The folktale works with fixed formulas. It favors the numerals one, two, three, seven, and twelve—numbers of firm definition and originally of magic significance and power. The hero or heroine either is alone or is the last member of a triad (the youngest of three children); less frequently, heroes or heroines appear as a pair, as in the tale of The Twins or Blood-Brothers (AT 303). This-worldly as well as otherworldly helpers and opponents appear on the scene singly (sometimes in the form of prominent leaders of a people, such as the king or prince) or in groups of three, seven, or twelve—but the latter only if their number does not at the same time serve to form episodes, for the triad rules the development of episodes. A succession of seven or twelve episodes would destroy the overall clarity of design and stability of form. The numbers seven, twelve, and one hundred are no more than stylistic formulas that embody the principle of plurality in formula-like rigidity. By contrast, pairs and triads have a structural function as well.35 Some folktales are bipartite, with the recovery of the lost spouse forming the second part. But it is above all the triad that is predominant: three tasks are accomplished in succession; three times a helper intervenes; three times an adversary appears. Since each gift that is presented to the hero is usually intended to resolve a single episode, the folktale prefers to mention three gifts, not seven, let alone twelve.
To a high degree, this preference for formulaic round numbers imparts a rigid quality to the folktale. Unlike the real world, the folktale knows nothing of numerical diversity and randomness; it aspires to abstract certainty. This aspiration is also evident in the verbatim repetition of entire sentences and long paragraphs. If the same event is repeated, it makes sense to state it in identical terms. Many storytellers avoid variation, not out of incompetence but because of stylistic demands. Strict word-for-word repetition, when it occurs, is an element of the folktale’s abstract style. Such rigidity corresponds to that of the metals and minerals that abound in the folktale. Sentences repeated verbatim at certain intervals also have an articulating role. Like a rhythmically recurring ornament, they ring out in the corresponding parts of the story at certain specified points.36 A similar result is produced by the recurrence of an individual expression within a sentence. When the word “bellissimo” is repeated four times in the course of eleven lines (un bellissimo cavallo, un bellissimo prato, un bellissimo giardino, and once again un bellissimo prato),37 we perceive an articulating effect that would not be produced if different adjectives were employed in each instance. Thus, the folktale almost spontaneously achieves a consistency of style of the sort that modern aesthetics requires of true works of art: the special character of the overall composition is reflected in its constituent parts, right down to the individual verbal expression.
The fixed metrical and rhyming tags and the opening and closing formulas of the folktale likewise serve to stabilize its form. The clear single-strandedness (Einsträngigkeit) of its plot signifies an emphatic refusal to portray directly anything that is many-layered or interpenetrating. Only a single sharply defined plot line is evident. A necessary correlative of the folktale’s single-stranded plot is the division of this plot into more than one episode (Mehrgliedrigkeit). Legends, which are nonepisodic, give us space, depth, stratification, atmosphere. The narrow line of the folktale plot is sustained by a plurality of episodes. Things that normally interpenetrate and coexist are detached and isolated, and their projection onto the story line makes them successive.38 Thus, single-strandedness and episodic structure are the foundation and the preconditions of the abstract style.
When every year the queen gives birth to a child, or even to two boys, each with golden curls and of ideal beauty, this is as much part of the abstract style of the folktale as when a gold coin or a golden ring falls out of the heroine’s mouth with her every (!) word, or when the dragon must receive a human sacrifice every day or every month, or when a dwarf appears with each note of a magic flute. All of the tsar’s daughter’s husbands die on the very first night.39 The folktale king is prepared to kill all of his twelve sons if he is given just one daughter; or he seeks and finds in his kingdom “eleven girls, each the perfect likeness of his daughter in countenance, figure, and size” (KHM No. 67). The sister who is to rescue her brothers keeps absolute silence unfailingly and steadfastly for seven years. Ninety-nine suitors are beheaded, but the hundredth accomplishes the task and wins the princess. A house in the forest is made entirely of gingerbread or of human bones. All this is abstract representation that is far removed from any concrete reality.
