by Alison Lurie
Anyone who is familiar with the works of C. S. Lewis will realize that it will be almost impossible to take Christianity out of Narnia. Lewis’s books are consciously founded on Christian theology; there is a witch in the series, but as Abanes says, “She is evil and based on age-old and widely accepted symbols and illustrations of evil.”19 In the world of Narnia, virtue consists in loving and serving the great lion Asian, a Christ-like figure who in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe sacrifices himself to redeem the child Edmund from moral enslavement to the witch.
In Narnia, final happiness is the result not of individual initiative and enterprise, but of submission to the wisdom and will of superior beings. Misbehavior can be forgiven if it is sincerely repented, and Edmund eventually becomes one of the Kings of Narnia. His older sister, Susan, however, loses her title at the end of the series because “she’s interested in nothing nowadays except nylons and lipstick and invitations.”20
One complaint that both Abanes and Arms make against the Potter books is that in them evil and good are ambiguous and shifting. Apparently harmless or innocent characters turn out to be working for dark forces, and wicked-looking characters are revealed to be messengers of light. In Narnia, on the other hand, good and evil are clearly distinguishable. The good supernatural figures often come from classical mythology, the bad ones from European folklore. In the battle at the end of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Asian is supported by good giants and unicorns and centaurs and fauns; the Witch by an army of ogres and wolves and apes and hags and wraiths.
The world of Narnia is simple and eternal: goodness, peace, and beauty will eventually triumph. The world of Harry Potter is complex and ambiguous and fluid. And in this, of course, it is far more like our own world, in which it is not always easy to tell the ogres from the giants. When we choose books for our children, do we want them to teach obedience to authority or skepticism, acceptance of the status quo or a determination to change what needs to be changed?
Joanne Rowling’s own story, like Harry’s, is in the classic European folklore tradition. As almost everyone now knows, when she was working on Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,21 she was a young single mother with long red hair, living on public assistance in Edinburgh. Because her flat was unheated, she would put her small daughter into a stroller and push her about the streets until the child fell asleep. Then she would go to a cafe, order a cup of coffee, and write.
Rowling’s fairy godmother was the Scottish Arts Council, which gave her a grant that made it possible for her to finish the first volume. But even then she had trouble getting transportation to the ball. Nine English publishers rejected Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone before Bloomsbury took it, and her editors had no idea it would be a success. At first they made no special attempt to promote the book, and printed only a small number of copies.
Now, of course, all that is history. At one point the first three volumes of the series were number one, two, and three on The New York Times best-seller list. This annoyed publishers of adult fiction so much, and their protests were so vociferous, that the editors of the paper finally agreed to begin listing juvenile bestsellers separately. The first volume has been translated into (at last count) twenty-eight languages. A plain-cover edition has also appeared in England, for adults who are embarrassed to be seen reading a children’s book. Though this edition costs two pounds more than the original, it very soon sold twenty thousand copies.
In the fall of 2001 the Warner Brothers film of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone opened to generally good reviews and crowds of fans. To accompany the release there were Harry Potter T-shirts, lunch boxes, video games, and action figures. There were also even more interviews with J. K. Rowling, and more intrusive articles about her life.
For Rowling herself this was clearly not an unmixed blessing. In the fourth volume of the series, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Harry is persecuted by the repellent Rita Skeeter, a scandal-sniffing female reporter for the tabloid Daily Prophet, who does her best to persuade Harry’s friends to betray his secrets, and nearly causes a disaster.
Whatever she feels about all this attention and success, the folktale heroine J. K. Rowling, once a welfare mother, has clearly now become a fabulously rich princess. Will she now find true love and live happily ever after? Will she be destroyed by the curses of fundamentalist Christians, or fall under the spell of wicked merchandisers and publicists? Her story promises to be almost as interesting as the future adventures of Harry Potter himself.
