From the Beast to the Blonde

by Marina Warner

  But vernacular culture is multiple, many-throated and remarkably robust in its resistance to state propaganda, and less brutal nationalist passions than those raging today have also drawn inspiration from folk culture in all media, as in opera (Prokofiev’s The Love for Three Oranges, Puccini’s Le Villi), in ballet (Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite, and original Ballets Russes productions – Stravinsky’s Firebird and Petrouchka); in film (Walerian Borowczyk’s Blanche, 1971, drew on the novel Mazeppa by the great Polish Romantic nationalist Juliusz Slowacki); in poetry Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads looked to traditional people’s songs, in the midst of heralding a revolutionary age; even a fiction as ironically poised and cosmopolitan as Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting contains committed passages about local Moravian music, rituals and stories, while his first novel, The Joke, bears a relation to Middle European Schwankmärchen, or jesting tales, about foxes outfoxed – then foxed again.5, 6 The very territory of popular, anonymous storytelling has proved an arena of resistance to tyranny, as well as a site of reconciliation and reversal for ostracized and condemned figures. Storytelling can act to face the objects of derision or fear and sometimes – not always – inspire tolerance and even fellow-feeling; it can realign allegiances and remap terrors. Storytellers can also break through the limits of permitted thought to challenge conventions; fairy tales, I have argued in this book, offer a way of putting questions, of testing the structure as well as guaranteeing its safety, of thinking up alternatives as well as living daily reality in an examined way. The Irish poet Eavan Boland has defined this first principle of an imaginative life: Only a subversive grasp on the private reality, it seemed to me, could guarantee the proper tension with the public one.’7

  For what is applauded and who sets the terms of the recognition and acceptance are always in question. Nor are the measure and weight of those terms assigned fixed values; unlike the statutory yards and metres kept safe in government vaults, they can and do change. Creating and contributing to the inhabited culture is not just a matter of individual creative genius, the exceptional master-work. We, the audience, you, the reader, are part of the story’s future as well, its patterns are rising under the pressure of your palms, our fingers, too.

  While fairy tales have shored up traditional aspirations (for fame and fortune, above all), they can also act as fifth columnists, burrowing from within, in the very act of circulating the lessons of the status quo. And because utopian ambitions beat strongly in the heart of fairy tale, many writers have hidden and hide under its guileless and apparently childish façade, have wrapped its cloak of un reality around them; adopting its traditional formal simplicities they have attempted to challenge received ideas and raise questions into the minds of their audience: protest and fairy tale have long been associated. In conditions of censorship – in Paris under Louis XIV as well as Prague before 1989 – fantasies can lead the censor a merry dance. The writings of the French précieuses and their disciples like Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier and Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy campaigned for women’s emancipation; nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers of both sexes also struggled to shape an egalitarian, communal, anti-materialist ethic, as Ruskin did with ‘The King of the Golden River’, George MacDonald in his Princess books and L. Frank Baum with The Wizard of Oz and its sequels.8 Karel Capek wrote against the rise of Fascism in the 1930s, shoring up the qualities of tolerance and mercy in his tender, comic, blithe shaggy-dog fairy tales, poking fun at greed and folly, bureaucrats and bullies.9 The Czech poet Miroslav Holub has described what pleasure it gave writers to trick the Communist system by encoding their dissidence in bafflingly innocuous images, of Cinderella and other irreproachable figures.10 Today, writers for children (and sometimes for adults, too) who draw on fairytale motifs and characters, like Terry Jones, Joan Aiken, Jane Yolen, Tove Jansson, Terry Pratchett, are conjuring up dream worlds as personally idealistic, as politically and socially contentious, and often as spiritedly wary and iconoclastic, as their more apparently sophisticated precursors, Erasmus, Voltaire, and Swift.

