Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale

by Marina Warner

  Figure 16 ‘Are you afraid of being poisoned?’: the wicked queen in modern dress. Maribel Verdú as the wicked stepmother in Pablo Berger’s film, Blancanieves, 2012.

  Like many current fairytale films, this one is not for children, but uses the famous children’s story to think about what can happen to innocence. Blancanieves adopts the full awareness of adults, and shows us openly what adults are capable of in the fulfilment of desire—especially perverse desire.

  The film is a tragedy, for this Snow White falls asleep forever and, as in Kafka’s ‘The Hunger Artist’, she is exhibited in her glass coffin as part of a travelling fair, alongside a hairy girl, a fat lady, and a starveling. It’s another form of Buñuel-style erotic fetishism, and the dwarf who loves her tends her with powder and paint; the film closes on a single tear leaking out of the corner of her eye.

  The most disquieting treatment of the story is however a self-identified feminist film, Julia Leigh’s Sleeping Beauty (2011), which exemplifies the dark turn fairy tales have taken, especially in the vision of women creators. A luminous, angelically beautiful student answers a job advert and is initiated into a specialist brothel, willingly becoming the drugged object of clients’ fantasies. Like Carter’s essay The Sadeian Woman, this version raises questions about women’s complicity and self-possession, and about pornography as the norm of sexual exchange in our society, not an aberration.

  Recognizing the dark heart of fairy tales has informed some stunning original works: Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), directed and written by Guillermo del Toro, condenses many myths into his story, about the goddess Persephone abducted into the underworld, for example. The film opens with a direct allusion to the ‘Cottingley fairies’, when two little girls persuaded Conan Doyle and other eminent Victorians that they had seen—and successfully photographed—tiny sprites dancing and sunbathing at the bottom of their garden, and it then unfolds into a searing tale of initiation in the gloomy forest, brilliantly weaving the actual historical reality of Spain under Franco into the fabric of magic and faery.

  Many of the most widespread and powerful expressions of fairy tale today feature women—old and young—at their heart. Whether the creators are male (Tangled, for example, has a male screenwriter and director), or female (Maleficent is written by Linda Woolverton, also the screenwriter on Disney’s Beauty and the Beast), readers and viewers, regardless of their gender, are drawn into the unfolding drama about a passionate female protagonist. Although Hollywood keeps trying to bring appealing young men into the picture (Snow White and the Huntsman struggled to make the male lead hunky and sensitive), Harry Potter stands pretty much alone among heroes, and J. K. Rowling’s series is too baggy and epic to be called a fairy tale.

  Twenty-first century films, such as Sleeping Beauty and Blancanieves, have broken with the chief defining principle of fairy tales that they should end happily. Fairy tales lift the spirits and spark a ray of hope for the future when they bring defeat and even death to the perpetrators of harm, to the vicious tyrants and greedy ogres and to the architects of family hell, cruel fathers and wicked queens. The darkness of contemporary retellings threatens to grow so deep it throws a shadow over the happy ending itself. But sometimes this gloom does not altogether destroy the sense that an alternative world has been created where goodness can brighten us, lighten us.

  EPILOGUE

  The kingdom of fairy tales … could be ecstasy but it is above all a land of pathos, of symbols of pain.

  Cristina Campo

  In The Servant’s Tale by the American writer Paula Fox, the author’s childhood self asks, ‘“What’s the difference between a story and a lie?”’ Her Nana replies ‘impatiently: “A lie hides the truth, a story tries to find it.”’ The little girl strains ‘to grasp her meaning … “Don’t worry,” she said soothingly. “You’ll see it all someday.”’

  Paula Fox then adds, ‘I understood enough to know that Nana saw what others couldn’t see, that for her the meaning of one thing could also be the meaning of a greater thing.’

  Fairy tales are stories that try to find the truth and give us glimpses of the greater things—this is the principle that underlies their growing presence in writing, art, cinema, dance, song. The tales used to be light in the midst of darkness. But dislike of shallow promises and easy solutions in times of conflict, eco-disaster, and other difficulties are clipping the wings of the fairy tale; hope can seem a deliberate falsehood. Disneyfication has become a dirty word—synonymous with mendacity—though it’s not altogether the case that his early films are so saccharine or sanitized as charged. The ‘realisation of imagined wonder’, which Tolkien saw as the aim of fairy tale, isn’t bright and shiny any more; its skies have clouded over. The stories used to be distinct from epic and tragedy, but renderings today are moving closer to those forms of storytelling. A few dissenting voices still consider fairy tales childish and foolish, but on the whole, they have been widely accepted as a most valuable and profound creation of human history and culture; they have come to be treated as scriptures from an authentic inaugural time of imaginative activity, a narrative blueprint when it was all set down, right and true.

