Contemporary Fairy-Tale Magic: Subverting Gender and Genre [1 ed.] 9789004418998, 9789004418981

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Contemporary Fairy-​Tale Magic

At the Interface/​Probing the Boundaries Founding Editor Rob Fisher (Progressive Connexions) Advisory Board Peter Bray (University of Auckland) Robert Butler (Elmhurst College) Ioana Cartarescu (Independent Scholar) Seán Moran (Waterford Institute of Technology) Stephen Morris (Independent Scholar) John Parry (Lewis & Clark College) Natalia Kaloh Vid (University of Maribor)

volume 129

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/​aipb

Contemporary Fairy-​Tale Magic Subverting Gender and Genre Edited by

Lydia Brugué and Auba Llompart

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Brill has made all reasonable efforts to trace all rights holders to any copyrighted material used in this work. In cases where these efforts have not been successful the publisher welcomes communications from copyright holders, so that the appropriate acknowledgements can be made in future editions, and to settle other permission matters. Cover Illustration by iStock.com/​RomoloTavani. Used with permission. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Brugué, Lydia, editor, author. | Llompart, Auba, editor, author. Title: Contemporary fairy-tale magic : subverting gender and genre /edited by Lydia Brugué and Auba Llompart. Description: Boston: BRILL, [2020] | Series: At the Interface/ Probing the Boundaries; 1570- 7113;. vol. 129 | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “For centuries, fairy tales and folktales have given uschildren and adults- the opportunity to escape from reality by transporting us to magical worlds of flying broomsticks, enchanted forests, spells, ogres, talking animals, princes, princesses, castles and dragons”–Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2019050007 | ISBN 9789004418981 (paperback) | ISBN 9789004418998 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Fairy tales–Adaptations–History and criticism. | Fairy tales in literature. | Fairy tales in motion pictures. | Fairy tales– Adaptations–Comic books, strips, etc. | Folklore in literature. | Modern literature–History and criticism. | Fairy tales–History and criticism. Classification: LCC PN3437.C665 2020 | DDC 398.02–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019050007

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/​brill-​typeface. issn 1570-​7 113 isbn 978-​9 0-​0 4-​4 1898-​1 (paperback) isbn 978-​9 0-​0 4-​4 1899-​8 (e-​book) Copyright 2020 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-​free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

To my parents and my daughters for their support, patience and love. -Lydia

…

To my grandmother, Teresa Pons, the best storyteller I ever knew. -Auba

∵

Contents

Acknowledgements xi List of Figures and Tables xii Notes on Contributors xiii



Introduction 1

part 1 Contemporary Subversions of Gender in Fairy Tales 1

The Cursed Fairy: Broken Spells in Anne Sexton’s Poetry 9 Francisco José Cortés Vieco

2

Revisiting Fairy-​Tale Land through a Gender Lens in Emma Donoghue’s Kissing the Witch 21 María Amor Barros del Río

3

Fairy-​Tale Reflections: Space and Women Host(age)s in Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy, Snow, Bird 32 Paula Barba Guerrero

4

Un-​Training the Imagination through Adaptation: an Exploration of Gender through Neil Gaiman’s The Sleeper and the Spindle 44 Jade Lum

5

‘There Are Always Choices. She Made One’: an Existential Approach to Neil Gaiman’s The Sleeper and the Spindle 54 Alba Torres Álvarez

6

The British Empire’s Lost Slipper: Dangerous Irish Cinderellas 63 Abigail Heiniger

7

Cinderboy and Snow White and the Seven Aliens: Analysis of the Rewriting of Two Classic Tales and Their Translations to Spanish 77 Ana Pereira Rodríguez and Lourdes Lorenzo García

viii Contents 8

Resistance and Revolt: Cinderella, Snow White and Sleeping Beauty Re-​Viewed 89 Sarah Bonner

9

Empowered Fairy-​Tale Heroines Reinvent Happily-​Ever-​After 99 Lisa L. Ortiz and Sheila M. Rucki

10

The Strongest of the Fairies: Reworking Gender and Villainy in Walt Disney’s Maleficent 107 Lydia Brugué and Auba Llompart

11

‘There’s Always a Bright Side’: Poppy, a Positive Role Model in Trolls 116 Sara Martín

part 2 The Darkness of Contemporary Fairy Tales 12

Far from Beastly: Monstrous Imaginations in Postmodern Fairy-​Tale Films 129 Claudia Schwabe

13

Echoes of Fairy Tales: Fantasy and Everyday Horrors in Guillermo del Toro’s Filmography 138 Gema Navarro Goig and Francisco Javier Sánchez-​Verdejo Pérez

14

From Fairy Tales to Slasher Films: Little Red Riding Hood and Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left 148 Javier Martín-​Párraga

15

Howling in the Woods: Angela Carter’s Metamorphosed Little Red Riding Hoods 158 Nerea Riobó-​Pérez

16

Red Shoes, Witches and Creatures of the Forest: Dolores Redondo’s Baztan Trilogy as Contemporary Fairy Tale 169 Miriam Borham-​Puyal

17

‘A Happy Person Never Phantasies’: Repression and Projection of the Self in John Connolly’s The Book of Lost Things 179 Stephanie Weber

Contents

18

‘Children were terrified of her’: Interpreting Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black as a Folktale 189 Marta Miquel-​Baldellou

19

The Broken Voice of History: Fairy Tales, Anti-​Tales, and Holocaust Representation 201 María Jesús Martínez-​Alfaro

20 Peter Pan Goes to War: the Reimaging and Exploration of J. M. Barrie’s Story as a Historically Realistic Graphic Novel 211 Stephané Greffrath

part 3 Other Contemporary Subversions of Genre through Fairy Tales 21

Mary Poppins: the Subversive Magic Helper 229 Renáta Marosi

22

Rodents in Children’s Literature and Audiovisual Fairy Tales: a Book-​to-​Film Adaptation Approach 240 Rebeca Cristina López González

23

Bear Tales: Ways of Seeing Polar Bears in Mythology, Traditional Folktales and Modern-Day Children’s Literature 250 Lizanne Henderson

24 Cultural Writings of the Fairy Tale: a Spatial Reading of Three Studio Ghibli Productions 262 Eduardo Barros-​Grela 25

Contemporary Japanese Folktales Represented in Anime: the Paradigmatic Case of InuYasha 273 Alba Quintairos-​Soliño

26 Oral Storytelling, Slavic Mythology, Philological Research and Fairy Tales: the Case of Croatian Tales of Long Ago 286 Estela Banov

ix

x Contents 27

The Mark of Fairy Tales on Galician Literature for Children and Young Adults 296 Carmen Ferreira Boo

28 Where Else but Reading? Blending Genres in Jasper Fforde’s Nursery Crime Series 307 Miriam Fernández-​Santiago 29 Following the Lead of Fairy Tales: Storytelling in Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion 317 María José Coperías-​Aguilar 30 Experimentalism and Self-​Reflexivity in Donald Barthelme’s Postmodern Fairy Tales 326 Luisa María González Rodríguez

Index 337

Acknowledgements We would like to thank everyone who has participated in this volume. First and foremost, thank you to all the contributors for their interest in our project. Without you, this would never have been possible. We also want to thank our publishers, Bram Oudenampsen, Benjamin Suchard and Jennifer Pavelko from Brill, for giving us this opportunity and for their guidance and support throughout the whole process. We cannot thank you enough for your advice and for patiently answering all our queries. We would also like to express our gratitude towards Dr Christina Bacchilega and Dr Sara Martín for their priceless advice and for sharing their knowledge with us. We would also like to thank the Asociación Nacional de Investigación en Literatura Infantil y Juvenil (anilij) and the Spanish Association of Anglo-​American Studies (aedean), as well as everyone else who helped us disseminate the call for papers, without which we would never have received such an amazing number of contributions. Our family and friends also deserve a special thank you for their unconditional support and love. Last but not least, thank you to all the authors, classic and contemporary, for inspiring us with their stories. Thank you for keeping the magic alive.