  But the case of The Satanic Verses throws into sharp relief the contradictory forces that tug at wonder tales as a genre: Salman Rushdie is a writer whose fiction is rooted in ancient fables and the mythic tradition, who has drawn on The Arabian Nights, on the Ramayana – and the Koran. The wonder tale that everyone knows, the common heritage of narrative, is there to be reshaped for each generation by the teller, but its potential is so rich that many seek to control it in their interests: it is a central ironical paradox of his case that his enemies, as they desire to destroy him admit that they recognize and fear the power of the teller to recast an old story and direct the way it is heard.

  Different listeners, different readers will pull the storyteller towards affirming their point of view: a different audience, a different message. Every work is ‘a link in the chain of speech communion’, and is made by source, narrator, receiver acting in conjunction.11 The fairy tale becomes the arena where beliefs struggle for ascendancy. But who has the sultan’s ultimate power to determine the tale’s outcome? Does it belong to Scheherazade? Or to her listeners, who determine her fate (her story) by the depth of their enthralment? If we are to let the story be told, we, too, have to deal with the sultans, and show the utmost courage, as Rushdie has done.12

  The story itself becomes the weapon of the weaponless. The struggles of women, for example, are not resolved by combat, on the whole (one or two Amazon heroines excepted), as the contests of men may be in heroic epic; when they need to undo error or redeem wrongdoing or defend the innocent, they raise their voices, if only in a conspiratorial whisper – hence the suspicion of women’s talk that haunts the whole history of the old wives’ tale. Women’s arts within fairy tales are very marked, and most of them are verbal: riddling, casting spells, conjuring, understanding the tongues of animals, turning words into deeds according to the elementary laws of magic, sometimes to comic effect. Whereas saints, knights, and fairytale heroes assault the beast with weapons – Perseus and the sea monster, Theseus and the Minotaur, St George and the Dragon, Jack the Giantkiller, Tom Thumb and the ogre – women in fairy tale align themselves with the Odyssean party of wily speechmakers, and with the Orphic mode of entrancement. In this they simply extend the practice of storytellers themselves.

  But the uses of enchantment in the contemporary world of the leisure industry, of competing theme parks and a commercialized culture of play, culminate in a sugar-candy replica of the Sleeping Beauty’s castle, and an opening ceremony (at EuroDisney) in which everyone pretended to be asleep until the prince kissed the princess. Tocqueville was indeed prescient when he wrote (if we take his ‘poetry’ as culture in general):

  We have also seen, among democratic nations, that the sources of poetry are grand, but not abundant. They are soon exhausted: and poets, not finding the elements of the ideal in what is real and true, abandon them entirely and create monsters. I do not fear that the poetry of democratic nations will prove insipid, or that it will fly too near the ground; I rather apprehend that it will be forever losing itself in the clouds, and that it will range at least to purely imaginary regions. I fear that the productions of democratic poets may often be surcharged with immense and incoherent imagery, with exaggerated descriptions and strange creations; and that the fantastic beings of their brain may sometimes make us regret reality.13

  Tocqueville contrasts, in the conventional way, fantasy and reality: but a deeper understanding of the workings of fantasy within reality (partly due to the ability of film to render the imaginary for real) has developed since, and with it a need to analyse the forms this interweaving takes. After the 1939–45 war, psychoanalytic approval of fairy tales as highly therapeutic and educational – a view crystallized by Bruno Bettelheim’s study – undoubtedly helped this return to respectability, and thence to the realization of illusory fairylands. But psychoanalysis has hardly been alone in contributing to revived interest in fa
iry tales. Italo Calvino, for example, began by writing, as a young communist, a realist novel about the partisans, Il Sentiero dei nidi di ragno (The Path to the Nests of Spiders), which appeared in 1947. The cultural politics of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had assumed that representing the interests of the people as well as communicating with them required a naturalistic, documentary mode – a print off life to demonstrate the heroism and the injustice of the common folk. But then Calvino became interested in folklore, and after he published his resonant collection Fiabe Italiane, the fruit of years of scavenging and collating and editing fairy tales from all over Italy, Calvino himself became a fabulist – he gave himself to a literature of dreaming rather than representation, and began to see the writer as a shaman who takes flight to another world.14 In his last series of lectures, he wrote:

