Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale
Once Upon a Time
Once Upon
a Time
A short history of fairy tale
MARINA WARNER
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom
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© Marina Warner 2014
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First Edition published in 2014
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ISBN 978–0–19–871865–9
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To Carolina, Riccardo, Sofia, and Hartley
(tesoro meraviglioso)
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Prologue
1. The Worlds of Faery
Far Away & Down below
2. With a Touch of Her Wand
Magic & Metamorphosis
3. Voices on the Page
Tales, Tellers, & Translators
4. Potato Soup
True Stories/Real Life
5. Childish Things
Pictures & Conversations
6. On the Couch
House-Training the Id
7. In the Dock
Don’t Bet on the Prince
8. Double Vision
The Dream of Reason
9. On Stage & Screen
States of Illusion
Epilogue
Further Reading
Publisher’s Acknowledgements
Index
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I have been thinking about fairy tales for a while, and friends, students, and colleagues have asked questions and made comments that have helped me hugely and crucially in the making of this book. For ten years, I’ve taught courses on fairy tales, given classes and talks, and written articles on various aspects of the topic. I would like to thank everyone who has invited me to speak, come to hear me, raised or discussed issues with me, and I offer heartfelt gratitude in particular to Jack Zipes, the well-named hero of fairy tale studies and mentor to so many readers and scholars; to Donald Haase, Cristina Bacchilega, and Anne Duggan, editors of the journal Marvels & Tales; Martine Hennard-Dutheil at the University of Lausanne; Daniela Corona and Valentina Castagna at the University of Palermo; Hilary Ballon of New York University, Abu Dhabi; Val Morgan, Peter Hulme, Jonathan Lichtenstein, Philip Terry, Karin Littau, Elizabeth Kuti, Adrian May, and Sanja Bahun at the University of Essex; Kevin Dawson of Whistledown Productions; Mary-Kay Wilmers, editor of the London Review of Books; to Andrea Keegan, and others among many editors at Oxford University Press, for their patience over the years it took; and to Beatrice Dillon for her help throughout, especially in the thickets of the cyberwood.
To Graeme Segal, believer in another kind of other world (that of mathematical reality), my love and endless thanks.
ILLUSTRATIONS
1 Vasilissa the Beautiful, illustrated by Ivan I. Bilibin, Russian Folk Tales, 1902. The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, 930 c. 3.
2 Oberon, Titania and Puck with Fairies Dancing, c.1786, by William Blake (1757–1827). Watercolour and graphite on paper. DeAgostini / SuperStock.
3 ‘Little Brother and Little Sister’ by the Brothers Grimm, illustrated by Arthur Rackham, 1917. The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Castello 26, opp. p. 52.
4 Jinn, from Marvels of Things Created and Miraculous Aspects of Things Existing, created by al-Qazwini. Lustre painted earthenware tile, Iran, 19th century. DeAgostini / SuperStock.
5 Wicked wizard from ‘The Golden Branch’, illustrated by Clinton Peters, The Fairy Tales of Madame D'Aulnoy, 1900. From the Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida.
6 Shahrazad and her sister Dinarzade, Alf layla wa-layla (The Tales of the Thousand and One Nights), Baghdad, Iraq, 16th century. John Rylands University Library of Manchester, Arabic MS 646 [706], leaf 124. University Library Tübingen, shelfmark Ma VI 32.
7 Secrets and Stories, Paula Rego, 1989, etching and aquatint, paper size 56.5 × 76.5 cm Edition of 50. Copyright the Artist, courtesy Marlborough Fine Art, Ltd.
8 La Barbe bleue, from Le Cabinet des fées, ed. C. J. Mayer, illustrated by Clément-Pierre Marillier, 1785–9. The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Douce M 299 v.1, facing p. 15.
9 ‘Caterpillar and Alice’, from Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, Lewis Carroll. British Library, Add. MS 46700, 1862–4. The Governing Body of Christ Church, Oxford.
10 ‘The Golden Bird’, illustrated by George Cruikshank, German Popular Stories, collected by M. M. Grimm, 1825–6. The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Opie C 883/1-2.
11 ‘The Boy Hidden in a Fish’, David Hockney, from ‘The Little Sea Hare’, in Illustrations for Six Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm, etching in black 13 1/2 × 14 3/4″, 1969. © David Hockney.
12 ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, illustrated by Gustave Doré, Perrault’s Fairy Tales, 1883. iStock.com/duncan1890.
13 ‘Sleeping Beauty’, illustrated by Walter Crane, Household Stories from the Collection of the Brothers Grimm, 1893. The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, PT921.K5613 KIN 1893.
14 The Love for Three Oranges, opera by Serge Prokofiev, directed by Gilbert Deflo, 2005. © Colette Mason / Roger-Viollet / Topfoto.
