by Alison Lurie
In the nineteenth century it was sometimes suggested that Americans didn’t need fairy tales, certainly not new ones. Instead of imaginary wonders we had the natural wonders of a new continent: we had Indians and wild animals instead of sprites and dragons; Niagara Falls and the Rockies instead of enchanted lakes and mountains.
However, Americans were already writing new fairy tales. Sometimes these stories featured old-fashioned props and characters: magic potions and spells, dwarves and witches, princes and princesses. But often they also included contemporary objects and figures: hotels and telephones, mayors and gold miners. And even from the beginning the best American stories had a different underlying message than many of those from across the Atlantic.
The standard European fairy tale, both traditional and modern, takes place in a fixed social world. In the usual plot a poor boy or girl, through some combination of luck, courage, beauty, kindness, and supernatural help, becomes rich or marries into royalty. In a variation, a prince or princess who has fallen under an evil enchantment, or been cast out by a cruel relative, regains his or her rightful position. These stories are full of wicked stepmothers and cruel kings and queens, but they seldom attack the institutions of marriage or monarchy. It is assumed that what the heroine or hero wants is to become rich and marry well. Usually the social system is implicitly unquestioned, and remains unchanged; what changes is the protagonist, and what he or she hopes for is to succeed within the terms of this system.
What makes American fairy tales different is that in many of them this does not happen. Instead, the world within the story alters, or is abandoned. In Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” (1820) Rip falls into a twenty-year sleep and wakes to find that a British colony has become a new nation, in which “the very character of the people seemed changed.”4
Even if the world does not change, its values are often implicitly criticized. The guests who visit “The Rich Man’s Place” (1880) in Horace Scudder’s story of that name enjoy the palatial house and grounds but don’t express any desire to live there. In Frank Stockton’s “The Bee-Man of Orn” (1887) a Junior Sorcerer discovers that an old beekeeper has been transformed from his original shape, and sets out to dissolve the enchantment. But as it turns out his original shape (like everyone’s) was that of a baby. The Junior Sorcerer restores him to infancy, but when he grows up he does not become a prince, but a beekeeper again—and as before he is perfectly contented.
In American fairy tales there is often not much to be said for wealth and high position, or even for good looks. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Feathertop” (1854) a New England witch transforms an old scarecrow into a fine gentleman and sends him out into the world, where he exposes the superficiality and snobbery of the well-to-do. In some ways the story is a democratic version of Mary De Morgan’s “A Toy Princess.” The scarecrow’s vocabulary, like that of the Toy Princess, is very limited, consisting only of phrases like “Really! Indeed! Pray tell me! Is it possible! Upon my word! By no means! O! Ah!” and “Hem,”5 but he is taken by the local people for a foreign nobleman and almost succeeds in winning the heart and hand of a good and beautiful girl. Though both these stories end without any real damage having been done, they are full of the unease we feel in the presence of someone with fine clothes and impenetrably bland good manners.
L. Frank Baum’s “The Queen of Quok” (1901) contains a castle and royal personages, but Quok is essentially ruled by common sense and small-town American values. At one point the boy king has to borrow a dime from his chief counselor to buy a ham sandwich. Love of money turns the would-be queen into a haggard old woman, while the insouciant young hero lives happily ever after. And in Baum’s “The Glass Dog” (1901) the poor glassblower manages to marry a princess, but she “was very jealous of his beauty and led him a dog’s life.”6 The implication of such stories is that an American does not need to become rich or marry up in order to be happy; in fact, one should avoid doing so if possible. Happiness is all around one already, as the boy in Laura Richards’s story “The Golden Window” (c. 1904) discovers: his farmhouse already has “windows of gold and diamond” when the setting sun shines on it.