Figures and Tables Figures 6.1 6.2 6.3 8.1

8.2

20.1 20.2 20.3 20.4 20.5 20.6 20.7 20.8

Clarke’s ‘She Left Behind One of Her Glass Slippers’. Perrault’s Fairy Tales. 64 Clarke’s ‘Front Piece’ for ‘Cinderella’. Perrault’s Fairy Tales. 65 Clarke’s ‘Cinderella Moral’. Perrault’s Fairy Tales. 66 The Maybe© Cornelia Parker, 1995. Installation at the Serpentine Gallery, London. A collaboration between Cornelia Parker and Tilda Swinton. The photograph is by Hugo Glendinning. Courtesy of the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London. 94 Carrie Mae Weems Mirror Mirror, 1987–​2012, gelatin silver print. 27 x 23 1/​4 inches (print), ©Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. 96 Peter Panzerfaust. Courtesy of Image Comics/​Shadowline, from Peter Panzerfaust by Kurtis J. Wiebe & Tyler Jenkins. 216 1911 Bedford illustration of Peter entering the nursery 217 Bedford’s Peter carries his dagger 218 Peter’s shadow. Courtesy of Image Comics/​Shadowline, from Peter Panzerfaust by Kurtis J. Wiebe & Tyler Jenkins. 219 Series of movements. Courtesy of Image Comics/​Shadowline, from Peter Panzerfaust by Kurtis J. Wiebe & Tyler Jenkins. 221 ‘Have at thee!’. Courtesy of Image Comics/​Shadowline, from Peter Panzerfaust by Kurtis J. Wiebe & Tyler Jenkins. 222 Bedford illustration of Hook and Peter’s duel 224 Final battle. Courtesy of Image Comics/​Shadowline, from Peter Panzerfaust by Kurtis J. Wiebe & Tyler Jenkins. 225

Tables Translator’s choices to convey onomatopoeias in Ceniciento 82 Alternative solution for conveying onomatopoeias in Ceniciento 82 Forms of appellation to refer to Cinderboy 85 Translator’s choices to convey forms of appellation in Ceniciento 85 Alternative solution for conveying forms of appellation in Ceniciento 86 Differences between Western and Japanese fairy tales (Kelley online; adaptation) 276 25.2 Features of contemporary Japanese fairy tales in InuYasha 280 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 25.1

Notes on Contributors Estela Banov works at the Department of Croatian Language and Literature at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Rijeka. Her scientific interests include folklore, oral storytelling and comparative studies of topics from the Croatian and other Slavic literatures. Paula Barba Guerrero is a predoctoral research fellow at the Department of English Studies of the University of Salamanca, where she is engaged in writing her doctoral dissertation on African American literature under the supervision of Dr. Ana Mª Manzanas. Her research interests include space, memory studies, hospitality and migration. Eduardo Barros-​Grela (Universidade da Coruña) teaches American Studies and Cultural Studies. He is interested in inorganic bodies and spaces, visual studies, and the dialectics of representation and performance. Recent publications include studies of space in the areas of American Studies, contemporary film, and twenty-​first-​ century literature. María Amor Barros del Río is a lecturer in English language, culture and literatures at Universidad de Burgos, Spain. Her research interests are contemporary fiction in English, particularly Irish fiction, where she focuses on gender studies, and language teacher training, topics on which she has published extensively. Lydia Brugué obtained her PhD in Translation, Languages and Literatures in 2013 (Universi­ tat de Vic-Universitat Central de Catalunya), and she is currently an Associate Professor of Translation, Interpreting and Applied Languages, and ­Coordinator of the Master of Arts in Specialized Translation at Universitat de Vic-Universitat Central de Catalunya. Her research interests include fairy tales, Film ­Studies and Translation Studies. Sarah Bonner is a senior lecturer at the University of Cumbria, UK. She teaches visual studies and critical theory. Gender, narrative and the visual arts in twentieth and

xiv 

Notes on Contributors

twenty-​first century contemporary culture are continuing areas of interest and research. Miriam Borham-​Puyal teaches British literature at the University of Salamanca. She has published extensively on female Quixotes and women writers. Her research on children’s literature and the mash-​up has appeared in prestigious journals. She has co-​ authored works on Digital Studies, and is also the editor of a volume on contemporary rewritings of Frankenstein (2018). María José Coperías-Aguilar is a professor of English at the University of Valencia. Her main areas of research are cultural studies, intercultural communicative competence, media in English, and literature by women. Her main teaching and research focus at the moment is English narrative from the seventeenth to the twenty-​first centuries. Francisco José Cortés Vieco (Ph.D. in Gender Studies, Alcalá University and Ph.D. in Literary Studies, Complutense University) teaches English Literature and Gender Studies at Complutense University of Madrid. He was Visiting Fellow at Harvard University (U.S.A.) and his main research interest is women’s literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Miriam Fernández-​Santiago is a senior lecturer at the Department of English and German Philology of the University of Granada (Spain), where she currently teaches Literary Theory and Literatures and Cultures of English-​Speaking Countries. Her current research interests include Critical Theory, Postmodern Narrative, Posthumanism and Trauma Studies. Carmen Ferreira Boo is a professor of Didactics of Language and Literature at the University of La Coruña and a tutor at the uned. Gema Navarro Goig has a BA and a PhD in Fine Arts from the Polytechnic University of Valencia. She is a full-​time Professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Complutense University of Madrid. Her research interests include cinema, myths, painting, printmaking, Artist’s book, and editorial illustration, mainly. She has published about these topics in different scientific publications.

Notes on Contributors

xv

Stephané Greffrath is currently working at anu College as an English teacher, instructing international students in preparation for full-​time degree studies at the ­Australian National University. She completed her Master’s degree in English Language and Literature in 2016 at the North-​West University in South Africa. Her research interests include children’s literature, adaptations and fairy stories. Luisa María González Rodríguez teaches at the University of Salamanca. Her main field of research is American literature, with an emphasis on the politics and aesthetics of postmodernism and postmodern short fiction. She is currently editing a volume entitled Towards New Perspectives on Latinidad in American Literature and Culture to be published by Brill. Abigail Heiniger is an Assistant Professor of English at Bluefield College. This research in disenchanting fairy tales was enabled by a fellowship from the Appalachian College Association. Heiniger first addressed the marginalized anti-​Cinderella narrative in her exploration of Hannah Crafts in Jane Eyre’s Fairytale Legacy at Home and Abroad. Lizanne Henderson is a cultural historian of supernatural beliefs, Scottish exploration, Arctic studies, and human-​animal studies. Her monograph, Witchcraft and Folk Belief in the Age of Enlightenment was the winner of the Katharine Briggs Book Award 2016, and her current project is ‘Picturing Polar Bears: Past and Present Semiotic and Iconic Perceptions of Ursus maritimus’. Auba Llompart obtained her PhD in English Literature in 2014 (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona), and she is currently an Associate Professor of English at Universitat de Vic-​Universitat Central de Catalunya. Her research interests include Children’s and YA literature, fairy tales, Gender Studies and Gothic Studies. Lourdes Lorenzo García is senior lecturer at the Faculty of Philology and Translation (Universidade de Vigo, Spain), where she teaches at the graduate, postgraduate and doctoral levels. For over twenty years, her research has focused on Children’s Literature Translation and Screen Translation, where she has more than 70 publications

xvi 

Notes on Contributors

in the disciplines of subtitling for the deaf and hard of hearing, dubbing, and multimedia translation. Rebeca Cristina López González was granted a PhD for her study on the dubbing of humorous allusions included in a corpus of animated feature films in 2015 at the University of Vigo (Galicia, Spain), where she currently works as a full-​time lecturer. She is a member of the galma Observatory for Media Accessibility research group. Her research fields are focused on specialised translation and children’s literature. Jade Lum is a Ph.D. student and Graduate Assistant in English at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, where she also received her M.A.  in English with a focus in literary studies. Her research interests include fairy tale studies, gender studies, adaptation studies, and visual and new media storytelling. Sara Martín is Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Cultural Studies at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Dr Martín specializes in Gender Studies, particularly Masculinities Studies, which she applies to the study of popular fictions in English, above all science fiction and gothic. She has published extensively on these fields. María Jesús Martínez-​Alfaro is Senior Lecturer at the Department of English and German Philology of the University of Zaragoza (Spain), where she teaches English literature and is one of the members of a research team working on ethics, trauma, memory, and transmodernity. Her publications deal with the above-​mentioned fields, with a special interest in Holocaust literature. Javier Martín-​Párraga is Associate Professor at the University of Córdoba (Spain). His main fields of research focus on American literature, films and cultural studies. He has worked as Visiting Scholar at several American and Polish universities. His academic publications include five books, and numerous book chapters and articles in peer-​reviewed academic journals. Renáta Marosi is a teaching assistant at J. Selye University, in Komárno, Slovakia. She is writing her dissertation at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary. Her main

