Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion

Jack Zipes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136646799
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The fairy tale is arguably one of the most important cultural and social influences on children's lives. But until the first publication of Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion, little attention had been paid to the ways in which the writers and collectors of tales used traditional forms and genres in order to shape children's lives – their behavior, values, and relationship to society.

As Jack Zipes convincingly shows in this classic work, fairy tales have always been a powerful discourse, capable of being used to shape or destabilize attitudes and behavior within culture. How and why did certain authors try to influence children or social images of children? How were fairy tales shaped by the changes in European society in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? Zipes examines famous writers of fairy tales such as Charles Perrault, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen and L.Frank Baum and considers the extraordinary impact of Walt Disney on the genre as a fairy tale filmmaker.

1

Fairy-Tale Discourse: Toward a Social History of the Genre

Language and style are blind forces. Writing is an act of historical solidarity. Language and style are objects. Writing is a function. It is the relation between creation and society. It is literary language transformed by its social destination. It is the form grasped in its human intention and thus tied to the great crises of history.

—Roland Barthes, Le degré zéro de l’écriture (1953)

Even though the fairy tale may be the most important cultural and social event in most children’s lives, critics and scholars have failed to study its historical development as a genre. There are chapters on the fairy tale in histories of children’s literature, essays and even books on the fairy tale for adults, in-depth psychological explorations of the fairy tale’s effect on children, and structuralist and formalist studies of individual tales galore. But no history of the fairy tale for children, in particular, no social history. Just a gap.

Nonhistory is history. Or, the acceptance of the gap means that brief descriptive outlines and chronologies of the fairy tale pass for history. Perhaps the most remarkable outcome of the so-called historical studies of literary fairy tales for children is the sense one gains that these tales are ageless. The best fairy tales are supposedly universal. It does not matter when or why they were written. What matters is their enchantment as though their bedtime manner can always be put to use to soothe the anxieties of children or help them therapeutically to realize who they are. One should not dissect or study fairy tales in a sociopolitical context, for that might ruin their magic power.

Fairy tales for children are universal, ageless, therapeutic, miraculous, and beautiful. This is the way they have come down to us in history. Inscribed on our minds, as children and then later as adults, is the impression that it is not important to know about the mysterious past of fairy tales just as long as they are there and continue to be written. The past is mysterious. The history of the fairy tale for children is mystery.

Fredric Jameson claims that “history is not a text, not a narrative, master or otherwise, but that, as an absent cause, it is inaccessible to us except in textual form, and that our approach to it and to the Real itself necessarily passes through prior textualization, its narrativization in the political unconscious.”¹ It follows, then, out of necessity that we write our own texts to gain a sense not simply of what has happened in reality but also of what has happened on psychological, economic, cultural, and other levels to free ourselves of the dictates of other sociohistorical texts that have prescribed and ordered our thinking and need to be disordered if we are to perceive for ourselves the processes that produce social structures, modes of production, and cultural artefacts. To write a historical text (or any text for that matter) implies that one has a worldview, an overall perspective of history, an ideology, whether conscious or unconscious, and that the writing of such a text will tend either to test this view or to legitimate it. Textual form depends on the method one chooses. We place a value on how and what we write.

Jameson talks about the necessity of developing a method of mediations that will enable us to grasp and evaluate history in the most comprehensive manner possible:

This operation is understood as a process of transcoding: as the invention of a set of terms, the strategic choice of a particular code or language, such that the same terminology can be used to analyze and articulate two quite different structural levels of reality. Mediations are thus a device of the analyst, whereby the fragmentation and automization of the various regions of social life (the separation, in other words, of the ideological from the political, the religious from the economic, the gap between daily life and the practice of academic disciplines) is at least locally overcome, on the occasion of a particular analysis.²

Jameson’s method could be called interdisciplinary but that would be too simplistic, for he does not want to bring disciplines together in a traditional positivist way to study literature from different statistical and strategic angles. Rather he wants to invent an ideological code and method that will subsume different approaches so he can grasp the underlying forces that have caused gaps in history and prevented our understanding the essence of literary creation. He seeks to explore the political unconscious, and it is obvious that he wants to develop many of the notions first elaborated by Roland Barthes in Le degré zéro de l’écriture (1953) and Mythologies (1957). For Jameson the individual literary work is a symbolic act, “which is grasped as the imaginary resolution of real contradiction.”³ Such a definition is helpful in understanding the origins of the literary fairy tale for children and adults because it immediately perceives the process of writing as part of a social process, as a kind of intervention in a continuous discourse, debate, and conflict about power and social relations. Jameson sees ideology not as something “which informs or invests symbolic production; rather the aesthetic act itself is ideological, and the production of aesthetic or narrative form is to be seen as an ideological act in its own right, with the function of inventing imaginary or formal ‘solutions’ to unresolvable contradictions.”⁴

Certainly one can speak about the single literary fairy tale for children as a symbolic act infused by the ideological viewpoint of the individual author—and here it is important to add that the fairy tale for children cannot be separated from the fairy tale for adults. The genre originated within an oral storytelling tradition and was created and cultivated by adults, and as the fairy tale became an acceptable literary genre first among adults, it was then disseminated in print in the eighteenth century to children. Almost all critics who have studied the emergence of the literary fairy tale in Europe^5. agree that educated writers purposely appropriated the oral folktale and converted it into a type of literary discourse about mores, values, and manners so that children and adults would become civilized according to the social code of that time. By the eighteenth century, the writers of fairy tales for children such as Sarah Fielding and Madame Leprince de Beaumont acted ideologically by presenting their notions regarding social conditions and conflicts, and they interacted with each other and with past writers and storytellers of folklore in a public sphere.

