In Jack Zipes’s words, “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.”1 This statement is not, given Zipes’s project in The Irresistible Fairy Tale (2012), to be understood as a definition that encompasses the genre of the fairy tale, but it identifies transformation as central to what most fairy tales do or anticipate. Like Zipes, I am interested in exploring how fairy tales affect the making of who we are and of the world we are in, and I agree that thinking about transformation—within the tales’ storyworlds; in the genre’s ongoing process of production, reception, reproduction, adaptation, and translation; in the fairy-tale’s relation to other genres; and more generally as action in the social world—offers a spacious and productive way into that exploration.
Fairy tales interpellate us as consumers and producers of transformation. For instance, in 2009, the same year in which Tiana of The Princess and the Frog entered the ranks of Disney princesses, Canadian photographer Dina Goldstein put on the World Wide Web her Fallen Princesses series, in which she imagines fairy-tale heroines in “modern day scenarios” and replaces the “happily ever after” with a hyper “realistic outcome” of a different kind: “Cinderella sits in a dive bar in Vancouver’s infamous Hastings Street. Snow White is trapped in a domestic nightmare, surrounded by unkempt children, with a lazy out of work prince in the background” (“About the Series” on www.fallenprincesses.com/). Just as striking as the transformative work of “critical disenchantment”—noted by Catriona McAra and David Calvin in their introduction to Anti-Tales: The Uses of Disenchantment2—that Goldstein’s photographs do, is the public response that they have in turn produced, ranging from a Marie Claire article (published in November 2009) to innumerable blogs and fan letters. And even more striking perhaps is the online debate that Goldstein’s project sparked, not only in defense of the positive role Disney magic has played in real-life individual experience but also in presenting a range of critical takes on the tales as well as on the photographs. Goldstein’s photographs make visible the contradiction between what Angela Carter critically called “mythic women” and the problems we face in everyday life, including loneliness, aging, and illness, and in doing so she clearly touched a nerve with the public. But the controversy also suggests that to change women’s images or more generally to disenchant the genre is not the only fairy-tale transformation in which the thousands of individuals who were touched enough to respond are invested.
“Fairy tales are ideologically variable desire machines,” I wrote a few years ago in Postmodern Fairy Tales, and I stand by this statement, which I realize could be said of all stories really, but perhaps holds higher stakes when applied to a genre that so overtly puts a desire for transformation in motion and one that is too often reduced to the narrative articulation of purportedly universal wish fulfillment. Just as Salman Rushdie’s child protagonist in Haroun and the Sea of Stories confronts the question “What is the use of stories that aren’t even true?”3 scholars have asked: what does the fairy tale do? Providing a neat definition of the genre within a framework that recognizes its multiple social valence is difficult, then, and necessarily self-contradictory. Fairy tales have been central to reproducing ingrained or second-nature habits, what Pierre Bourdieu calls habitus and Edward Said “structures of feeling”—and to destabilizing them. Characterized in Marina Warner’s words by “pleasure in the fantastic” and “curiosity about the real,”4 fairy tales have historically scripted a wide range of desires while maintaining a strong grip on ordinary social life. With an eye to solving problems, at least some versions are also produced and/or received as inspirations to undo privilege and prejudice.
To develop the idea that fairy tales “are informed by a human disposition to action,”5 we need to ask what do they do to inspire us to seek change, in ourselves, in order to fit in the social world and/or in the social world in order for it to accommodate us. For some, fairy tales instigate compensatory escapism, while for others they offer wisdom; alternatively, fairy tales are seen to project social delusions that hold us captive under their spell; or else they promote a sense of justice by narrating the success of unpromisingly small, poor, or otherwise oppressed protagonists. Maria Tatar’s recent “quilting” of published writers’ and public figures’ commentary on fairy tales, “passages that move us to think about the deeper meaning of fairy tales and how they have affected our lives and those of others,”6 significantly has a patchwork effect. Our ideas about the genre’s poetics depend on whether we associate the fairy tale as symbolic act with wish fulfillment, role-playing, idealization, survival, or something else; in other words, on how we use the genre. In the last two hundred years—the Grimms’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen’s volumes were first published in 1812–15—the fairy tale has served multiple sociocultural functions.