Notes on Contributors

xvii

research area includes the psychoanalytical analyses of P.  L. Travers’s Mary Poppins. Marta Miquel-​Baldellou is a member of the Dedal-​Lit Research Group at the University of Lleida. She is currently taking part in a three-​year research project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness. She has recently been granted a postdoctoral scholarship by the Spanish Association of Anglo-​North-​American Studies (aedean). Lisa L. Ortiz is a Professor of Journalism and Technical Communication at Metropolitan State University of Denver. Her research interests include media literacy and production, visual communication and Universal Design. Ana Pereira Rodríguez is senior lecturer at the Faculty of Philology and Translation (Universidade de Vigo, Spain), where she teaches at the graduate, postgraduate and doctoral levels. For over twenty years, her research has focused on Children’s Literature Translation and Screen Translation, particularly subtitling for the deaf and hard of hearing, where she has many publications. Alba Quintairos-​Soliño is a PhD student in Translation & Paratranslation at the Universidade de Vigo (Spain), where she also collaborates with the T&P research group. She has specialized in both Translation and Japanese Studies and her research interests include the analysis of Japanese culturemes, children’s literature and cultural translation. Nerea Riobó-​Pérez is currently finishing her PhD (usc) on the use of metamorphosis to deconstruct traditional gender roles and to create a new liminal female subjectivity in Angela Carter’s fairy tales. Her main research interests comprise fairy tale and gender studies, gothic, animal studies and Angela Carter’s short fiction. Sheila M. Rucki is a Professor of Political Science at Metropolitan State University of Denver. Her research centres on applications of neo-​Gramscian theory to contemporary political, economic and social issues.

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Claudia Schwabe is Associate Professor of German at Utah State University. She authored Craving Supernatural Creatures: German Fairy-​Tale Figures in American Pop Culture (2019), edited The Fairy Tale and Its Uses in Contemporary New Media and Popular Culture (2016), and co-​edited New Approaches to Teaching Folk and Fairy Tales (2016). Francisco Javier Sánchez-​Verdejo Pérez has a BA in English Studies, Language and Literature and a PhD in English Literature from the University of Castilla-​La Mancha (Spain). He is an Associate Teacher at the uned (National Distance Learning University). His research interests cover English and comparative literature, cultural studies, Gothic and horror literature. He has several high-​impact scientific publications. Alba Torres Álvarez studied at University of Roehampton (2008) and graduated at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (2009), where she also obtained an MA in English Literature & Culture (2010). Her dissertation dealt with latent feminism in Maria Edgeworth’s novel Belinda. She currently teaches and develops learning resources at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. Stephanie Weber studied Comparative Literature at the University of Vienna, Austria.

Introduction For centuries, fairy tales and folktales have given us—​children and adults—​ the opportunity to escape from reality by transporting us to magical worlds of flying broomsticks, enchanted forests, spells, ogres, talking animals, princes, princesses, castles and dragons. These tales have always been present in our lives, through the oral tradition or in written texts; they have reflected our desires, yearnings and deepest worries, and they have given us access to traditions and cultural references from other parts of the world, thus helping us see beyond our own borders. But apart from allowing us to temporarily get away from reality to visit fantastic worlds of adventures, the magic in these stories also teaches us instructive lessons that still prevail and are applied—​ sometimes unconsciously—​in our daily lives. Fortunately, in the last couple of decades we have witnessed a resurgence of fairy tales in popular culture, a renaissance that keeps these narratives alive through retelling and adaptation. Thanks to an endless list of writers, oral narrators, filmmakers, artists and thinkers from all over the world, fairy-​tale magic has adopted different shapes in images, words, forms and metaphors of all kinds, and it has also been adapted to new generations and new formats. The needs and expectations of contemporary audiences are shaping how these modern fairy tales are retold, not only in literature, but also in other audiovisual and artistic media. As we will see in the chapters that compose this book, these retellings show not only the cultural relevance, but also the incredibly malleable quality of fairy tales, which intertwine with other genres to offer subversions of gender roles, reinventions and reworkings of characters, settings, motifs and plots. It should also be highlighted that, in the last few decades, influential scholars such as Jack Zipes, Marina Warner, Maria Tatar or Cristina Bacchilega have turned the study of fairy tales into a serious academic discipline that continues to expand thanks to the constant organization of international conferences and academic publications on this field. In light of the above, Contemporary Fairy-​Tale Magic: Subverting Gender and Genre aims to make a contribution to the study of the influence and functions of fairy tales in contemporary cultures and societies from an interdisciplinary approach. As editors, it has been an honor to count on the collaboration of thirty-​four authors, who have studied the presence of fairy tales in a wide range of texts and from a great variety of academic approaches, as we will see in the following pages. The book is divided into three sections, each presenting one or several unifying topics. The first section, titled ‘Contemporary Subversions of Gender in

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | DOI:10.1163/9789004418998_002

2 Introduction Fairy Tales’, contains eleven chapters and examines modern literary retellings, film adaptations, artistic renderings and translations of fairy tales from a Gender Studies perspective. The second part, ‘The Darkness of Contemporary Fairy Tales’, focuses on how the darkest and more intriguing and gothic aspects of fairy tales come to the fore in many modern retellings. In the nine chapters that compose this section, we observe how, very often, modernizing fairy tales also entails exploiting their dark and gothic potential. Finally, the third and last section, titled ‘Other Contemporary Subversions of Genre through Fairy Tales’, presents ten contributions about other aspects of modern fairy tales, such as the reinvention of characters or the use of metafictive devices, among others. The first chapter in the first section is written by Francisco José Cortés Vieco, who presents how, in her poetry, Anne Sexton debunks certain myths related to fairy tales to show the less sugar-​coated side of America, particularly in relation to the subordination of women to patriarchal institutions. Next, in the second chapter, María Amor Barros del Río brings us closer to Emma Donoghue, who rewrites thirteen classical tales by Hans Christian Andersen, Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm in order to show the various possibilities that female emancipation offers beyond the restrictions established in some traditional tales. In the third chapter, Paula Barba Guerrero analyzes Boy, Snow, Bird, a 2014 retelling of ‘Snow White’ by Nigerian writer Helen Oyeyemi, which denounces the violence and marginalization of 1950s America. In the next chapter, Jade Lum also explores gender issues through the analysis of Neil Gaiman’s The Sleeper and the Spindle, a retelling of ‘Snow White’ and ‘Sleeping Beauty’. Lum highlights how fairy-​tale retellings have the potential to create a process that un-​trains the imagination from hegemonic perspectives of the female gender. In chapter five, Alba Torres Álvarez examines the same story, and shows the reader how it can also be read as an allegory of existential freedom as seen in Jean-​Paul Sartre’s works, paying particular attention to the female protagonist’s struggle for agency. In the sixth place and after all these ‘Snow White’ retellings, we now move on to ‘Cinderella’ with Abigail Heiniger’s contribution, which aims to show how the tale is present in the works of three Irish female writers and their marginalized heroines. Next, Ana Pereira Rodríguez and Lourdes Lorenzo García offer the reader a literary and translation analysis of Laurence Anholt’s 1990s reformulations of ‘Cinderella’ and ‘Snow White’, stressing the importance, not only of retellings and adaptations, but also of translation in the transmission of these stories to new generations. The next author in this first section, Sarah Bonner, explores the construction, repetition and dissemination of the idealized femininity of popular fairy tales, and how this is challenged in the works of three artists, by applying Judith Butler’s theories on gender construction. In the following chapter, Lisa L. Ortiz

