conflict between children and witch?
Few fairy tales take us as deeply into the woods as “Hansel and Gretel.” Its forests are compounded of dread and desire, offering a double thrill as the children face down the seductive terrors of the witch’s house. The children’s efforts to keep themselves alive, in the midst of a struggle for survival, have not earned them immunity to criticism. Bruno Bettelheim famously described them as victims of anxious fantasies: “Hansel and Gretel are convinced that their parents plan to starve them to death!” Regression and denial, he asserted, are the two strategies the children use to solve their problems. Carried away by their “oral craving” and “cannibalistic inclinations,” they give in to “untamed id impulses, as symbolized by their uncontrolled voraciousness.”3 Moving seamlessly from manifest content to latent meaning, Bettelheim reads the tale as a Freudian allegory about children who project all their unruly desires and fears on innocent adults. The cruel stepmother at home and the cannibalistic witch in the woods are nothing more than phantoms of the children’s imaginations and projections of their own desires.4
The two children facing down the witch can, however, also be seen as models of heroic behavior, learning, step by step, how to survive and find a way out of the woods. Linked with the classic trickster figures of folklore and mythology, they are driven by hunger and loss to improvise, to use deceit, and to discover a range of strategies for survival. Hansel and Gretel may not appear to be capable of managing the weight-bearing duties of the mythical trickster, but in the swift narrative strokes used to draw their characters, it is not difficult to identify trickster’s uncanny ability to develop creative intelligence in times of famine. More important, like trickster figures, Hansel and Gretel enact the paradox that spying, eavesdropping, mimicking, telling lies, and challenging property boundaries can not only enable survival but also move them along the path toward acquiring adult agency. If Hansel takes the lead in the first part of the story, Gretel comes out from behind to join him in the use of cunning to defeat the witch. Hansel substitutes a bone for his finger, and Gretel cleverly asks the witch to model how to climb into the oven. Later, Gretel chants words that summon a duck to help the two return home. The children’s strategies for survival begin with precocious listening; shade into duplicity; and end with a deadly ruse, a clever theft, and the use of art and poetry.
That ill will and evil are so often personified as adult female figures in fairy tales raises some weighty questions that challenge the notion of fairy tales as therapeutic reading for children. However satisfying the tales may seem from a child’s point of view, however much they may map developmental paths endorsed by orthodox Freudians, they still perpetuate strangely inappropriate notions about what it means to live happily ever after. In this tight microdrama of a dysfunctional family, Hansel and Gretel may save themselves by using their wits and learning how to do things with words, but they do so only after eradicating the witch in the woods and eliminating the stepmother at home.
In “The Juniper Tree,” a tale that can be seen as presenting the male counterpart to the female developmental trajectory mapped out in “Snow White,” the stepmother is also a troublemaker par excellence, stirring things up and unsettling the family in an unspeakably radical fashion. At the end of the Grimms’ version of the tale, she gets into real trouble for her wicked ways: “bam! the bird dropped the millstone on her head and crushed her to death” (see here). As in “Hansel and Gretel,” happily ever after comes in the form of a new family constellation: the children are reunited with their father in a household without a maternal presence.
With its lurid descriptions of decapitation and cannibalism, “The Juniper Tree” (also known as “My Mother Slew Me; My Father Ate Me” [ATU 720]) is probably the most shocking of all fairy tales. In most versions, the central character is a boy, yet occasionally, as in the British story “The Rose-Tree” (collected by Joseph Jacobs), a girl undergoes the transformation into a bird. The scenes of the boy’s beheading by the mother and consumption by the father have not prevented P. L. Travers from referring to the tale as “bea
utiful,”5 nor have they deterred J. R. R. Tolkien from describing it as a story of “beauty and horror” with an “exquisite and tragic beginning.”6 The “beauty” of the story probably turns less on its aesthetic appeal than on its engagement with cultural anxieties that fascinate us in their evocation of sheer dread. In the stepmother, we have a figure who represents maternal power run mad, an incarnation of a natural force so cruel and inexorable that it heightens our own sense of weakness and helplessness. In the Grimms’ version, the boy is transformed back to human form and reunited with his father and sister to live in a motherless household. But in some versions, as in the Scottish “Pippety Pew,” the boy remains a bird while “the goodman and his daughter lived happy and died happy.”7 In a version of the story that migrated to the U.S. South and was collected by a professor of romance languages at Tulane University, the mother of twenty-five children decides to get through hard times by cooking up her children, one by one, so that her husband will not starve. His enraged reaction leads to the same desire for revenge enacted in European fairy tales.
Fathers and father figures do not always fare as well as they do in “Hansel and Gretel,” “The Juniper Tree,” and “The Rose-Tree.” Who can forget the downfall of the ogres in British folklore who “eat little children” and the defeat of the giants who hunt down diminutive boys in French folklore? Many of the underdogs who battle monsters belong to a genealogy that includes David slaying Goliath and Odysseus defeating the Cyclops. Using brains because they lack brawn, these diminutive heroes outsmart their antagonists and triumphantly return home to their impoverished parent(s) with treasure in the form of magical artifacts, gold, and jewels.
Little Thumbling, in the tale of that title, is one of seven boys abandoned in a shockingly matter-of-fact fashion by parents who have too many mouths to feed. A “sickly” child, he is seen as stupid and blamed for anything that goes wrong. Thumbling may not speak a word, but he listens “carefully” to everything and learns quickly. From the ogre’s wife, who fools her husband into thinking that the scent of fresh meat is nothing more than the smell of a roasting calf, Thumbling learns how to deceive through substitution. Replacing the crowns worn by the ogre’s daughters with the caps worn by his brothers, he engineers the murder of the girls and the rescue of the boys. This is a fairy tale that self-reflexively celebrates the power of lying and stealing (what are fairy tales, after all, but lies that perpetually infringe on intellectual property rights?) and ends with the triumph of a trickster figure who continues his stealth operations as spy to the king and courier to the wealthy.
The Classic Fairy Tales (Second Edition) (Norton Critical Editions) Page 35
