Postmodern Fairy Tales

Gender and Narrative Strategies

Cristina Bacchilega

• Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Jahr: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780812200638
• Thema: Literature
• Thema: Literary Criticism

Postmodern Fairy Tales seeks to understand the fairy tale not as children's literature but within the broader context of folklore and literary studies. It focuses on the narrative strategies through which women are portrayed in four classic stories: "Snow White, " "Little Red Riding Hood, " "Beauty and the Beast, " and "Bluebeard." Bacchilega traces the oral sources of each tale, offers a provocative interpretation of contemporary versions by Angela Carter, Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, Margaret Atwood, and Tanith Lee, and explores the ways in which the tales are transformed in film, television, and musicals.

1

PERFORMING
WONDERS:

POSTMODERN
REVISIONS OF
FAIRY TALES

We tell stories because, in order to cope with the present and to face the future, we have to create the past, both as time and space, through narrating it.

_W.F.H. NICOLAISEN

Story demands sadism, depends on making something happen, forcing a change in another person, a battle of will and strength, victory/defeat, all occurring in a linear time with a beginning and an end.

—TERESA DE LAURETIS (revising Laura Mulvey)

ABUNDANCE, RATHER THAN LACK, motivates this study. Reproduced in a variety of discourses, fairy tales in the second half of the twentieth century have enjoyed an explosive popularity in North America and Western Europe. While many adults may not remember, and many children may not have been exposed to versions of “Snow White” or “Beauty and the Beast” other than Disney's, we nevertheless respond to stereotyped and institutionalized fragments of these narratives sufficiently for them to be good bait in jokes, commercials, songs, cartoons, and other elements of popular and consumer culture. Most visible as entertainment for children, whether in the form of bedtime-stories or of games and props marketed in conjunction with a movie or TV series, fairy tales also play a role in education. Not only are children encouraged to retell or dramatize them in schools, but college students encounter them again in across-the-curriculum readers and in courses on children's literature and folklore. This legitimizing of the genre has extended to several psychotherapeutical approaches and contexts. Bruno Bettelheim's Freudian study The Uses of Enchantment is still a landmark, though critically revisited; professional storytellers have been instrumental in helping abused children move beyond a burdened-by-guilt stage; and Jungian popularizers, as Gertrud Mueller Nelson in her hopeful Here All Dwell Free and Robert Bly in his mythifying Iron John: A Book About Men, have enlisted fairy tales in their best-seller projects of healing the wounded feminine and masculine.¹ Creative writers seem equally inspired by the fairy tale, which provides them with well-known material pliable to political, erotic, or narrative manipulation. Belittled, yet pervasive and institutionalized, fairy tales are thus produced and consumed to accomplish a variety of social functions in multiple contexts and in more or less explicitly ideological ways.

Thinking of the fairy tale predominantly as children's literature, or even as “literature of childhood,” cannot accommodate this proliferation of uses and meanings. The fairy tale “cannot be defined one-dimensionally,” and in any case, “adults have always read, censored, approved, and distributed the so-called fairy tales for children” (Zipes, “Changing Function” 28 and 23). While keeping in mind the history of the fairy tale as literature for children, it is within the adjacent realms of folklore and literature that I intend to seek a clearer understanding of contemporary transformations of fairy tales. Though not the only legitimate mode of inquiry, this approach is historically and generically sound. Why? Because the “classic” fairy tale is a literary appropriation of the older folk tale, an appropriation which nevertheless continues to exhibit and reproduce some folkloric features. As a “borderline” or transitional genre, it bears the traces of orality, folkloric tradition, and socio-cultural performance, even when it is edited as literature for children or it is marketed with little respect for its history and materiality. And conversely, even when it claims to be folklore, the fairy tale is shaped by literary traditions with different social uses and users.

