Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale Page 5

  Box 2 Animal Metamorphosis: The Silence of the Deer

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  In the Grimms’ ‘Little Brother and Little Sister’, the evil stepmother, who ‘can see through her eyelids’ (Philip Pullman), follows the children who have run away deep into the forest; she casts a spell on the forest streams—three times. Listening to the babbling water, Little Sister, like a far more heroic figure of legend, is able to decipher what it is saying, and as her brother cups his hands to drink, she cries out, ‘Don’t drink! The spring is bewitched. Anyone who drinks from it will become a tiger. Put it down, put it down! You’ll tear me to pieces!’

  At the next spring, she hears it warn that anyone who drinks there will turn into a wolf. Once more, Little Sister manages to curb her brother. But the third time, she is too late; he drinks, ‘And at once his face changed, and lengthened, and became covered in fine hairs, and his limbs changed into a deer’s legs and he stood up, tottering uncertainly—and there he was, a young deer, a fawn.’

  After this, as in an Ovidian metamorphosis, the deer can understand and feel with Little Brother’s fully human consciousness, but he’s beastlike in his instincts, is no longer able to speak, and rushes off to the sound of the hunters’ horns.

  This tender, poetic fairy tale reveals an underlying relation between human beings and all phenomena. These relations have no inherent ethical scaffolding; magic is arbitrary. The forest can shelter the children, or not. The springs can turn malevolent, and their powers are limited—they can warn potential victims, but have to obey the spell cast on them by a witch. Above all, the fairy tale assumes that Little Brother can turn into an animal. Nobody remarks on this, or on his change back into human form. It would not be a fairy tale from the Grimms’ collection if anyone expressed surprise.

  Heroines also suffer degrading disguise when they conceal their true identity under ashes and dirt, or shroud themselves in a wooden cloak, a coat of rushes, or the hide of a donkey or a bear. They aren’t ‘translated’ into animal shape, like Bottom or the Frog King, but hidden, often at their own initiative in order to elude an unwanted lover—sometimes their own father, as in the fairy tale ‘Peau-d’âne’ (Donkeyskin). This incest plot was so widespread that, in Perrault’s time, un conte de peau d’âne meant a fairy tale. The anthropologist James MacTaggart, when gathering material in the rural region of Estremadura, Spain, found that the heroine of their local variant of ‘Donkeyskin’ was wrapped in a pelican skin. He was puzzled (this is a part of the world where there have never been pelicans). But he soon discovered that goitre was endemic in the region, and realized that the imagery of the large bird with its baggy crop reflected the disfiguring swollen neck caused by malfunctioning of the thyroid gland, and that the familiar fairy tale was clothed in the specific conditions in that community.

  Female protagonists are mutilated more often than male heroes, but this cruel variety of bodily transformation can be miraculously reversed, when their severed hand is found in a fish, or when their beaten and scarred bodies are healed by the good offices of the Sultan Haroun al-Rashid (with the help of a jinniya obedient to his commands) as in the cycle of ‘The Porter and the Five Ladies of Baghdad’ in the Nights. However, gender does not make such a difference when it comes to being devoured and regurgitated, whole. Magically, Red Riding Hood and Granny are cut out from the belly of the wolf, Tom Thumb survives being swallowed by an ogre, and the little boy victim in ‘The Juniper Tree’ reappears safe and sound.

  A reversal of animal and other metamorphosis, leading to recognition of the protagonist’s value and virtue, provides the determining structure of classic fairy tales. The best-known fairy tale in the popular group known as Beast Bridegroom tales is ‘Beauty and the Beast’, written by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont, a governess working in England, and published in 1758 in The Misses’ Magazine, a miscellany she put together to teach her charges. Beaumont adapted an earlier, intricate, protracted romance, ‘La Belle et la bête’ (1740) by Mme de Villeneuve, one of the salonnières. In Villeneuve’s tale, the Beast has been cursed by his older godmother—after he rejected her advances (!). Beaumont reined in the rococo flourishes and corrected the morals: she swung the fairy tale more towards an ideal alliance, evoking a bourgeois romance designed to soothe young women facing arranged marriages; the tale invites them to accept the match their father proposes, however unappealing they find the prospective husband. They will come to love him, the story reassures them.

  Beaumont’s story has become a much-loved classic, much adapted, much performed, and it doesn’t succeed in suppressing the erotic undertow that pulls so deeply in all these stories of beasts. When Jean Cocteau made his film of La Belle et la bête in 1946, he cast Jean Marais as the Beast, all aquiver with life: who can ever forget how he seems to catch fire when Belle rejects him and how his whole body smokes and his claws and pelt smoulder after he’s made a kill, while he visibly grieves at these signs of his own monstrosity? Marais in his full hairy mask captures a perfect and irresistible synthesis of repulsiveness and attractiveness, and Cocteau’s realization of a dream about the power of love has exercised its seduction for over half a century.

