Angela Carter's Book Of Fairy Tales

by Angela Carter

  The vindictiveness and anger in this story make its heroine’s the most desperate stratagem of all. Note the intended rape of the husband.

  From Jokelore: Humorous Folktales from Indiana, ed. Ronald L. Baker (Indiana, 1986), p. 73.

  PART THREE: SILLIES

  1. A Pottle o’ Brains

  Joseph Jacobs, More English Fairy Tales (London, 1894), p. 125. ‘The noodle family is strongly represented in English folk-tales,’ observes Jacobs. Not among the female members, though.

  2. Young Man in the Morning

  The story was told, with a reprehensible lack of sisterly feeling, by Mrs Mary Richardson – ‘a wisp of a woman’, says Richard Dorson, ‘her nose squashed in by hoodoo evil’. Mrs Richardson, aged seventy when she talked to Dorson in the early 1950s, was born in North Carolina and later moved to Chicago, then to Calvin, in Southwestern Michigan, a black farming settlement founded by freedmen before the American Civil War. During the Depression in the 1930s, Southern-born Black men and women who fled poverty only to find it again on Chicago’s South Side settled in Calvin and communities around it, bringing with them a fund of stories with roots in a complex fusion of Black African and European traditions. The musical legacy, Gospel and rhythm and blues, bore fruit later in the decade in the musicians who created the Detroit sound.

  This story is also found in Russia, Estonia and Finland. Dorson’s other informants told other versions; Georgia Slim Germany said that the old woman sang out: ‘I’m shivering cold tonight, but I’m going to marry a young man in the morning, and I’m going to play rat-trap tomorrow night.’ (Negro Folktales in Michigan, collected and edited by Richard M. Dorson [Cambridge, MA, 1956], p. 193.)

  3. Now I Should Laugh, If I Were Not Dead

  Please note that if a wedding is the ultimate destination of so many fairy tales, marriage itself and its conditions are universally depicted as a joke.

  From Icelandic Legends, collected by Jon Arnason, translated by George Powell and Eirikr Magnusson (London, 1866), vol. 2, pp. 627–30.

  4. The Three Sillies

  Jacobs, English Fairy Tales, p. 9.

  5. The Boy Who Had Never Seen Women

  Told by a Mrs E.L. Smith. Dorson, p. 193.

  6. The Old Woman Who Lived in a Vinegar Bottle

  Heard around a camp fire in 1924 and published in Katharine M. Briggs, A Sampler of British Folktales (London, 1977), p. 40.

  7. Tom Tit Tot

  The people of Suffolk, whence this story, have long held a reputation for foolishness. When my maternal grandfather, from Lavenham, took the queen’s shilling in the 1890s, he joined a regiment with the soubriquet the ‘Silly Suffolks’. (Jacobs, English Fairy Tales, p. 1.)

  8. The Husband Who Was to Mind the House

  From Asjbørnsen and Moe again, this time in a handsome Victorian translation by Sir George Webb Darsent (Popular Tales From the Norse [Edinburgh, 1903], p. 269.)

  PART FOUR: GOOD GIRLS AND WHERE IT GETS THEM

  1. East o’ the Sun and West o’ the Moon

  Asjbørnsen and Moe once more, again in the Darsent translation (Darsent, p. 22). This is one of the most lyrically beautiful and mysterious of all Northern European fairy tales, and one that has proved irresistible to ‘literary’ writers for two thousand years, with its relation to the classical Cupid and Psyche story as retold in The Golden Ass by Apuleius, as well as to the lovely literary fairy tale ‘Beauty and the Beast’, written by Madame Leprince de Beaumont in the eighteenth century.

  But Madame Leprince de Beaumont’s Beauty is a well-brought-up young lady, designed to conform in a bourgeois, virtuous fashion. Madame Leprince de Beaumont worked as a governess for twenty years; she wrote extensively on good behaviour. But this young woman does not hesitate to go to bed with a strange bear and is betrayed by her own desire when she first sees the young man under the bearskin: ‘. . . she thought she couldn’t live if she didn’t give him a kiss there and then’. Then he disappears. But she gets him in the end.

  2. The Good Girl and the Ornery Girl

  ‘Told by Miss Callista O’Neill, Day, Mo, September 1941,’ to Vance Randolph. The story is called ‘Mother Holle’ in Grimm. (Randolph, The Devil’s Pretty Daughter.)