  For these reasons, fairy tales are gradually turning into myths: stories held in common about the deepest dilemmas, no longer aiming at being optimistic or consoling, but rather bearers of wisdom, deep, thought-provoking, and illuminating. Maria Tatar writes about ‘the ignition power’ of fairy tales, ‘the ability to kindle our powers of imagination so that the mind’s eye begins to see scenes created by mere words on the page’, and with this vivid summons of hitherto unknown dimensions of experience, the world of faerie stimulates sensations and emotions—fear, pleasure, dread, gratification. The most difficult task has now become how to make a story of child abandonment and cannibal witches bearable for small children at Christmas, as well as for those older and more knowing, in order to keep faith with the truth‐telling inside the stories. Increasingly, the tendency now is to leave them to us, the grown-ups.

  We are walking through the dark forest, trying to spot the breadcrumbs and follow the path. But the birds have eaten them, and we are on our own. Now is the time when we all must become trackers and readers of signs. Fairy tales give us something to go on. It’s not much, but it’ll have to do. It is something to start with.

  FURTHER READING

  GENERAL

  Benjamin, Walter, ‘The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov’, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1973).

  Bloom, Harold, ed., The Hero’s Journey (New York: Infobase, 2009).

  Borges, Jorge Luis, Other Inquisitions, 1937–1953 (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 1964).

  Calvino, Italo, Italian Folktales, trans. George Martin (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980).

  Calvino, Italo, Sulla Fiaba, ed. Mario Lavagetto (Turin: Einaudi, 1988).

  Dasen, Véronique, and Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère, Martine, Des Fata aux fées: regards croisés de l’Antiquité à nos jours (Lausanne: University of Lausanne, 2011).

  Davidson, Hilda Ellis and Anna Chaudhri, A Companion to the Fairy Tale (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2003).

  Féeries: Etudes sur le conte merveilleux XVIIe–XIXe siècle (Université Stendhal-Grenoble), 2003–.

  Gramarye: The Journal of the Sussex Centre for Folklore, Fairy Tales and Fantasy, 2012– .

  Haase, Donald, ed., The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Folktales and Fairy Tales, Vols. I–III (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2008).

  Heaney, Seamus, The Redress of Poetry (London: Faber & Faber, 2011).

  Lewis, C. S., Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories, ed. Walter Hooper (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1966).

  Lewis, C. S., Selected Literary Essays, ed. Walter Hooper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969).

  Lüthi, Max, The Fairy Tale as Art Form and the Nature of Man, trans. Jon Erickson (Oxford: Wiley & Sons, 1987).

  Marvels and Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Stu
dies (Detroit: Wayne State University Press).

  Ouyang, Wen-chin, ed., The Arabian Nights (London: Everyman, 2014).

  Propp, Vladimir, Morphology of the Folk-Tale (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas).

  Salmon, Christian, Storytelling: Bewitching the Modern Mind, trans. David Macey (London and New York: Verso, 2010).

  Tatar, Maria, ed., The Classic Fairy Tales (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co., 1999).

  Teverson, Andrew, Fairy Tale (The New Critical Idiom) (London: Routledge, 2013).

  Tiffin, Jessica, Marvellous Geometry: Genre and Metafiction in Modern Fairy Tale (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009).

  Tolkien, J. R. R., Tree and Leaf (London: Allen & Unwin, 1964).

  Warner, Marina, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and their Tellers (London: Chatto & Windus, 1994).

  Warner, Marina, No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling and Making Mock (London: Chatto & Windus, 1998).

  Warner, Marina, ed., Wonder Tales (London: Chatto & Windus, 1996).

  Warnes, Chris, Magical Realism and the Postcolonial Novel: Between Faith and Irreverence (London: Palgrave, 2009).