15 Still from The Adventures of Prince Achmed, directed by Lotte Reiniger, 1926. © AF archive / Alamy.
16 Maribel Verdú as the wicked stepmother in Blancanieves, directed by Pablo Berger, 2012. NOODLES PRODUCTION / Album / Album / SuperStock.
PROLOGUE
The Prospect
Imagine the history of fairy tale as a map, like the Carte du Tendre, the ‘Map of Tenderness’, drawn by Parisian romancers to chart the peaks and sloughs of the heart’s affections: unfurl this imaginary terrain in your mind’s eye, and you will first see two prominent landmarks, Charles Perrault’s Histoires et Contes du temps passé (Tales of Olden Times, 1697) and a little nearer in the foreground, the Grimm Brothers’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Tales, 1812–57). These collections dominate their surroundings so imposingly that they make it hard to pick out other features near or far.
Gradually, however, as your eyes adjust to the dazzle, several more features of the scene begin to grow in definition and give you better
bearings: along a whole web of routes from points further east, The Tales of the Thousand and One Nights form deep aquifers of story running through the entire expanse, and emerging here and there in waterfalls and powerful rivers spreading through wide floodplains. Harbours and market-places and pilgrimage sites—Venice, Naples, Genoa, Sicily, in Italy alone—begin to emerge as significant centres of talkative storytelling populations.
To the north, Hans Christian Andersen’s glowing Danish homeland is emitting powerful signals from regions stretching to the Arctic circle; and when your eyes track his large force field, you begin to discover beacons blazing in the darkness, lit by the work of Walter Scott in Scotland, Alexander Afanasyev in Russia, and other omnivores of their countries’ stories. The circumpolar regions, as well as the steppes and forests of Russia and Central Asia, are also rich in fairy tale ore: the ogress Baba Yaga lives deep in the forest in a hut that runs around on chicken legs, loves to eat children (but plucky Vasilissa the Beautiful foils the witch’s plans, see Figure 1). But Baba Yaga, like her counterparts farther south, sometimes takes a more innocent fancy to one of the heroes or heroines, and showers them with boons and blessings.
If you could turn this fictive atlas into an advent calendar and open windows in the scenery, you would then see scores of storytellers and inventors gathering, interpreting, re-visioning the material—hidden away hard at work in Ireland are Speranza Wilde and her son Oscar, W. B. Yeats and his patron Lady Gregory; in Wales, Charlotte Guest, who established the first English Mabinogion, a treasury of marvellous stories; in Zurich and Vienna, Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud; in Toronto, Japan, and South London, Margaret Atwood and Angela Carter. In full view and in close-up, windows that are in fact not windows but movie screens are shimmering with the works of inspired adaptors—Jean Cocteau with La Belle et la bête (1946), a poetic, slow-moving romance that crystallizes the seductive mysterious eros at the heart of fairy tale. Film adaptors and producers, stage directors, and designers are busy refashioning fairy tales for audiences of all ages, creating theatrical spectacles that combine circus techniques, masking, song and dance in the raucous and sentimental lineage of pantomime. Therapists, performance artists, couturiers, and photographers … a festive cavalcade of those professions now called ‘creative content providers’ are losing themselves in the forests of fairy tale in order to come back with baskets of strawberries picked in the snow.
There remain many more windows to open; in fact they’re numberless, and besides it becomes clear that the scenery is not stable, for the land masses and landmarks are floating in a vast ocean, the Ocean of Story, which, like the cosmic river of the ancient world, encircles the earth since recorded time. The light keeps changing over the scene, now plunging a once prominent element into shadow, then turning its beam on another hitherto disregarded part of the territory.
Stories slipped across frontiers of culture and language as freely as birds in the air as soon as they first began appearing; fairy tales migrate on soft feet, for borders are invisible to them, no matter how ferociously they are policed by cultural purists.
The Ocean of Story is the title of one of the most ancient collections of fairy tales—a phrase Salman Rushdie adapted for his fable, Haroun and the Sea of Stories. We swim, float, or navigate this fluid and marvellous body of water as a matter of course; mass media, television, game shows, video games, and every kind of popular entertainment trawl it daily to bring up plots and characters, animals and motifs.
This map of fairy tales still contains many unexplored corners and much terra incognita, and eagerness to discover new parts of it is growing among different audiences. Considered children’s literature for a dominant period of their history, fairy tales have now grown out of that Victorian and Edwardian prescription and have gained a new stature over the last twenty years, both as inspiration for literature, and for mass, lucrative entertainment. Thematic and structural similarities continue to attach contemporary fictions to popular and ancient legends and myths. Fairy tales are one of their dominant expressions, connective tissue between a mythological past and the present realities.