  I am accustomed to consider literature a search for knowledge. In order to move onto existential ground, I have to think of literature as extended to anthropology and ethnology and mythology. Faced with the precarious existence of tribal life – drought, sickness, evil influences – the shaman responded by ridding his body of weight and flying to another world, another level of perception, where he could find the strength to change the face of reality.15

  Through fairy tales he had heard, he said, the voices of the people, he had discovered the knowledge of another way of being, the fruits of struggle and hope. Crucially, he had also discovered common ground on which the agnostic and literate mandarin like himself stood beside the unlettered worker. It is a very important discovery: that fairy tale and fantasy can unite societies, across barriers of all kinds.

  Storytelling can act as a social binding agent – like the egg yolk which, mixed up with the different coloured powders, produces colours of a painting. A story like ‘Rashin Coatie’, collected in Scotland in the last century, relates to similar tales of wronged orphan girls all over the world, but it has particular Scottish resonances and emphases – this Cinderella meets her prince at the kirk, not the palace. Of course there are fairy tales unique to a single place, which have not been passed on. But there are few really compelling ones that do not turn out to be wearing seven-league boots. The possibility of holding a storehouse of narrative in common could act to enhance our reciprocal relations, to communicate across spaces and barricades of national self-interest and pride. We share more than we perhaps admit or know, and have done so for a very long time: early in the fifteenth century, when Richard, Earl of Warwick, made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, an emir asked him if he were descended from Guy of Warwick, that celebrated hero of Arthurian romance, whom he had read about ‘in bokes of their langage’.16 The late twentieth century has been seeing a radical reappraisal of such universally known tales – the Grimm Brothers proclaimed their fairy stories the pure uncontaminated national products of the Volk or German people, but we now know that many of their tales had been travelling through the world for centuries before the Grimms took them down.

  The balance between popular taste and democratic representation poses one of the most urgent questions facing all the narrative arts, performance and broadcasting as well as literature, for adults and children alike, but it seems a simple admission of defeat to weep and gnash one’s teeth at the thought of EuroDisney (a ‘cultural Chernobyl’, grieved the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut); it is simply unthinking and lazy to denounce all the works of Disney and his legacy. Theme parks and popular entertainment quarry the tradition of fairy tale – from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (one of the largest grossing films ever, and still earning) to the recent Hook and Aladdin; they rely not only on the characters and stories, but on the idea that adults enjoy being children again, that a public can include different generations and classes, who will lose themselves in the make-believe in a different way, united by the pleasures of enchantment. Fairy tales are indeed still criticized – and with reason – for the easy lies, the crass materialism, the false hopes they hold out, but in the last decade of the century, in conditions of radical change on the one hand, and stagnation on the other, with ever increasing fragmentation and widening polarities, with national borders disappearing in some places and returning with a bloody vengeance in others, as a millenarian feeling of ecological catastrophe gathers momentum, and the need to belong grows ever more rampant as it becomes more frustrated, there has been a strongly marked shift towards fantasy as a mode of understanding, as an ingredient in survival, as a lever against the worst aspects of the status quo and the direction it is taking.

  Many characteristics of fairy tale as a tradition have contributed to this change: first, the stories’ fallaciousness, the very quality that inspired scorn, makes them potential conduits of another way of seeing the world, of telling an alternative story. The mythical hope they conjure actually builds a mythology in which utopian desires find their place. Fairy tales often attack received ideas: monsters turn out to be handsome young princes, beggars princesses, ugly old women powerful and benevolent fairies (especially if you are nice to them and give them something to eat and do their laundry without a fuss). Fairy tales often champion lost causes, runts of the litter, the slow-witted and the malformed. An analogy would be the maxim of the Czech dissidents before the Velvet revolution: Live as if the freedoms you desire were yours already. Only by refusing the constraints that are imposed can they be broken – this is also true of imagining another life, making a new world.

