The Routledge Companion to Media and Fairy-Tale Cultures

Pauline Greenhill, Jill Terry Rudy, Naomi Hamer, Lauren Bosc, Pauline Greenhill, Jill Terry Rudy, Naomi Hamer, Lauren Bosc

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317368793
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

From Cinderella to comic con to colonialism and more, this companion provides readers with a comprehensive and current guide to the fantastic, uncanny, and wonderful worlds of the fairy tale across media and cultures. It offers a clear, detailed, and expansive overview of contemporary themes and issues throughout the intersections of the fields of fairy-tale studies, media studies, and cultural studies, addressing, among others, issues of reception, audience cultures, ideology, remediation, and adaptation. Examples and case studies are drawn from a wide range of pertinent disciplines and settings, providing thorough, accessible treatment of central topics and specific media from around the globe.

Part I
Basic Concepts

1
Overview of Basic Concepts

Folklore, Fairy Tale, Culture, and Media

Jill Terry Rudy

Folklorists, as experts trained in the study of traditional expression, think again and again about narrative, communication, and media. Primarily, folklorists think that oral expression matters, even advocating for understanding the primacy of words spoken in face-to-face interaction, because they study those expressions that involve tradition and groups, the lore and the folk. They specialize in studying expressions and performances that bring the past into the present, that follow and vary a familiar formula, that happen recognizably over new times and spaces as they are communicated between people who share at least one thing in common (Dundes 1965; Toelken 1996). Speaking and sharing artful knowledge in close groups, but also between them, remains a concern for tradition and a central component of folklore study. Folklorists assert traditional oral expression is crucial to being human. By extension, this posits the human body as the primary medium of expression and emphasizes mouths and ears as key producers and receptors of communication. Inherently, this involves people gathering close enough together to speak and be heard.

Yet because folklorists follow where traditional expressions lead, they must recognize the revolution toward other media, especially as new media evolve. They concede that the inclination to communicate using the voice and the spoken word has turned, and sometimes quickly, toward other media that inscribe and project communication. The hands and eyes and tools (technologies) that extend embodied capabilities become important in producing and receiving written, printed, photographed, and filmed expressions, including traditional ones. They also allow for participation by differently abled people, for example those who are hearing impaired. As communication and media connect with and beyond bodies to artifacts, machines, and airwaves, folklorists’ preferred assumption of artistic communication in small groups speaking together (Ben-Amos 1972) morphs toward an admission of, perhaps even fascination with, intermedial mingling.

A history of communicative media may seem linear and progressive rising past such folklore to modern technologies—from human speech into a succession of writing implements, printing presses, photographic imaging, moving and talking pictures, audio and audiovisual broadcasting, and digital computing and handheld devices. Yet staying attuned to tradition requires us to insist on recognizing human beings as communicative omnivores whose expressive media overlap and expand rather than supersede and replace. This point cannot be overstated and bears repeating: folklorists have come to see human beings as using all available means to share dilemmas and insights about dealing with recurring life situations. Mostly, they call those insights tradition; some associate them with stories. Marina Warner, in her wise guide to fairy tale, claims this as a pleasure and power of the genre: “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” (2014, 95). Thinking of humans as communicative omnivores allows the apparently linear progression of media to turn into a kind of recursive arc where social media communities seem not so distant or different from neighbors gathered around a hearth. Indeed, much of the rhetoric of the World Wide Web talks about its power to bring together individuals and groups separated by oceans and continents (Mosco 2000).

Yet these are very different communicative situations as well, for the physical, cultural, emotional, intellectual, spiritual distances, and technological mediations are real. People in the Global North learn this when the electricity goes down, the signal goes out, or the batteries die; those in the Global South have daily reminders. Critical disjunctures manifest in the various forms of transmitting and receiving media, traditional expressions, and folk narratives—differences in attention, presence, virtuality that have not yet been studied enough for participants to know how, or if, to mitigate their consequences. And it can be all too easy to forget the impositions of mediation in the felt immediacy, even magic, of face-to-face, printed, broadcast, online, and mobile interacting and communicating. Participants tend to overlook that necessary energy of being present, owning devices, plugging in, and accessing service providers. And yet, people may bracket some media as lesser and others as advanced; they make, and forget that they made, a split that divides the oral from the literate, the analog from the digital, the haves from the have-nots. Media distinctions so often turn into unrecognized geopolitical, socioeconomic, cultural, even interpersonal gulfs. So, not surprisingly, folklore’s founding and continuing practice remains enmeshed in these assumptions of social division which also happen to be imbricated in the rise of colonialism, modernity, imperialism, socialism, capitalism, and globalization.

