by M. O. Grenby
First-person narration situates point of view very specifically, enabling a perspective that is both personalised and restricted. Readers will normally align their sympathies with the narrator, but are also positioned to know no more than can be deduced from his or her telling. Access to story events and to the minds of other characters may thus be limited, encouraging readers to speculate about motivations and power relations amongst the characters. Gary D. Schmidt’s Rumpelstiltskin narrative, Straw into Gold (2001), places its readers in a speculative position because its narrator, an orphan child given seven days to find the answer to a riddle, lacks access to any crucial information. Having grown up in an isolated place, and knowing little of the world, Tousle cannot understand that his quest to solve the riddle embodies a quest to uncover the Rumpelstiltskin story (already retold in the peritext before the novel proper begins), his own place within it, and the wider significances of the story.
The effect of such positioning can be very strong when the narrator-focaliser is a character who has the role of Other or Villain in the pre-texts. Donna Jo Napoli’s multifocalised Zel (1996), for example, not only represents Rapunzel and her aristocratic lover as focalising characters, but frames the novel as the Witch’s first-person narration. The capacity to present other or multiple perspectives dismantles simplistic good–evil dichotomies and foregrounds the conflicting desires of the characters. Such narrative strategies enable a text to rework relationships grounded on gendered or other hierarchies and to renegotiate the ideologies and values inherent in those hierarchies.
As a wider range of narrative strategies has appeared in retold stories, the processes of retelling seem to have consequently become more self-reflexive, as narratives ponder their own telling. They may do this, for example, by foregrounding the storyteller’s function, by embedding subsidiary stories, or by incorporating discussion of interpretative practices. Perhaps the most brilliant of modern retellings of the Robin Hood story, Michael Cadnum’s In a Dark Wood (1998), places such issues of interpretation at the centre of his retelling of one of the story’s most often retold incidents, the night spent by the Sheriff of Nottingham in the forest as Robin Hood’s ‘guest’. As the Sheriff enters the forest with Robin, he rehearses protocols for interpreting the natural world as a sign system that reinforces social and religious beliefs. But when he is presented with an extempore story composed by Little John, and asked by Robin to interpret the story according to his previously demonstrated method, he cannot. He protests that, having never heard the story before, he cannot guess its meaning.5 The meaning of the story thus inheres in the audience’s reading competence, and Robin is depicted as using the Sheriff’s interpretative failure as a way to explicate his limiting enculturation. Readers are then left with a problem of interpretation that sits very well with Cadnum’s overall reframing of the traditional story by presenting it from the point of view of the Sheriff and thematising thereby problems of political power, social responsibility and human agency within social and political systems.
Cadnum’s move to a radical, against-the-grain point of view raises questions of how far retold stories can depart from models of interpretation exemplified by What-the-Dickens. The only study that attempts to formulate a general theory of retellings for children, Retelling Stories, Framing Culture (1998), argues that the processes of retelling are subject to a limited number of metanarratives.6 Considered from this perspective, the Sheriff’s bafflement may be seen to stem from an inability to identify an appropriate metanarrative, and hence an inability to identify which represented behaviours are desirable and which undesirable, and how the story is oriented towards his culture’s ideologies, systems and institutions. In a Dark Wood exemplifies a desire in many modern retellings to suspend a reader’s regular protocols in order to think about the focus story in a different way.
An opportunity to challenge regular protocols is also available in stories which have moved to the periphery of the canon because they fail to conform to the dominant metanarratives. A useful example is the story of Rumpelstiltskin, which is widely familiar as a (slightly peripheral) story in the most widely discussed area of retold story – the literary fairy tale. In the version collected by the Grimms, a miller boasts that his daughter can spin gold out of straw. To test this, the King locks her in a roomful of straw with a spinning wheel. She is saved from failure by the appearance of a little man who does spin the straw into gold in return for her necklace. This is repeated on a second night (in return for her ring), and on the third, when the girl has been promised marriage to the King if she succeeds. But to recompense the little man, she thoughtlessly agrees to give up her first child to him. In due course, then, he arrives to claim the new Queen’s child. When she protests, he tells her that she may keep the child if she can guess his name within three days. All attempts are fruitless until one of her messengers encounters the man dancing round a fire, singing his name. When the Queen correctly calls him ‘Rumpelstiltskin’, he is vanquished.
