In some ways it is bracing to see the fairy tale, which belongs to popular culture and draws on the vernacular, enshrined as a form of high art. Derided as “simple stories” and “children’s tales,” they are rarely recognized as being the plainspoken expression of complex thought. Although historical evidence points to multigenerational audiences, both male and female, as the driving force for oral storytelling cultures, inventing fairy tales has long been considered a “domestic art,” at least since Plato in the Gorgias referred to the “old wives’ tales” told by nurses to amuse and to frighten children. Virtually all of the national collections of fairy tales compiled in the nineteenth century were the work of men—dignified scholars, urban and urbane. Yet the tales themselves were ascribed to female narrators, symbolically represented as Gammer Grethel, Mother Goose, and Mother Bunch, and embodied in real life as untutored peasant women.
As early as the second century C.E., Apuleius, the North African author of The Golden Ass, had designated his story of Cupid and Psyche (told by a drunken and half-demented old woman) as belonging to the genre of “old wives’ tales.” The Italian writer Straparola claimed to have heard the stories that constituted his Facetious Nights “from the lips of lady storytellers,” and he embedded those stories in a narrative frame featuring a circle of eloquent female narrators.11 Giambattista Basile’s Pentamerone also has women storytellers—quick-witted, gossipy old crones who recount “those tales that old women tell to amuse children.”12 The renowned Tales of Mother Goose by Charles Perrault was designated by its author as a collection of old wives’ tales, “told by governesses and grandmothers to little children.”13 Many of the most expansive informants consulted by the Grimms were women—family friends, servants, and acquaintances who had at their disposal a rich repertoire of folklore. The most notable among them was Dorothea Viehmann, whose rough-hewn visage became the face of the collection over the decades. Later collections too, like George Dasent’s Popular Tales from the Norse, invoked an image of “old and feeble women” as the “depositories of these national treasures.”
The association of fairy tales with the domestic arts and with old wives’ tales has not done much to enhance their cultural status. “On a par with trifles,” Marina Warner stresses, “ ‘mere old wives’ tales carry connotations of error, of false counsel, ignorance, prejudice and fallacious nostrums—against heartbreak as well as headache; similarly ‘fairy tale’ as a derogatory term, implies fantasy, escapism, invention, the unreliable consolations of romance.”14 Fantasy, escape, recovery, and consolation—these are the quartet of terms Tolkien defined as the key positive components of fairy stories. By connecting fairy tales with the mythical rather than maternal, Tolkien succeeded, with one magical stroke, in restoring a level of dignity they apparently lacked when linked with gossips, godmothers, and grannies.
Today, our portal to fairy tales is Disney Studios, and films like Sleeping Beauty, Beauty and the Beast, and The Little Mermaid have real cultural traction because of those feature-length animated films. Disney kept the stories alive yet also created standard versions driven by market forces rather than communal energies. What was once folk culture became mass culture, moving top down rather than bottom up and mirroring values determined by a conglomerate rather than by a storytelling collective. More important, by animating fairy tales with cartoon technologies, Disney decisively moved fairy tales back to the nursery, despite advertisements trumpeting their “magic” for the young and the “young at heart.” Once again, fairy tales are dismissed as childish confections meant to entertain and distract more than anything else. Disney’s nostalgic appropriations form a stark contrast with many of the critically reflective adaptations in this volume. Those rescriptings bring fairy tales back and self-reflexively critique their terms by giving them new twists and turns. Yet Disney Studios also continually reinvents the fairy tale, most recently with live-action versions that mirror a growing understanding of the multigenerational appeal of the tales. Efforts to include characters that deviate from the flat, stereotypical wonders of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs or Cinderella have added a form of self-conscious narrative play and subtlety not seen in the early films. As critics of arguments about the monolithic, numbing effects of the cultural industry in all its corporate manifestations have also pointed out, film viewers are anything but passive recipients. They actively engage in critique, reenactment, and recasting, often disavowing rather than embracing the terms of what they watch.