Hearing, seeing, and knowing someone else’s situation, their very different situatedness, may yet allow for their very similar humanity and life situations. This is one great reason for keeping and sharing the fairy tale, to acknowledge and transform social division. As Maria Tatar astutely observes, “Fairy tales register an effort on the part of both women and men to develop maps for coping with personal anxieties, family conflicts, social frictions, and the myriad frustrations of everyday life” (1999, xi). No wonder people around the world love them and tell them over and over in every available communicative technology and semiotic mode. Thus, holding the seemingly incongruous assumptions of oral and face-to-face communicating as prime while allowing for communicative omnivoraciousness takes scholars somewhere quite interesting.

The ideas and patterns associated with traditions, and expressed as stories, sayings, songs, customs, celebrations, objects, and artifacts, sometimes seem to have such a life of their own that scholars at one time thought of these expressions as superorganic entities. Traditions have appeared to be forces with their own volition, crossing social and technological divides, flowing, and insinuating themselves in human conversations, situations, institutions, communities, and nations through any means available (Ranke 1967; El-Shamy 1997). Fairy-tale scholar Jack Zipes (2006) considers fairy-tale motifs as memes, a cultural equivalent of DNA that, rather like the earlier superorganic assumptions, replicates itself in opportunistic ways throughout cultures and communities. Advocating a more situated and close view of tradition, folklorist Barre Toelken, also using biological terminology, recognizes folklore as a “species of learning and expression which uses culture-based interactive codes and formulas” (1996, 47).

Toelken is mostly interested in how people in groups select and perform traditional expressions in specific, informal, close interactions. He allows that it’s best to think of such expressions as occurring “with or without literacy” and therefore “we might say that folklore is often aliterate” ([1976] 1996, 47). So, folklorists’ incongruous assumptions of the oral as prime and the intermedial as inevitable both apply in sharing traditional expressions in general and traditional stories particularly. Thinking of fairy tales as amedial may challenge, or at least acknowledge, the constructedness of oral/literate splits and have/have not divides. Thinking of fairy-tale cultures and media leads to remembering, critiquing, and honoring cultural and communicative differences while holding oral communication as prime and investigating the consequences and pleasures of intermedial mingling.

And now, for a case in point. “Cinderella” (ATU 510A) continues as a perennial fairy-tale favorite whose various iterations perpetuate the intermedial mingling of communicative omnivores. In his casebook on the story, Alan Dundes addresses the teeter-totter tendencies of universalism and particularism with fairy tales. He acknowledges that people assume these stories have a primeval meaning and universal reach that explains all humanity or have such peculiarity that a tale perfectly establishes one nation’s soul. Dundes, more moderately, encourages the recognition that “the item will not be limited to a single culture nor will it be worldwide” (1982, vi). This reminder is helpful especially with “Cinderella” because even browsing the children’s folklore picture book aisle reveals stories from around the world: Chinese, Egyptian, North American Indigenous, Mexican, Russian. It seems that the story has been told worldwide and that it speaks to universal longings for acceptance, for social wealth, and for relief from drudgery and abuse.

By 1893, Marian Roalfe Cox annotated and published 345 variants of the story noting medieval analogues. Over 100 years later, this fairy tale still captured popular interest, with Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine being a 1998 Newbery Honor book and 2004 film adaptation (dir. Tommy O’Haver), while Ever After (dir. Andy Tennant 1998) is a fondly remembered, and slightly realist and not-so-feminist, film adaptation (Williams 2010). As of spring 2016, the International Fairy Tale Filmography (IFTF) listed 132 “Cinderella” versions, with Cendrillon the earliest (dir. Georges Mèliés 1899). And the digital humanities project Fairy Tales on Television Visualizations (FTTV) finds “Cinderella” the most frequently televised fairy tale from the 1950s to the present, as indicated by a database of mostly North American, but some Japanese, British, and European, television shows. In 2015, Disney revisited its animated classic with the Kenneth Branagh–directed, live-action Cinderella. Each retelling situates the tale in specific contexts while adding to its intertextual and intermedial resonances.

