Fairy Tales

An important section of our collection at Espaço Atlântida is dedicated to fairy-tales and folk-tales.

Why are such stories important?

In that most compelling of autobiographies, Father and Son, Edmund Gosse tells of how works of fiction were not admitted into his parents’ stern Calvinist household. “Never in all my early childhood, did anyone address me the affecting preamble, ‘Once upon a time!’ I was told about missionaries, but never about pirates; I was familiar with humming-birds, but I had never heard of fairies. Jack the Giant-Killer, Rumpelstilskin and Robin Hood were not of my acquaintance, and though I understood about wolves, Little Red Ridinghood was a stranger even by name. So far as my ‘dedication’ was concerned, I can but think that my parents were in error thus to exclude the imaginary from my outlook upon facts. They desired to make me truthful; the tendency was to make me positive and skeptical. Had they wrapped me in the soft folds of supernatural fancy, my mind might have been longer content to follow their traditions in an unquestioning spirit.”

As Gosse discovered, fairy tales are not untrue, even though they don’t address the truths of our reality through factual and rational considerations. Their vantage point is the realm of the uncanny, the geography of the imagination set free, and from high above the turrets of enchanted castles and deep down in the burrows of Elfland, they allow us to contemplate our secret joys and unavowed terrors, our mad dreams of adventure and our dread of the unknown. Under fairy guises, they display for our discernment the absurdities of our social conventions, our family politics, our relationship with authority. In the daily business of our world, whatever magic we discover receives a scientific or bureaucratic explanation, and every death we experience is forever. And yet, underlying every factual no-nonsense answer lurks a brood of dark insidious questions that urges us to distrust these complacencies. Dante called such fictions “ non falsi errori“, “mistakes that are not untrue.”

How can we explain then our fascination with fairy tales, everywhere and always?

Why do we want to hear, again and again, the saga of the beautiful princesses, valiant heroes, crafty animals who can speak, voracious wolves and hairy ogres, kind crones and evil witches?

Marina Warner, a scholar of the fairy tale, suggests that there are four characteristics that define a veritable fairy tale: first, its length (it should be short); second, it should be (or seem) familiar; third, it should suggest “the necessary presence of the past” through well-known plots and characters; fourth, since fairy tales are told in what Warner aptly calls “a symbolic Esperanto,” it should allow horrid deeds and truculent events to be read as matter-of-fact. If, as Warner says, “the scope of a fairy tale is made by language,” it is through language that our subconscious world, with its dreams and half-grasped intuitions, comes into being and its phantoms become transformed into comprehensible figures like cannibal giants or wicked parents or friendly beasts.

The German term for fairy tales is Wundermärchen, which distinguishes, in the general realm of fairy tales, the genuine folk stories from the literary fairy tales, Kunstmärchen, the latter born from an intellectual Romantic intent to rescue the former. The nationalistic movements of the seventeenth to nineteenth century in Europe led to determined searches for original folk material that would define in some way the soul of the nascent and coalescing countries, resulting in the work of the Brothers Grimm, of course, and Charles Perrault, Hans Christian Andersen, Madame d’Aulnoy, and Giambattista Basile.

The Brothers Grimm and their comrades-in-arms procured their tales from village storytellers and elderly servants, mainly women. These storytellers had themselves heard the tales told by their elders, and would then embroider and alter them according to their own particular circumstances and inclination while performing them for their audiences in different voices and with identifying gestures. But when the Brothers Grimm and the other “seekers of authenticity” transcribed them, they once more changed the text into what they judged to be a truly popular style, inventing for this purpose a narrative voice that came be identified with the fairy tale genre.

The popularity, influence and prevalence of these fairy tales, in their edited and published versions, was immense, not only helping define what, beginning in the nineteenth century, began to be called “children’s literature”, but also infusing all serious fiction with the possibility of telling stories in a newly-perceived “popular” way. The Brontës, Mazzoni, Lermotov, George Sand, Proust, Oscar Wilde and many, many more owe a literary debt to these collectors and retellers. Dickens especially wrote under their influence and his novels (as Chesteron rightly observed) are all in some sense fairy tales. When Scrooge is carried away by the first of the spirits, he sees his young self abandoned in a empty school classroom at Christmas, but surrounded by the characters of the fairy tales he is reading: Valentine and Orson of the Carolingian romance, Ali Baba and the genii of the Arabian Nights, and even Robinson Crusoe and his parrot transformed in the child’s wishful imagination into inhabitants of Fairyland.

 

What do fairy tales, with their repeated motifs and recurrent characters, told and retold from ancient China and India to Victorian Europe and contemporary America, have to say about the human condition?

What do fairy tales, with their repeated motifs and recurrent characters, told and retold from ancient China and India to Victorian Europe and contemporary America, have to say about the human condition? Does the fact that the story of Cinderella appears under one guise in ninth-century China and another in seventeenth-century Naples, a different one in France in the 1690s and yet another in Scotland a hundred years later, point to a common ancestral human unconscious, or is it proof of intercultural communications and influences stronger than even the most travelled of scholars would have suspected? Today’s tellers of fairy tales might acknowledge that common imaginaire: Angela Carter in England, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya in Russia, Michel Tournier in France, Sophia de Mello Breyner in Portugal, Margaret Atwood in Canada.

Historians of folklore has tried to find the roots of certain stories in actual events (Gilles de Rais as the inspiration for Bluebeard, the Beast of Givaudan for Little Red Ridinghood’s wolf) but their terrain of exploration is far from clear. Psychology, delving into fairy tales, labours in a nebulous area: the symbolic vocabulary of our psyche (and in that “our” an intuition of universality is betrayed) is read according to the conventions of the tribe to which each individual belongs, and who can say whether these different translations of images of fear, love, family, courage and trust stem from a common unfathomable original. No investigative reading of fairy tales can provide a single, indisputable, clear-cut explanation. Nothing seems to be able to explain their fantastical landscapes away, fraught as they are with bloody chambers and the dark menacing forests. After all the efforts to dissect and analyze their workings, and pin Snow White and Puss-in-Boots down to neatly labelled categories, the fairy tales themselves escape intact and ready to be retold.