[Discussion] MAGIC KINGDOMS: What is a fairy tale, anyway?

[Paksoy, Hb]

MAGIC KINGDOMS: What is a fairy tale, anyway?
by ADAM GOPNIK

Issue of 2002-12-09
Posted 2002-12-02
At the sand-logged, mildewy tail end of a beach vacation, four exhausted
parents take two seven-year-olds to a rainy-day play, "The Fairy Tale
Detective": the tales of the Three Bears and Hansel and Gretel and Red
Riding Hood, retold as though in a film noir, complete with raincoated
detectives and lynx-eyed blondes. Puzzled looks from the seven-year-olds:
the kids, the startled parents realize, just don't know the fairy tales,
don't know the material or the usual spirit in which they're told. At last,
one parent whispers, "It's a parody, a kind of joke-you know, like the Mr.
Peabody stories on the 'Bullwinkle' videos." Instant enlightenment crosses
their features; oh, that familiar thing, and, almost visibly, the work of
interpretation-O.K., what's being kidded here? Although "Beauty and the
Beast" and, perhaps, "The Little Mermaid" are part of the children's
cultural baggage-or, rather, among their cultural parachutes; we are their
cultural baggage-the tales exist for them only in highly sweetened,
song-filled forms. A thought crosses at least one parental mind as he
shepherds the children toward the exit and the fried clams: Is it possible
that we have actually come to the end of fairy tales as an available, rather
than an archival, entertainment? Fairy tales, however many times they are
transformed, depend in some part for their effect on an air of sincerity, of
urgent seriousness. For the not merely wise but wised-up children of this
new century, other tales and other, more skittish ways of telling seem to
have usurped the old stories and styles. Which means that the fairy tale
could be headed for the place where all our good used-up things go,
America's Island of Misfit Toys, the college English department.

Like a fairy godmother, along comes an encyclopedic book about fairy tales,
prepared by a literature professor, which will test whether we must entomb
or can yet enliven the genre. "The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales" (Norton;
$35), edited by Maria Tatar, a professor at Harvard, is the latest in
Norton's long line of annotated classics, a form that Martin Gardner
invented and perfected, forty years ago, with "The Annotated Alice" and "The
Annotated Snark": a familiar text with lots of glosses, explanations, and
reflections. Annotating a classic is hard, since it involves both discreetly
explaining the obvious and modestly explaining the unobvious, while being
willing to stand on a soapbox in the margin now and then to give a speech.
Charm and quarrelsomeness in equal parts are necessary. Tatar is well fit
for all of it. Some of her notes are startling but true (of "The Little
Match Girl" she writes, "The attribute 'little' before the name of a girl in
a story for children often spells the character's doom"); others seem
appropriately schoolmarmish ("In carrying out domestic chores, Snow White
moves into a new developmental stage"); and others are nicely cheerleading
("Beauty compares favorably in every way with her two sisters").

More potent even than Tatar's annotations are her choices: a formidable
scholar of the unschooled, she rummages through all possible tellings and
retellings to finally choose the version of a familiar story that strikes
her as in one way or another definitive. She includes old familiars ("Little
Red . . .," "Jack and . . .," "Beauty and . . ."), mostly in their first
printed forms, and the stranger classics ("The Juniper Tree," "East of the
Sun and West of the Moon"), and even throws in some duds-for the Folk have
their "Mister Moonlight"s and "Revolution 9"s, too-like "Molly Whuppie." She
also includes hundreds of illustrations by the great fairy-tale
illustrators-many, of sad necessity, no more than postage-stamp size. (For
Tatar, as for this viewer, Maxfield Parrish's dreamy northern lights carry
away the laurels against Arthur Rackham's thorny linearities.)

Gardner, in his pioneering Nortons, had to fight the two-headed Jabberwock
of the psychoanalytic and the psychedelic readings of "Alice." Tatar has her
own battles to fight, with an alliterative two-headed creature made up of
the snapping heads of Bruno Bettelheim and Bill Bennett. Tatar's notes
throughout chide Bettelheim's Freudian, and extremely influential, "Uses of
Enchantment" for loading the stories with the child-hating, punitive
morality of turn-of-the-century Vienna. "Hansel and Gretel," for instance,
is in Bettelheim's view a story about the "oral greed" of children. Hansel
and Gretel enact their hostility toward a symbolic mother, who, because she
is a child's provider, is also, in a neat Freudian flip, the withholder of
nourishment. At the end of the story, the children have mastered their "oral
anxieties." But surely H. and G. are not anxious about eating; they are
anxious about being eaten. As Tatar points out, "Bettelheim suggests that
the real source of evil in the story is nothing more than an alter ego of
the children."