  The Magic of Words

  The stress falls on the binding power of words: the father must keep his promise to the Beast, the beauty will sleep for a hundred years, according to the letter of the spell. Readers and audiences grasp the importance of paying attention to what is said. These narrative elements are historic survivals from a pre-literate society when concepts of honour and trust provided the foundation for stability. The fairy tales themselves, growing out the spoken word, dramatizing fateful charms and spells, playing with meaning and double entendres, become part of that legislating fabric, and by issuing warnings about what happens to kings and princesses, wolves and other beasts who don’t keep their promises, remind us to keep ours (see Figure 12).

  Prophecies—and curses—march on unstoppably. One message of fairy tales is ‘Beware what you wish for.’ Another would be ‘Beware what you promise.’ Yet another would be ‘Beware what you utter.’ You can’t take back what you say. There’s a profound respect in the genre for what words do in the world, as well as in the stories. Of all the charged, active, enchanted elements in the tales, it is the words of the story that possess charmed life. Spells are formed of repetition, rhyme, and nonsense; when they occur in fairy tales, they’re often in verse—riddles and ditties, and they belong to the same family of verbal patterning as counting out, skipping songs, and nursery rhymes.

  The pleasure of these refrains arises from their absurdity, and they are often chanted over and over; patterning weaves the spell tighter, and repeating formulae thrice packs the power into the spell more strongly. Names are comical and mysterious in a memorable way: after Old Rinkrank has imprisoned the princess in a glass tower, he tells her she’s now called Mother Mansrot. He calls out to her:

  ‘It’s me poor Old Rinkrank

  On my seventeen-foot legs

  On my one great swollen foot

  Mother Mansrot open the door.’

  The mood can be shuddery comic:

  ‘Fee fi fo fum

  I smell the blood of an Englishman

  Be he alive or be he dead

  I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.’

  Or uncanny and perverse, as in the English folk tale, ‘The Three Heads in the Well’: when each severed head rises spookily from the depths, it asks:

  ‘Faire maiden, white and red

  Stroke me smoothe and combe my head … ’

  If its wish is met, it promises:

  ‘And every haire a sheave shall be

  And every sheave a goulden tree.’

  Such fragments of verse often survive from anonymous, undatable sources. For example, the patchwork of proverbs, saws, riddles, and allusions in the speech of Lear’s Fool, of Edgar in disguise as Poor Tom, of mad Ophelia, has been pieced by Shak
espeare from a ragbag of sources already anonymous and ancient—and often baffling—when he was writing. The web of words ensnares the cast of characters in the tale as surely as it intends to enthral us.

  Patterns of repetition widen out from the brief rhymes and charms into whole structures of incident, with internal architecture reprising a similar episode again and again—most often in threes, but also in sixes and sevens, and in the Arabian Nights in thousands—multitudes of proliferating incidents, each with their own multitude of jinn. The numbers are dizzy-making, macro versions of the tiny incantations at the core of the plot’s driving magical powers.

  Magic, being a compact between practitioner and client, requires an audience for its accomplice; it depends on the consent of the participants, on ‘that willing suspension of disbelief’ Coleridge famously invoked on behalf of the supernatural in his poems. Rhyme, repetition, rhythmic prose or verse carry traces of oral performance and act as mnemonic markers. They also draw attention to the teller, who frequently opens and closes with a set phrase in order to frame as fairy tale what the audience is about to hear and help us enter the world where magical thinking rules. These verbal devices request the consent of the audience to accept what is to come, however unlikely. One could say, they cast a spell.

  In this way, the storyteller adopts the devices of verbal magic; the animate forces ascribed to the world of phenomena by fairy tale as a genre are infused into the individual stories themselves.

  3

  Voices on the Page

  Tales, Tellers, & Translators

  A real fairy tale, a tale in its true function, is a tale within a circle of listeners.

  Karel Čapek

  A fairy tale keeps on the move between written and spoken versions and back again, between print and performance and, since the coming of mass media, between page and screen; this peripatetic character confirms the sense that the fairytale genre does not possess a precisely delineated literary form, as does a novel by Jane Austen, but is as fluid as a conversation taking place over centuries. The audience is not necessarily assembled in one place at one moment—the circle loops out across the centuries, forming a community across barriers of language and nation as well as time. Think of it as a plant genus, like roses or fungi or grasses, which seed and root and flower here and there, changing species and colour and size and shape where they spring. Or think of it as a tune, which can migrate from a voice to a symphony to a penny whistle, for a fairy tale does not exist in a fixed form or medium. The stories’ interest isn’t exhausted by repetition, reformulation, or retelling, but their pleasure gains from the endless permutations performed on the nucleus of the tale, its DNA as it were. C. S. Lewis, the creator of the Narnia books, pointed out that fairy tales don’t even need to be especially well written to be unforgettable. Many of the most powerful tales are terse to the point of blankness, brimful of inconsistencies, and plotted with baffling lack of logic (why would a father decide to murder his twelve sons in favour of his daughter? why would another father cut off his daughter’s hands?). Coleridge praised ‘motiveless malignancy’ in narrative; it certainly excites a frisson, that mixture of cold fear and thrilling transgressive pleasure that is the characteristic smoky aroma given off by fairy tales.