This interaction had already begun in Italy during the sixteenth century and led to an institutionalized symbolic discourse on the civilizing process in France that served as the basis for the fairy-tale genre. For example, writing literary tales in France in the late seventeenth century, modeled on Italian tales, was predicated on their acceptance at Louis XIV’s court and in prominent Parisian salons. The oral tale had flourished for a long time in villages and nurseries, part of a popular discourse, part of a discourse between governesses and children of the upper class. It had even seen literary light in the mass-marketed “blue books” distributed by peddlers for consummation by peasants and the lower classes.⁶ However, it was disdained as a literary form by the aristocratic and bourgeois classes until it received courtly approval through Madame de Maintenon and Fénelon; that is, until it could be codified and used to reinforce an accepted discursive mode of social conventions advantageous to the interests of the intelligentsia and ancien régime,⁷ which made a fashion out of exploiting the ideas and productivity of the bourgeoisie. There is an interesting parallel that one could draw with the institution of conversation at this time. A noncompulsive elegant mode of conversing was developed at the court and salons that paradoxically emanated from a compulsion to respect strict rules of decorum.⁸ The speaker was compelled to be noncompulsive, and the audience was to be spontaneous in its reception of stories and exchange of remarks. The more folktales could be subjected to the rules of conversation, the more they were ornamented and accepted within the dominant discourse. This was the historical sociogenetic origination of the literary fairy tale for children. Writing fairy tales was a choice, an option exercised within an institution, a manner of imposing one’s conversation on the prescribed fairy-tale discourse.

Jameson is again instructive in his definition of genre:

Genres are essentially literary institutions, or social contracts between writer and a specific public whose function is to specify the proper use of a particular cultural artefact. The speech acts of daily life are themselves marked with indications and signals (intonation, gesturality, contextual deities and pragmatics) which ensure their appropriate reception. In the mediated situations of a more complicated social life—and the emergence of writing has often been taken as paradigmatic of such situations—perceptual signals must be replaced by conventions if the text in question is not to be abandoned to a drifting multiplicity of uses (as meanings must, according to Wittgenstein, be described). Still, as texts free themselves more and more from an immediate performance situation, it becomes ever more difficult to enforce a given generic rule on their readers. No small part of the art of writing, indeed, is absorbed by this (impossible) attempt to devise a foolproof mechanism for the automatic exclusion of undesirable response to a given literary utterance.⁹

In the case of the literary fairy tale for children as genre, it appears fruitless to me to begin a definition based on the morphological study of Vladimir Propp¹⁰ or the semiotic practice of Algirdas-Julien Greimas,¹¹ as many critics have done. To be sure, Propp and Greimas are useful for comprehending textual structures and signs of the tales, but they provide no overall methodological framework for locating and grasping the essence of the genre, the substance of the symbolic act as it took form to intervene in the institutionalized literary discourse of society.

This becomes apparent when one reads the remarkably informative essay “Du Conte merveilleux comme genre” (On the Magic Folk Tale as Genre) by Marie-Louise Tenèze, who uses the works of Propp and Max Lüthi to grasp the kernel (un noyau irréductible) of what constitutes the magic of the folktale.¹² She begins with Propp’s thesis that there are a limited number of functions in the magic folktale with an identical succession of events. The hero lacks something and goes in search of aid (intermediaries) to achieve happiness, most often marriage. The structure of every magic folktale conforms to this quest. Then she combines Propp’s ideas with those of Lüthi, who sees the hero of a magic folktale as a wanderer charged with carrying out a task. Because the answer or solution to this task is known in advance, there is no such thing as chance or coincidence in a folktale. This accounts for the precise, concrete style of all the tales, and their composition is a detailing of the ways in which the hero takes steps to survive and complete his mission. According to Tenèze, the rich variety of folktales stems from the freedom given to each narrator to alter the functions and tasks within the fixed schema. Her synthesis of Propp and Lüthi leads her to the following formulation:

The magic folk tale reveals itself in its very core to be like the narration of the situation of the hero between the “response” and the “question,” that is between the means obtained and the means employed. In other words, it is the relation between the hero—who is explicitly or implicitly but always assured of aid in advance, guaranteed—and the difficult situation in which he finds himself during the course of action that I propose as the constitutive criterion of the genre.¹³