On her other sword arm, Tatar duels the tutting finger of Bennett, and his
"Book of Virtues" brand, which, with its insistence that the great fairy
tales teach timeless and universal cultural values, she writes, "endorses a
kind of mindless reading that fails to interrogate the cultural values
embedded in the stories written once upon a time." Fairy tales, she argues,
rarely dramatize, much less endorse, the conservative Republican virtues of
honesty and plain dealing and ascension from humble beginnings through hard
work. Instead, they more often celebrate the triumphs of feckless sons who,
through luck, cunning, and conniving help from wiser counsellors, manage to
win their way to unearned wealth and power.



Tatar's choices search but do not settle a central historical question: Are
the stories that we conventionally group together as fairy tales really
folktales in origin, a repository of popular wisdoms and oral tradition,
which came to rest in the hands of a few compilers in the nineteenth
century, or are they highly artificial, manufactured romantic literary
productions, pre-distressed, like bluejeans, to look the part? This is a hot
subject in fairy-tale academe; new studies of the Brothers Grimm and the
English fairy-tale compilers make much of their ideological polishing and
their nationalist agendas. One new scholarly book, "Fairy Godfather:
Straparola, Venice, and the Fairy Tale Tradition" (Pennsylvania; $36.50), by
Ruth Bottigheimer, even makes the case that the fairy tale, far from rising
from the ground as a rural folk tradition, was invented by a city-bound
sixteenth-century Italian literary hack, Zoan Francesco Straparola, in his
"Pleasant Nights." Straparola, a freewheeling entrepreneur who seems to
belong more to eighteenth-century London than to sixteenth-century Venice,
put together "the urban tale's humble protagonists with the courtly tale's
magic," combining the manners of Boccaccio with the matter of commedia
dell'arte. Where in the old stories magic brought you grace, in Straparola's
stories magic brought you money, and, in the joining together of these two
kinds of tales, a new genre was born. The "fairy tale," if one accepts
Straparola's primacy, is an invented tradition, like the kilt or haggis.

Tatar deals with this subject by avoiding it: without proposing any rule
about what's put in and what's kept out, her book includes obvious folktales
retold; tales so thoroughly remade as to be unrecognizable; and
nineteenth-century literary confections that are no closer to folk tradition
than "A Christmas Carol." There are literary contes, like Perrault's
"Donkeyskin," so stiff with polish that they could stand up and promenade in
Versailles, and there are Hans Christian Andersen's parables and allegories,
which are about as much folktales as Tchaikovsky is folk music.

At the same time, Tatar seems, throughout her notes, very friendly to the
idea that fairy tales represent a long line of vernacular folk (and
particularly feminine) stories that were told by generations of women and
happened to land in the opportunistic lap of a compiler, to be retold, with
the old amorality still shining gaily through. So fairy tales are not part
of a bad folk tradition (masculine, nationalist, and völkisch) but part of a
good folk tradition (feminine, universal, subversive, and anti-patriarchal).
This combination of beliefs-fairy tales are wherever you find them; fairy
tales are an oral feminist tradition-gives Tatar's collection its peculiar
shape, as if a CD of folk songs included not just "Down in the Valley" but
Stephen Foster and Bob Dylan and Irving Berlin and the Blues Brothers, too,
while the liner notes insisted that the beauty of folk songs lies in their
unstudied popularity.

At one level, of course, it is true that even manufactured entertainment can
be folk art, since everybody is somebody's folk. (Vegas lounge acts
doubtless revere Dean Martin the way blues archivists revere Leadbelly, as
part of the dim epic past of their form.) If Hans Christian Andersen didn't
begin as folk literature, it is now. Still, one would expect a scholar to
give a scholarly argument for what's in and what's not, and it is surprising
not to see it.

If Tatar doesn't offer an organizing idea about what fairy tales are, she
does offer a strong view about what they usually include, and that ends up
doing more or less the same work. She makes a point of not
minimizing-indeed, whenever possible, of underlining-the violence and horror
of fairy stories. We are not spared the blinding of Rapunzel's prince or
that of Cinderella's stepsisters (in one version, their eyes are pecked
out). "Today we recognize that fairy tales are as much about conflict and
violence as about enchantment," she writes. "When we read 'Cinderella,' we
are fascinated more by her trials and tribulations at the hearth than by her
social elevation. We spend more time thinking about the life-threatening
chant of the giant in 'Jack and the Beanstalk' than about Jack's acquisition
of wealth. And Hansel and Gretel's encounter with the seemingly magnanimous
witch in the woods haunts our imagination long after we have put the story
down."

