The Question of Ownership
The question of ownership is not an idle question. As we’ve seen, our specific views on the origin and nature of fairy tales necessarily imply that we have, implicitly or explicitly, a specific attitude toward their ownership. And these attitudes, in turn, have an impact on the reception of fairy tales insofar as they determine how we both read and use fairy tales. The problem—indeed, the danger—with both the nationalistic/ethnic and universal views of fairy tales is that they prescribe forms of thought and behavior, and modes and models of humanity, that are meant to be normative. That is, they stereotype us—either as members of a nationalistic or ethnic group, or as human beings defined by a certain concept of what is or is not normal. This is why fairy tales have been so frequently utilized by both nationalists and universalists in the socialization of children. In both cases, fairy tales are supposed to depict or prescribe for us what is true, as well as what forms of behavior are typical, normal, and acceptable. Whether we view them as yours and mine or as ours, fairy tales—read from these perspectives—confine and limit us, narrowing our views of reality while allegedly giving us greater insight into the other, into ourselves, or into humanity. From these perspectives, fairy tales own us, we don’t own them.
An important twist was added to the question of ownership with the proliferation of both printed texts and copyright law in the nineteenth century. While folktales remain in the public domain because of their anonymous origin in the oral tradition (which accounts in part for their popularity among publishers), there has been a growing tendency to stress private ownership by individuals or even corporations. This is evident in the way we speak about fairy tales. With deference to the folk’s public ownership of fairy tales, the Grimms claimed only to have collected the stories in their famous edition. Yet we refer to them as “Grimms’ fairy tales.” Contemporary storytellers, who work for a fee and are cautious about allowing audio or video recordings of their performances, frequently talk of making a traditional folktale their own. Although this is in one sense an artistic claim, the vocabulary of ownership clearly implies the expectation to control and profit from the tale in question. When Disney called his animated fairy tales by his own name—Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Walt Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, and so on—he was not simply making an artistic statement, but also laying claim to the tales in what would become their most widely known, public versions. In 1989, when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences used the figure of Snow White in its televised award ceremonies, the Walt Disney Company filed a lawsuit claiming “unauthorized use of its Snow White character,” which the corporation felt had been treated in an unflattering manner in the comical and mildly satirical sketch.23 When the Walt Disney Company spent $1 million for the videocassette rights to the “Rocky and Bullwinkle” series—including the “Fractured Fairy Tales” that sometimes parody the Disney versions and Walt Disney himself—its corporate ownership and control of the fairy tale were extended to even the subversive fairy tale.24 If the Walt Disney Company cannot completely prevent unflattering parodies of its fairy-tale movies and their creator, at least it will now be able to control and profit from their distribution.
The Disney case demonstrates that the question of ownership is important because it is ultimately a question of control. So who owns fairy tales? To be blunt: I do. And you do. We can each claim fairy tales for ourselves. Not as members of a national or ethnic folk group—as French, German, or American. Not as nameless faces in a sea of humanity. And not in the Disney model as legal copyright holders. We claim fairy tales in every individual act of telling and reading. If we avoid reading fairy tales as models of behavior and normalcy, they can become for us revolutionary documents that encourage the development of personal autonomy.
