Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale Read online

  At the fin de siècle, J. K. Huysmans wrote a notorious, decadent novel, Là-Bas, inspired by the excesses of Gilles de Rais; later, Georges Bataille, who was engaged all his life with defining the sacred and the profane, and used pornography to expose social conventions, argued in his edition of the Breton nobleman’s trial that his excesses epitomize the power of the aristocracy and the profligacy of chivalry—their extravagant clothes, their butchery out hunting, and their pitiless violence towards the poor whose lands they raided.

  Both these writers’ imaginings flow into the novel about La Barbe bleue and Joan of Arc that Michel Tournier published in 1983, in which he returns to the lurid stories of paedophiliac, satanist carnage committed by Gilles de Rais. He conveys no scepticism over their historical status; for him, the fictional form of the conte offers that crystalline translucency through which a more profound truth appears.

  Charges of witchcraft were not infrequent in the fifteenth century and posterity usually treats them with utter scepticism, as in the case of Joan of Arc. Historians prefer to examine the context that led to such serious fears, arguing from observation of evidence and the social, political, and perhaps personal tensions it reveals. Yet, running against the grain of ordinary and reasonable scepticism, the guilt of Gilles de Rais has been taken at face value on the basis of the evidence at the trial. It has always seemed to me improbable that so many children—between 80 and 200—could have gone missing without explanation over a period of years without leaving some traces, or causing an outcry from the victims’ families, before Gilles was accused and tried. One of the worst riots in Paris, for example, broke out in 1750, when children were regularly going missing. The king Louis XV—or one of his daughters—was suspected of kidnapping them to drink their blood, a remedy that had been prescribed, it was rumoured, by the royal physicians to restore the royal health. No similar riots are recorded in Brittany at the time that Gilles de Rais was accused of the deaths of so many children, and because of this as well as other reasons (his chief prosecutor inherited all his offices and possessions), historians have expressed doubts about his crimes.

  The case of Gilles de Rais is particularly interesting because, like the uprising of 1750, it reveals the continual interplay of existing fantasies with historical events. Another obvious problem with identifying Gilles de Rais as La Barbe bleue is that Gilles, if he was a mass murderer, chose his victims among little boys: his legend does not depicts him as a serial wife-killer, but rather closer to a classic fairytale ogre, snacking in the night on an infant or two until a clever young hero dupes him.

  The case of Snow White has also inspired a quest for a historical original. For example, in the exhibition Treasures of Heaven at the British Museum (2012), one of the many relics, set in a scintillated jewelled reliquary, remembered the death of St Ludmila, the grandmother of King Wenceslas of the Christmas carol. She’s the patron saint of Bohemia and much revered to this day. She was murdered by her mother-in-law, the label went on, who grew jealous of her goodness and beauty and strangled her with her veil.

  There have been several bids to identify the authentic model for the Grimms’ heroine: in 1994, a German scholar, Eckhard Sander, proposed Margarete von Waldeck (b. 1553), who was possibly poisoned in dynastic scheming of the time. Margarete also grew up in a town (Wildungen) where children went down the copper mines and, Sander continues, were consequently stunted, and taunted as ‘poor dwarfs’.

  Claims by historians that they have identified Bluebeard or unearthed the first, authentic Snow White reveal a thirst for stable genealogies—something that can never be appeased. Snow White’s situation is historical and generic: it encapsulates fundamental dynamics of family life over a longue durée, unfortunately. It is reflected in the fury of Venus against Psyche after her son Cupid has fallen in love with her in The Golden Ass, for example. Shakespeare dramatizes the conflict in Cymbeline, when the Queen—stepmother to the heroine Imogen—schemes against her. In her very first speech, she alludes to ‘the slander of most stepmothers’ (I.i.85) and hastens to reassure Imogen that she will not act stereotypically. But she attempts to poison her, of course. In Pericles, another evil queen orders Marina killed, because she’s gifted with more qualities than her own daughter. Shakespeare knows such plots from his historical sources, because the tensions were commonplace, especially in early medieval history when women could occupy positions of power but were always poised precariously, easily unseated by a rival. Like ‘Bluebeard’, the fairy tale of ‘Snow White’ does not record a single, appalling crime, but testifies to a structural and endemic conflict in society that was political and social as well as personal, producing many, many instances of similar violence.