The folktale has a liking for all extremes, extreme contrasts in particular. Its characters are completely beautiful and good or completely ugly and bad; they are either poor or rich, spoiled or cast out, very industrious or completely lazy. The hero is either a king’s son or a peasant’s son; he is either a scurfhead or a golden boy (frequently first one and then the other, by an abrupt change); the princess marries the country bumpkin; the horse is either golden or mangy; and the gift that the hero receives either shines like gold or looks completely undistinguished. Whereas the antiheroes are magnificently provided with clothes and horses and cake, the hero must get by with crusts of bread and lame nags (or he asks for no more than these).40 The contrasting figures of the folktale are coated with either pitch or gold; cruel punishments and the highest rewards are set off against one another. The hero or heroine is usually an only child or is the youngest of three; frequently he or she appears as a simpleton or ashmaid. The folktale often tells of childless couples, or then again of couples with a superabundance of children. Parents die and leave their children all alone. The hero and heroine are young, but their advisers are old men and women. Hermits, beggars, and one-eyed persons come on the scene. Shabby garments or stark nakedness appear side by side with precious furs. The hero may be as strong as a bear, but the helpless heroine is surrendered to a monster. Otherworld beings take the forms of giants or dwarves. Heinous crimes, fratricide, infanticide, and malicious slander are everyday features of the folktale, as are gruesome methods of punishment. The folktale’s many prohibitions and strict conditions contribute in no small way to the elaboration of its precise style.
Miracles are the quintessence of all extremes and bring the abstract style to its most pointed expression. When the peasant woman, the maid, and the mare all eat part of the talking fish, each gives birth to a son the very next night.41 The magic ointment immediately restores the blind man’s sight and brings the dead back to life.42 Sick people are cured by being dismembered and put back together again.43 Abrupt metamorphoses dazzle the eye. “While he was asleep, the rose leaped down from his hat and turned into a beautiful girl who sat down at the table and ate up everything served.”44 The animal bridegroom no sooner casts off his hedgehog hide than he is revealed as a handsome young man.45 “As the princess lay there they stuck a needle into her right ear, and immediately she turned into a bird and flew away.”46 The two states of being need not be internally related. The evil queen turns her three stepsons first into three brass candlesticks, then into three clods of earth, and finally into three wolves.47 A fox is transformed into a beautiful shop;48 a dragon turns into a boar, the boar into a hare, and the hare into a pigeon;49 a witch changes into a bed or a fountain;50 a princess turns into a lemon or a fish, then into a lump of silver, and finally into a beautiful linden tree.51 A reed turns into a silver dress or into a dun horse.52 A large castle can be changed into an egg and back again at will.53 In a Lithuanian folktale, the wolf says to the simpleton: “Slaughter me! Then my body will turn into a boat, my tongue into a rudder, and my entrails into three dresses, three pairs of shoes, and three rings.” Subsequently, after the simpleton has made use of all these things, the wolf comes back to life and carries him and his princess to their destination.54 Nothing is too drastic or too remote for the folktale. The more mechanical and extreme the metamorphosis, the more clearly and precisely it unfolds before us.
The abstract stylization of the folktale gives it luminosity and firm definition
. Such stylization is not the product of incapacity or incompetence, but of a high degree of formative power. With marvelous consistency it permeates all elements of the folktale and lends them fixed contours and a sublime weightlessness. It is far removed from lifeless rigidity, for the rapid and emphatic advance of the plot is an integral part of it. The hero is a wanderer who effortlessly moves across vast expanses, often carried at the speed of the wind by flying horses, carriages, coats, or magic shoes. His progress is not arbitrary, however, for its form, direction, and laws are precisely determined. The diagrammatic style of the folktale gives it stability and shape; the epic-like forward progression of the plot gives it quickness and life. Firm form and effortless elegance combine to form a unified whole. Pure and clear, with joyous, weightless mobility, the folktale observes the most stringent laws.
* * *
† Max Lüthi, “Abstract Style,” in The European Folktale: Form and Nature, trans. John D. Niles (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1982), pp. 24–36, 140–42. © 1982 by ISHI. Reprinted with permission of Ophidian Films Ltd.
1. August Leskian, Balkanmärchen (Jena: Diederichs, 1919), pp. 179–180 (Serbo-Croatian).
2. Gerhart Hauptmann, Ausblicke (Berlin: Fischer, 1924), p. 22.
3. For example, Klara Strobe, ed., Nordische Volksmärchen, MdW (Jena: Diederichs, 1919), II, No. 24 (Norwegian).
4. August von Lewis of Menar, ed., Russische Volksmärchen, (Jena: Diederichs, 1927), No. 43.
5. Balkanmärchen, No. 17 (Bulgarian).
6. Emmanuel Cosquin, ed., Contes populaires de Lorraine (Paris: Vieweg, 1886), I, No. 1.
7. Friedrich S. Krauss, ed., Sagen und Märchen der Südslaven, II (Leipzig: Friedrich, 1884), No. 131.
8. Johannes Bolte and Georg Polivka, Anmerkungen zu den Kinder- und Hausmärchen der Brüder Grimm, 5 vols. (Leipzig: Dieterich, 1913–32), I, 208.
