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The Fairy Tale Post

Wednesday, 22 December, 2004

Let us revisit the subject of fairy tales. As I've said previously, I do have something of an obsession with them. I'm not quite sure how it started. They were standard children's fodder when I was growing up, what with Disney's sanitised musical animations, watching Swan Lake as a five-year-old (my first ever ballet) and the various hardcover children's books on fairy tales (Hans Christian Anderson/Grimm/Perrault) that were part of my early library (none of which I have any more—they weren't worth keeping). After we moved to Australia, my reading diet consisted mainly of Enid Blyton (Folk of the Faraway Tree, Malory Towers, The Naughtiest Girl in the School, The Mystery of the Pantomine Cat and the hugely influential [on me, anyway] Tales of Long Ago) and Lucy Maud Montgomery (I read through all the Anne books, all the Emily books, The Stoy Girl duology and all the stand-alones [of which The Blue Castle and Jane of Lantern Hill remain my favourites]).

I think I had a natural inclination towards all things fantastic. My interest in Greek myths and the Trojan War was sparked about this time. In high school I moved on to Marion Zimmer Bradley (my goodness! I didn't know she died 5 years ago!), Guy Gavriel Kay (I remember reading Tigana for five days straight—lounging around on our deck; I later added that first edition to my private library which is why I now have two copies) and dabbling my toes in Tolkien (though I wasn't quite ready for it—never got past the prologue).

My passion for fairy tales really kicked off in late high school when the ABC screened the original Broadway production of Into the Woods as part of their Sunday night art special. Stupidly, I had chosen to watch The Fisher King but my friend Liwen was far more discerning and taped the program which I viewed later. I was already a bit of a Sondheim fan, having grown up listening to Barbra Streisand's rendition of “Not While I'm Around” and “Being Alive”. And I had always sort of been into musicals too (A Chorus Line, 42nd Street, Anything Goes, etc.) My friend Ynping and I went to see the Sydney Theatre Company's production of Into the Woods and, as a result, I got the worst mark I've ever received for a maths exam (but it was worth it!) I think the three of us were profoundly impacted by Into the Woods—not just the musical but all the things surrounding it: David Stratton's (was it David?) fine introduction, the program booklet article about fairy tales, a piece which discussed Bruno Bettelheim's influence on Sondheim, etc.

Coinciding with this sudden burst of Sondheim was my introduction to Robin McKinley by another friend who lent me Beauty, saying it was her favourite book ever (this edition also made it to my library and somehow I've ended up with three copies). What I loved about Robin's retelling is that she made the characters seem so human and so likable but she didn't sacrifice the story for the sake of some hidden agenda—she was completely faithful to the Beauty and the Beast tale (Beauty and the Beast is her archetypal source story).

So it was quite appropriate that, when it came time to do some sort of speech for Year 11/Year 12 English, fairy tales became my theme. I read bits of The Uses of Enchantment (Bruno Bettelheim) and I also discovered J.C. Cooper's Fairy Tales: Allegories of Inner Life in the local library. Bettelheim subscribed to the school of Freud; Cooper, the school of Jung. So my initial thinking about fairy tales was heavily psychoanlytical and I guess it still is. One of the major things that appeals to me about fairy tales is that they are about growing up—the transition from childhood to adulthood, passing through the rites of initiation, overcoming trials, finding “home” in the “happily ever after”. As G.K. Chesterton writes,

“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”

Perhaps that's something my 16-year-old self needed to hear, battling with what I realise in hindsight was probably depression, perhaps brought about by changing life circumstances and the dreaded HSC.

This psychoanalytical perspective on fairy tales continued until part-way through Uni when I was reading a journal article on A.B. Facey's A Fortunate Life which was completely based on Max Lüthi's Fairy Tale as Art Form and Portrait of Man. In this book, Lüthi discussed fairy tale conventions—particularly that of the protagonist:

• he is usually the youngest;
• he is normally a nobody and a nothing who has no special talent or nothing to recommend himself;
• he is blessed by “God” in that, along the way, others (animal or human) give him assistance in his quest;
• he learns the rules and conventions of the land of fairy tale and, through obedience to them, overcomes in the end, etc.

(A.S. Byatt plays with all of these conventions in “The Story of the Eldest Princes” (one of the fabulous short stories in The Djinn in the Nightgale's Eye which I heartily recommend you read.)