  The elements are stirred into the pot of story. Occasionally, a fait divers, news item or true-life story, does make its way directly into the soup. The Tales of the Thousand and One Nights gathers in several incidents reported from history—and transmutes them into fairytale romance. ‘The Tale of al-Mutawakkil’ (the 10th Caliph, d. 861) and Mahbuba, his beloved concubine, relates how, after a long estrangement, he dreams of her and of their reconciliation; soon after he wakes up, a slave slips him a note; al-Mutawakkil steals into the women’s quarters and finds Mahbuba singing; the poem—of her own composition—describes how she saw him come to her in a dream to make peace with her.

  Mutual dreaming is one of the distinctive enchantments of the Nights, and after this, the lovers are reconciled—until the Caliph’s murder. In this story, Mahbuba then pines away and dies, to live forever as a symbol of faithful love. (In historical reality she was handed over to the next ruler, but refused to oblige him, was thrown into prison, and lost to view.)

  André Miquel, translator and editor of the Nights, has commented that this story discloses rather clearly the warp and weft of history and fantasy in such literature, but it remains unusual in featuring by name individuals who once existed: epics such as La Chanson de Roland, or fantastic biographies, such as the Alexander romance, do so as a matter of course, but fairy tales usually bring ordinary mortals centre stage. In the same way as the runaway girl wears a pelican skin in the Spanish version of ‘Donkeyskin’, so local incidents and memories add colour and point to an existing tale, long after the historical memory of them has faded.

  The scholar Catherine Velay-Vallantin has shown how the story of the Bê te de Gevaudan, a French variation on the Beast of Dartmoor and other legends, became interwoven with the retellings of ‘Red Riding Hood’ in provincial France. The Bê te was a monstrous creature, reputedly a huge wolf, which took the lives of many before it was finally hunted down. The local bishop fulminated against the morals of the community, identifying the Beast as a sure sign from God of their sinfulness, both to bring former Huguenots into line, and to terrorize rural shepherd girls into Christian modesty and decorum: ‘This idolatrous and criminal flesh,’ he ranted, ‘which serves only as a demonic instrument for seducing and condemning souls, should it not be given unto the murderous teeth of the ferocious Beast to tear it to pieces?’

  Occasionally, the necessary transformation into fiction does not convince, and the nouvelle remains one, failing to crystallize as a conte. The Grimms, for example, collected a savage episode in a tale called ‘Playing Butchers’: ‘There once was a father who slaughtered a pig, and his children saw that. In the afternoon, when they began playing, one child said to the other, “you be the little pig, and I’ll be the butcher.” He then took a shiny knife and slit his little brother’s throat.’

  The Grimms had found the story in a Berlin newspaper edited by the Romantic writer Heinrich von Kleist, so it hardly had authentic Volk credentials, except as an urban myth; it does have analogues in folklore elsewhere, but its pitilessness aroused shock and horror in the first readers of Children’s and Household Tales, and the Grimms came under pressure to drop it. They did so in later editions of their collection. But Wilhelm protested that it taught children the all-important distinction between playing make-bel
ieve and real life. He saw the wisdom in the tales as cautionary as well as consolatory.

  Common Bonds

  On the whole, though, the historical reality that can be excavated from fairy tales does not carry the memory of extreme horrors, specific tragedies, or individuals, but rather dramatizes ordinary circumstances, daily sufferings, needs, desires—and dangers, especially of dying young. Rather than seek for a particular vicious individual behind a fairytale figure, or for a specific event, thinking of the stories as responses to generic human experience yields far greater results. The story of Bluebeard touches upon areas of acute anxiety—about male sexuality in general and in extremis; about the rights of husbands—and the rights of wives; about money (Bluebeard is always vastly wealthy); about foreigners and Orientals; about the delinquency of curiosity and women’s special propensity to be curious. The deaths of his wives one after another may offer a historical memory of the toll of childbirth.