The context of folklore and literature, and more specifically the more limited field of folk and literary narrative, is also especially productive to the analysis of those transformations found in the privileged, though not isolated, concern of this book—postmodern literary texts for adults.² Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, literary authors have exploited the fairy tale in a variety of ways. To cite only a few of the most prominent examples, the fairy tale serves as structuring device for Charlotte Brontë in Jane Eyre and William Faulkner in Absalom, Absalom! as an explicitly ideological theme for Charles Dickens in Hard Times and Anne Sexton in Transformations, or as an expectation-setting allusion for Henry James in What Maisie Knew and for Italo Calvino in his early works, starting with Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno. Literary authors such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in “The Fairy Tale” or George MacDonald in “The Day Boy and the Night Girl” have also written their own “original” fairy tales or Kunstmärchen, not necessarily for children. In works like Anatole France's “The Seven Wives of Bluebeard,” they have rewritten specific classic fairy tales to advance individual interpretations of them. And modern feminist writers from Olga Broumas to Fay Weldon have engaged the “inherited” tradition of fairy tales to “refuse to obey their authority by revising and appropriating them” (Walker 83).³ Recent studies like Theorizing Folklore: Toward New Perspectives on the Politics of Culture (Western Folklores 1993 special issue edited by Charles Briggs and Amy Shuman) and Folklore, Literature, and Cultural Theory: Collected Essays (edited by Cathy Lynn Preston, 1995) have provided theoretical frameworks for folklorists to rethink not only the multiple roles of tradition within culture today, but to view transformations within an interdisciplinary context which does not necessarily require a defense of the integrity and autonomy of scholarly fields.⁴ An informed knowledge of both folklore and literature can help us to question and redefine their borders, to articulate how narrative rules are (re) produced; such an approach also has wide-ranging implications for an understanding of literary texts within a broader cultural dynamics—an understanding which I would define as semiotic.

Literary and non-literary contemporary narratives which rewrite and revise “classic” fairy tales are the specific objects of this study, whether Margaret Atwood's “Bluebeard's Egg” or the TV-series Beauty and the Beast. When reading these texts I want to address—within a critically semiotic understanding of folklore and literature, and culture in general—several problems related to how fairy tale materials are selected, appropriated, and transformed. Three questions direct my efforts. What kinds of images of woman and story do these rewritings/ revisions project? What narrative mechanisms support these images? And finally which ideologies of the subject underlie these images? In short, this book explores the production of gender, in relation to narrativity and subjectivity, in classic fairy tales as re-envisioned in late twentieth-century literature and media for adults.

To pursue this feminist and narratological project, I will have to struggle at times with still larger questions. How can we distinguish among the many ideological and narrative manipulations these transformations operate? How are the objectives and functions of contemporary transformations different, if at all, from earlier ones? And can we establish a typology of contemporary fairy tale transformations which would move towards a critical systematizing of their proliferation and yet resist closed classification? Since this interdisciplinary perspective draws on the study of the fairy tale, folklore and literature, and of feminism and postmodernism, the rest of this chapter will outline my perspective on these fields and their debates, thus supplying a frame for my ensuing discussion of contemporary tales of magic. In the process, I will also explain how I am using such terms as “tale of magic” or “fairy tale”; narrativity, performance, and performativity; and subjectivity and postmodernism.

THE TALE OF MAGIC AND ITS MIRRORS

So it is my turn to tell stories—stories about stories, or “theories,” as we call them. And since nobody, from psychologists and historians to parents and artists, feels any qualms about defining and discussing fairy tales, I will follow tradition here and tell my own version of the “fairy tale” story.

The fairy tale's magic fulfills multiple desires. As literature for children, fairy tales offer symbolically powerful scenarios and options, in which seemingly unpromising heroes succeed in solving some problems for modern children. These narratives set the socially acceptable boundaries for such scenarios and options, thus serving, more often than not, the civilizing aspirations of adults. Dulce et utile: fiction at its most successful, at the height of its magic. As a hybrid or transitional genre, the fairy tale also magically grants writers/tellers and readers/listeners access to the collective, if fictionalized past of social communing, an access that allows for an apparently limitless, highly idiosyncratic re-creation of that “once there was.” Though it calls up old-time wisdom, the fairy tale grants individuals the freedom to play with this gift, to dismiss it as children's fantasy. And for girls and women, in particular, the fairy tale's magic has assumed the contradictory form of being both a spiritual enclave supported by old wives' wisdom and an exquisitely glittery feminine kingdom. Regardless of the group, though, the fairy tale still proves to be everyone's story, making magic for all.⁵