As some revisionist writers and storytellers have already recognized, the removal of the fairy tale from the service of nationalism and universalism requires the subversion of traditional tales. Thus we find contemporary literary versions of “Little Red Riding Hood,” for instance, that offer alternative visions. In one version, by the Merseyside Fairy Story Collective, a young girl overcomes her fear and slays the wolf who threatens her grandmother.25 In another, by Angela Carter, a young woman, far from becoming the wolf’s innocent victim, accepts her animal nature—her sexuality—and actually leaves her family and village to join the company of wolves.26 In other media, such as film, video, and music, attempts have also been made to reclaim the fairy tale. In fact, Angela Carter’s Red Riding Hood story, “The Company of Wolves,” has itself been remade as a movie.27 And some of the irreverent video adaptations in Shelley Duvall’s Fairie Tale Theatre28 go a long way toward offsetting the saccharine Disney model of the Consumer Romance. Even in popular music the Disney claim on meaning has been challenged by authorized remakes of the songs from Walt Disney’s fairytale movies. Sinéad O’Connor’s subtly ironic rendering of “Someday My Prince Will Come,” Betty Carter’s sensual subversion of “I’m Wishing,” and Tom Waits’s industrialized “Heigh Ho” give us the opportunity to reinterpret Disney and “his” tales for ourselves and our time.29
Discovering Individual Ownership of Fairy Tales
The opportunity to reclaim fairy tales is as crucial for children as it is for adults. But the right to ownership of the tales may in some ways be more difficult for children to claim. After all, teachers, librarians, parents, and powers in the culture industry exert a certain control over the popular reception of fairy tales by determining to a great extent not only the nature of the tales that are made accessible to children, but also the context of their reception. A storyteller who buys into myths about the pristine origin of fairy tales assumes an unearned mantle of authority and shrouds the stories not only in mystery but in error. A parent under Bruno Bettelheim’s spell uses time-bound tales to justify a timeless moral authority. And a teacher concerned about the so-called crisis of cultural literacy will emphasize canonized fairy-tale texts and treat them as sacred cultural artifacts. In each case, children’s responses are expected to conform to the external authority of the tales they read or hear. It is no accident that parents and educators so often praise fairy tales because of their ability to enchant children. Stripped of sentimentality, enchantment—that is, being spellbound and powerless—is also a curse. We applaud the rescue of a Frog King or a Sleeping Beauty who is powerless to break the spell of a malevolent force, but when a moralistic text “enchants” and has a child in its spell, we apparently have that child exactly where we want her or him.
There are at least two ways in which children can be awakened from this form of enchantment and helped to discover their individual ownership of fairy tales. First, teachers and parents can offer children a wider variety of fairy tales than is usually proffered. Complementing the classic tales and anthologies with newer or lesser-known stories and variants places the traditional tales in a context that encourages diverse responses, questions, and significant comparisons—even among elementary school children. When I read my own daughter the Grimms’ “Little Red Riding Hood” and the version of the Merseyside Fairy Story Collective, for example, she announced that she liked the second version better “because the little girl was smarter.”
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Beyond presenting children with a variety of fairy tales, adults can also encourage the creative reception of fairy tales. In other words, children can make fairy tales their own by creating and re-creating their own versions. There is good evidence that given the opportunity, children will take fairy tales into their own hands in any case. In his book on the Brothers Grimm, Jack Zipes has recounted how fifth- and sixth-grade girls combined the character of Peter Pumpkin-Eater and the story of Cinderella into a new tale that explicitly reflects their developing sexuality and consciousness.30 And Kristin Wardetzky has shown how the storytelling of children in the former East Germany does not always succumb to the dominant cultural models and re-creates the fairy tale in ways that express the
children’s power over the genre.31
At the end of his list of heresies Wolfdietrich Schnurre wonders, “Can the fairy tale be saved?” His answer: “Perhaps. If specialists expose the roots of the tales and tell them in a way that is thoroughly new and which expresses their essence.”32 Writers and professional storytellers retelling tales and making them their own can indeed renew the fairy tale. But readers, too—including children—can reread and reinterpret the tales in new ways. By experiencing a wide variety of tales, they can view the stories of the classical canon in new context. By actively selecting, discussing, enacting, illustrating, adapting, and retelling the tales they experience, both adults and children can assert their own proprietary rights to meaning. It is no heresy to re-appropriate the tales from either tradition or the culture industry. “They are not,” as Auden knew, “sacred texts.”33 If the fairy tale needs saving and if we are to save it, then we need to abandon the untenable views of its ownership that put us in its power. We must take possession of it on our own terms. Saving the fairy tale in this way is nothing less than saving our very selves.
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† From Donald Haase, “Yours, Mine, or Ours? Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, and the Ownership of Fairy Tales,” in Once Upon a Folklore: Capturing the Folklore Process with Children, ed. Gloria T. Blatt (New York: Teachers College, Columbia U, 1993), pp. 63–75. Copyright © 1993 by Teachers College, Columbia University. All rights reserved.
1. W. H. Auden, “In Praise of the Brothers Grimm,” The New York Times Book Review (12 Nov. 1944): 1, 28.
2. Hermann Bausinger, “Anmerkungen zu Schneewittchen,” in Und wenn sie nicht gestorben sind: Perspektiven auf das Märchen, ed. H. Brackert (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1980), 46.
3. Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (New York: Knopf, 1976), 210.