WHAT FAIRY TALES TELL US
THE stories of magic and transformation that we call “fairy tales” (though they usually contain no fairies) are one of the oldest known forms of literature, and also one of the most popular and enduring. Even today they are a central part of our imaginative world. We remember and refer to them all our lives; their themes and characters reappear in dreams, in songs, in films, in advertisements, and in casual speech. We say that someone is a giant-killer or that theirs is a Cinderella story.
The fairy tale survives because it presents experience in vivid symbolic form. Sometimes we need to have the truth exaggerated and made more dramatic, even fantastic, in order to comprehend it. (The same sort of thing can occur in other ways, of course, as when at a costume party we suddenly recognize that one of our acquaintances is in fact essentially a six-foot-tall white rabbit, a pirate, or a dancing doll.)
“Hansel and Gretel,” for instance, may dramatize the fact that some parents underfeed and neglect their children physically and/or emotionally, while others, like the witch who lives in a house made of cake and candy, overfeed and try to possess and perhaps even devour them. “Beauty and the Beast” may suggest that a good man can seem at first like a dangerous wild animal, or that true love has a power to soothe the savage heart. The message may be different for each reader; that is one of the great achievements of the fairy tale, traditional or modern.
For though not everyone knows it, there are modern fairy tales. Though most people think of these stories as having come into existence almost magically long ago, they are in fact still being created, and not only in less urbanized parts of the world than our own. Over the last century and a half many famous authors have written tales of wonder and enchantment. In Britain and America they have included Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde, H. G. Wells, Carl Sandburg, James Thurber, Bernard Malamud, I. B. Singer, T. H. White, Angela Carter, and Louise Erdrich. Like other authors in other countries (especially France and Germany) they have used the characters and settings and events of the fairy tale to create new and marvelous stories—not only for children, but for adults. The traditional fairy tale was not read from a book but passed on orally from one generation to the next, and its audience was not limited to children. Its heroes and heroines most often are not children but young people setting out to make their fortunes or find a mate, or most often both. Many of these stories were written for readers of all ages, or only for adults. But even when they were principally meant for children, and have child protagonists, these modern tales often contain sophisticated comments and ironic asides directed to the adults who might be reading the story aloud.
The best modern fairy stories, like traditional folktales, can be understood in many different ways. Like all great literature, they speak to readers of every place and time. They have one message for a seven-year-old and another one, more complex and sometimes more melancholy, for a seventeen-year-old or a seventy-year-old; they may mean one thing to a nineteenth-century reader and another to a twentieth-century one.
George MacDonald’s “The Light Princess” (1864), for example, is on the face of it a traditional tale of enchantment. When the princess is born, her parents, in the time-honored manner, fail to invite a wicked witch (who is also the king’s sister) to the christening party. As a result, the witch curses the baby with a lack of gravity. This lack manifests itself both physically and psychologically: the princess weighs no
thing, and she also is incapable of serious emotions; in contemporary parlance, she is a total airhead. Eventually a prince falls in love with the Light Princess. He is willing to sacrifice his life for her, and when the princess finally realizes it, she too falls in love, and this breaks the enchantment. The prince is restored to life, and they are married and live happily ever after.
A modern reader might come away from this story thinking it says that the best way to grow up fast is to fall in love. To a Victorian reader, however, it would more likely have seemed to be about the proper behavior of women. At the time it was generally considered, as the Light Princess’s Queen remarks, a bad thing for a woman to be light-headed and light-minded. Later on the prince who loves her is pleased to discover that when the princess swims in the lake, she is “not so forward in her questions, or pert in her replies. . . . Neither did she laugh so much, and when she did laugh, it was more gently. She seemed altogether more modest and maidenly.”1 Like the ideal Victorian girl, the princess becomes gentle, quiet, and above all serious.
The earliest attempts to create modern fairy tales were tentative. At first, authors merely rewrote the traditional stories of Grimm and Perrault, sometimes in what now seems a ridiculous manner. In 1853 the Grimms’ first English illustrator, George Cruickshank, began to publish revisions of the most popular tales from a teetotal point of view. The Giant in his “Jack and the Beanstalk” turns out to be an alcoholic, and Cinderella’s wedding is celebrated by the destruction of all the drink in the Prince’s castle.