Even further from the traditional pattern are Carl Sandburg’s Rootabaga Stories (1922), which reflect his love of American tall tales and deadpan humor, as well as his closeness to his pioneer ancestors. The family in his “How They Broke Away to Go to the Rootabaga Country” repeats the experience of many nineteenth-century immigrants to the Midwest. They sell all their possessions and ride to “where the railroad tracks run off into the sky,”7 ending up not in a fairy kingdom but in rich farming country named after a large turnip. “The Story of Blixie Bimber and the Power of the Gold Buckskin Whincher” takes place in what is obviously the early-twentieth-century Midwest, complete with hayrides, band concerts, and steeplejacks. But magic is still potent, and romantic passion is a kind of inexplicable spell. “The first man you meet with an X in his name you must fall head over heels in love with him, said the silent power in the gold buckskin whincher,”8 and Blixie Bimber does, the traditional three times.
Other American fairy tales also take place in a contemporary, unromantic milieu. In Philip K. Dick’s “The King of the Elves” (1953), for instance, the future leader of the elves turns out to be an old man in charge of a rundown rural gas station. Anyone, the story says, no matter how mundane his circumstances, may be a magical hero in disguise.
Sometimes American authors used the stock figures of the folktale to criticize contemporary skepticism: James Thurber’s famous comic fable “The Unicorn in the Garden” (1949) presents the triumph of a mild visionary over his would-be oppressors: the police, a psychiatrist, and a hostile, suspicious wife who thinks that anyone who sees unicorns is mad.
Some modern American writers have taken the conventions of the folktale or children’s story and turned them upside down, as real life sometimes does. In Richard Kennedy’s “The Porcelain Man” (1987) the heroine declines to rescue the enchanted hero, whose only attractive quality is his beauty. Another strange reversal occurs in Ursula Le Guin’s “The Wife’s Story” (1982), a werewolf tale related by a wolf, which can be read as a brief but terrifying fable about family love, madness, and social prejudice.
Many of the best recent American fairy tales comment on twentieth-century events. In Bernard Malamud’s “The Jewbird” (1963) a talking crow flies into the Lower East Side apartment of a frozen-foods salesman and announces that he is fleeing from anti-Semites. To judge by what happens next, he may be one of those immigrant survivors of the Holocaust whom some American Jews, after the Second World War, found burdensome. Donald Bartheleme’s experimental “The Glass Mountain” (1970) takes off from a traditional story of the same name in Andrew Lang’s The Yellow Fairy Book, and manages simultaneously to expose the callous ambition of New Yorkers and the formulaic analysis of literary scholars. The mountain he climbs is a skyscraper, and he rejects the princess because she is only “an enchanted symbol.” In the late twentieth century American writers also began to compose tales of magic based upon previously untapped folk traditions. Many of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s stories, including “Menaseh’s Dream” (1968), draw on Jewish folk beliefs and make wise, if disguised, comments on Jewish life, in this case on the power of memory and of family love. Louise Erdrich, in “Old Man Potchikoo” (1989), uses the Native American trickster tale as a starting point for celebration of Dionysian energy.
Several writers, both British and American, have produced fairy tales with a strong feminist slant. Among them are Tanith Lee’s “Prince Amilec” (1972), Jay Williams’s “Petronella” (1973), and Jeanne Desy’s inventive “The Princess Who Stood on Her Own Two Feet” (1982), in which a well-meaning young woman gives up more and more of her natural abilities in order to make her fiancé feel good about himself—a procedure that unfortunately may still be observed in real life. In the end, of course, she rebels and refuses to marry the prince. And in Angela Carter’s “Bluebeard�
� (1979) the heroine is rescued not by her brothers but by her mother, who has already killed a man-eating tiger.
Another interesting example of the genre is Jane Yolen’s “The River Maid” (1982). The protagonists of Yolen’s poetic fairy tales are often prefeminist: delicate, passive, and either victimized or self-sacrificing or both. But in “The River Maid,” though the eponymous heroine remains frail and helpless, the river of which she is the guardian spirit is strong. A greedy farmer dams and diverts the water to enrich his fields, and abducts and rapes the River Maid. The following spring the river rises, washes away the farm, and drowns the farmer. Afterward it can be heard “playing merrily over [his] bones,” with a “high, sweet, bubbling song . . . full of freedom and a conquering joy.”9 Women may be imprisoned and abused, the story seems to say, but time and the forces of nature will avenge them.
