It is tempting to dismiss some of these adaptations as nothing more than guilty pleasures served up to us by a cultural industry that recognizes the power of narratives in a secular age. But fairy tales tap into something much deeper—primal questions that are not just up close and personal but also deeply implicated in our collective aspirations. These stories are encoded with enigmas, provocative puzzles challenging us to debate their terms even if we cannot solve them. Hansel and Gretel, forced to leave home, face down a demon who embodies warmth and hospitality—offering the children comfort food and a soft bed—but she soon turns murderously hostile, fattening them up for a feast. What are we to make of this form of cruelty, masquerading as kindness? Beauty is turned over to Beast in a story that tests the limits of compassion and empathy in the face of monstrosity. How do we manage our own anxieties about alterity and the dark doubles that haunt our imaginations? Briar Rose invites riskless voyeurism in scenes that feed our desire for beauty’s protection against mortality, corruption, and decay. Is Sleeping Beauty also somehow implicated in all those magazine images of fashion models who are made up to appear as lifeless as they are flawless? The constant in these stories is less character than abstract concepts, always reshuffled and reinvigorated by the values of the next generation of tellers.
“On the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, an unintelligible truth.”26 These words, drawn from The Unbearable Lightness of Being (where they are applied to a painting), tell us something about the illusory surfaces in all fairy tales and about the challenging complexities of what lies beneath. The words of Milan Kundera’s character remind us of why Einstein is reputed to have said, “If you want intelligent children, read them fairy tales. If you want more intelligent children, read them more fairy tales.”27 The stories possess what the philosopher Paul Ricoeur calls ontological vehemence, a bracing liveliness that challenges us to think more and to think harder.
Fairy tales deliver not only the shock of beauty, as Max Lüthi put it in a folkloric meditation on the genre, but also jolts of horror, rewiring our brains and also charging them up, challenging us to make sense of the harsh realities exposed in them. The pleasures of the genre arouse curiosity about the world around us and provide social, cultural, and intellectual capital for navigating its perils. For that reason, fairy tales have been credited with an insurrectionary and emancipatory potential that goes against the grain of conventional wisdom about fairy tales as trivial pursuits. Jack Zipes tells us that fairy tales are “informed by a human disposition to action—to transform the world and make it more adaptable to human needs, while we try to change and make ourselves fit for the world.”28 As the philosopher Ernst Bloch put it, fairy tales hold forth the utopian promise of “something better,” or a “more colorful and easier somewhere else,” a place that lies over the rainbow, east o’ the sun and west o’ the moon, in the land of milk and honey.29
We are forever reinventing fairy tales, and scholarly efforts to classify, categorize, and bring order into the storytelling world can easily misfire, breaking spells in ways that destroy the spirit of stories rather than enabling critical thinking about them. Still, some part of the brain seems to light up when we discover that our Little Red Riding Hood has a distant relative in some other time and place, or that “Beauty and the Beast” has a global reach, or that Sleeping Beauty has many male counterparts in other cultures. The geographical orientation in this volume is Anglo-American and European, not for the purpose of establishing a canon but rather as a way of developing a disciplinary base. Fairy tales were not invented in Europe or Great Britain. They have flourished in every time and place since humans began telling stories to each other. Recent efforts to locate the origins of fairy tales in sixteenth-century Venice fail to take into account the fact that variants of the stories circulated in Asian and African cultures long before they were written down and became part of a print culture.
Fairy tales not only seem to be part of our DNA, they also seem to have a replicatory power of their own, operating like memes, to use Richard Dawkins’s term. This volume includes units on a range of different tale types: “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “Snow White,” “Sleeping Beauty,” “Cinderella,” and “Bluebeard.” It then turns to trickster figures, boys and girls who use their wits and courage to escape from monsters and find their way back home. Finally it concludes with literary fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen and Oscar Wilde, stories that have become collective cultural property, on a global level in the case of Andersen. A set of critical essays forms the second part of the volume, and each of the authors offers different disciplinary approaches to fairy-tale research and introduces a range of analytic concepts that can be brought to bear on the texts included. Storytelling is a culture-building activity, as these essays reveal, one that makes the human world, but, as the tales included here are forever reminding us, they also make the world human.
Bill Willingham explains exactly why he used fairy-tale plots, characters, and tropes to construct his series of graphic novels titled Fables:
The thing that moved me toward fairy-tale stories: One, it’s a group of characters and stories that we all own. Every single person in the world owns all of these characters and stories outright. We’re all born with an inheritance that we can take advantage of. I think those of us who are doing fairy-tale-based stories are the ones who are sort of cashing in on our inheritance.… You do not have to get anyone’s permission to do a new version of Snow White, for example. We’re social people. We get ideas from each other.30
This is a legacy that does not weigh us down but rather lifts us up with its beauty, poetry, and power to envision perils and possibilities. We are right to preserve it, nurture it, and watch it grow.
* * *
1. Lewis is quoted by Wendy Berg and Mike Harris, The Secret History of Western Religion (Woodbury, MN: Llewellyn, 2003), p. 1.
2. Neil Gailman’s essay can be found at: theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/15/neil-gaiman-future-libraries-reading-daydreaming.