  Also, it is important to realize that the traffic does not only go one way, the fairy tale taking colour from real life. Real life is understood in the light of the stories, too. That pre-Revolutionary Parisian violence was suffused with a fairytale dread of child-guzzling ogres who came straight from the pages of ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ or ‘Hop o’My Thumb’ or, one could say, the collective imaginary.

  And fantasy often exercises a stronger pull than reality: Gilles de Rais is far more compelling cast as a fairytale monster bridegroom than he is as a victim of feudal and ecclesiastical ambition in medieval France.

  In one sense the nightmare of Bluebeard overlaps with the terrors of penny dreadfuls and tabloid journalism about Jack the Ripper and other extreme, specific horrors. In another sense, however, the murderer bridegroom and his persistent presence in the tales symbolize more general grounds of acute anxiety. The voyeuristic violence has a moral dimension, too; what is the pleasure for the reader (and the writer) of the bloody chamber?

  ‘Bluebeard’, ‘Beauty and the Beast’, and many other fairy tales about monster bridegrooms appear to focus on the villain, the male protagonist. But they are as entangled with the bride and with questions of female desire as they are with male drives. Bluebeard’s afterlife in literature and other media divides sharply along gender lines: male writers see themselves in the role, with varying degrees of self-scrutiny and complacency, whereas for women, the Bluebeard figure often embodies contradictory feelings about male sexuality, and consequently presents a challenge, a challenge they meet in a variety of ways. The fascination and the repulsion that beast bridegrooms provoke in women turns such stories into explorations of female sexuality, and this strand has become one of the powerful attractions of the whole genre. Bluebeard typifies the principal male antagonist in the sex wars, an enemy, a sadist, and a rapist—who can also be irresistibly alluring.

  His house, his castle, his forbidden chamber become synonymous with forbidden knowledge: when the heroine of Angela Carter’s variation on the fairy tale first sees the place where she is being taken:

  And, ah! his castle. The faery solitude of the place; with its turrets of misty blue, its courtyard, its spiked gate, his castle that lay on the very bosom of the sea with seabirds mewing about its attics, the casements opening on to the green and purple, evanescent departures of the ocean, cut off by the tide from land for half a day … that castle, at home neither on the land nor on the water, a mysterious, amphibious place, contravening the materiality of both earth and the waves, with the melancholy of a mermaiden who perches on her rock and waits, endlessly, for a lover who had drowned far away, long ago. That lovely, sad, sea-siren of a place!

  This enchanted fortress conceals a torture chamber.

  The bride is initiated into erotic pleasure by this Bluebeard, but rescued, in a rightly celebrated, exuberant twist at the end of the story, by the arrival of her sharp-shooting mother: ‘You never saw such a wild thing as my mother, her hat seized by the winds and blown out to sea so that her hair was her white mane, her black lisle legs exposed to the thigh, her skirts tucked round her waist, one hand on the reins of the rearing horse while the other clasped my father’s service revolver and … ’.

  This vision owes something to the bewitched Highland crew, Cutty Sark and her ilk, whom Carter knew from her Highlander granny.

  The heroine of Geneviève Breillat’s low-budget, art house movie Barbe-bleue (2009) also gets the better of her rich, obese, doting husband; this perverse rendering by a woman director, who has been censured for earlier pornographic work, deliberately evokes children’s pop-up story books in design and narration, and ends with a tableau of the bride contemplating Bluebeard’s head on a platter, a victorious Salome with the head of John the Baptist. This revenge eludes the protagonist of E. L. James’s sado-masochist sensation, Fifty Shades of Grey; in this case, the female author chooses to let Bluebeard have his way.

  In the twenty-first century, the politics of the bedchamber communicate a different perspective on the dangers that sex presents to a young woman.

  Heroic Optimism

  The nesting places of the storyteller, Walter Benjamin pointed out, are in the loom shed and at the spinning wheel, in the fulling barn and the kitchen when doing tedious, repetitive tasks—shelling peas in readiness for storing, sorting pulses for bagging, bottling and preserving. Stories were told to alleviate harsh labour and endless drudgery—and they were passed between generations—by the voice of experience, filled with the laughter of defiance, the hope of just deserts.