By combining Propp’s thesis with Lüthi’s, Tenèze endeavors to elaborate a structural approach that stresses the dynamics and changeability of the tale, avoiding the pitfalls of the static models of Propp and Lüthi. She draws an interesting parallel to the primitive North American Indian ritual of puberty described by Claude Lévi-Strauss in Tristes Tropiques,¹⁴ where adolescents were placed in the wilderness and left alone to survive and develop a sense of power while they also were expected to become aware of the absurdity and desperation one would experience by leaving the social order. Tenèze believes that

like the real hero of this custom, the hero of the magic folk tale ventures, alone and far from his familiar surroundings, to the perilous fringe of an exceptional experience capable of supplying him with a “personal provision of power,” his insertion into the world—and thus, there is a magic solution to the absurd and desperate endeavor to leave the social order which is played out in the universe of fiction. Isn’t the folk tale a response to the oppressive interrogation of reality?¹⁵

Like Propp and Lüthi, Tenèze favors the structural approach to explain the essence of the magic folktale. In other words, it is through the structure or composition of the tale that we can gain an understanding of its meaning or enunciation, what it is trying to communicate. The difficulty with this approach, as Tenèze realizes, is that, if all folktales have essentially the same “morphology” (even though the functions may be varied), they all express the same thing, some kind of universal statement about the plight of humanity. The form itself is its meaning, and the historicity of the individual creator (or creators) and society disappears. Such formalist approaches to folk and fairy tales account in great part for the reason why we tend to see the tales as universal, ageless, and eternal. The tendency here is to homogenize creative efforts so that the differences of human and social acts become blurred.

Tenèze is much too aware of the failing of the structural approach to be satisfied with it, for the second half of her essay on the genre explores other aspects that may help us define its essence such as its relation to myth and legend and to the narrator and community. In her survey of criticism dealing with reception aesthetics, she stresses the significance of specific narrators and their audiences, their norms and values, all of which must be taken into account if we are to grasp the core of the genre, especially the significance of its development. This leads Tenèze to conclude,

When we envisage it in its concrete cultural formations, in spite of the character of the world which we recognize in it, the magic folk tale needs to be inscribed in the functional totality of the system of expression of the community in question. Even more than this, it needs to be situated in the life of this community itself. This is the research which must now be carried out in studies of the European folk tale.¹⁶

Whereas it is extremely difficult to study the historical origins and social significance of a folktale (the relationship between narrator and audience) because we lack a great deal of information about storytelling in primitive tribes and societies, it is not so difficult to define the historical rise of the literary fairy tale for children. It seems to me that any definition of this genre must begin with the premise that the individual tale was indeed a symbolic act intended to transform a specific oral folktale (and sometimes a well-known literary tale) and designed to rearrange the motifs, characters, themes, functions, and configurations in such a way that they would address the concerns of the educated and ruling classes of late feudal and early capitalist societies. What Tenèze amply discusses as the dynamic structure of the folktale is what August Nitschke¹⁷ has evaluated in terms of autodynamics, heterodynamics, and metamorphosis of primitive tribes and modern societies. Nitschke maintains that every community and society in history can be characterized by the way human beings arrange themselves and perceive time, and this gives rise to a dominant activity (also called a line of motion). The perspectives and positions assumed by members of society toward the dominant activity amount to a configuration. The configuration designates the character of a social order because the temporal–corporeal arrangement is designed around a dominant activity that shapes the attitudes of people toward work, education, social development, and death. Hence, the configuration of society is the pattern of arrangement and rearrangement of social behavior related to a socialized mode of perception. In the folktale the temporal–corporeal arrangement reflects whether there are perceived to be new possibilities for participation in the social order or whether there must be a confrontation when possibilities for change do not exist. This is why, in each new stage of civilization, in each new historical epoch, the symbols and configurations of the tales were endowed with new meaning, transformed, or eliminated in reaction to the needs and conflicts of the people within the social order. The aesthetic arrangement and structure of the tales were derived from the way the narrator or narrators perceived the possibility for resolution of social conflicts and contradictions or felt change was necessary.

If we examine the vast group of European folktales of the feudal and early capitalist periods, those tales with which we are most familiar and that were recorded very early, that which is our legacy, we must bear in mind that their configurations and symbols were already marked by a sociopolitical perception and had entered into a specific institutionalized discourse before they were transformed into literary tales for children of the Eu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction to the Routledge Classics Edition
• Preface to the Second Edition
• 1. Fairy-Tale Discourse: Toward a Social History of the Genre
• 2. The Origins of the Fairy Tale in Italy: Straparola and Basile
• 3. Setting Standards for Civilization Through Fairy Tales: Charles Perrault and the Subversive Role of Women Writers
• 4. Who’s Afraid of the Brothers Grimm? Socialization and Politicization Through Fairy Tales
• 5. Hans Christian Andersen and the Discourse of the Dominated
• 6. Inverting and Subverting the World with Hope: The Fairy Tales of George MacDonald, Oscar Wilde, and L. Frank Baum
• 7. The Battle over Fairy-Tale Discourse: Family, Friction, and Socialization in the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany
• 8. The Liberating Potential of the Fantastic in Contemporary Fairy Tales for Children
• 9. Walt Disney’s Civilizing Mission: From Revolution to Restoration
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index