Introduction

3

and Sheila M. Rucki focus on the reinvention of fairy-​tale heroines and their happily-​ever-​afters in various film adaptations. We, the editors, Lydia Brugué and Auba Llompart, also participate in the book as authors in a chapter focused on the characterization of the evil female figure in Maleficent, Disney’s reworking of the classic fairy tale ‘Sleeping Beauty’. With this chapter, we aim to show that, despite Disney’s attempt to provide more positive representations of powerful female characters, there are still many problematic issues that need to be addressed. And, finally, before closing this first section on the representations of gender roles in fairy tales, Sara Martín offers an interesting analysis in which she concentrates on Princess Poppy, the protagonist of DreamWorks’ Trolls, a singular fairy tale—​as the author herself describes it in her chapter—​inspired by the Good Luck Trolls designed by Thomas Dam. Through these eleven chapters, we see a great number of attempts on the part of writers and filmmakers to break away from fairy-​tale gender stereotypes and provide new role models for new generations of readers and viewers. In the second section, we penetrate into the dark forests of fairy tales through the analysis of stories about monstrous figures and other gothic motifs, and in which some of the most horrific acts of the history of humanity are also tackled. To start with, and following Sara Martín’s study of cute monsters in Trolls, Claudia Schwabe talks about some postmodern representations of the monster by examining a selection of fairy-​tale films in which these characters are rewritten and turned into more sympathetic, positive and even cute figures. Secondly, Gema Navarro Goig and Francisco Javier Sánchez-​Verdejo Pérez carry out a study about Guillermo del Toro’s filmography, which uses old formulas, characters and motifs derived from fairy tales, but with a modern, adult and dark twist. Next, Javier Martín-​Párraga analyzes the potential of fairy tales to be turned into horror films with the example of The Last House on the Left, Wes Craven’s version of the classic tale ‘Little Red Riding Hood’. If Snow White, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty are the protagonists of section one, Little Red Riding Hood is clearly one of the most present folktale characters in this second section. Martín-​Párraga’s contribution is followed by other gothic Red Riding Hoods with Nerea Riobó-​Pérez’s chapter, in which Riobó-​Pérez examines three retellings of this tale from Angela Carter’s collection The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories. In her analysis, the author shows how, through metamorphosis, anthropomorphism and zoomorphism, the traditional gender roles present in fairy tales are deconstructed. In the next chapter, Miriam Borham-​Puyal makes a proposal based on the analysis of Dolores Redondo’s Baztan Trilogy, an acclaimed series of books that represents, according to the author, a clear example of hybridity between a detective novel and a contemporary fairy tale. Furthermore, this chapter will serve as a transition from audiovisual retellings

4 Introduction to literary retellings in this section. In the sixth contribution, Stephanie Weber applies the models of repression and projection presented in the works of Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung in order to explore how fairy tales—​and their monsters—​derive from reality and present distorted visions of our desires and fears. In this chapter, Weber takes as an example John Connolly’s The Book of Lost Things, a gothic young adult book that is rife with distorted and monstrous fairy-​tale elements. Still in the realm of gothic novels, Marta Miquel-​Baldellou presents an analysis of Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black as a gothic story that shares many features with traditional folktales, through the study and application of theories by thinkers such as Carl Jung, Claude Lévi-​Strauss or Vladimir Propp. In penultimate place in this second section, we move now from supernatural events to historical events with María Jesús Martínez-​Alfaro, who presents a contribution which draws special attention to the representation of the Holocaust in contemporary novelistic fairy-​tale retellings that give voice to this dark past of humanity by means of intertextuality. Finally, this section closes with a chapter written by Stephané Greffrath, who highlights the adaptability of stories over the years, concentrating on J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan and one of its most recent retellings, Kurtis J. Wiebe and Tyler Jenkins’s graphic novel Peter Panzerfaust, in which Barrie’s character is transported to World War ii. Taking Hutcheon’s adaptation theory as a basis, Greffrath analyzes the interplay between both texts through the analysis of dialogues and imagery and opens the door to the third and last section of the book. From Peter Pan, we move now to another British character that flies over the streets of Edwardian London and, with it, to section three. Renáta Marosi opens this section with her research on the analysis of fairy-​tale motifs in the fantastic stories of Mary Poppins by P. L. Travers, particularly the figure of the magic helper. According to Marosi, Travers’s beloved character can be read as a subversive and unconventional helper. Marosi’s contribution is followed by Rebeca Cristina López González’s, which is also about the figure of the helper, in this case the animal helper. López González particularly concentrates on depictions of rodents in works of children’s literature and their film adaptations, and how these tiny creatures are highly present in the fairy-​tale tradition despite having often been relegated to secondary roles. From rodents we move on to polar bears with Lizanne Henderson’s chapter, which focuses on representations of these fabulous animals as essential figures in the traditional popular culture and the mythology of Arctic and Subarctic peoples. In her research, Henderson offers some examples to illustrate the various intercultural ‘ways of seeing’ polar bears, from northern folklore to modern-​day children’s literature. In the next chapter, Eduardo Barros-​Grela transports the reader to Japan and analyzes three productions by the Japanese franchise Studio

Introduction

5

Ghibli, in order to examine the rhetorical impact of magic and its connection with spatiality and nature in the depiction of the protagonists and their environments. In chapter five, we remain in Japan, as Alba Quintairos-​Soliño presents a contribution to highlight the influence of Japanese folktales in anime, taking as an example the InuYasha animation, a production which, according to the author, combines the main features of anime with elements from Japanese popular stories. Furthermore, with this contribution, Quintairos-​Soliño points out how Western conceptions of fairy tales are not applicable to other cultures, and she proposes a new, more inclusive definition. Continuing with international folktales and fairy tales, Estela Banov takes us to Croatia with her study of the most important transtextual aspects of the classic book Croatian Tales of Long Ago, written by Ivana Brlić-​Mažuranić, which includes eight fairy tales and is described by the author as one of the most popular examples of fantasy in Croatian literature. Following Banov’s contribution, Carme Ferreira Boo takes the reader to Galicia with a study that presents a historical overview of the influence of fairy tales on Galician literature for children and young adults through the analysis of the most influential works from each of the different stages into which the children’s literature of this Spanish region can be divided. In Miriam Fernández-​Santiago’s work, we return to detective fiction, a genre that has already been explored in Borham-​Puyal’s chapter. Focusing on Jasper Fforde’s Nursery Crime series, the author examines how detective fiction blends with nursery rhymes to create a highly original piece of humorous, self-​reflective detective fiction in which nursery rhymes are the very object of investigation. In the next chapter, María José Coperías Aguilar analyzes Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion, which not only contains fairy-​tale elements, but in which oral storytelling is also highly present as a narrative technique. Last but not least, Luisa María González Rodríguez’s contribution presents us yet with more examples of postmodern fairy tales: the works of Donald Barthelme. In her chapter, González Rodríguez returns to topics such as metafiction and postmodernity, which had already been discussed in the previous chapters, and also to gender, thus taking us back to the first section of the book and coming full circle. All things considered, we can affirm that it has been a real pleasure to participate in the edition of this volume, which originated in the international conference ‘Fairy tales, Folk Lore and Legends’ (Budapest, Hungary, March 2016), organized by Inter-​Disciplinary.net. During that meeting, we had the opportunity to experience how fairy tales and folktales can be studied from a wide range of perspectives, and how all the different disciplines intertwined and added another tiny but significant grain of sand to this growing area. This book has given us the chance to bind different disciplines together, and we