A strong case could be made that Disney’s culturally conservative approach to fairy tales accounts for the resurgence of adult interest in the genre. It was the feminist critique of fairy tales (Disney versions in particular), beginning in the 1970s, which in some ways brought fairy tales back, restoring them to the canon and making them culturally relevant by pointing to the obligation to reinvent them. In what can be seen as a catalytic moment, Alison Lurie recruited fairy tales to the feminist cause,15 while Marcia Lieberman denounced them for acculturating women to “traditional social roles.” “Millions of women,” she added, “must surely have formed their psycho-sexual self-concepts, and their ideas of what they could or could not accomplish, what sort of behavior could be rewarded, and the nature of reward itself, in part from their favorite fairy tales.”16
In the very same decade that Lurie and Lieberman set the terms for later debates, Bruno Bettelheim was arguing for the revival of fairy tales and the “uses of enchantment.” Drawing on psychoanalytic theories, he emphasized the importance for children of stories with a dark side, tales that enacted in symbolic form unconscious anxieties and desires. Fairy tales had the power to calm the “cauldron of seething emotions” that is the mind of the child, with its “narcissistic disappointments, oedipal dilemmas, sibling rivalries.”17 The sensational content of fairy-tale plots—there is no shortage of bloodthirsty ogres, cunning witches, flesh-eating giants, and cruel stepmothers in them—had therapeutic benefits, according to Bettelheim.
The Uses of Enchantment put fairy tales squarely back in the canon of children’s literature, and at the same time the volume legitimized the academic study of fairy tales, revealing that there were multiple layers of latent meaning in the manifest content of fairy tales. Scholars were drawn into the orbit of the agenda Bettelheim set, studying the magic, mystery, and violence of tales in the European canon. But given the orthodox Freudian readings of fairy tales set forth in the volume, there was also much to contest and critique, setting the stage for a powerful reorientation of the field toward multiple issues ranging from the sexual politics of fairy-tale stereotypes to the cultural politics of fairy-tale adaptations.
If Disney and Bettelheim both move in the restorative mode, seeking to bring back “tales as old as time” for the young, feminist adaptations of fairy tales move along a different path, producing creative adaptations that unsettle the genre by breaking with tradition and renewing it. “Make it new” was never a piece of advice you had to give storytellers spinning yarns at communal gatherings. They were always making it new—shamelessly cutting and pasting but always improvising as well—so that their stories would tick and whirr just as smoothly as the ones told the night before. The most skillful raconteurs, then as now, were the iconoclasts. They were able to preserve the raw energy of the tales and keep them alive precisely because they were constantly trying to undo them. In the 1980s Anne Sexton took up the role of iconoclast, undermining the history and wisdom of the past encoded in fairy tales and reimagining the Grimms’ fairy tales through parody and critique. Her Transformations takes up the excesses of fairy tales, exaggerating and inflating them until they blow up, destroying them and doing them one better at the same time.
The poems in Sexton’s volume stake a claim to producing fairy tales by declaring the poet herself to be the new source of folk wisdom and of oracular authority. She positions herself as speaker, “my face in a book” (presumably the Grimms’ Children’s Stories and Household Tales), with “mouth wide, ready to tell you a
story or two.”18 In a self-described appropriation of the Grimms’ legacy (“I take the fairy tale and transform it into a poem of my own”), Sexton models how to create new stories that stage “very wry and cruel and sadistic and funny” psychic battles. As “middle-aged witch,” Sexton presents herself as a master of the black arts, of an opaque art of illusion, and also as a disruptive force, a figure of anarchic energy that subverts conventional cultural wisdom.
Nowhere is Sexton’s critique of romantic love, of the “happily ever after” of fairy tales, more searingly expressed than in the final strophe of her “Cinderella”:
Cinderella and the prince
lived, they say, happily ever after
like two dolls in a museum case,
never bothered by diapers and dust,
never arguing over the timing of an egg,
never telling the same story twice,
never getting a middle-aged spread,
their darling smiles pasted on for eternity.
Regular Bobbsey Twins.
That story.