But I believe it is also safe to say that since the popularizing of the Grimms’ collection, as a genre the fairy tale’s dominant or hegemonic association has been with magic and enchantment, as a result of several convergences: the segregation of fairy tales to the nursery where “magic” is normalized as the mysterious ways in which the world works to produce immediate gratification and where “enchantment” is at the service of a spellbinding discipline that has the “child exactly where we want her or him,”7 the universalizing of “happily ever after” as the signature mark of the fairy tale, the repurposing in mass culture of fairy tales for advertising products that fulfill our every wish, and the spectacle of the fairy tale as an American capitalist utopia and as “consumer romance” in Disney’s films and other fairy-tale commodities.
If generally the desired effect of this poetics of enchantment is the consumer’s buying into magic, the contemporary call for disenchanting the fairy tale is directly related to a now-public dissatisfaction with its magic as trick or (ultimately disempowering) deception, a disillusionment with the reality of the social conditions that canonized tales of magic idealize. However, magic and pacifying enchantment are not the only poetics of the fairy tale, historically or in the present. As medievalist Jan Ziolkowski reminds us, “Wonder is the effect [fairy] tales seek to achieve, while magic is the means that they employ to attain this goal.”8 It is no accident that fairy tales are also known as “wonder tales.” As an effect, wonder involves both awe and curiosity. In Marina Warner’s eloquent words, “Wonder has no opposite; it springs already doubled in itself, compounded of dread and desire at once, attraction and recoil, producing a thrill, the shudder of pleasure and of fear. It names the marvel, the prodigy, the surprise as well as the responses they excite, of fascination and inquiry; it conveys the active motion towards experience and the passive stance of enrapturement.”9
Fairy tales can invite us to dwell in astonishment and explore new possibilities, to engage in wondering and wandering. It is in this symbolic enactment of possibilities, “announcing what might be”—and taking us ex-cursus, off course, or off socially sanctioned paths to “unlock social and public possibilities,” to explore alternatives we hope for—that the fairy tale’s “mood is optative”10 and wonder producing. Furthermore, wonder has been recognized as a significantly complex effect of fairy tales, but the genre’s links with wonder have a complicated history, including the secularization of religious legends and miracle tales in medieval Europe; the transformation of ancient pagan tales; and, with Arabian Nights being the most well-known case, the appropriative translation of what Donald Haase calls other cultures’ “wonder genres.”
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How and to what uses are fairy tales being adapted in and to the twenty-first century * * * and why should we care? For Arthur W. Frank in Letting Stories Breathe: A Socio-Narratology (2010), “not all stories engage all people,”11 an important point suggesting how stories do not just connect human beings but reflect and generate differences among us; however, stories of all kinds do animate, instigate, conduct, and emplo
t human lives. Two of Frank’s socionarratological insights about stories in general resonate with and in my project. The first is that of the making and unmaking of narrative emplotment in both fiction and life: “Stories project possible futures, and those projections affect what comes to be, although this will rarely be the future projected in the story. Stories work to emplot lives: they offer a plot that makes some particular future not only plausible but also compelling.… We humans spend our lives … adapting stories we were once told.… Not least among human freedoms is the ability to tell the story differently and to begin living according to that different story.”12 The dynamics of emplotment seem to me particularly relevant to reflecting on fairy tales in social practice because this genre is so basically tied up in plot, has been hegemonically utilized to emplot or frame our lives within a heteronormative capitalist economy, and yet has such a history of and potential for adaptability as well as subversion because it operates in the optative mode.