6 Introduction hope that it will inspire and serve as a starting point for other research works on the study of fairy tales. As editors, we also hope that this collection of essays will serve as a reminder that, in moments of an excess of reality, magic will always be present. Magic is necessary to believe, to create, to inspire, and it helps us to function both as individuals and as members of society. We are born with magic, and fairy tales clearly contribute to keeping it alive, either through literature, cinema, translation or other forms of art. As J.K. Rowling once said: ‘It is important to remember that we all have magic inside us!’. Let us allow this innate magic, then, to take our hands and transport us to wonderful worlds of fantasy and unbelievable experiences and adventures. Lydia Brugué and Auba Llompart The Editors

pa rt 1 Contemporary Subversions of Gender in Fairy Tales

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­c hapter 1

The Cursed Fairy: Broken Spells in Anne Sexton’s Poetry Francisco José Cortés Vieco Abstract In Transformations (1971), Anne Sexton curses fairy tales to offer her own demythologizing versions of these traditional stories for children. Her poems are transformed into obscure looking glasses which, simultaneously, reflect Sexton’s self-​image and other women in postwar America. While revealing boredom behind marvels, ordinariness behind fantasy or depravity behind beauty, her verses vanish the fairy-​tale convention of the happy ending and tell the secret sad truth of her own life, fairylands and the modern United States: women’s subordination to unheroic men and patriarchal institutions, as young wives are condemned to domestic prisons of silence, or old women are punished for being malevolent, powerful witches railing against conservative values of male supremacy.

Keywords Anne Sexton –​poetry –​fairy tales –​postwar America –​princess –​ witch

1

Anne Sexton’s Charm

Marina Warner believes that ‘storytelling is a dangerous vocation, for the fairies punish those who return to tell their secrets’ (12). American poet Anne Sexton (1928–​1974) seems to banish her distinctive Confessional Poetry, centered on personal experiences, to unravel mysteries in custody of fairies from a magic kingdom, when three years before committing suicide, Transformations (1971) is published. This collection of poems is Sexton’s (re)visions of sixteen fairy tales1 first captured from ancient oral sources by the Brothers Grimm to 1 Anne Sexton’s sixteen fairy tales retold in Transformations are: ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’, ‘The White Snake’, ‘Rumpelstiltskin’, ‘The Little Peasant’, ‘Godfather Death’, ‘Rapunzel’,

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | DOI:10.1163/9789004418998_003

10 Cortés Vieco indoctrinate patriarchal dogmas to girls, and later by herself to unearth evil darkness beneath their patina of glitter and rainbow colors. Jack Zipes argues that revising a classical story aims to create something new that incorporates the critical and creative thinking of the producer, not only to meet changed demands or tastes of new audiences, but also because there is something wrong with the original work requiring improvement (9). Transformations transforms self-​gratifying daydreaming for children into disquieting actuality for adults, and transfigures Sexton into a cursed fairy, who symbolically betrays her fellow fairies, because she does not poetically retell fairy tales but rather dissects them to reveal the demoralizing truth beneath their aura of candy fantasy. This might be the reason why she was punished with a lifelong career of depression and self-​destruction. Contemporary revisions of fairy tales are often utopian visions intended to defend the imagination or the human spirit, as neoromantic protests against the rationalization or instrumentalization in capitalist societies (Zipes 160). By contrast, Anne Sexton finds astonishing parallelisms between fairy tales and the apparent fairyland of complacency, homogeneity and domesticity for women in postwar America. Like a beautiful young princess, Sexton’s own fairy-​tale role was to encounter her Prince Charming, the successful businessman Alfred Muller Sexton ii, but she did not ‘live happily ever after’ with him, as his wife and mother of his children, in an affluent Boston suburb. She not only told the Brothers Grimm’s stories to her two daughters, but according to Maxine Kumin, Sexton herself was also attracted to fairy tales, because her beloved great-​aunt Nana read them to her when she was a child (xxviii). Besides, Sexton’s unhappy ending of endless ennui and discontent with the gender roles assigned to her by patriarchal institutions mirrors the so-​called ‘problem without a name’, which was generalized among wives in postwar America, as identified by Betty Friedan. In fact, there was a discrepancy between women’s reality and the image to which they were attempting to conform—​‘the feminine mystique’ (Friedan 1): the apparent satisfaction with their lives of domesticity, early marriage and large families in times of the baby boom that, according to Friedan, was the undefined cause of the high prevalence of sexual problems, emotional breakdown and suicide among American women in their twenties and thirties (20). This essay examines four poems in Transformations:  ‘Cinderella’, ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’, ‘Rapunzel’ and ‘Briar Rose’ to explore that, thanks ‘Iron Hans’, ‘Cinderella’, ‘One-​Eye, Two-​Eyes, Three-​Eyes’, ‘The Wonderful Musician’, ‘Red Riding Hood’, ‘The Maiden Without Hands’, ‘The Twelve Dancing Princesses’, ‘The Frog Prince’, ‘Hansel and Gretel’ and ‘Briar Rose’. ‘The Gold Key’ only serves as an introductory poem to Sexton’s collection.

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to her clairvoyance, Anne Sexton breaks these fairy tales’ spells, to apprehend to what extent they are intertwined with her own experiences, while also demonstrating their translatability into women’s subordination to patriarchal society still in modern times. In the first composition of the collection, ‘The Gold Key’, Sexton declares that the narrator of her poems is ‘a middle-​aged witch, me’ (Sexton 223). Witches are mythical figures associated with primitive matriarchal religions, transmitting learning from mothers to daughters, while for women’s liberation movements from the late twentieth century, witches are understood to be proto-​feminist sisters (Purkiss 8–​9). Formerly healers, midwives or priestesses of pagan wisdom, witches have been viewed with suspicion, as powerful, rebellious or lunatic spinsters, or a female army of Satan, who emasculate men, so they have been marginalized for their powers and immolated by patriarchal intolerance and Christian inquisition. In fairy tales, witches are not story-​tellers but revengeful, malignant secondary characters, who torture their good protagonists: naive, beautiful young princesses, so these stories’ moral is to eventually punish witches with severity. As the symbolic heiress of the women executed after the Salem Witchcraft Trials (1692) in New England, Anne Sexton writes Transformations while facing her personal midlife crisis, the trauma of ageing and the gradual loss of her anthological beauty. Hence, her poems reflect no sympathy for a younger generation of female victims, but sisterly affection and solidarity with fairy-​tale villains or older witches, like the stepmother in ‘Cinderella’, the Queen in ‘Snow White’, Mother Gothel2 in ‘Rapunzel’ or the thirteenth fairy in ‘Briar Rose’. 2

On Cursed Princesses and Witches

Transformations is faithful to the classic plots of literary fairy tales but adorned with rhythms of American slang and reverberations of the U.S. pop culture. Thanks to the introductions and codas of her poems, Anne Sexton is not the witch cruelly judged in fairy tales, but half sardonic, half corrosive, she herself judges the problem statements and final verdicts of these stories. Whereas these poems’ ending verses use a magic wand to vanish happy-​ending conventions, their preambles interlace the contemporary American republic with timeless magic kingdoms. The introduction to ‘Cinderella’ offers the success stories of a plumber, a charwoman, a milkman and a nursemaid, who toil hard 2 ‘Mother Gothel’ is the name given to this character in Disney’s film adaptation of ‘Rapunzel’ (2010) and by Anne Sexton’s poem in Transformations, whereas in English translations of the Grimms’ fairy tale, Gothel is referred to as ‘Dame Gothel’.