  For this reason, many readers have found in fairy tales a powerful ‘consolatory fable’ for the sufferings that ordinary people went through, and the proof of the emancipatory spirit of the oppressed in action. Idealists, reformers, self-styled prophets and utopians, are especially attracted to the form, and it is significant how many writers borrowed the conventions of fairy tales to campaign for social reforms: some, such as Charles Kingsley, Christina Rossetti, and C. S. Lewis, were devout Christians; others, from John Ruskin to Frank L. Baum, Antonio Gramsci to Philip Pullman, envision alternative societies, often organized along socialist lines. J. K. Rowling’s political commitment to the cause of single mothers, for example, and her strong egalitarian feelings, are entirely of a piece with forerunners in the world of the expanded fairytale form.

  The happy ending, that defining dynamic of fairy tales, follows from their relation to reality. Ordinary misery and its causes are the stories’ chief concern. But writers—and storytellers—address their topics with craft, and it is often more compelling to translate experience through metaphor and fantasy than to put it plainly. As C. S. Lewis wrote in the title of one of his essays, ‘Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s To Be Said’.

  Even a writer as dreamy (and privileged) as the German Romantic Novalis defined the form as a way of thinking up a way out: ‘A true fairytale must also be a prophetic account of things—an ideal account—an absolutely necessary account. A true writer of fairy tales sees into the future.’

  The stories face up to the inadmissible facts of reality and promise deliverance. This honest harshness combined with the wishful hoping has helped them to last. If literature is a place we go to, in Seamus Heaney’s words, ‘to be forwarded within ourselves’ then fairy tales form an important part of it. If literature gives ‘an experience that is like foreknowledge of certain things which we already seem to be remembering’, fairy tales offer enigmatic, terrifying images of what the prospects are, of the darkest horrors life may bring. Yet the stories usually imagine ways of opposing this state of affairs, or at worst, of having revenge on those who inflict suffering, of turning the status quo upside down, as well as defeating the natural course of events; they dream of reprisals, and they sketch alternative plot lines. They are messages of hope arising from desperate yet ordinary situations.

  5

  Childish Things

  Pictures & Conversations

  Each picture told a story … as interesting as the tales Bessie sometimes narrated on wi
nter evenings … and when, having brought her ironing-table to the nursery hearth, she allowed us to sit about it, and … fed our eager attention with passages of love and adventure taken from old fairy tales and other ballads …

  With Bewick on my knee, I was then happy: happy at least in my way.

  Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

  Jane Eyre is the first little girl—or, if not the first, the most celebrated—to tell us her story in a novel in the first person; she is 10 years old, and taking refuge from the bullying of her cousin by hiding away in a red alcove and losing herself in a picture book.

  A forerunner of Alice in Wonderland in the ranks of fictional child protagonists, and the heroine of a novel that is shot through with the vivid colours, grotesqueness, and cruelty of romances and fairy tales, the young Jane is mind-voyaging as she reads, a pastime much disapproved by her vicious foster-family (so like a fairy tale). But Thomas Bewick’s History of British Birds in her lap is twinned, in the passage, with memories of her beloved nurse Bessie telling tales while she was ironing, and this collocation, of real birds in pictures and remembered stories told aloud, foreshadows the scene of storytelling that has now become the dominant advice to parents: reading to a small child with a picture book open and shared between them.

  This is a familiar image of good parenting, but it is formed by modern ideas about children, the value of stories, and the truth of the imagination.

  Yet in 1855, when Charlotte Brontë died, fairy tales were not yet routinely published with illustrations. Woodcuts of birds by Thomas Bewick, the creator of beguiling pastoral vignettes, belong to enlightened, humanist pedagogy which urged that young minds explore phenomena empirically, according to reason. John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau were opposed to fancy (children had enough of that naturally), although they agreed with the Romantics when they too observed nature, and saw ‘a world in a grain of sand | And a heaven in a wild flower’.