The second of Frank’s insights is a set of questions that, adapting Bakhtinian dialogism, informs his critical analysis of storytelling, which he sees as the symbiotic and dynamic work that people and stories do with, for, and on one another. Frank asks, “what is at stake for whom, including storyteller and protagonist in the story, listeners who are present at the storytelling, and others who may not be present but are implicated in the story? How does the story, and the particular way it is told, define or redefine those stakes, raising or lowering them? How does the story change people’s sense of what is possible, what is permitted, and what is responsible or irresponsible?”13 Readers familiar with fairy-tale studies will recognize these as the issues that Jack Zipes’s critical oeuvre, from Breaking the Magic Spell (1979) on to The Irresistible Fairy Tale (2012), has taken on to trace the cultural and social history of the fairy-tale genre. * * * What are the stakes of adapting the fairy tale in the early twenty-first century? For whom? And how do today’s fairy-tale adaptations affect “people’s sense of what is possible,” or of what transformations to anticipate/fear/desire? Because the genre’s popularity is both persistent and pervasive and because questions of individual agency and social transformation are central to the tales’ narrative permutations, reflecting on today’s fairy-tale adaptations—both their production and reception—illuminates and affects how we construct human relations in the present and how we map out our options for the future. This broadly intellectual concern motivates my continued inquiry into the genre and its varied poetics and politics of magic, enchantment, and wonder.
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* * * Fairy-tale studies emerged as a field where sociohistorical analysis has been challenging romanticized and nation-centered views of the genre. Noting that Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Jack Zipes’s Breaking the Magic Spell both came out in 1979, Stephen Benson reminds us in his introduction to Contemporary Fiction and the Fairy Tale of “the extraordinary synchronicity, in the final decades of the twentieth century, of [fairy-tale] fiction and fairy-tale scholarship.”14 For example, the early 1990s saw Carter’s edited collections of The Virago Book of Fairy Tales (1990 and 1993) alongside Marina Warner’s From the Beast to the Blonde (1994), each making a singular and lasting intervention in the ongoing feminist debate over fairy tales. One could say that if today, as Donald Haase’s introduction to the 2008 Greenwood Encyclopedia of Folktales and Fairy Tales authoritatively attests, the international and interdisciplinary institutionalization of fairy-tale studies is a fait accompli, this has a lot to do with the extraordinary literary production by writers of “the fairy-tale generation” as well as with leftist and second-wave feminist interrogations of the value of fairy tales. Vanessa Joosen’s important book, Critical and Creative Perspectives on Fairy Tales: An Intertextual Dialogue between Fairy-Tale Scholarship and Postmodern Retellings (2011), develops our understanding of this dialogue by centering her analysis on three key critical texts from the 1970s—Marcia K. Lieberman’s “Some Day My Prince Will Come,” Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment, and Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic—that she links thematically with an impressively “large number of retellings and illustrated versions”15 of six well-known fairy tales. Basic to her tracing of this dynamic dialogue is Joosen’s starting point that “any intertextual analysis of contemporary fairy-tale retellings has to take into account that the best-known fairy tales have been reproduced in innumerable variants and that fairy-tale material has generated countless verbal and nonverbal manifestations.”16
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As Theo Meder documented, folktale collections on the Internet have provided an impressive array of texts to researchers: “One of the earliest (1994) and still one of the finest folktale collections is the German Gutenberg Project, which as of 2006 contained some 1,600 fairy tales,” and its English-language version includes not only Charles Perrault’s and the Brothers Grimm’s canonical texts, but also Giambattista Basile’s, Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, and The Arabian Nights.17 And D. L. Ashliman’s extensive online research tools Folklore and Mythology: Electronic Texts, and Folklinks: Folk and Fairy Tale Sites, both of which originated in 1996, provide folktale and fairy-tale texts and links to other collections and critical resources on the Internet, some of encyclopedic nature (most prominently the Enzyklopädie des Märchens, the leading German-language reference on folk and fairy tales in an international research context), others devoted to specific tales (for example, Kay E. Vandergrift’s Snow White site, created in 1997), still others consisting of scholarly journals (for example, Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies, a print publication also available through Project MUSE and JSTOR). During the 1996–2006 period, Folklinks alone had over one million visits, while the Folklore and Mythology: Electronic Texts had more than three million visitors by June 2011. Two other well-respected fairy-tale sites, Endicott Studio and SurLaLune Fairy Tales, are also quite popular, and as such it is instructive to take a look at their profiles and trajectories.