12 Cortés Vieco but become rich to enjoy the vanity fair of idleness and luxury. These illustrations of the ‘American Dream’ are ‘that story’, like the ensuing fairy tale, where accidental strokes of good luck bestow huge fortunes upon their recipients (Fukuda 35). The introduction to ‘Snow White’ stresses that the high value of young girls in patriarchal societies resides in their treasure of virginity, fixed beauty canons and their docile willingness to serve as robotic puppets to please men: Cheeks as fragile as cigarette paper, arms and legs made of Limoges, lips like Vin Du Rhône, rolling her china-​blue doll eyes open and shut. […] She is unsoiled. She is as white as a bonefish. sexton 224

If women are dehumanized as mere objects of male desire and worship in ‘Snow White’, they are hypnotized as psychotherapy patients in ‘Briar Rose’ to regress to fetal existence in the maternal womb as a ‘pocketbook’ (Sexton 290), swimming in amniotic liquid ‘like a salmon’ (290), or to childhood to remember traumas when they dangerously sat on their father’s knees. Meanwhile, the introduction to ‘Rapunzel’ shows the incestuous-​homosexual relationship between an old aunt and her niece, like the game for this girl to learn ‘play mother-​me-​do’ (246) before she becomes an adult, or like Plato’s inseminating knowledge to his pupils. In a nutshell, Anne Sexton presents social and sexual issues of modern times in the United States, like women’s commodification, the American Dream, incest or lesbianism, to prepare her readers to reevaluate the already-​known fairy tales that are to be retold in her poems, while alerting them to the hidden dangers, untold truths and sordid meanings in those seemingly inoffensive stories originally addressed to children. Whether in Sexton’s Boston or in Cinderella’s magic kingdom, as Jane Austen declares: ‘it is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife’ (5). A rich prince is also a prisoner of patriarchy, with the duty to enter the marriage market, not seeking love, but to perpetuate his royal lineage with a male heir. Luce Irigaray argues that society is based on the exchange of women, because they are ‘scarce commodities’ essential for communities (170). But among the sexually desirable and socially available candidates in the woman market, a maid like Cinderella is a forbidden royal bride, because it is also ‘a truth universally

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acknowledged’ that an orphan girl, like her, is hated by her wicked stepmother. This older woman transforms Cinderella, as the family heiress, into a sooty servant and forbids her to attend the prince’s ball, where he will choose his future wife. Nevertheless, a dove grants Cinderella’s wishes and, unrecognized by her stepmother and stepsisters, she dances with the prince for three evenings and vanishes soon thereafter, until she loses a gold shoe. Forced to locate his runaway bride, the shoe-​fitting experience is an exhausting business for the prince, because ‘he began to feel like a shoe salesman’ (Sexton 258), while this situation is hilarious for Sexton’s reader and physically painful for Cinderella’s stepsisters. The timeless rivalry among women to compete for the love and marriage proposal of a single man with a fortune coerces them into fighting for financial security and fitting in monolithic beauty standards. The amputation of the heel and big toe is the bloodstained stratagem of each of the two stepsisters to become a princess until ‘Cinderella fit into the shoe/​like a love letter into its envelope’ (Sexton 258). The success story of this maid, crowned with the diadem of marriage, not only demonstrates that, in the speculative market of women as objects of transaction, beauty is as important as social rank, but also that one single physical attribute, like a graceful small foot, determines the prince’s choice of a wife. The presumable happy ending of the royal wedding in ‘Cinderella’ inspires Anne Sexton to imagine its aftermath of loveless coexistence and anodyne domesticity: Cinderella and the prince lived, they say, happily ever after, like two dolls in a museum case never bothered by diapers or dust, never arguing over the timing of an egg, never telling the same story twice, never getting a middle-​aged spread, their darling smiles pasted on for eternity.[…] That story. sexton 258

For Jeanne Beaumont, this poem from 1971 reflects Sexton’s ‘tarnished view of lasting marital bliss’ and her disillusionment with her own marriage, published only two years before divorcing her husband (236). In ‘Cinderella’, the prince and his consort become inert wax-​dolls exhibited in the prison of a palace-​museum to please viewers. This insipid couple is not burdened by routine housework or childcare, but neither husband nor wife is alive or free. As artworks, they endlessly enjoy the silent Grecian beauty of each other, without

14 Cortés Vieco the wrinkles of ageing and mortality, but they remain expressionless. They must feign happiness before their subjects, because they are not gifted with the wrinkles of emotions, joy and sympathy for one another. Anne Sexton breaks the spell of the happy ending in her introductory American Dreams and in her fairy tale, because both are merely fiction—​‘that story’. Meanwhile, the stepmother is punished to see how none of her daughters becomes a princess to ensure her own financial tranquility in her older years. Instead, at Cinderella’s wedding, her stepsisters become mutilated, blind spinsters after ‘white doves pecked their eyes out/​Two hollow spots were left/​like soup spoons’ (Sexton 258). This violent revenge, revealing the unsurprising reversal of roles between goodies and baddies, ultimately stains the poem’s coda with blood. Menaced by her adolescent daughters and the advent of menopause, Anne Sexton is preoccupied with her self-​image and sympathizes with another stepmother ‘eaten […] by age’ (225). In ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’, the older Queen’s beauty is transformed into poison, when she looks herself in the mirror announcing to her that she is not the fairest anymore, but her pubescent stepdaughter. Snow White is a porcelain doll with scarlet allure, who incarnates prescribed ideals of femininity: young, docile and fertile, to serve patriarchal interests of procreative sexuality. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar contend that, in the traditional fairy tale, the absent king is represented by the looking glass, whose voice of judgement rules every woman’s self-​evaluation, and he declares that his consort is now a rebellious witch, so she must be replaced by his angelic, dutiful daughter (37–​38). As a slave of rituals of beautification to maintain her attractiveness, the Queen perceives that Snow White’s menarche, allied with patriarchal forces, is the fiend who devalues her majestic power and jeopardizes her safe position at court. Without royal magnanimity, her fear is also transformed into murderous bestiality: she sentences her stepdaughter to death, although Snow White’s life is eventually saved by the hunter commissioned to assassinate her. Men are not only saviors of damsels in distress in this fairy tale, but also animal predators. In the woods, Snow White wanders aimlessly for weeks and finds only hungry wolves and ‘those little hot dogs’ (Sexton 226)—​seven dwarfs in want of a (sexual) servant at home. As the middle-​aged witch, Sexton calls Snow White ‘the dumb bunny’ (228), because she falls thrice into the trap of the Queen, who disguised with rags, visits her in her dwarfish prison of domesticity to offer presents to murder her: lacing, a comb and a poison apple. This Biblical fruit of temptation seems to kill the girl, so the dwarfs imprison her corpse in a glass coffin, as the Queen is the captive of her mirror. For Elisabeth Bronfen, this fairy tale exemplifies how beautiful dead women are idealized and adored as objects of exhibition, not for mourning, but for erotic pleasure and the sense of possession by male

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voyeurs (100–​101). Snow White’s lifeless beauty captivates her next beneficiary: an errant prince. It is not his love kiss, but an unromantic accident, which revives the girl when the coffin falls and ‘the chunk of apple flew out of her throat’ (Sexton 228). Only charmed by her virginal beauty and female silence, the prince marries Snow White. Sexton’s moral in this story is that it is a socially learned behavior, transmitted intergenerationally, that women of all ages give importance to their physical appearance, in fairy tales or in modern America. Without an identity of her own, Snow White is not antagonistic to the Queen but becomes her own self-​image, because she will dangerously mimic her stepmother’s vice: ‘sometimes referring to her mirror/​as women do’ (229). She is still admired as a young doll-​princess, whose robotic grace meets male expectations of meek femininity, yet like her stepmother, she will be someday an older monarch abhorred by everyone. While this virgin’s unconscious beauty makes her a stupid commodity, ‘an experienced woman’s conscious beauty makes her not only cruel but doomed’ (Ostriker 257). Invited to the wedding, the Queen must wear red-​hot iron shoes, and not for glamorous purposes, because she is declared to be a witch by the fairy-​tale inquisition. Then, she is tortured in a graphic spectacle of burning alive, described by Sexton to denounce how old women, possibly like herself, are viewed as monsters to be punished with social death for becoming old and being loud beyond this tale: First your toes will smoke and then your heels will turn black and you will fry upward like a frog, […] she danced until she was dead, a subterranean figure, her tongue flicking in and out like a gas jet. sexton 228–​229