9. See Max Lüthi, Die Gabe im Märchen und in der Sage (Bern: Francke, 1943).
10. P. Kretschmer, Neugriechische Märchen, MdW (Jena: Diederichs, 1919), No. 31 (Cretan).
11. Balkanmärchen, No. 29 (Serbo-Croatian).
12. Russische Volksmärchen, No. 4.
13. For example, Balkanmärchen, No. 7 (Bulgarian).
14. A. Löwis of Menar, ed., Finnische und estnische Volksmärchen, MdW (Jena: Diederichs, 1922), No. 26 (Finnish).
15. Ibid., No. 30 (Finnish).
16. Balkanmärchen, Nos. 2, 6, 12, 18 (“Everything there was black—the people, the animals, even the tsar himself”).
17. Nordische Volksmärchen, II, No. 7 (Norwegian). A Russian folktale begins: “There once was a tsar, a mighty lord, who lived in a region as flat as a tablecloth” (Russische Volksmärchen, No. 43).
18. See Gabe, p. 95.
19. If he does not remain a truncated motif. In the Swiss folktale “Hans Tgavrêr,” the princess wants to give the hero a hundred soldiers to take along on his journey. “ ‘Certainly not, I shall go alone,’ said Hans. ‘No, I will not let you go like that,’ she answered. So in the end he decided to take forty men along with him”—but even these he soon sends back home, and only then can his adventures begin. Leza Uffer, ed., Rätoromanische Märchen und ihre Erzähler (Basel: Schweizerische Gesellschaft für Volkskunde, 1945), No. 21, rpt. in Lüthi, Europäische Volksmärchen, p. 279, and in Uffer, Die Märchen des Barba Plasch (Zürich: Atlantis, 1955), p. 72.
20. Balkanmärchen, No. 17 (Bulgarian).
21. See Gabe, p. 135 (an allusion to The Frog Prince, KHM No. 1).
22. Zaunert, Deutsche Märchen seit Grimm, I, 1, rpt. in Lüthi, Europäische Volksmärchen, p. 301. The narrative was first printed in U. Jahn, ed., Volksmärchen aus Pommern und Rügen, I (Soltau: Norden, 1891).
23. See Gabe, pp. 61–62.
24. See Gabe, pp. 30–31.
25. For example, Balkanmärchen, No. 23 (Serbo-Croatian).
26. Not only in Grimm but in the Yugoslavian folktale as well: Balkanmärchen, No. 34 (Serbo-Croatian).
27. Zaunert, Deutsche Märchen aus dem Donaulande, pp. 62 ff.
28. Zaunert, Deutsche Märchen seit Grimm, I, 1 (see note 22, here).
29. See, for example, Cosquin, I, 32, 34.
30. Russische Volksmärchen, No. 4.
31. Balkanmärchen, No. 29 (Serbo-Croatian).
32. Deutsche Märchen seit Grimm, II, 285.
33. Balkanmärchen, No. 56.
34. I am using the term after the model of Wilhelm Worringer in his 1907 Bern dissertation, Abstraktion und Einfühlung, published in Munich by R. Piper & Co. in 1908 and frequently reprinted thereafter, most recently in 1959. For basic remarks pertaining to this work, see Gabe, p. 28 n., and my article Abstraktheit in the Enzyklopädie des Märchens, I (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1977), cols. 34–36.
35. See further Mackensen, p. 309. That the original magic and power of the sacred numbers still find a faint echo in the folktale is emphasized by Karl Justus Obenauer in Das Märchen: Dichtung und Deutung (Frankfurt: Kostermann, 1959), pp. 93–127.
36. This principle is beautifully illustrated in the Lotharingian folktale of “Le Roi d’Angleterre et son filleul” (Cosquin, I, 32 ff.; German trans. in Lüthi, Europäische Volksmärchen, p. 150).