Jack Zipes, Ruth B. Bottigheimer, Maria Tatar, and other critics have taught us the value of breaking this magic spell. Looking with Dorothy behind the curtain at Oz to investigate the mechanisms of enchantment, their research has revealed how the workings of this magic, however benevolent, rely on privilege and repression. Clever and industrious boys, dependent and hard-working girls, and well-behaved “normal” children in general—such products demonstrate how the fairy tale's magic act requires not only social violence and appropriation but a careful balance of threats and rewards.⁶ My own thinking about this critical disenchantment has taken two directions: an attempt to place this double-edged magic more firmly within a folklore and literature frame; and a study of the fairy tale's narrative construction of magic as “natural,” with an emphasis on the gendered implications for women.

From Breaking the Magic Spell (1979) to Spells of Enchantment (1992) and, most recently, in Fairy Tale as Myth/Myth as Fairy Tale (1994), Jack Zipes has relentlessly focused our critical attention on the changing social functions of fairy tales in Europe and the United States, identifying the ideologically narrow and repressive uses the fairy tale has been put to, but also stressing its emancipatory impulses. I have no quarrels with Zipes's much needed genealogy or social history of the European fairy tale; however, I would like to take his discussion of the relationship between folk and fairy tales in a somewhat different direction. In Breaking the Magic Spell, where Zipes affirms the continuity between folk and fairy tales, he complains that the two are often confused nowadays. This is not a contradiction, but an historically grounded distinction which demands that narrative be understood within specific social contexts. A tale told by peasants in Medieval Europe simply does not express the same desires or values as the “same” tale written by a Romantic German poet, and since narratives often symbolize different needs and aspirations for different social groups, Zipes follows in August Nitschke's steps, by arguing that, at different times and in different contexts, the “same” fair)' tales support dominant ideologies or articulate a desire for change. In his more recent “The Changing Function of the Fairy Tale” (1988), Zipes focuses more closely on the continuity between the “wonder folk tale, often called the Zaubermärchen or the magic tale” (7) and the fairy tale, to reveal their multiple and elaborate ideological functions. While both genres “awaken our regard for the miraculous condition of life” (11), both have also served conservative and emancipatory purposes.

Yes, folk and fairy tales are ideologically variable desire machines.⁷ And certainly Zipes's social history provides the necessary backdrop for my own inquiry. When I reflect on the continuity between the “wonder folk tale” and the fairy tale, I find I want to emphasize the ideological paradox or “trick” which in its multiple performances informs both: that magic which seeks to conceal the struggling interests which produce it. Zipes's social history of the fairy tale contains a somewhat devolutionary premise, arising at least in part from his strong sympathy for the needs of the socially oppressed. In the middle ages, folk tales served more of an emancipatory function because they expressed the problems and desires of the underprivileged; in modern times, the fairy tale has more often than not been “instrumentalized” to support bourgeois and/or conservative interests. My point is that the tale of magic within a folk context was not and cannot be simply liberatory because within its specific community it would also, to some degree, rely on and reinforce social norms. In describing this process, Zipes rightly points out that the printing and privatization of the fairy tale “violated the communal aspects of the folk tale” (Fairy Tales as Myth 13), since in an oral context “the voice of the narrator was known. The tale came directly from common experiences and beliefs. Told in person, directly, face to face, [tales] were altered as the beliefs and behaviors of the members of a particular group changed” (10). Even such face to face, community-centered interaction, however, can hardly be imagined as operating outside of established hierarchies, systems of authority, or common assumptions. Though we may not think of them as folkloric “preliminary censorship,” tradition and consensus go together, and it is their dynamic interaction with an “innovative” or subversive impulse that constitutes folk narratives. As folk and fairy tale, the tale of magic produces wonder precisely through its seductively concealed exploitation of the conflict between its normative function, which capitalizes on the comforts of consensus, and its subversive wonder, which magnifies the powers of transformation.⁸ What interests me, then, is how the narrative construction and manipulation of the tale of magic contribute to making different ideological effects possible within specific historical and social contexts.