  3. The Armless Maiden

  This horrid story depicts the misfortunes of virtue with the glee of a Marquis de Sade – cf. the Grimms’ ‘Armless Maiden’. (Afanas’ev, p. 294.)

  PART FIVE: WITCHES

  1. The Chinese Princess

  The French medieval fairy Mélusine changed into a snake from the waist down once a week. The English Romantic poet John Keats has a poem, ‘Lamia’, about a snake that turns into a beautiful woman. In Freudian terms, this is the return of the repressed with a vengeance.

  From Folk Tales of Pakistan, compiled by Zainab Ghulam Abbas (Karachi, 1957).

  2. The Cat-Witch

  Mary Richardson again (Dorson, p. 146).

  3. The Baba Yaga

  Baba Yaga, the Russian witch, lives in the forest in a hut with chicken’s legs that run around when she wants them to. Some say she is the devil’s grandmother. She is bad, but stupid, and was characterized thus during the Stalinist period by the Soviet folklorist E.A. Tudorovskaya: ‘Baba Yaga, the mistress of the forest and animals, is represented as a real exploiter, oppressing her animal servants.’ (W.R. Ralston, Russian Folk Tales [London, 1873], pp. 139–42.)

  4. Mrs Number Three

  This comes from G. Willoughby-Meade, Chinese Ghouls and Goblins [London, 1928], a collection of popular lore (p. 191). Names and locations are given with unusual precision. Compare the fate of Mrs Number Three’s guests with that of the hero of Apuleius’s ‘The Golden Ass’, and compare Mrs Number Three herself with Circe, the enchantress in Homer’s Odyssey, who transformed her clients into swine.

  PART SIX: UNHAPPY FAMILIES

  1. The Girl Who Banished Seven Youths

  Bushnaq, p. 119.

  2. The Market of the Dead

  Melville J. and Frances S. Herskovits, Dahomean Narrative (Northwestern University African Studies, Evanston, 1958), p. 290.

  3. The Woman Who Married Her Son’s Wife

  Millman, p. 127. Told by Gustav Broberg, Kulusuk, East Greenland.

  4. The Little Red Fish and the Clog of Gold

  Bushnaq, p. 181.

  5. The Wicked Stepmother

  Cardinall, p. 87.

  6. Tuglik and Her Granddaughter

  Heard from Anarfik, Sermiligaq, East Greenland. (Millman, p. 191.)

  7. The Juniper Tree

  The definitive version of a tale of child abuse and sibling solidarity known all over the world, in very similar forms. Verrier Elwin prints one from Tribal India. In no other story does the happy ending have more of an ache of wish-fulfilment; it is obvious that this solution can only be imagined, not experienced in reality. (Grimm, p. 171.)

  8. Nourie Hadig

  This Armenian ‘Snow White’ was collected by Susie Hoogasian-Villa from Mrs Akabi Mooradian, in the Armenian community in the city of Detroit, Michigan, to which they both belonged. Mrs Mooradian settled in Detroit in 1929, after various wanderings imposed on her by the turbulent history of her homeland since her birth in 1904. (100 Armenian Tales, collected and edited by Susie Hoogasian-Villa [Detroit, 1966, p. 84].)

  9. Beauty and Pock Face

  Chinese Fairy Tales and Folk Tales, collected and translated by Wolfram Eberhard (London, 1937), p. 17.

  10. Old Age

  Millman, p. 192.

  PART SEVEN: MORAL TALES

  1. Little Red Riding Hood

  From Charles Perrault’s Histoires ou contes du temps passé (Paris, 1697). I put it into English; my maternal grandmother used to say, ‘Lift up the latch and walk in,’ when she told it me when I was a child; and at the conclusion, when the wolf jumps on Little Red Riding Hood and gobbles her up, my grandmother used to pretend to eat me, which made me squeak and gibber with excited pleasure.

  For an in-depth sociological, historical and psy
chological discussion of this story, plus thirty-one different literary versions including a feminist revision by the Merseyside Fairy Story Collective, see Jack Zipes, The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood (London, 1983). Jack Zipes thinks that ‘The Story of Grandmother’, recorded in Nièvre, France, around 1885, is part of a ‘Red Riding Hood’ tradition of a thoroughly emancipated kind; this little girl, colour of clothing unknown, is not an awful warning but an example of quick thinking:

  There was a woman who had some bread. She said to her daughter: ‘Go carry this hot loaf and a bottle of milk to your granny.’

  So the little girl departed. At the crossway she met bzou, the werewolf, who said to her:

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I’m taking this hot loaf and a bottle of milk to my granny.’