But then it is in the nature of storytelling to depend for its spell on
establishing the credibility of the villain's evil, from Satan to the Wedgie
Woman, and this does not mean that the story's real hero is not God or
Captain Underpants. It is not, as Blake wrote, that Milton was on the side
of the Devil without knowing it because he was a poet. It is that Milton was
on the Devil's side because, as a poet, he was on the side of sides. Having
two dimensions, one good and one bad, is all that gives a poem, or a fairy
tale, three.



Still, Tatar is surely right to sense in the cruelty and violence of fairy
tales some key to their spell. What, after all, is the difference between a
fairy tale and a legend, a parable, or a moral story? We sense it at once:
it is the presence of magic, meaning not just cool weird stuff but an
unpredictable suspension of the regularities of natural and human order, an
arbitrary and therefore sometimes terrifying lifting of the rules, including
the rules of justice and mercy. Magic-completely unearned and undeserved
good fortune or misfortune-is at the heart of the fairy tale, what gives it
its special flavor. The giant is evil, the giant's wife friendly; the boy is
a fool, the boy gets the beans. Rumpelstiltskin outwits the girl and has his
hands on the baby; a sudden bit of luck in the forest dooms him.
Bottigheimer tells us that when the Council of Trent, in the sixteenth
century, got hold of Straparola's book it deleted the words fortuna and fato
wherever they were found. This was a sharp bit of literary criticism; the
magic of fairy tales is the pagan magic of fortune, rather than of virtue,
and of fate, rather than of faith, or even grace. The moral of every fairy
tale is not "Virtue rewarded" but "You never know" (which bean will sprout,
which son will triumph).

Tatar's mixed-up choices do have an internal logic. Any story with random
magic and an arbitrary allotment of ascents and punishments can justly be
called a fairy tale. At the end of her book, one comes to feel that the
fairy tale, like satire, is a genre with a certain shape and spirit that
pops up all over the place, rather than a form with a single history. It is
in its origins hybrid and bastardized. Andersen's cruel, mysterious "Snow
Queen," though an invention, is the truest of fairy tales.

There is something about the pagan, or pre-Christian, quality of true fairy
tales that seems to sit well with the feminism that Tatar finds in them,
too. By escaping from morality into magic, fairy tales have their own erotic
candor. In a moral conte, the Princess would learn something from the pea.
In a fairy tale, she just feels it. The average reader may not be prepared
for how many fairy stories seem to deal, in fairly direct ways, with a
girl's first experience of sex. "East of the Sun and West of the Moon,"
"Beauty and the Beast," "Donkeyskin" (with its incestuous material), "The
Frog King," "Rapunzel" (who lets down her hair only to become pregnant, and
mystified by it) are about a woman's discovery of the animal nature of man.
A beast abducts a girl and marries her, and she either gets used to the
beast or finds out he's not so beastly. Reading Tatar's book, one thinks of
how, for many thousands of years and generations, women must have approached
the marriage bed armed only with rumor and fear, and how the good or bad
news about what went on there got passed along in the form of warning and
enticing stories: you'll like it in the end, or else you won't, or else it
may kill you; the wolf will eat you until you're bleeding or else you will
eat the wolf. Contemplating the centuries of this dread almost makes a
father grateful for Christina Aguilera; whatever other horrors our daughters
may suffer, a lack of sexual awareness won't be one of them.



If fairy tales are where you find them, where can we find them now? The
"Star Wars" films, like Tolkien's books, are surely epic rather than fairy,
with a neat morality and the overriding lesson that blood (Luke Skywalker's
or Aragorn's) will always tell. C. S. Lewis's Narnia tales uneasily mix an
optimistic Christian morality with a darker and more intuitive pagan one.
(Lewis is creepy on the subject of his witches' bare white arms.) The magic
of the Harry Potter books is that there is no magic in them; they depend
entirely on the idea that what looks like magic is really something regular
you learn, like algebra or French verbs.

To this reader, at least, only a few modern children's classics have the
necessary mixture of mystery and amoral magic to count as true fairy tales,
and high among these are Barrie's "Peter Pan" and P. L. Travers's Mary
Poppins books. Both are undependable in the way good fairy stories ought to
be: Peter Pan is a hero, but, like a true fairy-tale hero, his motives are
suspect and his desires vainglorious; Mary Poppins is essentially
benevolent, but she is also cruel, conceited, and unpredictable. That both
these pure expressions of the fairy spirit came so recently, and out of an
urban capital of empire under extreme stress, is, this Christmas, at once a
scary and a hopeful thought. All our fairy tales are fractured now. But then
it seems they always were.