Today, the fairy tale is often dismissed as old-fashioned, sentimental, and silly: a minor form of literature, appropriate only for children. To readers who have been overexposed to the bowdlerized and prettified cartoon versions of the classic stories, this criticism may seem justified. But any reader who knows the authentic traditional tales, or the many brilliant modern variations on their themes, will realize that fairy tales are not merely childish entertainments set in an unreal and irrelevant universe. Though they can and do entertain children, we will do well to listen seriously to what they tell us about the real world we live in.
BOYS AND GIRLS COME OUT
TO PLAY: CHILDREN’S GAMES
MOST readers of this book, though they may have enjoyed childhood, were not totally happy in elementary school. I am reminded of this when I see boys and girls waiting for the yellow bus on a misty autumn morning. They look serious, tensed up, uncertain of what lies ahead. They know that even if events in the classroom are predictable, recess will be an interlude of near anarchy in which anything can happen. They may be admired or mocked, attacked or welcomed, know sudden triumph or crushing humiliation.
As the British folklorist Iona Opie puts it in The People in the Playground, childhood “is a time more full of fears and anxieties than many adults care to remember.”1 Few of us revisit elementary school as we do secondary school and college. The idea that someone might deliberately return to this scene and spend months and even years hanging about, without the pay and official status of a teacher, seems odd.
Yet Iona Opie herself in England, and Barrie Thorne in America, did just that during roughly the same period—the late 1970s—with interesting results. They also witnessed many of the same phenomena; but their stance as observers, the manner in which they report their discoveries, and the works that resulted, are wholly different. Iona Opie’s attitude toward the children whose activities she recorded is one of affectionate sympathy, and though she makes few attempts to analyze the rich original material she has collected, her journal is a pleasure to read. She writes in the British tradition of the amateur naturalist and essayist, assuming a wide but literate audience who will understand references to Rabelais or Rossetti. Barrie Thorne, who was far less comfortable on the playground, is a professor writing for professors, which traditionally requires a more formal manner. Her Gender Play is sometimes hard going, but it contains many interesting and original observations.
Iona Opie is now probably the world’s best-known authority on the culture of childhood; she shared this honor with her husband, Peter, until his death in 1982. Together the Opies more or less invented the study of juvenile games, rhymes, and songs, publishing now-classic works like The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, and Children’s Games in Street and Playground. In 1960 Mrs. Opie began to spend time at a state elementary school near her home in Hampshire; between 1970 and 1983 she made regular weekly visits to it. The resulting book, in journal form, is “a narrative account of what one person could see and overhear and be told directly during the fifteen eventful minutes of morning playtime,” from January 1970 to July 1980.2
Iona Opie seems to have known instinctively how to present herself to children. When she appears they crowd around, jostling for the chance to tell a joke or a rhyme, or draw her into their fantasies. “The bold bad story-teller caught up with me,” she writes of one encounter, “brandishing a length of joined elastic bands and saying, ‘This is a threatening machine.’”3
For her, the experience was exhilarating. Even after twenty years of observation, she writes, “I still feel the excitement of the hunter when I hear children coming out to play.”4 The playground is a thrilling place where “there is always something to copy, something to watch, something to join in.”5 She admires the children’s imagination, the way they can instantly throw themselves into a fantasy. “We’re playing Anti-tanks and Anti-aeroplanes . . . killing elephants and the warring mammoths,’” one confides. “‘That’s how they got extinct.’”6
But Iona Opie is by no means sentimental about children. Sometimes she sees them as temporary lunatics or angry savages:
I stood watching . . . and thought, “Playtime is a chance to go mad.” The children were pushing, clutching, staggering, prancing, dodging, exaggerating every moment into pantomime; it was continuous Saturnalia.7
She writes of
the savage noises of the playground: the aggressive and defensive shouting—Nah, gettaway,” “Watch it, you dope,—and the wordless invective of screams and snarls. Hobbes, I thought, was right in his belief that man is committed to endless conflict.8
