So although male writers and collectors have dominated the production and dissemination of popular wonder tales, they often pass on women’s stories from intimate or domestic milieux; their tale-spinners often figure as so many Scheherazades, using narrative to bring about a resolution of satisfaction and justice. Marguerite de Navarre, in the Heptaméron, gives the stories to ten speakers, five of whom are women: they too, like the narrator of The Arabian Nights, put their own case, veiled in entertaining and occasionally licentious fantasy. Boccaccio, and his admirer and emulator (to some degree) Chaucer, voiced the stories of women, and some contain folk material which makes a strong showing in later fairy stories; the Venetian Giovan Francesco Straparola (the ‘Babbler’) reported the stories told by a circle of ladies in his entertaining and sometimes scabrous fantasies, filled with fairytale motifs and improbabilities, called Le piacevoli notti (The Pleasant Nights), published in 1550; the Neapolitan Giambattista Basile, in Lo cunto de li cunti (The Tale of Tales), also known as Il Pentamerone (The Pentameron), published posthumously in 1634–6, featured a group of wizened and misshapen old crones as his sources.
The women who inaugurated the fashion for the written fairy tale, in Paris at the end of the seventeenth century, consistently claimed they had heard the stories they were retelling from nurses and servants. Mme de Sévigné, writing to her daughter, revealingly reported a metaphor borrowed from the kitchen to describe the new enthusiasm: ‘cela s’appelle les [contes] mitonner. Elle nous mitonna donc, et nous parla d’une île verte, où l’on élevait une princesse plus belle que le jour’ (it’s called simmering them [tales]; so she simmered for us, and talked to us about a green isle where a princess grew up who was more beautiful than the day).
Charles Perrault’s collection of 1697 bore the alternative title of Contes de ma Mère l’Oye (Mother Goose Tales); in an earlier preface, to the tale ‘Peau d’Ane’ (Donkeyskin), Perrault also placed his work in the tradition of Milesian bawdy, like the tale of ‘Cupid and Psyche’, but he added that he was passing on ‘an entirely made up story and an old wives’ tale’, such as had been told to children since time immemorial by their nurses. While referring to a written canon, he thus disengaged himself from its élite character to invoke old women, grandmothers and governesses as his true predecessors. He was quick to add, however, that unlike the moral of ‘Cupid and Psyche’ (‘impénétrable’), his own was patently clear, which made it far superior to its classical predecessors:
These Milesian fables are so puerile that it is doing them rather an honour to set up against them our own Donkeyskin tales and Mother Goose tales, or [they are] so filled with dirt, like The Golden Ass of Lucian or Apuleius … that they do not merit that we should pay them attention.
Perrault may have had his tongue in his cheek when he protested that ‘Donkeyskin’, a tale of father-daughter incest, was morally impeccable. But a contemporary pedant, the Abbé de Villiers, took his argument at face value, and rounded in outrage on Perrault and the writers of fairy tales, penning a pamphlet against the genre, ‘As a preventive measure against bad taste.’ There he lumped women and children together as the perpetrators of the new fad: ‘Ignorant and foolish, they have filled the world with so many collections, so many little stories, and in short with these reams of fairy tales which have been the death of us for the last year or so.’ The diminutive form of the nouns (sornettes, bagatelles, historiettes) recurs in the rhetoric of detractors and supporters alike; the former branding fairy stories as infantile, the latter praising them as childlike. This tension between opposing perceptions of the child informs the development of the tales and continues to do so.
Villiers sets up an imaginary debate between a fashionable Parisian and a sensible visitor from the provinces. The provincial calls them sottises imprimées (follies in print) and compares them derogatorily to fables, scorning them as ‘Tales to make you fall asleep on your feet, that nurses have made up to entertain children’. The Parisian counters that nurses have to be highly skilled to tell them. To which the provincial retorts that if such tales ever contained a coherent moral purpose, they would not be considered in the first place ‘the lot of ignorant folk and women’. The battle was joined, over the value of fairy tales; their female origin was not really contested.