Rumpelstiltskin is shaped by a bundle of familiar story conventions, but they are conventions which fail to yield up determinable meanings and are therefore subject to slippage in retelling. Further, the tale has no clear moral direction, in that none of the characters can be said to behave ethically. The ethical question places demands on any reteller to impart some kind of moral shape to the retelling – this is most likely to pivot on depicting the miller’s daughter as victimised by all three men in the story, and depicting Rumpelstiltskin as non-human and alien: other.
One approach to these problems is seen in William J. Brooke’s Teller of Tales (1994), where, having been told an abbreviated version of the Grimms’ rendering, the teller ponders the tale’s gaps and lack of convincing motivation, tells a tale which addresses some of these problems, and imagines a happier ending for Rumpelstiltskin himself. Another is when Vivian Vande Velde poses the same bundle of problems in her collection The Rumpelstiltskin Problem (2000), and writes six different versions within that frame. Brooke and Vande Velde make explicit the dialogue within which retold stories unfold: the already-known story is shaped by the metanarratives pertaining at the time, or times, of its production; and subsequent retellings, sometimes consciously and sometimes implicitly, are likewise informed and shaped by whatever social preoccupations and values are current when subsequent versions are produced.
Rumpelstiltskin is also somewhat problematical as a retold story because its pre-texts are uncertain and variable. Retellings in English are occasionally influenced by English folktale analogues such as Tom Tit Tot, but most retellings derive from the Grimms’ 1819 version, probably mediated through Andrew Lang’s The Blue Fairy Book (1889), clearly identifiable by the fate of the mysterious little man, who ‘in his rage drove his right foot so far into the ground that it sank in up to his waist; then in a passion he seized the left foot with both hands and tore himself in two’.7 Many versions, however, prefer a less violent ending in which Rumpelstiltskin’s stamping opens a crevasse into which he falls and disappears (presumably falling into Hell where he belongs).
Retellings may depart more comprehensively from what an audience might think of as the ‘original’ story. An urge to interrogate the androcentrism and class-centrism underpinning the pre-text and the cultural heritage of which it is part may foreground a detail which modern audiences often find problematic: the female character is so much a disposable object that the King seems to be quite indifferent as to whether he kills or marries her. This indifference may be used to foreground social ideologies pertaining to gender, class, materialist and economic assumptions in relation to (and in reaction to) the mores of current society. Schmidt’s Straw into Gold resolves the problem as an issue in the politics of succession, whereby, in a borrowing of a motif from the story of patient Griselda, Rumpelstiltskin removes the baby to protect him from the lords of the realm who will not accept the son of a peasant as their king. This novel overtly affirms a teleology shaping the story, a ‘design’ lying deeper
than mere chance.
Aspects of retelling evident in these versions foreground the major questions to be asked about the process. What do the metanarratives that structure the texts indicate about the assumed social values that inform them? How are social and personal development framed? What is the nature of intersubjective relationships? What assumptions are being made about class and gender? What material and spiritual aspirations inspire the characters? What ethical and moral paradigms are implied? What teleology shapes the story?
The metanarratival domains implicit in these questions are invoked by Donna Jo Napoli and Richard Tchen in their novelisation Spinners (1999), through the personal items that the miller’s daughter can offer Rumpelstiltskin. These items prove a logical irritant for many readers, since Rumpelstiltskin can have no interest in their small material value. His interest must instead lie in their symbolic value, culminating in possession of the child, as representations of love and marriage. The girl (named ‘Saskia’) is here identified as Rumpelstiltskin’s daughter, a fact known only to him. When, on the third night, she says she has nothing more to offer other than her body, the situation instantiates some specific responses within the metanarratival domains pointed to above. First, humanistic paradigms of social and personal development are threatened by the likely consequences of her offer; second, power inequality perverts an intersubjective relationship; third, appropriate gender relationships – father/daughter, old/young, ugly/beautiful – are being violated; fourth, the material necessity to preserve life forecloses ‘higher’ aspirations; and fifth, although culturally accepted ethical and moral paradigms are being breached, moral judgment is compromised by the shadow of another metanarrative which decrees that Saskia’s reluctant self-prostitution is its own moral compromise.