The Thorny Hedge: Questions of Definition
What are the defining characteristics of a fairy tale? First, ‘a fairy tale’ is a short narrative, sometimes less than a single page, sometimes running to many more, but the term no longer applies, as it once did, to a novel-length work. Secondly, fairy tales are familiar stories, either verifiably old because they have been passed on down the generations or because the listener or reader is struck by their family resemblance to another story; they can appear pieced and patched, like an identikit photofit. The genre belongs in the general realm of folklore, and many fairy tales are called ‘folk tales’, and are attributed to oral tradition, and considered anonymous and popular in the sense of originating not among an élite, but among the unlettered, the Volk (the people in German, as in ‘Volkswagen’, the ‘People’s Car’). The accumulated wisdom of the past has been deposited in them—at least, that is the feeling a fairy tale radiates and the claim the form has made since the first collections. Scholars of fairy tales distinguish between genuine folk tales (Märchen) and literary or ‘arty’ fairy tales (Kunstmärchen); the first are customarily anonymous and undatable, the latter signed and dated, but the history of the stories’ transmission shows inextricable and fruitful entanglement.
Even when every effort was made to keep the two branches apart, fairy tales would insist on becoming literature. On the stage, a similar, traditional sense of an ancient, oral voice sounds in the libretto or plot: Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, Bartók and Balász’s Bluebeard’s Castle, Dvořák’s mermaid opera Rusalka, or a Ballets Russes production such as Firebird, proclaim their roots in unauthored folklore, although they are in themselves unique and original works. Cinema likewise announces its proximity to tradition—while often claiming implicitly to be filling out the original in the most effective and satisfactory possible way, cinema being the Gesamtkunstwerk (the total work of art) with the largest audience. One television series of fairy tales was simply called The Storyteller (1988). Written and directed by Anthony Minghella with the puppeteer Jim Henson, each episode opened with a fireside scene in which a storyteller, played by John Hurt, dramatized the fairy tale we were about to watch, presenting it as part of a living tradition come down through the centuries. In fact, these versions are some of the most adventurous and inventive variations on the material ever made for television.
Second-order narrative of this kind, which is not ashamed to proclaim its fidelity to the past, diverges fundamentally from the cultural ideals, in fiction and other forms of creation, of singularity and novelty. The Grimms wanted to uncover the true voice of the German Volk by transcribing fairy tales from oral sources; they made a pretence of vanishing from their opus. Angela Carter (1941–92) saw the matter differently. She declared she wanted to put new wine in old bottles so that they would explode. But the old bottles were necessary to create her fantastic pyrotechnics.
A third defining characteristic of fairy tales follows organically from the implied oral and popular tradition: the necessary presence of the past makes itself felt through combinations and recombinations of familiar plots and characters, devices and images; they might be attached to a particular well-known fairy tale—such as ‘Puss-in-Boots’ or ‘Cinderella’—but fairy tales are generically recognizable even when the exact identity of the particular story is not clear. A universe of faerie is the matrix for any number of incidents that take place within its borders, incidents which then bud and effloresce into fairy tales as such, discrete and interwoven. The term ‘fairytale’ is often used as an epithet—a fairytale setting, a fairytale ending—for a work that is not in itself a fairy tale, because it depends on elements of the form’s symbolic language. Fairytale or, sometimes, faery or faerie (as in Edmund Spenser’s allegory The Faerie Queene) or ‘fairy’ (Joseph Addison in 1712 wrote of ‘the Fairy Way of Writing’) are epithets applied to evoke a quality of
a scene or figure beyond a fairy tale as a distinct narrative. For example, an episode in an epic (Circe turning men into swine marks her as the predecessor of the wicked witch). Elements in many of the great Victorian and Edwardian children’s stories have a fairytale character. The authors of newly invented stories, such as Charles Dickens and Charles Kingsley, George Eliot, E. Nesbit, and J. R. R. Tolkien, do not write fairy tales as such, but they adopt and transform recognizable elements—flying carpets, magic rings, animals that talk—from fairytale conventions, adding to readers’ enjoyment by the direct appeal to shared knowledge of the fantasy code.
Fourthly, the scope of fairy tale is made by language: fairy tale consists above all of acts of imagination, conveyed in a symbolic Esperanto; its building blocks include certain kinds of characters (stepmothers and princesses, elves and giants) and certain recurrent motifs (keys, apples, mirrors, rings, and toads); the symbolism comes alive and communicates meaning through imagery of strong contrasts and sensations, evoking simple, sensuous phenomena that glint and sparkle, pierce and flow, by these means striking recognition in the reader or listener’s body at a visceral depth (glass and forests; gold and silver; diamonds and rubies; thorns and knives; wells and tunnels). The novelist A. S. Byatt calls this ‘the narrative grammar’. Byatt is herself a brilliantly combinatorial creator of stories from this repertory, and shows her attraction to this prime material of fairy tale when she writes of the Grimm Brothers:
It is interesting how impossible it is to remember a time when my head was not full of these unreal people, things, and events … The Tales … are older, simpler, and deeper than the individual imagination.
It is very odd, when you come to think of it—that human beings in all sorts of societies, ancient and modern, have needed these untrue stories … These ‘flat’ stories appear to be there because stories are a pervasive and perpetual human characteristic, like language, like play.