Villiers’s Parisian was putting forward the views of poets and literati like Mlle Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier de Villandon (1664–1734), a cousin and close friend of Perrault, who defended the form with fighting spirit precisely because it conveyed the ancient, pure wisdom of the people from the fountainhead—old women, nurses, governesses. In her preface to the story ‘Marmoisan, ou l’innocente tromperie’ (Marmoisan, or the innocent trick) of 1696, she declared herself a partisan of women and their stories, remembering: ‘A hundred times and more, my governess, instead of animal fables, would draw for me the moral features of this surprising story.… Why yes, once heard, such tales are far more striking than the exploits of a monkey and a wolf. I took an extreme pleasure in them—as does every child.’
L’Héritier could never rid her praise of its defensive tone (‘the moral features’), and for good reason. The phrase ‘old wives’ tale’ was superficially pejorative when Apuleius used it on the lips of his hoary-headed crone of a storyteller; it remained so, in the very act of authenticating the folk wisdom of the stories by stressing the wise old women who had carried on the tradition. It is still, in English, an ambiguous phrase: an old wives’ tale means a piece of nonsense, a tissue of error, an ancient act of deception, of self and others, idle talk. As Marlowe writes in Dr Faustus, ‘Tush, these are trifles and mere old wives’ tales.’ On a par with trifles, ‘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.
But the idealistic impulse is also driven by dreams; alternative ways of sifting right and wrong require different guides, ones perhaps discredited or neglected. Women from very different social strata have been remarkably active in the fields of folklore and children’s literature since the nineteenth century. The Grimm Brothers’ most inspiring and prolific sources were women, from families of friends and close relations, like the Wilds—Wilhelm married Dortchen, the youngest of four daughters of Dorothea Wild, who possessed a rich store of traditional tales, and she provided thirty-six for the collection. Dorothea, the Grimms’ sister, married Ludwig Hassenpflug, and his three sisters passed on forty-one of the tales. From the Romantic literary circle of the artistic aristocratic von Haxthausens (who contributed collectively no fewer than sixty-six of the Grimms’ tales) Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, the poet, and her sister Jenny were among the women who eagerly took part in telling the brothers the stories they had heard as children and more recently from their local area of Westphalia. Oscar Wilde’s father, a doctor in Merrion Square, Dublin, in the mid-nineteenth century, used to ask for stories as his fee from his poorer patients: his wife Speranza Wilde then collected them. Many of these were told to him by women, and in turn influenced their son’s innovatory fairy tales, like ‘The Selfish Giant’ and ‘The Happy Prince’. At the end of the century, the omnivorous Scottish folklorist Andrew Lang relied on his wife Leonora Alleyne, as well as a team of women editors, transcribers and paraphrasers, to produce the many volumes of fairy stories and folk tales from around the world, in the immensely popular Red, Yellow, Green, Blue, Rose Fairy Books, which he began publishing in 1890. The writer Simone Schwarz-Bart stitched her memories of Creole stories from her Martinique childhood into her poetic, adventurous, linguistically hybrid fictions. The grandmother Reine Sans Nom (Queen-With-No-Name) in Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle (1972) embodies survival and history, and keeps the memory of slave culture, and of Africa before that. With the help of her friend, a sorceress, she passes on lore, fables, fairy tales, ghost stories to her granddaughter. As Simone
Schwarz-Bart once said in an interview, ‘The tale is, in large part, our capital. I was nourished on tales. It is our bible.… I don’t have a technique, but I know. I’m familiar. I’ve heard. I’ve been nourished.… When an old person dies, a whole library disappears.’
It would be absurd to argue that storytelling was an exclusively female activity—it varies from country to country, from one people to another, and from place to place within the same country, among the same people—but it is worth trying to puzzle out in what different ways the patterns of fairytale romancing might be drawn when women are the tellers.