Such retellings and remediations in the era of broadcast and spreadable (even conglomerate) media involve oscillating shifts of reality and fantasy, constitutive of the fairy tale and a key element of its intermedial proclivities, but a matter of controversy for fairy-tale scholars. Jessica Tiffin asserts that the tale denies reality (2009, 4), though a total denial would make any story incomprehensible. Warner questions not only if fairy tales reflect experience but asks, “Do they interact with reality and shape it?” (2014, 81). An oscillation between the two might involve accepting the magical event or character as natural yet unexplained, and then shift to highlighting the wondrous as an anomaly. Disney’s Enchanted (dir. Kevin Lima 2007) exemplifies the mainstream, popular working through of these oscillations, produced by the company most associated with late-capitalist workings of magic and wonder. The movie’s use of animation and live action not only signals the shift between fantasy and reality but plays with the consequences of blurring lines, and lives, between imagined and real worlds.

When the animated lead character, Giselle, falls through a well and comes out of a New York City manhole cover in her ridiculous hyperbolically poufy wedding dress, an early twenty-first-century iteration of fairy-tale fiction and reality manifests. With Disney’s Cinderella as one visual cue to identify Giselle’s princessness, the fairy tale itself becomes the parodic, and still metatextual, message that these stories are problematic but are not going away in the contemporary imagination.¹ Evidently, intertextual and intermedial associations with oral and print fairy-tale characters and their filmed, televised, and digital counterparts, and their requirement to negotiate shifts between fantasy and reality, still matter to powerful communications conglomerates and to those who make and view tales.

Consider these shifts in context of the politics and poetics of magic and wonder limned by Cristina Bacchilega in relation with modernity and coloniality. She traces the consequence that “the means of wonder, that is, magic, became a trick or childlike make-believe rather than the outcome of a way of knowing and being in the world” (2013, 194). In a few intermedial “Cinderella” retellings, this struggle over magic and wonder becomes a way of knowing and being rather than a mere trick or make-believe. The “Fractured Fairy Tales” segment of the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show (1959–1964) exemplifies how broadcast media in a droll tone can portray magical tricks and wondrous knowing. In one of several versions of the tale, Cinderella must sell pots and pans under contract to the fairy godmother, whose greater knowledge of contract law ends up winning the day. Megan Armknecht (2014) has analyzed how several “Fractured Fairy Tales” oscillate toward American Cold War values and frequently reward the character who can most realistically think about and manipulate contractual agreements. While the animation invokes something fantastic, the adapted plots and characters espouse realistic 1960s American mores.

Thought, and especially imagination, cannot be removed from this process of sharing traditional narrative, and so folklorists, throughout the discipline’s history, have also thought again and again about thinking—and about the relationship of thinking with speaking and other forms of expression. Folklorists hold some paradoxical assumptions about traditional stories being situated communication. One long-held Euro-American idea about the relationship of thinking and expressing suggests that thoughts are universal, fully formed, mental things that expression merely exteriorizes. This concept suggests that stories just wait in people’s brains for the moment when a skull metaphorically splits open and the expression springs forth, as Athena from Zeus’s head. If thoughts are already fully formed in people’s heads, then a specific situational context (Oring 1986) may be the wedge that splits it all open to let the expression out at an apt place and time. Additionally, if these pre-formed thoughts seem particularly symbolic, they may appear as archetypes, as in Jung’s assertions of a collective unconscious which depends on, and interprets, fairy-tale characters, images, and situations as intuitive representations of the Self (Dundes 1982, 200–202). Yet if thoughts themselves are constructed through a medium of expression, like language or affect or imagery, then stories may be held in individual human memory not as whole expressions but as collectively constructed forms that emerge in specific performance situations.

With fairy tales, cultures, and media, these paradoxical assumptions of fully formed thoughts and socially constructed expression relate with where stories might come from, how they act,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of Figures
• Introduction and Acknowledgments
• PART I BASIC CONCEPTS
• PART II ANALYTICAL APPROACHES
• PART III ISSUES: POLITICAL AND IDENTITY ISSUES
• Thematic Issues Raised by Fairy-Tale Media
• Issues of Intersection With Other Study Areas
• PART IV COMMUNICATIVE MEDIA
• PART V EXPRESSIVE GENRES AND VENUES
• List of Contributors
• Index