Adrienne Rich coins the term ‘lesbian continuum’ to refer to same-​sex genital experiences and many more forms of primary intensity between/​among women, like sharing a rich inner life, the bonding against male tyranny and the giving or receiving of support (648–​649). When Anne Sexton ages and attempts to separate boys from her daughters, she recalls her childhood: the protection from male testosterone, the teachings and unconditional love from Nana, her unmarried great-​aunt Anna Ladd Dingley, already deceased. This older woman-​young girl relationship is dramatized in ‘Rapunzel’ with Sexton’s confessional sympathy. Dame or Mother Gothel is a lonely old witch, a healer who keeps a herbal garden and snatches a baby girl from her mother’s bosom

16 Cortés Vieco as a bargain to punish her father’s transgression: he stole Gothel’s magic herbs to ease his wife’s pregnancy pain. Named Rapunzel, the girl is confined to a solitary tower by her benefactress, who protects her virginity from male intruders but symbolically penetrates her through a window to play the incestuous game of mother-​me-​do with her: ‘when the witch wanted to enter she cried/​ Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair’ (Sexton 247). Gothel forces her captive to sexual slavery without her resistance and objectifies her thick braid as the symbol of her erotic desirability, apparently unavenged because of the narrator’s empathy for the witch. This display of homosexual desire and love violates fairy-​tale conventions, but unlike in ‘Snow White’, where the sense of sight satisfies men’s lust, Sexton also innovates in relying on the sense of touch to express woman-​to-​woman pleasure in her introduction to ‘Rapunzel’: ‘give me your skin/​as sheer as a cobweb’ (245). Delightful tactile experiences occur in natural settings: ‘we are two birds/​washing in the same mirror’ (246); and they are accompanied by humid sensations: ‘we lie together all in green/​like pond weeds/​[…]as tender as bog moss’ (246). Like in other tales, an interfering prince ruins the plans of older women for young girls, whether to destroy them or to love them, like Gothel with her pupil. Inexperienced with men, Rapunzel is sexually attracted to manly attributes and phallic strength, as soon as she meets the prince, who interrupts the lesbian continuum with her mistress: What is this moss on his legs? What prickly plant grows on his cheeks? What is this voice as deep as a dog? […] Yet he dazzled her with his dancing stick. They lay together upon the yellowy threads, swimming through them like minnows through kelp. sexton 248

The prince teaches Rapunzel the rule of compulsory heterosexuality and separates her from her same-​sex older lover. Although Gothel punishes his audacity with blindness, her spell of homosexuality is broken, because sexual desire and romantic love for a man have already infected Rapunzel, whose tears save him and restore his sight. The pupil forgets her mistress, because homoeroticism can only be a transient phase of youth for fairy-​tale heroines and postwar American women alike, before assuming their only viable destiny of marriage and motherhood. Rapunzel loses both the erogenous lesbian pleasure and the master-​disciple relationship with the witch, who can no longer transmit powers and knowledge to her, so Rapunzel does not ultimately become a wise

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healer but, instead, a dumb consort. For Ostriker, the poem stresses the emotional poignancy of the older woman’s loss, while perfunctorily dismissing the normality of the heterosexual lovers (258). Rapunzel marries her prince, but the reader doubts the truth behind a traditional happy ending for her, whereas Gothel is punished with endless heartbreak. Her sexual life and lesbian continuum vanish, so she is, again, a lonely spinster with only the company of dreams and sweet memories of her lost pupil, because ‘a woman/​who loves a woman/​ is forever young’ (Sexton 244–​245). In ‘Briar Rose’, the thirteenth fairy is another middle-​aged witch with: ‘her fingers as long and thin as straws,/​her eyes burnt by cigarettes,/​her uterus an empty teacup’ (291), and astonishing likeness to Anne Sexton: a slender, heavy smoker, afraid of menopause. Uninvited to the christening of the kingdom’s longed-​for princess, the witch is the victim of the king’s sexist prejudices. Her revenge against him is to curse his daughter to prick herself on a spinning wheel in her fifteenth year and die, but the twelfth fairy palliates this hex, so during her adolescence, the princess does not pass away after hurting herself, but sleeps until she is kissed by love. Nevertheless, whose is the true curse in this tale? The good fairy’s or the evil witch’s? The happy ending in Sexton’s poem unearths the all-​pervasive nightmare of the Sleeping Beauty after having been awakened thanks to the prince’s kiss, which broke the witch’s spell, yet rose her sexual trauma. Then, the princess does not call her savior (and future husband), but her father instead. Eventually released from her prison of slumber, she is not afraid of the wicked fairy, but dreads falling asleep again: Each night I am nailed into place And I forget who I am. Daddy? That’s another kind of prison. It’s not the prince at all, But my father drunkenly bent over my bed, Circling the abyss like a shark, My father thick upon me Like some sleeping jellyfish. What voyage this, little girl? This coming out of prison? God help–​This life after death? sexton 294–​295

A contemporizing aspect of Transformations is how Anne Sexton, a psychiatric patient, turns tales into representative ‘case histories’ to modernize the conflicts of her heroines, placed among twentieth-​century neurotics and

18 Cortés Vieco psychotics (Beaumont 220). Within a physician-​sufferer relationship, Sexton psychoanalyzes the comatose princess of ‘Briar Rose’, so that she retrieves the brutal deflowering she eternally suffered during her prolonged sleep. The fairy-​ tale king did not protect his daughter from the evil witch’s curse but benefited from the good fairy’s blessing of hibernation to perpetrate his incestuous crime. With impunity, this father treasured Briar Rose’s hymen to imprison and assault her in bed, where her inert body lay.3 Sexton’s therapy permits the princess to verbalize how she was incessantly accosted and raped by a familiar sea animal—​sticky, razor-​edged and bloodthirsty—​with his phallic gun of female destruction. Hence, Briar Rose’s sexual life is not a sweet novelty to be discovered with her husband, but the well-​known nightmare of her father’s uncanny felony, unburied by the labyrinth of her memory. Sexton’s question to interrogate her fairy-​tale patient anticipates her answer: to awaken after this ordeal is to constantly expect sexual danger, not to enjoy marital bliss, because having died in a mortal bed in the past, she must now stand up dead in life. Consequently, the good fairy’s former spell of somnolence to save the princess activates Briar Rose’s voluntary insomnia at the present time, so as not to relive anymore the sexual abuse repeated for ages. After having been tormented by her father-​king, Briar Rose also ages due to the mental pain of remembering her rape and she ultimately becomes the same revengeful old witch, whose curse of death could have prevented a worse malediction in her life: the ordeal of incest and being alive after incest. It is controversial to surmise that Anne Sexton suffered childhood sexual abuses, but non-​consensual father-​daughter sexual intercourse and reverberations of its lasting psychological harm intermittently erupt in the confessional poem ‘Briar Rose’. Tale or truth, Sexton’s pen vomits blood from an open wound of sexual source, potentially fueling her final decision of suicide, or she simply denounces seemingly healthy yet deeply dysfunctional families in postwar America, where girls are princesses trusting their kingly daddies, whose libidinous brutality corrupts the ideal of paternal love. 3

Nobody ‘lived happily ever after’

More than undertaking a female/​feminist revision of patriarchal fairy tales in Transformations, Anne Sexton becomes a cursed fairy, who breaks the spell of 3 Anne Sexton’s poem ‘Briar Rose’ is also reminiscent of Giambattista Basile’s version of ‘Sleeping Beauty’ called ‘Sun, Moon and Talia’ (1634), in which Talia is raped by the king while she is asleep.