3. As Steven Swann Jones puts it, “fairy tales depict magical or marvellous events or phenomena as a valid part of human experience.” See his The Fairy Tale: The Magic Mirror of the Imagination (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 9.
4. Marina Warner, Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014), p. xxii.
5. Vladimir Nabokov, “Good Readers and Good Writers,” in Lectures on Literature, ed. Fredson Bowers (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1998), p. 5.
6. Tolkien writes about the Cauldron of Story in “On Fairy-Stories,” in The Tolkien Reader (New York: Ballantine, 1966). Rushdie refers to the “ocean of the stream of stories” in Haroun and the Sea of Stories (New York: Granta Books, 1990).
7. Angela Carter, ed., The Virago Book of Fairy Tales (London: Virago, 1990), p. x.
8. Charles Dickens, “Frauds on the Fairies,” in Household Words: A Weekly Journal (New York: McElrath & Barker, 1854), p. 97.
9. George Cruikshank, George Cruikshank’s Fairy Library (London: Bell & Daldy, 1854), p. 38.
10. W. H. Auden, “In Praise of the Brothers Grimm,” New York Times Book Review, November 12, 1944, p. 1.
11. Giovan Francesco Straparola, The Facetious Nights, trans. W. G. Waters (London: Privately Printed for Members of the Society of Bibliophiles, 1901).
12. The Pentamerone, trans. Benedetto Croce, ed. N. M. Penzer (London: Bodley Head, 1932), p. 9.
13. Charles Perrault, “Préface,” Contes en vers (1694; reprint, Paris: Gallimard, 1981), p. 50.
14. Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994), p. 19.
15. Alison Lurie, “Fairy Tale Liberation,” New York Review of Books, December 17, 1970, pp. 42–44.
16. Marcia K. Lieberman, “ ‘Some Day My Prince Will Come’: Female Acculturation through the Fairy Tale,” College English 34 (1972): 383–95.
17. Bruno Bettelheim,
The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (New York: Knopf, 1976), p. 6.
18. Diane Middlebrook, Anne Sexton: A Biography (New York: Random House, Vintage, 1992), p. 336.
19. Robin Ann Sheets, “Pornography, Fairy Tales, and Feminism: Angela Carter’s ‘The Bloody Chamber,’ ” Journal of the History of Sexuality 1 (1991): 635.
20. Jessica Tiffin, Marvelous Geometry: Metafiction and Narrative in Modern Fairy Tales (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2009), p. 234.
21. Jackie Wullschlager, Hans Christian Andersen: The Life of a Storyteller (New York: Knopf, 2001), p. 49.
22. Bo Grønbech, Hans Christian Andersen (Boston: Twayne, 1980), p. 81.
23. Einfache Formen: Legende, Sage, Mythe, Rätsel, Spruch, Kasus, Memorabile, Märchen, Witz (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1958).
24. For the cinematic variations, see Maria Tatar, Secrets beyond the Door: The Story of Bluebeard and His Wives (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2006).
25. Cristina Bacchilega, Fairy Tales Transformed?: Twenty-First-Century Adaptations and the Politics of Wonder (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2013), p. 16.
26. Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being: A Novel (New York: Harper Perennial, 2009), p. 63.
27. See en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein#Disputed.
28. Jack Zipes, The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2013), p. 2.
29. Ernst Bloch, “The Fairy Tale Moves on Its Own in Time” in The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988).
30. “Fable Master: Bill Willingham Modernized Fairy Tales before Modernizing Fairy Tales Was Cool,” Willamette Week, April 24, 2013.
The Texts of
THE CLASSIC FAIRY TALES
NEIL GAIMAN
Instructions†
Touch the wooden gate in the wall you never saw before.
Say “please” before you open the latch,
go through,
walk down the path.
A red metal imp hangs from the green-painted front door,
as a knocker,
do not touch it; it will bite your fingers.
Walk through the house. Take nothing. Eat nothing.
However,
if any creature tells you that it hungers,
feed it.
If it tells you that it is dirty,
clean it.
If it cries to you that it hurts,
if you can,
ease its pain.
From the back garden you will be able to see the wild wood.
The deep well you walk past leads to Winter’s realm;
there is another land at the bottom of it.
If you turn around here,
you can walk back, safely;
you will lose no face. I will think no less of you.
Once through the garden you will be in the wood.
The trees are old. Eyes peer from the undergrowth.
Beneath a twisted oak sits an old woman. She may ask for something;
give it to her. She
will point the way to the castle.
Inside it are three princesses.
Do not trust the youngest. Walk on.
In the clearing beyond the castle the twelve months sit about a fire,
warming their feet, exchanging tales.
They may do favors for you, if you are polite.
You may pick strawberries in December’s frost.
Trust the wolves, but do not tell them where you are going.
The river can be crossed by the ferry. The ferryman will take you.
(The answer to his question is this:
If he hands the oar to his passenger, he will be free to leave the boat.
Only tell him this from a safe distance.)
If an eagle gives you a feather, keep it safe.
Remember: that giants sleep too soundly; that
witches are often betrayed by their appetites;
dragons have one soft spot, somewhere, always;
hearts can be well-hidden, and you betray them with your tongue.