The pedagogical function of the wonder story deepens the sympathy between the social category women occupy and fairy tale. Fairy tales exchange knowledge between an older voice of experience and a younger audience, they present pictures of perils and possibilities that lie ahead, they use terror to set limits on choice and offer consolation to the wronged, they draw social outlines around boys and girls, fathers and mothers, the rich and the poor, the rulers and the ruled, they point out the evildoers and garland the virtuous, they stand up to adversity with dreams of vengeance, power and vindication.
The veillées were the hearthside sessions of early modern society, where early social observers, like Bonaventure des Périers and Noël du Fail in the sixteenth century, describe the telling of some of today’s most familiar fables and tales, like ‘Donkeyskin’ and ‘Cinderella’. These gatherings offered men and women an opportunity to talk—to preach—which was forbidden them in other situations, the pulpit, the forum, and frowned on and feared in the spinning rooms and by the wellside. Taking place after daylight hours, they still do not exactly anticipate the leisure uses of television or radio today—work continued, in the form of spinning, especially, and other domestic tasks: one folklore historian recalled hearing the women in her childhood tell stories to the rhythm of the stones cracking walnuts as they shelled them for bottling and pickling. As Walter Benjamin wrote in his essay on ‘The Storyteller’:
[The storyteller’s] nesting places—the activities that are intimately associated with boredom—are already extinct in the cities and are declining in the country as well. With this the gift for listening is lost and the community of listeners disappears.…
Benjamin never once imagines that his storytellers might be women, even though he identifies so clearly and so eloquently the connection between routine repetitive work and narrative—storytelling is itself ‘an artisan form of communication’, he writes. And later, again, it is ‘rooted in the people … a milieu of craftsmen’. He divides storytellers into stay-at-homes and rovers—tradesmen and agriculturalists, like the tailors and the shoemakers who appear in the stories, on the one hand; on the other, the seamen who travel far afield adventuring, like the questing type of hero. He neglects the figure of the spinster, the older woman with her distaff, who may be working in town and country, in one place or on the move, at market, or on a pilgrimage to Canterbury, and who has become a generic icon of narrative from the frontispiece of fairytale collections from Charles Perrault’s onwards. The Scottish poet Liz Lochhead, who has drawn on much fairytale imagery in her work, has written:
No one could say the stories were useless
for as the tongue clacked
five or forty fingers stitched
corn was grated from the husk
patchwork was pieced
or the darning was done …
And at first light …
the stories dissolved in the whorl of the ear
but they
hung themselves upside down
in the sleeping heads of the children
till they flew again
into the storyteller’s night.
Spinning a tale, weaving a plot: the metaphors illuminate the relation; while the structure of fairy stories, with their repetitions, reprises, elaboration and minutiae, replicates the thread and fabric of one of women’s principal labours—the making of textiles from the wool or the flax to the finished bolt of cloth.
Fairy tales are stories which, in the earliest mentions of their existence, include that circle of listeners, the audience; as they point to possible destinies, possible happy outcomes, they successfully involve their hearers or readers in identifying with the protagonists, their misfortunes, their triumphs. Schematic characterization leaves a gap into which the listener may step. Who has not tried on the glass slipper? Or offered it for trying? The relation between the authentic, artisan source and the tale recorded in book form for children and adults is not simple; we are not hearing the spinsters and the knitters in the sun whom Orsino remembers chanting in Twelfth Night, unmediated. But the quality of the mediation is of great interest. From the mid-seventeenth century, the nurses, governesses, family domestics, working women living in or near the great house or castle in town and country existed in a different relation to the élite men and women who may have once been in their charge, as children. The future Marquise de la Tour du Pin recalled in her memoirs how her nurse was her mainstay and that, when she turned eleven and a governess was appointed instead, ‘I used to escape whenever I could and try to find her [the nurse], or to meet her about the house.’ Another noblewoman, Victorine de Chastenay, also wrote that her own mother alarmed her and dominated her, and that she took refuge with her nurse and her nurse’s family. The rapports created in ancien régime childhood shape the matter of the stories, and the cultural model which places the literati’s texts on the one side of a divide, and popular tales on the other, can and should be redrawn: fairy tales act as an airy suspension bridge, swinging slightly under different breezes of opinion and economy, between the learned, literary and print culture in which famous fairy tales have come down to us, and the oral, illiterate, people’s culture of the veillée; and on this bridge the traffic moves in both directions.