Traditional stories, especially fairy tales, are frequently retold in picture-book form. A subtle picture book uses its interaction of words and pictures to engage with the possible meaning or meanings conveyed by a particular motif. In Paul O. Zelinsky’s 1986 Caldecott Honor Book Rumpelstiltskin, for example, the young woman’s third encounter with Rumpelstiltskin clearly positions her as victim: the King’s power and the enormity of the task demanded of her are emphasised by an illustration dominated by the sheer abundance of straw and the multitude and ornateness of the columns in the room, and her helpless, defensive posture is accentuated as she appears to shrink away from Rumpelstiltskin, who leans over her like a bird of prey. Illustration is thus pivotal in framing character interactions and audience response. In contrast, her subsequent victory depicts her dressed as befits a queen, in red and gold, leaning towards and looking down at Rumpelstiltskin, whose otherness is emphasised through his caricatured face and his possession of a large cooking ladle, the latter a phallic motif elided by the Grimms although collected in their first manuscript version of the tale (fig. 11). The Queen’s servant enacts joy at the extreme left of the scene, contrasting with the anger on the right. Finally, the contrast between realistic portrait (Queen) and caricature (Rumpelstiltskin as a small grotesque) weighs the balance of power heavily in the Queen’s favour. Further, Zelinsky’s use of an Italian Renaissance setting allows him to invoke a discourse and body of work which adds authority and cultural capital both to the story he is retelling and to the text itself.
Figure 11. Paul O. Zelinsky, Rumpelstiltskin. New York: Dutton’s Children’s Books, 1986, pp. [35] and [36].
Illustrations themselves may function as retold stories. This example plays a game with isomorphism, in that it quotes and inverts the positioning of the Virgin Mary and the Angel Gabriel in Fra Filippo Lippi’s The Annunciation (c. 1442), which is already a playful reworking of a familiar scene and subject: Lippi’s Angel Gabriel has possessed himself of the iconic lilies of purity usually found in a vase in this genre scene, so that the vase, prominent in the foreground, is now empty; Zelinsky then replaces the lilies with the astonishingly phallic ladle on which Rumpelstilstkin rides. The long tradition whereby paintings are retold stories is likewise wittily exploited in Diane Stanley’s Rumpelstiltskin’s Daughter (1997), where they feature as backgrounds to a narrative which blatantly imposes a utopian democracy on an autocratic social system: the most notable is a dialogue established between a reworking of Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus (c. 1482), Hans Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes (1836) and the narcissistic arrogance of the King in the Rumpelstiltskin story.
In the Zelinsky illustration, the contrast between the victorious Queen and the more or less monstrously other Rumpelstiltskin is a trope in visual texts, although this is not a matter of cross-influences, but of the underlying metanarrative of struggle and victory. Zelinsky’s portrayal of the Queen’s triumph over those who have victimised her is clinched by the final page, when she rejoices in her baby as her husband, the King, strays in from the background apparently wondering if he has missed something. Zelinsky has conflated a couple of the Grimm versions to produce his text, but the outcome illustrates how a retelling will be more than a simple replication of the story and point of view of its source(s).