Do not be jealous of your sister.
Know that diamonds and roses
are as uncomfortable when they tumble from one’s lips as toads and frogs:
colder, too, and sharper, and they cut.
Remember your name.
Do not lose hope—what you seek will be found.
Trust ghosts. Trust those that you have helped to help you in their turn.
Trust dreams. Trust your heart, and trust your story.
When you come back, return the way you came.
Favors will be returned, debts be repaid.
Do not forget your manners.
Do not look back.
Ride the wise eagle (you shall not fall)
Ride the silver fish (you will not drown)
Ride the gray wolf (hold tightly to his fur).
There is a worm at the heart of the tower; that is why it will not stand.
When you reach the little house, the place your journey started
you will recognize it, although it will seem much smaller than you remember.
Walk up the path, and through the garden gate you never saw before but once.
And then go home. Or make a home.
Or rest.
* * *
† Neil Gaiman, “Instructions,” in A Wolf at the Door, ed. Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), pp. 405–07. Copyright © 2000 by Neil Gaiman. Reprinted by permission.
INTRODUCTION: Little Red Riding Hood
“Little Red Riding Hood was my first love. I felt that if I could have married Little Red Riding Hood, I should have known perfect bliss.”1 When Charles Dickens made this confession, he was living in an age that knew only the innocent child in stories collected by Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm. In those folkloric treatments, a villainous predator squares off against a sweet, trusting child and earns a bad name for himself as a ruthless, gluttonous beast. Dickens’s first love had not yet grown up to become Red Hot Riding Hood, Little Red Running Shorts, Little Red Riding Crop, or any number of other seductive sirens, attractive fashionistas, and unyielding avengers who face down the horrors of beasts in the forest.
We often think of “Little Red Riding Hood” as a story with a whiff of the archaic, but it is in fact alive and present in our own culture with near manic expressive intensity. So ubiquitous is the tale that it sometimes disappears from sight precisely because it is so familiar. The girl in red appears in story and song, on screen and on the written page, on the runway as well as on stage. A source of adult entertainment, she is also very much at home in the nursery, telling us not only about encounters between predator and prey but also about human interactions that foreground innocence and seduction.2 Hers is a story about appetite in all shadings of the term, from primal hunger to sexual desire, both tainted by the threat of desire turning dark and deadly—desire so rapacious that it feeds on human life. We are as much in the realm of myth as of fairy tale, with stories that provide a platform for staging the consequences of desires, sinister and benign, in their most vivid and extreme form.
“Little Red Riding Hood” most likely emerged as part of a storytelling culture that took up the theme of predatory animals roaming the countryside in search of food. As Barbara Ehrenreich tells us, “human storytelling … grew out of encounters with real animal predators and served as a means of fear management as well as a means to ready the group for future encounters.”3 The earliest versions of “Little Red Riding Hood” featured wolves on the prowl, looking for nothing more than a tasty meal. It was only in the course of the nineteenth century that the story bifurcated, taking two different paths in Anglo-American and European cultures. It migrated directly into the nursery to become a story with a disciplinary edge and all kinds of behavioral directives designed to teach the child outside the story lessons. At the same time, in more subtle
and dispersed ways, Little Red Riding Hood entered adult culture, where she and a metaphorical wolf dance a tango of innocence and seduction, with a sultry Red Riding Hood perfectly capable, over time, of playing the wolf.
The girl in red, now often positioned as a seductive innocent who stalks a monstrous predator as much as she fears him, is no longer a willing victim. When the heroine of the popular 1990s TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer dresses up as Little Red Riding Hood for Halloween, she carries weapons in her basket. Matthew Bright’s Freeway (1996) takes us to the mean streets of southern California, with an urban Red Riding Hood named Vanessa Lutz who sports a red leather jacket as she tries to elude a host of predators, among them a pedophile serial killer named Bob Wolverton. In David Slade’s Hard Candy (2005), a fourteen-year-old girl in a hooded red sweatshirt, brilliantly played by a sweet-looking Ellen Page, turns out to be not so innocent. She sets out to torture an on-line sexual predator in ways that are nearly unimaginable. Joe Wright, the director of Hanna (2011), reinvents Red Riding Hood as a genetically modified teenage assassin, who goes out for target practice dressed in pelts. In the cabin where she lives with her father, she spends cold Norwegian winter evenings reading the Grimms’ fairy tales, pausing to reflect on “Little Red Riding Hood.”
The heroine’s path to predator is not as unexpected as might seem at first blush. Fairy tales, as folklorists and historians never tire of reminding us, have their roots in a peasant culture relatively uninhibited in its expressive energy. For centuries, agricultural laborers and domestic workers relied on the telling of tales to shorten the hours devoted to repetitive tasks, ranging from hoeing and harvesting to spinning and sewing. Is it surprising that, in an age without radios, televisions, and other electronic wonders, they favored fast-paced narratives with heavy doses of burlesque humor, melodramatic action, scatological jokes, and free-wheeling violence?
The Classic Fairy Tales (Second Edition) (Norton Critical Editions) Page 3