Sexton’s transformations reveal the gap between “that story” and reality, yet at the same time they expose the specious terms of “that story,” showing just how intolerable it would be, even if true.
Sexton’s smart, sassy poems entered into an impassioned dialogue with the Brothers Grimm, contesting their premises, interrogating their plots, and reinventing their conclusions. Other writers, recognizing the social energy of these tales, have followed her lead, rewriting and recasting stories written down by Perrault, the Grimms, Madame de Beaumont, Hans Christian Andersen, Alexander Afanasev, and many others. The intertextual dialogue may not always be as pronounced as is the case with Sexton’s poetry. In some cases the fairy-tale inspiration will not be announced in the title, and readers will have to make their own connections, as is the case in many cinematic productions. Jane Campion’s The Piano, for example, opens with a nod to Andersen’s “Little Mermaid,” then alludes repeatedly to the Grimms’ “Robber Bridegroom” and Perrault’s “Bluebeard.”
With her collection of stories The Bloody Chamber, Carter joined Sexton in defamiliarizing and reworking the familiar scripts of fairy tales. Making it her business to “demythify” fairy tales, Carter aimed to mount “a critique of current relations between the sexes.” She positioned herself as a “moral pornographer,” a writer seeking to “penetrate to the heart of the contempt for women that distorts our culture.” “Beauty and the Beast,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Bluebeard,” and “Sleeping Beauty”: all these stories have, according to Carter, a “violently sexual” side to them, a latent content that becomes manifest in the rescriptings of fairy tales for an adult audience.19 Carter aims above all to demystify these sacred cultural texts, to show that we can break their magic spells and that social change is possible once we become aware of how the tales have guided our social, moral, and personal development, shaping our identity in ways we fail to process at a conscious level.
In the same era as Carter and Sexton, Margaret Atwood was writing novels and short stories that adapted and critiqued fairy tales, showing the degree to which the stories inform our affective life, programming our responses to romance, defining our desires, and constructing our anxieties. Like Sally, the fictional heroine of her short story “Bluebeard’s Egg,” Atwood questions the seemingly timeless and universal truths of our cultural stories by reflecting on their assumptions and exploring how they can be unsettled through rewriting. The full self-reflexive force of critical adaptations comes to bear on this story about a woman taking a writing class in which she is given an assignment to rewrite the Grimms’ “Fitcher’s Bird,” a variant of “Bluebeard.” As Jessica Tiffin notes in a study of narrative and metafiction in modern fairy tales, adaptations like Atwood’s recapture the magic of the fairy tale as a “self-aware artifact with the power to adapt, change, and reflect the needs and concerns of its age.”20
Not all creative adaptations take the same turn as these feminist rewritings, which set the stage for the proliferation of new fairy-tale treatments in Anglo-American cultures and beyond. In this volume I have included two authors who give us literary fairy tales that are neither restorative nor critical but something of a hybrid of the two. Both Hans Christian Andersen and Oscar Wilde were deeply familiar with oral traditions. Andersen, who grew up in impoverished circumstances, listened to fairy tales in the spinning room at the local asylum where his grandmother worked. “As a child, it was my greatest pleasure to listen to fairy tales,” he wrote, “and some of those are either very little or not at all known. I have retold one of them here, and if it wins approval, I plan to retell several, and one day to publish a cycle of ‘Danish Folk Tales.’ ”21 Over the years, however, it dawned on Andersen that he could “write” his own fairy tales rather than just reproduce the ones he remembered from childhood. His excitement about branching out into a form that would appeal to children and adults alike is captured in a letter to a friend:
I believe that I have now found out how to write fairy tales! The first ones I wrote were, as you know, mostly old ones I had heard as a child and that I usually retold and recreated in my own fashion; those that were my very own such as “The Little Mermaid,” “The Storks,” and “The Daisy,” received, however, the greatest approval and that has given me inspiration. Now I tell stories of my own accord, seize an idea for adults—and then tell it for the children while still keeping in mind the fact that mother and father are listening too, and they must have a little something for thought!22
Like Andersen, Oscar Wilde, whose father had published a book on Irish superstitions in 1852 and whose mother produced a book called Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland, was steeped in folkloric traditions as a child as well as in his adult life. The fairy tales he wrote share much with stories from oral storytelling traditions, but, again like Andersen, he added his own creative twists, strengthened the cult of beautiful objects in the tales, and encoded them with messages about human suffering and social justice. These literary re-creations replaced what the critic André Jolles referred to as the naive morality of fairy tales (“our absolute instinctual judgment of what is good and just”) with a belief in redemption through suffering as well as a heightened sense of social justice.23 Both Andersen and Wilde inflected the tales in ways that returned them to multigenerational audiences, revealing how the compact form of the fairy tale lends itself to stories that are both intellectually engaging and consonant with cultural values of their time.