  ‘What path are you taking,’ said the werewolf, ‘the path of needles or the path of pins?’

  ‘The path of needles,’ the little girl said.

  ‘All right, then I’ll take the path of pins.’

  The little girl entertained herself by gathering needles. Meanwhile the werewolf arrived at the grandmother’s house, killed her, put some of her meat in the cupboard and a bottle of her blood on the shelf. The little girl arrived and knocked at the door.

  ‘Push the door,’ said the werewolf, ‘it’s barred by a piece of wet straw.’

  ‘Good day, Granny. I’ve brought you a hot loaf of bread and a bottle of milk.’

  ‘Put it in the cupboard, my child. Take some of the meat which is inside and the bottle of wine on the shelf.’

  After she had eaten, there was a little cat which said: ‘Phooey! . . . A slut is she who eats the flesh and drinks the blood of her granny.’

  ‘Undress yourself, my child,’ the werewolf said, ‘and come lie down beside me.’

  ‘Where should I put my apron?’

  ‘Throw it into the fire, my child, you won’t be needing it any more.’

  And each time she asked where she should put all her other clothes, the bodice, the dress, the petticoat, and the long stockings, the wolf responded:

  ‘Throw them into the fire, my child, you won’t be needing them any more.’

  When she laid herself down in the bed, the little girl said:

  ‘Oh, Granny, how hairy you are!’

  ‘The better to keep myself warm, my child!’

  ‘Oh, Granny, what big nails you have!’

  ‘The better to scratch me with, my child!’

  ‘Oh, Granny, what big shoulders you have!’

  ‘The better to carry the firewood, my child!’

  ‘Oh, Granny, what big ears you have!’

  ‘The better to hear you with, my child!’

  ‘Oh, Granny, what big nostrils you have!’

  ‘The better to snuff my tobacco with, my child!’

  ‘Oh, Granny, what a big mouth you have!’

  ‘The better to eat you with, my child!’

  ‘Oh, Granny, I’ve got to go badly. Let me go outside.’

  ‘Do it in the bed, my child!’

  ‘Oh, no, Granny, I want to go outside.’

  ‘All right, but make it quick.’

  The werewolf attached a woollen rope to her foot and let her go outside.

  When the little girl was outside, she tied the end of the rope to a plum tree in the courtyard. The werewolf became impatient and said: ‘Are you making a load out there? Are you making a load?’

  When he realized that nobody was answering him, he jumped out of bed and saw that the little girl had escaped. He followed her but arrived at her house just at the moment she entered.

  2. Feet Water

  Kevin Danaher, Folktales of the Irish Countryside (Cork, 1967), pp. 127–9.

  3. Wives Cure Boastfulness

  Herskovits and Herskovits, p. 400.

  4. Tongue Meat

  Knappert, p. 132.

  5. The Woodcutter’s Wealthy Sister

  Bushnaq, p. 137.

  6. Escaping Slowly

  Afro-American Folktales, stories from Black traditions in the New World edited and selected by Roger D. Abrahams (New York, 1985), p. 240.

  7. Nature’s Ways

  Hoogasian-Villa, p. 338.

  8. The Two Women Who Found Freedom

  Millman, p. 112; from Akpaleeapik, Pond Inlet, Baffin Island.

  9. How a Husband Weaned His Wife from Fairy Tales

  Afanas’ev, p. 308.

  NOTES ON PARTS 8 – 1 3

  PART EIGHT: STRONG MINDS AND LOW CUNNING

  1. The Twelve Wild Ducks

  From the collection of Norwegian folk tales made by Peter Christian Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe, in George Webb Darsent’s handsome Victorian translation, Popular Tales from the Norse (Edinburgh, 1903).

  The film-maker Alfred Hitchcock thought nothing was more ominous than the look of blood on daisies. Blood on snow catches even more directly at the viscera. The raven, the blood, the snow – these are the elements of the unappeasable northern formulae of desire. In ‘The Story of Conall Gulban’ in J.F. Campbell’s Popular Tales of the West Highlands Conall ‘would not take a wife forever whose head should be black as the raven, and her face as fair as the snow, and her cheeks as red as blood’.

  Campbell crisply suggests the raven must have been eating something, because of all the blood, and offers a variant from Inverness:

  When he got up in the morning there was young snow, and the raven was upon a spray near him, and a bit of flesh in his beak. The piece of flesh fell and Conall went to lift it, and the raven said to him, that Fair Beauteous Smooth was as white as the snow upon the spray, her cheek as red as the flesh that was in his hand, and her hair as black as the feather that was in his wing. (Popular Tales of the West Highlands, orally collected with a translation by J.F. Campbell, vol. III, Paisley, 1892.)