  Fairy tales feel out the rules: the forbidden door opens on to terra nova where different rules may apply. Curiosity, so closely linked to speech, runs live electricity through many of the stories, and though the questor (Psyche, Bluebeard’s wife, Goldilocks) is often punished for not abiding by the rules, the story also runs against its own grain by rewarding her just the same. Since the first medieval romances, with their fairies and monsters, the unreal settings and impossible situations have made possible the exploration of sexual experience and sexual fantasy. One of the chief tropes by which approaches to this forbidden territory are negotiated is animal metamorphosis: confronting or defining the outlawed and alien literally affects the figures in the stories; the beastly or less than human becomes an index of alienation, and often of one’s own otherness; the story relates the possibility of acceptance, an end to the ache of longing to belong.

  The body of the schoolteacher Lisa (played by Alice Kriege) is carried into an inner chamber to be enshrined in Institute Benjamenta, a film by the Quay Brothers inspired by Snow White and other writings of Robert Walser.

  The domain of fantasy where fairy tales grow has a long, heterodox pedigree, and there has been in history a prolonged struggle between different social groups to control the storyteller. The genre’s fortunes have entered a new phase: a certain view of fairy tales is being naturalized by companies like Disney, and then domesticated by publishers like Ladybird Books, who have now struck a deal with Disney so that all the illustrations are based on the films’ graphics and storyline. The voices whom L’Héritier and Calvino and Schwartz-Bart heard, for instance, risk being lost in the noise of these loud standard numbers, with certain prejudices and values deeply instilled. This is one of the prima facie problems of corporate reach in the global village: in the same way as hedgerows are shedding variety of species, flora and fauna, the imagination of children reared on Ladybird fairy tales will be saturated with the Disney version, graphic and verbal.

  This process of loss has to be resisted: as individual women’s voices have become absorbed into the corporate body of male-dominated decision-makers, the misogyny present in many fairy stories – the wicked stepmothers, bad fairies, ogresses, spoiled princesses, ugly sisters and so forth – has lost its connections to the particular web of tensions in which women were enmeshed and come to look dangerously like the way things are. The historical context of the stories has been sheared away, and figures like the wicked stepmother have grown into archetypes of the human psyche, hallowed, inevitable symbols, while figures like the Beast bridegroom hav
e been granted ever more positive status. Generally speaking, the body of story has passed out of the mouth of the quiltmaker from Palermo, on to the lips of film-makers – Steven Spielberg – or psychoanalysts – Bruno Bettelheim – or therapists – Robert Bly. The danger of women has become more and more part of the story, and correspondingly, the danger of men has receded: Cinderella’s and Snow White’s wicked stepmothers teach children to face life’s little difficulties, it is argued, but films about a Bluebeard or a child murderer, as in ‘Tom Thumb’, are rated Adults Only.17

  There are grounds for profound pessimism about the narrative possibilities that remain. Yet fairy tale provides motifs in common, a sign language and an image store which can be interpreted and re-interpreted, as many contemporary artists and writers are now doing, from Robert Coover’s fictional reworking of ‘Pinocchio’, to Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories, (his predicament seen through The Arabian Nights), A. S. Byatt’s Possession and later tales; to Jeanette Winterson’s experimental novels. Among artists, Paula Rego has continued to explore conflicts and tenderness within families and between the sexes using the shared terms of nonsense verses, and new fairy tales like Peter Pan; the Quay Brothers, with The Comb (1991) and Institute Benjamenta (1994), inspired by Robert Walser’s Snow White and other writings, and Joanna Woodward, in Princess Brooch and the Sinful Clasp (1981), have used a mixture of live action and animation to dramatize psychological discovery and erotic adventure in a true fairytale spirit of ‘insatiable curtiosity’.