  Zipes, Jack, trans., Beauties, Beasts and Enchantments: Classic French Fairy Tales (New York: NAL Books, 1989).

  Zipes, Jack, ed., The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales: The Western Fairy Tale Tradition from Medieval to Modern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

  Zipes, Jack, ed., The Great Fairy Tale Tradition: From Straparola and Basile to the Brothers Grimm (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co., 2001).

  Zipes, Jack, Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion, 2nd edn. (New York and London: Routledge, 2006).

  Zipes, Jack, The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).

  PROLOGUE

  Borges, Jorge Luis, Labyrinths, ed. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (London: Penguin, 1964).

  Duffy, Carol Ann, Still, Melly, and Supple, Tim, Beasts and Beauties, dir. Melly Still, Hampstead Theatre, December 2011–January 2012.

  CHAPTER 1. THE WORLDS OF FAERY: FAR AWAY & DOWN BELOW

  Auden, W. H., Forewords and Afterwords (New York: Vintage, 1974).

  Barrie, J. M., The Annotated Peter Pan, ed. Maria Tatar (New York and London: W.W. Norton 2011).

  Borges, Jorge Luis, The Book of Imaginary Beings, trans. Norman Thomas di Giovanni (London: Vintage, 2002).

  Briggs, Katharine, The Anatomy of Puck: An Examination of Fairy Beliefs among Shakespeare’s Contemporaries and Successors (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1959).

  Garner, Alan, ed., A Book of Goblins (London: Penguin, 1969).

  Hunter, Michael, ed., The Occult Laboratory: Magic, Science and Second Sight in Late 17th-Century Scotland (Woodbridge: Boydell Books, 2001).

  Jolles, André, Einfache Formen: Legende/Sage/Mythe/Spruch Kasus/Memorabile/Märchen/Witz (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellshaft, 1958).

  Keightley, Thomas, The Fairy Mythology Illustrative of the Romance and Superstition of Various Countries (London: George Bell & Sons, 1910).

  Kirk, Robert, The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies, with intro. by Marina Warner (New York: New York Review Books, 2009).

  Paracelsus (Theophrastus van Hohenheim), Four Treatises, inc. A Book on Nymphs, Sylphs, Pygmies, etc., ed. and trans. E. Sigerest (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1996).

  CHAPTER 2. WITH A TOUCH OF HER WAND: MAGIC & METAMORPHOSIS

  Bell, Karl, The Legend of Spring-Heeled Jack: Victorian Urban Folklore and Popular Cultures (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2012).

  Carter, Angela, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (London: Victor Gollancz, 1979).

  Carter, Angela, ed., The Virago Book of Fairy Tales, intro. by Marina Warner (London: Virago, 1990).

  Chandler, Robert, The Magic Ring and Other Russian Folktales (London: Faber & Faber, 1979).

  Coover, Robert, Briar Rose and Spanking the Maid (London: Penguin, 1996).

  Crossley-Holland, Kevin, Folk-Tales of the British Isles (London: Faber & Faber, 1985).

  Ellis, John M., One Fairy Story Too Many: The Brothers Grimm and Their Tales (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).

  Gonzenbach, Laura, Beautiful Angiola: The Lost Sicilian Folk and Fairy Tales of Laura Gonzenbach, ed. and trans. Jack Zipes (New York: Routledge, 2003).

  Gonzenbach, Laura, The Robber with a Witch's Head, ed. and trans. Jack Zipes (New York: Routledge, 2004).

  Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, Selected Tales, trans. Joyce Crick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

  Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, trans. Jack Zipes (Toronto and London: Bantam Books, 1987).

  Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère, Martine, Reading, Translating, Rewriting: Angela Carter’s Translational Poetics (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2013).

  Pullman, Philip, Grimm Tales: For Young and Old (London: Penguin, 2012).

  Straparola, Giovan Francesco , The Pleasant Nights, ed. Donald Beecher, trans. W. G. Waters, 2 vols. (Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press, 2012).

  Tatar, Maria, ed., The Annotated Brothers Grimm (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co., 2004).

  Warner, Marina, Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

  Warner, Marina, Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights (London: Chatto & Windus, 2012).