  This carnivorous imagery expresses the depths of a woman’s desire for a child in traditional stories. ‘Snow-White’ in the familiar version collected by the Brothers Grimm starts off the same way. Please note that, according to the editors of Palestinian Arab stories, childless mothers in fairy tales wish for daughters far more frequently than they do for sons.

  ‘The Twelve Wild Ducks’, with its savage beginning and theme of sibling devotion, forms the basis of the Danish Hans Christian Andersen’s lovely literary story, ‘The Wild Swans’. Andersen upgraded the ducks to romantic swans although I feel that if wild ducks were good enough for Ibsen, they should have been good enough for him.

  2. Old Foster

  Collected from Jane Gentry in 1923 in Hot Springs, North Carolina, by Isobel Gordon Carter. Text from Journal of American Folklore, 38 (1925), 360–1.

  This ancient story of sex murder and serial killing travelled across the Atlantic with the first English settlers of the US in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. ‘Old Foster’ is first cousin to the sinister Mr Fox (see this volume, p. 9), and to ‘The Robber Bridegroom’ of the Brothers Grimm.

  3. Šāhīn

  From Speak, Bird, Speak Again: Palestinian Arab Folktales, collected and edited by Ibrahim Muhawi and Sharif Kanaana, and published by the University of California Press, 1988.

  These stories were collected on tape between 1978 and 1980 in Galilee, since 1948 part of the state of Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. In the Palestinian tradition, women are the custodians of narrative; if men tell stories, they must adopt the narrative style of women. Since storytelling style matures with age, old women have the edge on everybody else. Tales are told on winter nights, when there is little work in the fields, and extended families gather together for mutual entertainment. The oldest woman usually starts. The gatherings are dominated by women; there is a pronounced pro-woman bias to all these Palestinian stories, although the Palestinian family is, as Muhawi and Kanaana explain, ‘patrilineal, patrilateral, polygynous, endogamous and patrilocal’.

  In their introduction, they note that the pattern of free mate choice by women ‘is so consistently at odds
with the facts of social life that we must finally conclude that a deeply felt emotional need is being articulated’.

  Nevertheless, ‘Šāhīn’, with its exuberantly self-assertive heroine, was told by a sixty-five-year-old man from Galilee, a ploughman and shepherd all his life. In another variant, the exhausted hero, newly married, says to Šāhīn, ‘Believe me you are the man and I am the bride.’ And it is nothing but the truth.

  4. The Dog’s Snout People

  A story from the Baltic country of Latvia collected in the 1880s and published in a majestic collection called Siberian and Other Folktales: Primitive Literature of the Empire of the Tsars, collected and translated with an introduction and notes by C. Fillingham-Coxwell (London, C.W. Daniel, 1925).

  Christian culture was slow to influence the people of heavily forested Latvia, who are said to have retained pagan altars as late as 1835. According to tradition, marriage was obtained by abduction, a risky business. Geographically between, and politically at the mercy of, Germany and Russia for centuries, the Letts, according to Fillingham-Coxwell, regarded the Germans and Russians ‘with hatred and despair’. Fillingham-Coxwell also thought the enigmatic ‘dog’s snout people’ themselves might contain memories of aboriginal Lettish inhabitants.

  5. The Old Woman Against the Stream

  Norwegian, again; from the same Asbjørnsen and Moe collection as ‘The Twelve Wild Ducks’, in a modern translation by Pat Shaw and Carl Noman (New York, Pantheon Books). Originally published in Oslo by Dreyers Verlag in 1960.

  6. The Letter Trick

  The people who were taken from West Africa as slaves to the place formerly called Dutch Guiana, now Suriname, took with them an invisible treasure of memory and culture. In the late 1920s, the anthropologists Melville J. Herskovits and Frances S. Herskovits collected a vast number of tales and songs, in the coastal city of Paramaribo. The language of the city was a thick, rich Creole; the Herskovits translated their material into English.

  The city of Paramaribo possessed a mixed-race culture – Dutch, Indian, Carib, Arawak, Chinese and Javanese people mingled with those of African descent, but, among the latter, a strong African influence remained, expressing itself not only in voodoo beliefs and practices but in such matters as the tying of a headscarf. Descent was traced through the maternal line; the men were often absent as migrant workers.