At other times children appear to her as instinctive humorists:
Try to analyse the sound of children at play: the thin screaming noise can be heard from several streets away. Vitality? Yes. But come closer and step into the playground; a kind of defiant light heartedness envelops you. The children are . . . making fun of life.9
Usually Mrs. Opie describes rather than analyzes; but her range is both broad and detailed. She records the weather and the way people move and speak: “The sky overcast, with glaring white light shining through. House-martins hunted . . . directly overhead.”10 “A maelstrom of wind and small wet snow.”11 “As a boy begins to run away from a chaser his eyes open wider.”12
Part of the charm of Iona Opie’s book is that she often reacts as if she were a child herself. “A boy was standing and writing in the middle of the playground. I felt a sense of kinship, and competition.”13 She identifies the children as a child might: “the mouse boy,” “the gorilla boy,” “the chorus girl,” and “the freckle-faced horror.” She describes a hollow in the grass as “a depression deep enough for a platypus to nest in,” and takes notes with a pencil she had decorated with silver sealing wax when she was ten. Reporting on an encounter with two little girls, she speaks as if she were exactly their age: “We were quite content to laugh together about nothing in particular (an enjoyment not comprehensible to adults). . . .”14
Iona Opie admires the spontaneous and natural and is put off by self-consciousness. She is especially irritated by a girl named Lisa, who appears to be what might be called an unauthentic subject. Lisa, Mrs. Opie remarks, is “a damned nuisance. It is ‘Miss, watch this!’ all the time. She showed me several boring sequences with a ball today. . . . She invents these things especially for me, so that I will write them down. I am sure she would not play them otherwise.”15
When the material Mrs. Opie is offered is authentic, nothing bores or shocks her, though at one point she does become weary of the inane washroom jokes offered by two children she calls “the naughty boys.” “Perhaps they were possessed,” she suggests after they have contributed a characteristic rhyme. (“Hey diddle diddle, The cat done a piddle, The cow done a poo on the floor.”)16 Most of the material Iona Opie is so eagerly offered is harmless or even witty. (“What lies on the bottom of the sea and shivers? A nervous wreck.”)17 She enjoys it even when the joke is on her:
The story-teller . . . was prancing round me, clutching a plastic bag of biscuit crumbs. “You ain’t having none of these,” he
chortled. “Oh, where did you get them from?” I asked, forgetting that he was not a fellow housewife. “Up the common,” he said, “when I was digging for food.”18
As might be expected, The People in the Playground is full of remarkable rhymes and games. Some go back more than a hundred years; others are topical and prove again that it is impossible to shield children from contemporary life:
One banana, two banana, three banana, four,
Fifteen skinheads knocking at the door,
Five with machine guns, five with sticks,
Five with hand grenades hanging from their—
la la la la la . . .19
A few are romantic and surrealist:
Please, Mr. Crocodile, may we cross your golden river
In a silver boat?
If not, why not?
What is your favourite color?20
Even if it were magically possible, few children would want to experience forty consecutive periods of recess. Most readers, similarly, will not choose to read The People in the Playground straight through, unless they are interested in observing an ethnographer in action; but you can open it anywhere and find something to enjoy.
Barrie Thorne’s Gender Play, on the other hand, is not the sort of book you can dip into for fun. Part of the problem is its style: Professor Thorne does not cling to social science jargon; she wants to lighten up, but doesn’t always manage it. Half-dead metaphors jostle each other uneasily in her prose; as she says in a sentence that proves its own point, “Different angles of vision lurk within seemingly simple choices of language.”21 Also, though she has much to say about the culture of childhood, Thorne seems to have been less comfortable than Iona Opie at the schools she visited in California and Michigan in 1966–67 and 1980. She began with some disadvantages, of course: she was twenty years younger than Mrs. Opie and far less experienced as an observer of children; and she was trying to do much more. The Opies, as folklorists, assumed that it was enough to collect material. Barrie Thorne believed that a book must have a thesis, a focus of interest. Hers, as her title suggests, was the difference between how boys and girls play at school.