Meanwhile, other writers were beginning to go beyond revision to compose original tales, often in order to point out an improving moral. The lesson, of course, varied with the convictions of the author. Catherine Sinclair’s lighthearted “Uncle David’s Nonsensical Story About Giants and Fairies” (1839) suggested that idle and overfed children were apt to be eaten alive, while Juliana Horatia Ewing’s “Good Luck Is Better Than Gold” (1882) and Howard Pyle’s “The Apple of Contentment” (1886) punished greed and laziness.
Some writers were concerned with more contemporary issues. John Ruskin’s famous ecological fable, “The King of the Golden River” (1851), promotes both his political and his aesthetic beliefs. The two wicked older brothers in this story are shortsighted capitalists who exploit both labor and natural resources, turning a once-fertile and dramatically beautiful valley into a barren wasteland. Their moods are so dark and their hearts so hard that it seems quite appropriate that they should eventually be transformed into two black stones, while little Gluck, who appreciates the sublime natural landscape and relieves the sufferings of the poor and disabled, restores the land to beauty and fruitfulness.
In “A Toy Princess” (1877) Mary De Morgan mounts a scathing attack on the ideal Victorian miss. The courtiers among whom her heroine grows up scold her for expressing her feelings, and much prefer the artificial doll-princess who never says anything but “If you please,” “No thank you,” “Certainly,” and “Just so.”2 With the help of a good fairy, the real princess escapes from the palace and finds happiness and love in a fisherman’s family.
More unsettling, and with a darker ending, is Lucy Lane Clifford’s “The New Mother” (1882), which tells of the awful fate of two innocent children who are repeatedly encouraged in naughty behavior by a strange and charming young woman who may be an evil spirit. Eventually the children try their mother’s patience so far that she threatens to leave them and send home a new mother, with glass eyes and a wooden tail. Anyone who has ever seen a harassed parent appear to turn temporarily into a glassy-eyed monster—or done so themselves—will understand this story instinctively, and so will parents who have doubts about the moral qualities of their baby-sitters. The author was a good friend of Henry James, and it is possible that “The New Mother” may be one of the sources of The Turn of the Screw.
After Perrault and Grimm the greatest influence on the literary fairy tale was Hans Christian Andersen, whose work was first translated into English in 1846. Andersen’s early tales were adaptations of those he had heard from his grandmother, with their commonsense pagan fatality overlaid with Christian morality; later he composed original stories that often celebrated the nineteenth-century virtues of stoicism, piety, and self-sacrifice.
Andersen’s romantic, spiritual narratives were echoed in the work of Oscar Wilde and Laurence Housman, among many others. Often their tales seem remarkably modern. In Housman’s “The Rooted Lover” (1894) the hero is what my students at Cornell would call a postfeminist man. Like the prince in George MacDonald’s “The Light Princess,” he does not fight giants and dragons, but shows his courage and virtue through patient endurance for the sake of love.
In Wilde’s “The Selfish Giant” (1888) Christian morality and myth dominate. The traditional fairy-tale villain of the title is not slain but reformed by a child who turns out to be Christ. Other writers, following Andersen’s example, abandoned the usual happy ending of the fairy tale to create stories with an ambiguous or disturbing conclusion, like Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Song of the Morrow” (1894) in which a series of events is endlessly repeated in an almost Kafka-like manner.