Women writers like Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier and Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy mediated anonymous narratives, the popular, vernacular culture they had inherited through fairy tale, in spite of the aristocratic frippery their stories make at a first impression. Indeed, they offer rare and rich testimony to a sophisticated chronicle of wrongs and ways to evade or right them, when they recall stories they had heard as children or picked up later and retell them in a spirit of protest, of polite or not so polite revolt. These tales are wrapped in fantasy and unreality, which no doubt helped them entertain their audiences—in the courtly salon as well as at the village hearth—but they also serve the stories’ greater purpose, to reveal possibilities, to map out a different way and a new perception of love, marriage, women’s skills, thus advocating a means of escaping imposed limits and prescribed destiny. The fairy tale looks at the ogre like Bluebeard or the Beast of ‘Beauty and the Beast’ in order to disenchant him; while romancing reality, it is a medium deeply concerned with undoing prejudice. Women of different social positions have collaborated in storytelling to achieve true recognition for their subjects: the process is still going on.
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† From Marina Warner, “The Old Wives’ Tale,” in From the Beast to the Blonde (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994), pp. 12–24. Copyright © 1994 by Marina Warner. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC, and by International Creative Management.
JACK ZIPES
Breaking the Disney Spell†
It was not once upon a time, but at a certain time in history, before anyone knew what was happening, that Walt Disney cast a spell on the fairy tale, and he has held it captive ever since. He did not use a magic wand or demonic powers. On the contrary, Disney employed the most up-to-date technological means and used his own “American” grit and ingenuity to appropriate European fairy tales. His technical skills and ideological proclivities were so consummate that his signature has [obscured] the names of Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, and Carlo Collodi. If children or adults think of the great classical fairy tales today, be it Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, or C
inderella, they will think Walt Disney. Their first and perhaps lasting impressions of these tales and others will have emanated from a Disney film, book, or artifact. Though other filmmakers and animators produced remarkable fairy-tale films, Disney managed to gain a cultural stranglehold on the fairy tale, and this stranglehold has even tightened with the recent productions of Beauty and the Beast (1991) and Aladdin (1992). The man’s spell over the fairy tale seems to live on even after his death.
But what does the Disney spell mean? Did Disney achieve a complete monopoly on the fairy tale during his lifetime? Did he imprint a particular American vision on the fairy tale through his animated films that dominates our perspective today? And, if he did manage to cast his mass-mediated spell on the fairy tale so that we see and read the classical tales through his lens, is that so terrible? Was Disney a nefarious wizard of some kind whose domination of the fairy tale should be lamented? Wasn’t he just more inventive, more skillful, more in touch with the American spirit of the times than his competitors, who also sought to animate the classical fairy tale for the screen?
Of course, it would be a great exaggeration to maintain that Disney’s spell totally divested the classical fairy tales of their meaning and invested them with his own. But it would not be an exaggeration to assert that Disney was a radical filmmaker who changed our way of viewing fairy tales, and that his revolutionary technical means capitalized on American innocence and utopianism to reinforce the social and political status quo. His radicalism was of the right and the righteous. The great “magic” of the Disney spell is that he animated the fairy tale only to transfix audiences and divert their potential utopian dreams and hopes through the false promises of the images he cast upon the screen. But before we come to a full understanding of this magical spell, we must try to understand what he did to the fairy tale that was so revolutionary and why he did it.
The Classic Fairy Tales (Second Edition) (Norton Critical Editions) Page 61