Of course, most narratives seek to resolve their contradictions. Even those literary narratives which celebrate paradox in the name of the avantgarde still rely on some norms and reproduce some minimal consensus simply to be intelligible. What distinguishes the tale of magic or fairy tale as a genre, however, is its effort to conceal its “work” systematically—to naturalize its artifice, to make everything so clear that it works magic, no questions asked. As Jack Zipes notes, the fairy tale operates as “myth” par excellence.⁹ This quality itself provokes different responses. Max Lüthi's stylistic portrait of the European fairy tale describes its magic precisely in these terms, but from within an essentialist framework that projects a set of unchangeable humanistic values onto these narratives. Lüthi's celebration of the fairy tale's enchantment as an artistic achievement is, however, precisely the spell that Zipes and others have, in an anti-universalizing and historicizing move, struggled to break. My own wish is to make visible the narrative construction of this magic through a narratological effort to name its paradoxes and articulate its variable ideological effects. To break the magic spell, we must learn to recognize it as a spell that can be unmade.

Adults and children, rich and poor, storytellers and literary artists, boys and girls, social groups and individuals.…If the fairy tale seduces all even as it articulates or represses their conflicting interests, how does it do so? And in name of whose desire? As Teresa de Lauretis notes, “the object of narrative theory,” semiotically speaking, “is not…narrative but narrativity; not so much the structure of narrative…as its works and effects.” For feminist theory, this turn to narrativity means examining the relationship of narrative to desire, and “rereading…sacred texts against the passionate urging of a different question, a different practice, and a different desire” (Alice Doesn't 107). What happens, then, if we articulate what Max Lüthi calls the “one-dimensionality” and the “universal interconnection” of the fairy tale with “a different desire”? We know that in folk and fairy tales the hero is neither frightened nor surprised when encountering the otherworld, receiving magic gifts, holding conversations with animals, or experiencing miraculous transformations.¹⁰ The numinous is artfully made to appear natural. Similarly, isolation from a specific community allows the hero to form “all-encompassing interrelationships” (Lüthi, European Folktale 54), and the narrative to exercise its stylistic unity. What would require explaining in a culturally-grounded legend, for instance, is not mysterious or accidental, but natural in the tale of magic. These and other features of abstract style produce that “effortlessness” which Mircea Eliade notes when defining the folktale as “a lighthearted doublet of myth and initiation rite” (Lüthi, European Folktale 116).¹¹ Since consenting to the rules of one's community is represented as a natural process, the stylistic and thematic projects of the tale of magic, then, are the same: to disguise its artifice and its social project.¹²

This disguise, however, seems doubly persuasive and dangerous when assumed by tales centering upon the experiences of women. That long tradition of representing woman both as nature and as concealed artifice contributes to the success and power of such images in the tale of magic. As much anthropological and historical research has shown, women are commonly “identified as being closer to nature than to culture,” which in a patriarchal system makes them “symbolic of an inferior, intermediate order of being” (Lerner 25). Simone de Beauvoir wrote that as man represents her, woman incarnates his dream: “she is the wished-for intermediary between nature, the stranger to man, and the fellow being who is too closely identical” and therefore competitive and possibly hostile (de Beauvoir 172). This association of woman with nature paradoxically produces the artifice of “femininity,” both as naturalizing make-up and as representations of womanly “essence.” To take an extreme case, when Snow White is presented as a “natural” woman, the artful construction of her image encourages thinking of her and other stereotypical heroines in pre-cultural, unchangeable terms. By showcasing “women” and making them disappear at the same time, the fairy tale thus transforms us/them into man-made constructs of “Woman.”

Considering that questioning the fairy tale's magic has been a feminist project for several decades at least, with its own several phases and problematics, we fortunately do not need to reject fairy tales as inherently sexist narratives which offer “narrow and damaging role-models for young readers” (Stone 229).¹³ Feminists can view the fairy tale as a powerful discourse which produces representations of gender—a “technology of gender,” for ...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Performing Wonders: Postmodern Revisions of Fairy Tales
• 2. The Framing of “Snow White”: Narrative and Gender (Re)Production
• 3. Not Re(a)d Once and for All: “Little Red Riding Hood”'s Voices in Performance
• 4. In the Eye of the Beholder: “Where is Beast?”
• 5. “Be Bold, be Bold, but not too Bold”: Double Agents and Bluebeard's Plot
• Epilogue. Peopling the Bloody Chambers: “Once upon Many Times” and “Once upon One Time”
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index