4. Donald Haase, “Gold into Straw: Fairy Tale Movies for Children and the Culture Industry,” The Lion and the Unicorn 12 (1988): 193–207.
5. Wolfdietrich Schnurre, “Ketzerisches zum Märchenschatz: 24 kurzweilige Thesen,” in Grimmige Märchen: Prosatexte von Ilse Aichinger bis Martin Walser (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1986), 23.
6. Ibid., 23.
7. Giuseppi Cocchiara, The History of Folklore in Europe, trans. J. N. McDaniel (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1981), 4.
8. Alan Dundes, The Study of Folklore (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1965), 2.
9. L. L. Snyder, “Cultural Nationalism: The Grimm Brothers’ Fairy Tales,” in Roots of German Nationalism (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1978), 51.
10. Ibid., 51.
11. Robert Darnton, “Peasants Tell Tales: The Meaning of Mother Goose,” in The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 1984), 50–51.
12. Darnton, Great Cat Massacre, 63.
13. Paul Hazard, Books, Children and Men, trans. Marguerite Mitchell (Boston: Horn Book, 1947), 121–24.
14. Cited in Hazard, Books, 122.
15. C.-A. Sainte-Beuve, “Charles Perrault,” in Causeries du lundi (Paris: Garnier, 1944), V, 273.
16. Readers who follow the teachings of Rudolf Steiner, who was deeply influenced by Jungian psychology [editor’s note].
17. Carl-Heinz Mallet, Fairy Tales and Children: The Psychology of Children Revealed through Four of Grimms’ Fairy Tales, trans. J. Neugroschel (New York: Schocken, 1984), 38.
18. Bettelheim, Uses, 17.
19. Ibid., 310.
20. Jack Zipes, “On the Use and Abuse of Folk and Fairy Tales with Children: Bruno Bettelheim’s Moralistic Magic Wand,” in Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales (New York: Methuen, 1984), 160–82.
21. C. Pekow, “The Other Dr. Bettelheim: The Revered Psychologist Had a Dark, Violent Side,” Washington Post (26 Aug. 1990), Cl, C4; and Jack Zipes, The Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forests to the Modern World (New York: Routledge, 1988), 110–34.
22. Donald Haase, “ ‘Verzauberungen der Seele’: Das Märchen und die Exilanten der NS-Zeit,” in Begegnungen mit dem “Fremden”: Grenzen—Traditionen—Vergleiche: Akten des VIII. Internationalen Germanisten-Kongresses, Tokyo 1990 (Munich: iudicium, 1991), 44–50.
23. “Disney Company Sues over Snow White Use,” New York Times (31 March 1989), C33; A. Harmetz, “An Apology to Disney,” New York Times (7 April 1989), C30.
24. D. A. Kaplan, “Vatch out Natasha, Moose and Squirrel Are Back,” Detroit Free Press (7 May 1989), 3F.
25. Jack Zipes, The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood: Versions of the Tale in Sociocultural Context (South Hadley, Mass.: Bergin & Garvey, 1984), 239–46.
26. Ibid., 272–80.
27. Angela Carter and N. Jordan (Screenwriters), The Company of Wolves, Vestron Video, 1984–85.
28. Shelley Duvall (Producer), Fairie Tale Theater, Playhouse Video, 1982–85.
29. H. Willner (producer), Stay Awake: Various Interpretations of Music from Vintage Disney Films, A&M, 1988.
30. Jack Zipes, Don’t Bet on the Prince: Contemporary Feminist Fairy Tales in North America and England (New York: Methuen, 1986), 146.
31. Kristin Wardetzky, “The Structure and Interpretation of Fairy Tales Composed by Children,” Journal of American Folklore, 103 (1990): 157–76.