37. Giuseppe Pitrè, ed., Novelle popolari Toscane, I (Rome: Soc. Editrice del Libro Italiano, 1941), 3.
38. Occasional attempts at maintaining parallel plot lines, as with the simultaneous departure of two or three brothers, disappear before the dominant preference of the folktale for plots of a single strand (Einsträngigkeit). A modern narrator from Lorraine enjoys to the full, with heavy-handed transitions, the unaccustomed refinement of a double-stranded plot: “Now we leave the lad in the garden and go back, we return to Rosamunde and see how things are going there.” Or: “Now we leave the pilgrims again and follow the lad.” See Angelika Merkelbach-Pinck, ed., Lothringer erzählen, I (Saarbrücken: Saarbrücker Druckerei, 1936), 226, 230. For a similar effect see Plasch Spinas, another present-day folktale narrator, in Leza Uffer, ed., Rätoromanische Märchen, No. 21, trans. in Lüthi, Europäische Volksmärchen, p. 279: “Now let us leave him to prepare the sticks while we return to the princess, because he needed about three weeks to cut sticks for all the goats.” See also a modern Greek tale: “Now let us leave the princess to wail and to search for him everywhere, and let us turn to the sugar merchant and his wife” (Neugriechische Märchen, No. 53). Cf. Bolte-Polívka, IV: 22–24.
39. Balkanmärchen, No. 2 (Bulgarian). In the frame story of The Arabian Nights, it is king Shahriar who every night for three years takes a beautiful girl as his wife, but has her head cut off at dawn; this is at once more rational and more realistic than the unreasonable and unexplained nonviolent death of the husbands in the Bulgarian folktale.
40. For example, Balkanmärchen, Nos. 42 and 43 (Serbo-Croatian), Russische Volksmärchen, No. 41.
41. Lettisch-litauische Volksmärchen, No. 1 (Latvian).
42. Balkanmärchen, No. 36 (Serbo-Croatian); Lettisch-litauische Volksmärchen, No. 1.
43. Finnische und estnische Volksmärchen, No. 31 (Finnish).
44. Balkanmärchen, No. 35 (Serbo-Croatian).
45. Ibid., No. 33 (Serbo-Croatian).
46. Ibid., No. 17 (Serbo-Croatian).
47. Irische Volksmärchen, No. 21.
48. Zaunert, Deutsche Märchen aus dem Donaulande, p. 315; cf. Gabe, p. 63.
49. Balkanmärchen, No. 26 (Serbo-Croatian); cf. Zaunert, Deutsche Märchen seit Grimm, I, 133.
50. Lettisch-litauische Volksmärchen, No. 26 (Latvian).
51. Nordische Volksmärchen, II, No. 4 (Norwegian).
52. Irische Volksmärchen, No. 20.
53. Lettisch-litauische Volksmärchen, No. 26.
54. Ibid.
SANDRA M. GILBERT AND SUSAN GUBAR
[Snow White and Her Wicked Stepmother]†
&
nbsp; As the legend of Lilith1 shows, and as psychoanalysts from Freud and Jung onward have observed, myths and fairy tales often both state and enforce culture’s sentences with greater accuracy than more sophisticated literary texts. If Lilith’s story summarizes the genesis of the female monster in a single useful parable, the Grimm tale of “Little Snow White” dramatizes the essential but equivocal relationship between the angel-woman and the monster-woman. * * * “Little Snow White,” which Walt Disney entitled “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves,” should really be called Snow White and Her Wicked Stepmother, for the central action of the tale—indeed, its only real action—arises from the relationship between these two women: the one fair, young, pale, the other just as fair, but older, fiercer; the one a daughter, the other a mother; the one sweet, ignorant, passive, the other both artful and active; the one a sort of angel, the other an undeniable witch.
Significantly, the conflict between these two women is fought out largely in the transparent enclosures into which * * * both have been locked: a magic looking glass, an enchanted and enchanting glass coffin. Here, wielding as weapons the tools patriarchy suggests that women use to kill themselves into art, the two women literally try to kill each other with art. Shadow fights shadow, image destroys image in the crystal prison. * * *
The story begins in midwinter, with a Queen sitting and sewing, framed by a window. As in so many fairy tales, she pricks her finger, bleeds, and is thereby assumed into the cycle of sexuality William Blake called the realm of “generation,” giving birth “soon after” to a daughter “as white as snow, as red as blood, and as black as the wood of the window frame.”2 All the motifs introduced in this prefatory first paragraph—sewing, snow, blood, enclosure—are associated with key themes in female lives (hence in female writing). But for our purposes here the tale’s opening is merely prefatory. The real story begins when the Queen, having become a mother, metamorphoses also into a witch—that is, into a wicked “step” mother: “… when the child was born, the Queen died,” and “After a year had passed the King took to himself another wife.”
The Classic Fairy Tales_Norton Critical Edition Page 57