When a familiar classic is retold in another era and in an unexpected genre, the impact on its significance can be very striking. For example, Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908), which is narrated in linguistic and social discourses that may today seem as inaccessible as Shakespeare, has been repackaged in several ways. A conservative approach has been to update the appearance of the book by replacing the older illustrations of Arthur Rackham and Ernest Shepard with illustrations by eminent modern picture-book artists, including John Burningham (1983), Eric Kincaid (1986), Michael Foreman (2001) and Robert Ingpen (2007), amongst many others. While the text remains unchanged, the illustrations place it in a new context and invest it with new values and new intertexts: Burningham’s depiction of Toad standing beside his first car is very reminiscent of the first opening of his earlier Mr Gumpy’s Outing (1970), for example. The Wind in the Willows, or sections of it, has been retold as a play, film, and television series, and in the late 1990s French illustrator Michel Plessix turned the story into a four-part comic book series.
Grahame’s text consists of omniscient narration and character direct speech, whereas Plessix’s text, in accord with European comic book conventions, consists predominantly of pictures (incorporating extralinguistic typographical signs suggesting emotion, such as a thought bubble containing ‘???’) and an embedded verbal text that mixes narrative (often character focalised) and direct speech. The result is not only faster-moving, less introspective and more humorous, but its attitudes and social concepts belong to a different era from the pre-text. While it cultivates affectionate parody rather than the trenchant social revisioning of Jan Needle’s Wild Wood (1981), the comics series does make fun of the class and gender assumptions of The Wind in the Willows. The comic book genre itself produces meaning in a unique way, as comparison of the following narrative segments, describing Toad’s relationship with the daughter of his jailer, makes clear. Here is Grahame:
Toad, of course, in his vanity, thought that her interest in him proceeded from a growing tenderness; and he could not help half regretting that the social gulf between them was very wide, for she was a comely lass, and evidently admired him very much.8
And here is Plessix:
The Toad was convinced that his warm charm wasn’t leaving the young woman indifferent. But too many differences separated them – there was a social gulf between them that nothing could ever span. Baron Tadpole with some jailer’s daughter . . . what a ridiculous idea!9
The pivotal difference here is that the focus for Grahame’s irony is, explicitly, Toad’s egocentric vanity, and ‘the social gulf’ – apparently taken for granted – has been elided by an earlier comment that the girl ‘was fond of animals as pets’. In contrast, the emphatic and exclamatory style pertaining to comic book discourse, the shift into free indirect speech at the second sentence, and the transfer of ‘comely lass’ into a larger-than-life close-up of t
he woman’s eyes and curly hair shifts the focus to Toad’s internalised classist thinking.
It is very apparent that the genre itself is playing a major role in the production of meaning. Some genres more obviously than others bring with them a metanarratival overburden, which may in turn be dealt with consciously and playfully. Diana Wynne Jones’ Howl’s Moving Castle (1986) uses folktale in such a way. The novel is not a retelling of a particular story, but rather draws inventively on numerous folktale motifs. Hence a fairy tale conjuncture of setting and cultural conditions dominates the opening of the novel:
In the land of Ingary, where such things as seven-league boots and cloaks of invisibility really exist, it is quite a misfortune to be born the eldest of three. Everyone knows you are the one who will fail first, and worst, if the three of you set out to seek your fortunes.
Sophie Hatter was the eldest of three sisters. She was not even the child of a poor woodcutter, which might have given her some chance of success.10
The assertion that magical objects such as seven-league boots and cloaks of invisibility exist here, and the reference to how the rule of three conventionally functions in fairy tales, asserts a fairy tale discourse. On the other hand, the retrospective narration and the taken-for-granted tone of the narrating voice invoke a realist mode. The discourse thereby hovers between the narrative conventions of everyday realism and those of fairy tale.
The oscillation between realism and fairy tale focuses attention on conventional and figurative elements likely to be central for the novel’s significance, especially the references to appearances and beauty, which evoke the common fairy tale theme of the gap between surface appearance and reality. Once Sophie is transformed into an old crone, her role in the novel focuses on the struggle to recuperate a fallen world, that is, to retrieve a state of being which has been lost. Sophie’s subjectivity has already been diminished because of her withdrawn introspection, and, in Howl’s case, because of the displacement of his heart and fragmentation of selfhood. Once they learn to connect Self to Other and Self to world, they can achieve the personal and moral growth necessary for reunification of the self.