Today, “Cinderella,” “Sleeping Beauty,” and “Jack and the Beanstalk” keep coming back, always inflected in new ways. On screen, they trumpet their genealogy in titles like Tommy Wirkola’s Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters or Tex Avery’s Red Hot Riding Hood. But even more often they conceal their affiliations, as in Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (remember those female raptors in the kitchen, eager to make a meal of Lex and Tim?) and David Slade’s Hard Candy (with Ellen Page sporting a red hoodie and, for a change, stalking the wolf).
Fairy tales seem to have a built-in refresh button, inviting us to adapt and repurpose them as they migrate into new scenes of storytelling and make themselves at home in new media. In the 1940s, the Bluebeard story set up shop in Hollywood, and screenwriters dropped subtle hints about their folkloric point of reference with oversize house keys, forbidden chambers, and marriages haunted by the threat of murder. The vogue was brief but intense, with George Cukor’s Gaslight (1944), Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946), and Fritz Lang’s Secret beyond the Door (1947) among the most prominent examples.24 Ever since Georges Méliès made the short film Barbe-bleue in 1902, we keep encountering the fairy-tale figure on screen, in works ranging from Charlie Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux (1947) to Catherine Breillat’s Barbe Bleue (2009) and Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2015), with its reclusive CEO of a tech company known as Blue Book.
The question of adaptation has been taken up productively by Cristina Bacchilega, who
writes about a fairy-tale web (using a metaphor drawn from discourses about the connectedness and interdependence of fairy tales in general) and the “multimedial or transmedial proliferation of fairy-tale transformations in recent years.”25 She is concerned with how stories “mingle with, influence, anticipate, interrupt, take over, or support one another,” engaging in reciprocal intertextual exchanges that cannot always be neatly identified and mapped.
This volume explores the process of adaptation—restorative, critical, and creative—and those categories that, of course, have considerable overlap with each other. The marvelous messiness of fairy-tale networks defies the systematic classification systems developed by folklorists in the past century. As such, this work can refer only in passing to the many fairy-tale motifs, tropes, and characters that fuel the imaginations of writers, poets, filmmakers, dramatists, and others. Little Red Riding Hood lurks in the shadows of many cultural productions, just as Cinderella has informed the construction of many a female protagonist. When Carrie loses a shoe in the television series Sex and the City, has she turned into Cinderella? When the narrator of Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane drives down a road flanked by brambles and briar roses, is he reenacting the journey of the prince in Sleeping Beauty? Perhaps not, but the stories flash out at us, deepening and complicating the quests undertaken in those made-up lives.
How do we make it new today? What is the secret sauce for successful fairy-tale adaptations? Poe’s “Imp of the Perverse” often steals into fairy-tale territory to animate reinventions. Snow White luxuriates in her coffin and becomes a vampiric ghoul in Neil Gaiman’s “Snow, Glass, Apples”; Sleeping Beauty becomes a willing sexual slave in Anne Rice’s quartet of Sleeping Beauty novels; Rumpelstiltskin is ready for a killing spree in John Katzenbach’s The Analyst. Our adult entertainments demand fictions larger than life and twice as unnatural, and fairy tales offer up scandalous melodrama in portions that are generously extravagant, if sometimes profoundly unappetizing.
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