Founded in 1987 and directed by writer-artist-scholars Terri Windling and Midori Snyder, the Endicott Studio website and its Journal of Mythic Arts are “dedicated to literary, visual, performance, and environmental arts rooted in myth, folklore, fairy tales, and the traditional stories of people the world over.” Created in 1999 by librarian and researcher Heidi Anne Heiner, SurLaLune Fairy Tales “features 49 annotated fairy tales, including their histories, similar tales across cultures, modern interpretations and over 1,500 illustrations”; it also includes over 1,600 folktales and fairy tales from around the world in electronic books and a discussion forum. Both Endicott Studio and SurLaLune were envisioned and are run by indefatigable and creative women who have put their visionary expertise at the service of scholars, writers, teachers, students, and the public at large, and both sites have strong women-centered and feminist profiles, as seen in the essays of the Journal of the Mythic Arts and judging from the discussion board on SurLaLune. While “mythic projects” and healing in literary and visual arts are more of a focus in Windling’s and Snyder’s nonprofit project, Heiner states she “created [hers] strictly for educational and entertainment purposes.” Informed by folklore and fairy-tale studies scholarship, both sites are configured to make their visitors’ experience of the many wonder tales into a transformative journey, whether mythic or educational. Over time the two websites have also transformed. A small nonprofit, Endicott Studio has since 2008 reduced its activities but maintains its archives and a blog with news about Endicott-Studio-associated artists’ publications and awards, and currently has a presence on YouTube and Facebook. Strengthened somewhat by its association with Amazon.com, SurLaLune continues to expand its reach. The blog, which Heiner started in June 2009, is dizzyingly filled with news about fairy-tale books, films, illustrations, and more. Furthermore, Heiner has also started to publish print volumes in the SurLaLune Fairy-Tale series, including Rapunzel and Other Maiden in the Tower Tales from Around the World (2010), The Frog Prince and Other Frog Tale
s from Around the World (2010), Bluebeard: Tales from Around the World (2011), and Cinderella: Tales from Around the World (2012).
The fact that websites are doing more than providing a wealth of folktale and fairy-tale primary texts to those who can access the Internet is further brought home by the multiplying of online publications, like the English-language Cabinet de Fées and Fairy Tale Review (both of which have issues also available in print); discussion forums, such as SurLaLune’s, which in the October 2000–June 2011 period had 3,761 average visits per day and 23,391 total posts on over six hundred different topics; blogs, including Breezes from Wonderland by Harvard-based fairy-tale scholar Maria Tatar and the one Michael Lundell has maintained since 2007, The Journal of 1001 Nights; and Facebook groups like Fairy Tale Films Research. * * *
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The fairy-tale web as I conceptualize it is necessarily a twenty-first-century construct that accounts for, even depends to some extent on, the World Wide Web’s impact. As such, the “fairy-tale web” seemingly builds on fashionable terminology and is an easily graspable concept, but I do not mean it at all to be coterminous with the circulation of fairy tales on the Internet. The twenty-first-century fairy-tale web I envision is more a methodological field than a state of affairs. Analytically, it has a history, or better, histories—both as metaphor and reading practice—and, I hope to show, it has critical potential. Proposing the fairy-tale web as a general site for critical inquiry into the genre’s activity has a twofold purpose: to further the construction of a history and remapping of the genre that are not insulated from the power structures and struggles of capitalism, colonialism, coloniality, and disciplinarity; and to envision current fairy-tale cultural practices in an intertextual dialogue with one another that is informed not only by the interests of the entertainment or culture industry and the dynamics of globalization in a “postfeminist” climate but also by more multivocal and unpredictable uses of the genre.
The Classic Fairy Tales (Second Edition) (Norton Critical Editions) Page 70