  CHAPTER 3. VOICES ON THE PAGE: TALES, TELLERS & TRANSLATORS

  Afanasyev, A. N., Russian Fairy Tales, trans. Norbert Guterman, intro. by Roman Jakobson (New York: Random House, c.1973).

  Balázs, Béla, The Cloak of Dreams: Chinese Fairy Tales, trans. Jack Zipes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).

  Basile, Giambattista, The Pentameron, trans. Sir Richard Burton (London: William Kimber, 1952).

  Basile, Giambattista, Il racconto dei racconti, ovvero Il trattenimento dei piccoli, trans. Ruggero Guarini , eds. Alessandra Burani and Ruggero Guarini (Milan: Adelphi Edizioni, 1994).

  Calvino, Italo, Fiabe Italiane, 2 vols. (Turin: Einaudi, 1956).

  Calvino, Italo, Italian Folktales, trans. George Martin (London: Penguin, 1980).

  Canepa, Nancy, ed., Out of the Woods: The Origins of the Literary Fairy Tale in Italy and France (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998).

  Čapek, Karel, Nine Fairy Tales, trans. Dagmar Herrmann (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1990).

  D’Aulnoy, Madame, Contes, ed. Philippe Hourcade. Vol. I: Les Contes des Fées; Vol. II: Contes nouveaux ou Les Fées à la Mode (Paris: Société des Textes Français Modernes, 1997).

  Dupont, Florence, The Invention of Literature: From Greek Intoxication to the Latin Book, trans. Janet Lloyd (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).

  Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, German Popular Stories, ed. and trans. Edgar Taylor, illus. George Cruikshank [1823] (London: The Scholar Press, 1977), 2 Vols.

  Haase, Donald, ed., The Reception of Grimms’ Fairy Tales: Responses, Reactions, Revisions (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993).

  Hannon, Patricia, Fabulous Identities: Women’s Fairy Tales in Seventeenth-Century France (Amsterdam and Atlanta, Ga.: Rodopi, 1998).

  Jacobs, Joseph, ed., Celtic Fairy Tales (London: Senate, 1994).

  Lang, Andrew, ed., The Green Fairy Book (New York: Dover Publications, 1965 [1892]). (And others in the series.)

  Maitland, Sara, Gossip from the Forest: The Tangled Roots of Our Forests and Fairytales (London: Granta, 2012).

  Perrault, Charles, The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault, trans. Angela Carter (London: Penguin, 2008).

  Perrault, Charles, The Complete Fairy Tales, trans. Christopher Betts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

  Spufford, Francis, The Child that Books Built: A Memoir of Childhood and Reading (London: Faber, 2002).

  Winterson, Jeanette, The Passion (London: Bloomsbury, 1987).

  Zipes, Jack, The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers
Grimm: The Complete First Edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014).

  CHAPTER 4. POTATO SOUP: TRUE STORIES/REAL LIFE

  Barzilai, Shuli, Tales of Bluebeard and His Wives from Late Antiquity to Postmodern Times (New York and London: Routledge, 2009).

  Darnton, Robert, The Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes in French Cultural History (London: Allen Lane, 1984).

  Hermansson, Casie E., Bluebeard: A Reader’s Guide to the English Tradition (Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, 2009).

  Philip, Neil, The Cinderella Story: The Origins and Variations of the Story Known as ‘Cinderella’ (London: Penguin, 1989).

  Pollock, Griselda, and Anderson, Victoria (eds.), Bluebeard’s Legacy: Death and Secrets From Bartók to Hitchcock (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2009).

  Tatar, Maria, The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987).

  Weber, Eugen, ‘Fairies and Hard Facts: The Reality of Folktales’, Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 42, No. 1 (Jan.–Mar. 1981).

  CHAPTER 5. CHILDISH THINGS: PICTURES & CONVERSATIONS

  Carroll, Lewis, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, ed. Hugh Haughton (London: Penguin, 2003).

  Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, German Popular Stories, ed. and trans. Edgar Taylor, illus. George Cruikshank [1823] (London: The Scolar Press, 1977), 2 Vols.

  Handler Spitz, Ellen, Inside Picture Books (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).

  The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes (London: John Newbery, 1765).

  Hockney, David, Six Fairy Tales (London: Petersburg Press, 1970).

  Makdisi, Saree, and Nussbaum, Felicity, eds., The Arabian Nights in Historical Context (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).