Not all nineteenth-century British fairy tales are this serious: many are quietly or broadly comic. There are good-natured burlesques like Charles Dickens’s “The Magic Fishbone” (1868) in which a scatty Micawber-like (or Dickens-like) family is saved by the patience and good sense of the eldest daughter; and there are gentle satires of social conformity and cowardice, like Frances Browne’s “The Story of Fairyfoot” (1856), which exposes the arbitrary nature of standards of beauty, imagining a kingdom where the larger your feet are, the better-looking you are thought to be. Perhaps the best known of such stories is Kenneth Grahame’s “The Reluctant Dragon” (1898), possibly the first overtly pacifist fairy tale. It features a sentimental dragon who writes sonnets and only wishes to be admired by the villagers whom he has terrified; many readers will recognize a common human type.
The fashion for tales that were humorous and satirical as well as (or instead of) uplifting or improving continued into the early twentieth century. E. Nesbit’s “The Book of Beasts” (1900) is a lighthearted fable about the magical power of art. The volume that contains this title has pictures of exotic creatures that come alive when the pages are opened. The boy who finds the book releases first a butterfly, then a Blue Bird of Paradise, and finally a dragon that threatens to destroy the country. If any book is vivid enough, this story seems to say, its content will invade our world for good or evil.
For H. G. Wells, magic was allied with, or a metaphor for, science. His rather spooky Magic Shop, in the story of the same name (1903), contains both traditional supernatural creatures, like a small angry red demon, and the actual inventions of the future, including a train that runs without steam.
Other twentieth-century British writers composed more romantic tales. Some, like Walter de la Mare’s “The Lovely Myfawny” (1925) and Sylvia Townsend Warner’s witty “Bluebeard’s Daughter” (1940), have a traditional fairy-story background of castles and princesses, and rebuke old-fashioned faults—in the former case, possessive paternal love; in the latter, curiosity. Others are set in the contemporary world. John Collier’s “The Chaser” (1941), a very short story with a sting in its tale, takes place in modern London; Naomi Mitchison’s “In the Family” (1957) is set in a Scotland complete with buses and parish halls—and a fairy woman who warns the hero of a future highway accident.
Often these twentieth-century tales are interesting variations on earlier classics. Lord Dunsany’s “The Kith of the Elf-Folk” (1910) is a half-poetic, half-satirical version of Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid,” with a happier, though rather conservative conclusion. In it a Wild Thing from the marshes ends by rejecting both her newly acquired human soul and a singing career in London. She returns to her former life and companions in the depths of the countryside—as other strange wild young women have sometimes done.
More recently th
e gifted British writer Angela Carter has become famous for her dramatic retellings of well-known fairy tales. Though her stories are as full of mystery and wonder, they are clearly set in modern times: Bluebeard’s castle is connected to Paris by telephone, and in “The Courtship of Mr. Lyon” (1979) Beauty returns to her dying Beast from contemporary London on a train. Her characters too have been subtly updated: her Beast is Mr. Lyon, the awkward, lonely, growling owner of a Palladian villa equipped with politely rather than magically invisible servants. Beauty temporarily abandons Mr. Lyon to become a spoiled urban society girl who “smiled at herself in mirrors a little too often,”3 but later she as well as he is transformed by the power of love. In another version of the same story, “The Tiger’s Bride,” the hero does not become a handsome prince; instead Beauty is transformed into a tigress by his passionate kisses. The implication is that the magical world is not a thing of the past but may coexist with ours. Perhaps, at any moment, we may enter it.
Some modern British authors of fairy tales, like these, revel in descriptions of exotic or luxurious settings. Others, by contrast, sometimes seem deliberately to choose the drabbest and most ordinary backgrounds, as if to remind us that strange and wonderful things can happen anywhere. Joan Aiken’s “The Man Who Had Seen the Rope Trick” (1976) takes place in a dreary English seaside boardinghouse, and T. H. White, in “The Troll” (1935), begins with a similarly pedestrian setting, a comfortable railway hotel in northern Sweden where his hero has gone for the fishing. During his first night there he discovers that the professor in the next room is a troll who has eaten his wife. We accept this, and all that follows, not only because of White’s great literary skill but because we know that some men, even some professors, are really trolls, and that some husbands do, psychologically at least, devour their wives (and wives their husbands).