I referred to Lüthi so much, I eventually photocopied the entire book (also did that with Cooper as well; Bettelheim I found in Lesley MacKay's bookshop in Double Bay and I went on to read the entire volume during my Honours year). I can't remember how I came to acquire the other books in my thesis bibliography but I must have stumbled across them along the way (Jack Zipes [first read him in the University of Wollongong library], Brian Froud [my favourite movie is The Labyrinth], even Neil Gaiman [who wrote the fabulous “Troll Bridge”]). At the beginning of 1998 I went to Canada/US and stocked up majorly on The Fairy Tale series (ed. Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling; novels and short stories) and the books listed in their recommended reading list (Anne Sexton's Transformations poetry sequence, The Practical Princess and Other Liberating Fairy Tales [Jay Williams] and, of course, the compulsory The Bloody Chamber [Angela Carter]. But I too squeamish to ever read The Juniper Tree—well, more than the excerpt that appeared in Armless Maidens which was a very troubling reminder of the abuses that have been committed against children by adults).

I tried to write a poetry sequence on Cinderella when I was doing third-year Creative Writing. When I finished my major in English, I thought that fairy tales would be a good thing to do my Honours in. Well, it didn't quite work out the way I'd hoped. I ended up doing it at UNSW instead of Wollongong. But half a lifetime of collecting fairy tale materials did pay off when it came to writing my thesis and I certainly had a lot of head knowledge and useless facts about fairy tales. Take Cinderella for example (which is my favourite fairy tale):

• The original story comes from ancient China and that's where we get elements like the wicked stepmother (evil first wife in a society where it was acceptable for a man to have several wives) and the tiny feet (foot binding—small feet are for the aristocracy who don't have to walk).
• The glass slippers are really fur slippers; someone mistranslated Perrault (who popularised Cinderella).
• Basil's Cat Cinderella has the girl plotting with her governess to kill her own mother and then the governess takes her place. It's far more violence and gruesome than Disney.
• Fairy godmothers aren't in the original.
• Neither are pumpkin coaches or rat footmen. I think those were a Perraultian invention—in other versions, she walks to the ball.
• Cinderella is very closely related to Donkeyskin.
• The title, Cinderella, is misleading; the German Aschenputtel is a better rendering because, according to Cooper, ciners are the product of incomplete combustion (and are therefore dirty) whereas ashes are the product of complete combustion (and are therefore clean).

Fairy tales is such a humongous topic I wasn't really sure what I wanted to write about at first. I had vague ideas about doing something about rewritings (which have always fascinated me—how authors can take an old tale and make it their own; Charles de Lint, for example, transformed “Jack and the Beanstalk” into an urban grungy tale about “Jacqui” and the “giants” of the underworld gangs; Pamela Dean's Tam Lin follows the undergraduate career of a young woman during the seventies who becomes involved with a young man named Thomas who is a Classics major as well as evoking the particular quirks of campus “folklore”). Then I came to realise that I had been thinking about rewritings in terms of there being an “original” to rewrite when the truth was, there probably wasn't. Stories evolved as they were passed down through time, the younger generation taking on the tales to make them their own and promote their own ideals and values. Perrault, for example, believed in the aristocracy, whereas the Grimms brothers came from the rising merchant class/bourgeousie and didn't see social climbing/marrying outside your social circle as a problem. Even now fairy tales are tailored to be politically correct (Once Upon a More Enlightened Time), to promote homosexual ideology (I didn't read that one) or feminist ideals (Ever After is an excellent example of this), or to mindlessly entertain (Mario Bros/The Legend of Zelda, etc.).

I am tremendously indebted to Jack Zipes for eventually coming to this understanding and that is why my supervisor thinks I took a post-Marxist approach to my thesis (I don't even understand what post-Marxism is!) So when I wrote about postmodern fairy tales, I was just talking about fairy tales written after World War II and what they were like—how they promoted the ideologies of our society and culture in the modes and mediums of our culture—and, I guess, where my little contribution fitted into that. To me it seems wonderful that the process of telling tales of wonder (“fairy tale” is such a stupid term; most of them don't even have fairies in them. The German word, märchen, is better) has persisted throughout the centuries, resulting in incarnations even more wonderful and exciting than that which has gone before. Though Neil Gaiman's Coraline and Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away draw upon the tropes and conventions of the genre, their creations seem so fresh and original that it's as if there never were fairy tales like them before.

But the ultimate fairy tale has always been for me (and I know this is going to sound awfully clichéd and trite but it is true) the gospel story as retold in the Bible. There is nothing more wonderful or marvellous than the great tale of how God came to save us and to live with him as part of his family forever.

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