  Mode Parisienne: Mother Goose Tales and Arabian Nights

  In 1697, when Charles Perrault published Contes du temps passé (Tales of Olden Times), his classic anthology of seven fairy tales, he did not use his own name, but attributed the book to his son, describing how Pierre had written down stories he had heard told by nurses and old women. The subtitle, Tales of Mother Goose, picks up a proverbial phrase for an ‘old wives’ tale’, an equivocal and ancient expression (Plato uses it) for traditional folk wisdom passed on by grannies and nurses. ‘Contes de ma mère l’oye’ appears in the frontispiece of Perrault’s first edition, written on a plaque hanging on the wall behind a crone sitting by the fire with children around her; it signals to the reader her character as a generic figure of the storyteller, a bardic repository of tribal lore.

  Perrault’s tales were soon translated into English and disseminated in unpretentious chapbooks, illustrated with tiny woodcuts of significant moments in the tales: the wolf springing on Red Riding Hood to devour her, Bluebeard dragging his wife by her hair with his scimitar raised menacingly (see Figure 8). The collection closed with ‘Peau-d’âne’ (Donkeyskin), in a prose version (Perrault had earlier refashioned it in light, ironic verse, insouciant and comic). It ends, in Angela Carter’s translation, ‘The story … is not something you might read every day in the morning papers. But as long as there are children, mothers, grandmothers and Mother Goose, it will always seem new.’

  Such a fairy tale, with its dark theme of incest, was in this way firmly identified as family entertainment, with an emphasis on continuity through women’s voices.

  Perrault has become by far the most celebrated pioneer of the fashion for the literary fairy tale under the ancien régime, but he was only one writer among many. Fairy tales were taken up most enthusiastically by defenders of the ‘modernes’ (French, local, demotic) against the ‘anciens’ (classical, universal, latinate)—chiefly independent-minded women of courtly, élite society, conteuses, salonnières, and bluestockings who embroidered and expanded the generic plotlines and characters, adding rococo ornament to biting satire about domestic cruelty and political tyranny. Marie-Catherine D’Aulnoy, an extravagant and prolific writer, was immediately pirated in English translation; she was the first author to use the phrase Contes des fées (Tales of the Fairies), in 1698. In England, she was dubbed Mother Bunch, a name with a ring of Mother Goose, which summons false expectations of jolly fun; D’Aulnoy’s writing is arch, worldly, and acerbic. The women fairytale writers were often loquacious, whereas Perrault is laconic; they were embattled, while he gives more of a Gallic shrug at the misdeeds of fairytale characters. Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier, Henriette-Julie de Murat, Charlotte-Rose de La Force, and Marguerite de Lubert likewise adopted the conventions of the fairy tale to depict the virtues, the sufferings—and the hopes—of their sex; they speak out against arranged marriages and the double standard, which allowed men to enjoy love affairs and punished women for adultery, which gave men an education and denied women the freedom that follows from knowledge; their heightened and sardonic flights of fancy about wealth and luxury also point to the excesses of the royal and princely courts. ‘The White Cat’ by D’Aulnoy contains a brilliantly savage account of one of Louis XIV’s ruinous wars. Several of these women suffered legal penalties—prison, house arrest, exile—for their views, even though they had hidden their messages in apparent frippery.

  In the same period, the Arabian Nights (Figure 6) began appearing in print for the first time. The Orientalist Antoine Galland subdued the effervescent original into courtly French with his masterly and hugely influential rendering (Les Mille et une nuit, 1704–17); its English counterpart, the so-called ‘Grub Street’ anonymous version (Arabian Nights’ Entertainments), appeared soon after. Serialized in broadsheets and journals, it became a triumphant success, even a craze. Writers enthusiastically adopted the mode of Oriental fairy tale for the page and the stage. For example, fairytale motifs, travel fantasy, satires of political ambition and despotic excess, dreams of vast fortunes, and commedia dell’arte buffoonery are all mixed together in Alain-Reneé Lesage’s Arlequin roi des ogres ou Les Bottes de sept lieues (Harlequin, King of the Ogres or the Seven-League Boots, 1720), in which a chorus of ogres chants nonsense ‘in their native Algonquin’.

  Figure 6 Telling stories to save your life: Shahrazad’s ultimately successful nocturnal stratagem. From a manuscript of Alf layla wa-layla (The Tales of the Thousand and One Nights), Baghdad, 16th century.

  The confluence of the European fairy tale with the Orientalizing tale was crucial; many of the defining features of the genre crystallized in the process. In this way, popular fairy tale, with its roots in what was to be called folklore, intertwined and cross
-fertilized with Oriental tales that had been refined by Galland’s renderings. D’Aulnoy invokes ‘an old Arab slavewoman’ as her informant, for example, which may or may not have been the case. In the chapbooks Barbe bleue/Bluebeard is identified by illustrators as a Saracen (turbaned and brandishing a scimitar), and his last bride is given the name Fatima. The debt to the Nights has been underestimated. The Oriental mode of storytelling has inspired the excess and opulence, revenges and passions, animal metamorphoses and imbricated structure in, for example, Anthony Hamilton’s burlesque ‘The Ram’, and D’Aulnoy’s fairy tale ‘The Blue Bird’. But these are two examples from a host that could be cited.