32. Schnurre, “Ketzerisches,” 25.
33. W. H. Auden, “Praise,” 28.
MARIA TATAR
From Sex and Violence: The Hard Core of Fairy Tales†
For many adults, reading through an unexpurgated edition of the Grimms’ collection of tales can be an eye-opening experience. Even those who know that Snow White’s stepmother arranges the murder of her stepdaughter, that doves peck out the eyes of Cinderella’s stepsisters, that Briar Rose’s suitors bleed to death on the hedge surrounding her castle, or that a mad rage drives Rumpelstiltskin to tear himself in two will find themselves hardly prepared for the graphic descriptions of murder, mutilation, cannibalism, infanticide, and incest that fill the pages of these bedtime stories for children. In “The Juniper Tree,” one of the most widely admired of the tales, a woman decapitates her stepson, chops his corpse into small pieces, and cooks him in a stew that her husband devours with obvious gusto. “Fledgling” recounts a cook’s attempt to carry out a similar plan, though she is ultimately outwitted by the boy and his sister. Frau Trude, in the story of that title, turns a girl into a block of wood and throws her into a fire. “Darling Roland” features a witch who takes axe in hand to murder her stepdaughter but ends by butchering her own daughter. Another stepmother dresses her stepdaughter in a paper chemise, turns her out into the woods on a frigid winter day, and forbids her to return home until she has harvested a basket of strawberries.
Lest this litany of atrocities lead to the mistaken view that women are the sole agents of evil in German fairy tales, let us look at examples of paternal and fraternal cruelty. Who can forget the miller who makes life miserable for his daughter by boasting that she can spin straw to gold? Or the king of the same tale who is prepared to execute the girl if her father’s declarations prove false? In another tale a man becomes so irritated by his son’s naiveté that he first disowns him, then orders him murdered by his servants. The singing bone, in the tale of that title, is whittled from the remains of a fratricide victim; when the bone reveals the secret of the scandalous murder to the world, the surviving brother is sewn up in a sack and drowned. The father of the fairy-tale heroine known as Thousandfurs is so bent on marrying his own daughter that she is obliged to flee from her home into the woods. Another father is so firm a believer in female ultimogeniture that he prepares twelve coffins for his twelve sons in the event that his thirteenth child turns out to be a girl. One monarch after another punishes wicked females by forcing them to disrobe and to roll down hills in kegs studded with nails.
In fairy tales
, nearly every character—from the most hardened criminal to the Virgin Mary—is capable of cruel behavior. In “The Robber Bridegroom,” a young woman watches in horror as her betrothed and his accomplices drag a girl into their headquarters, tear off her clothes, place her on a table, hack her body to pieces, and sprinkle them with salt. Her horror deepens when one of the thieves, spotting a golden ring on the murdered girl’s finger, takes an axe, chops off the finger, and sends it flying through the air into her lap. Such behavior may not be wholly out of character for brigands and highwaymen, but even the Virgin Mary appears to be more of an ogre than a saint in the Grimms’ collection. When the girl known as Mary’s Child disobeys an injunction against opening one of thirteen doors to the kingdom of heaven and tries to conceal her transgression, the Virgin sends her back to earth as punishment. There the girl marries a king and bears three children, each of whom is whisked off to heaven by the Virgin, who is annoyed by the young queen’s persistent refusal to acknowledge her guilt. The mysterious disappearance of the children naturally arouses the suspicions of the king’s councilors, who bring the queen to trial and condemn her to death for cannibalism. Only when the queen confesses her sin (just as flames leap up around the stake to which she is bound) does Mary liberate her and restore the three children to her. Compassion clearly does not number among the virtues of the Virgin Mary as she appears in fairy tales.
The Grimms only occasionally took advantage of opportunities to tone down descriptions of brutal punishments visited on villains or to eliminate pain and suffering from their tales.1 When they did, it was often at the behest of a friend or colleague rather than of their own volition. More often, the Grimms made a point of adding or intensifying violent episodes. Cinderella’s stepsisters are spared their vision in the first version of the story. Only in the second edition of the Nursery and Household Tales did Wilhelm Grimm embellish the story with a vivid account of the doves’ revenge and with a somewhat fatuous justification for the bloody tableau at the tale’s end: “So both sisters were punished with blindness to the end of their days for being so wicked and false.” Rumpelstiltskin beats a hasty retreat on a flying spoon at the end of some versions of his tale, but the Grimms seem to have favored violence over whimsy. Their Rumpelstiltskin becomes ever more infuriated by the queen’s discovery of his name; in the second edition of the Nursery and Household Tales, he is so beside himself with rage that he tears himself in two. Briar Rose sleeps for a hundred years while a hedge peacefully grows around the castle in the first recorded version of the story. In successive editions of the Grimms’ collection, we not only read about the young prince who succeeds in penetrating the thorny barrier, but also learn the grisly particulars about Briar Rose’s unsuccessful suitors. They fail because “the briar bushes clung together as though they had hands so that the young princes were caught in them and died a pitiful death.”
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