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postwar America as a magic kingdom, where women’s dreams become true, thanks to heroic men as princes, to patriarchal institutions as the goodies or to the happy ending of marriage. Instead, Sexton’s blatant pessimism about her own life experiences and the modern United States transforms the marvels from fairy tales into real nightmares. As soon as the fairy dust of the traditional stories of ‘Cinderella’, ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’, ‘Rapunzel’ and ‘Briar Rose’ vanishes, the poet ridicules young women as candy princesses without an identity of their own beyond their beauty, their destined role as wives or their expected obedience to men. Moreover, Sexton accuses fairy-​tale princes of ruining woman-​to-​woman relationships and encouraging female competition; she reveals sordid sexual secrets from the sacred family institution, and she ultimately honors malevolent witches, possibly like herself, unjustly and violently punished for being older, strong-​minded or powerful, by patriarchal forces supposedly embodying the good. Through her retellings of classic children’s tales, the cursed fairy Anne Sexton ultimately betrays her fellow fairies by revealing that, just as in contemporary America, nobody 'lived happily ever after'.

Works Cited

Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice, Vivien Jones (ed.). London: Penguin, 2003. Beaumont, Jeanne Marie. ‘ “The Speaker in this Case”: Anne Sexton as Tale-​Teller in Transformations’. The Business of Words, Amanda Golden (ed.). Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2016. 218–​247. Bronfen, Elisabeth. Over her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1992. Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. London: Penguin, 2010. Fukuda, Shiho. ‘The Hesitancy of a “Middle-​Aged Witch”: Anne Sexton’s Transformations’. Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos 13 (2008): 31–​47. Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic. New Haven:  Yale UP, 2000. Irigaray, Luce. The Sex which is not One. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985. Kumin, Maxine. ‘How it was’. The Complete Poems, Anne Sexton. Boston:  Mariner Books, 1999. xix–​xxxiv. Ostriker, Alicia. ‘That Story: Anne Sexton and Her Transformations’. Sexton: Selected Criticism, Diana Hume George (ed.). Urbana: Chicago UP, 1988. 251–​273. Purkiss, Diane. The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth-​Century Representations. London: Routledge, 1996. Rich, Adrienne. ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence’. Signs 5.4 (1980): 631–​660.

20 Cortés Vieco Sexton, Anne. The Complete Poems. Boston: Mariner Books, 1999. Warner, Marina. Once Upon a Time:  A Short History of Fairy Tales. Oxford:  Oxford UP, 2014. Zipes, Jack. Fairy Tale as Myth/​Myth as Fairy Tale. Lexington:  The UP of Kentucky, 1994.

­c hapter 2

Revisiting Fairy-​Tale Land through a Gender Lens in Emma Donoghue’s Kissing the Witch María Amor Barros del Río Abstract By the end of the twentieth century, feminist and postmodern criticism had bolstered a literary outburst that presented a challenge to the fairy-​tale tradition. A wave of fictional re-​writings emerged to address an adult audience with challenging plots and innovative ideas. In 1997, acclaimed Irish writer Emma Donoghue published her first story collection Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins, a re-​writing of thirteen classic tales from Andersen, Perrault and the Brothers Grimm. Its singularity did not go unnoticed and the book was shortlisted for a James Tiptree Award and named an ala Popular Paperback for Young Adults. Donoghue’s stories offer alternative possibilities of female emancipation that reach beyond the boundaries of traditional folk plots. Her female characters subvert the canon, bringing to the fore issues hitherto alien to the fairy-​tale universe. Accordingly, literary innovations both transcend content and affect form. Narrated in the first person, the stories are interlinked through the use of a recurring ploy that introduces each new tale. This device serves to unify the selected stories and suggests both a collective plot of oppression inherent in the folk tale pattern, and an uncharted tradition of female rebellion, transformation, and success.

Keywords gender –​intersectionality –​fairy tale –​Emma Donoghue –​Kissing the Witch

1

Engendering the Fairy-​Tale Tradition

Prolific writer Emma Donoghue (1969) was born and raised in Ireland. She graduated in English literature and French at University College Dublin, before moving to England where she earned a PhD in English literature, and finally settling in Canada in 1998 where she established her family home. These changes affected not only her writing but also her place in the English-​speaking

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | DOI:10.1163/9789004418998_004

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literary canon. At the beginning of her career, she was considered an Irish author (Bourke et  al.; D’hoker; Moloney and Thompson). Later on she was labelled a Canadian writer (Young), but more recently, literary criticism tends to consider her a transnational writer (Ue) and a queer trans-​Canadian author (García Zarranz). Furthermore, Emma Donoghue is a declared feminist and a lesbian, as well as an award-​winning writer who has experimented with almost every genre: novels, short fiction, drama, screenplays and historical fiction. So far, ten novels, with an eleventh to be published in September 2019, have established her fame worldwide, especially titles such as Hood (1995), Landing (1997), Slammerkin (2000), The Sealed Letter (2008) and Room (2010). She has also gained fame and recognition for her five short story collections. In 1997, inspired by feminism and the literary revisionist movement of the late twentieth century, Emma Donoghue published her third book of fiction and first story collection, Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins, joining the ranks of renowned feminist writers who before her had succeeded in subverting the traditional patriarchal patterns of fairy tales.1 According to Zipes, these folk stories have since been transformed into new fictional texts with the aim to ‘counter as well as collide with our complex social realities’ (The Irresistible 136). A common characteristic of that ‘fairy-​tale renaissance’, Joosen explains (Critical and Creative 4), was their challenge to tradition both in form and content in order to ‘invite readers to reconsider the traditional texts’ (16). In Kissing the Witch, Emma Donoghue compiles re-​writings of twelve classic stories from Hans Christian Andersen, Jeanne-​Marie Leprince de Beaumont, Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, alongside a newly invented tale, all under new titles that work both as a nod to and a deviation from the original tales.2 In this 1 Emma Donoghue has confessed her admiration for feminist writers re-​writing myth and fairy tales such as Angela Carter, Anne Sexton, Olga Broumas and Jeannete Winterson, among others. In fact, the thirteenth story included in this volume, ‘The Tale of the Kiss’, was inspired by folk motifs about oracles and magic helpers discussed in Marina Warner’s From the Beast to the Blonde, as the author states in her web page. For a more detailed account of Donoghue’s influences and interests, see the volume of interviews authored by Moloney and Thompson. 2 ‘The Tale of the Shoe’ is based on the Grimms’ folk tale of Cinderella; ‘The Tale of the Bird’ is based on Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘Thumbelina’; ‘The Tale of the Rose’ is based on Madame le Prince de Beaumont’s ‘Beauty and the Beast’; ‘The Tale of the Apple’ is based on the Grimms’ folk tale Snow White; ‘The Tale of the Handkerchief’ is based on the Grimms’ ‘Goose Girl’; ‘The Tale of the Hair’ is based on the Grimms’ ‘Rapunzel’; ‘The Tale of the Brother’ is based on Andersen’s ‘Snow Queen’; ‘The Tale of the Spinster’ is based on the Grimms’ ‘Rumpelstilskin’ and similar stories of magical helpers; ‘The Tale of the Cottage’ is based on the Grimms’ ‘Hansel and Gretel’; ‘The Tale of the Skin’ is based on the Grimms’ ‘Donkeyskin’; ‘The Tale of the Needle’ is based on Perrault’s ‘Sleeping Beauty’; ‘The Tale of the Voice’ is based on Andersen’s ‘Little Mermaid’; and, finally, ‘The Tale of the Kiss’ is an original creation of Emma Donoghue’s.

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volume, which received immediate positive criticism and acclaim, Donoghue skillfully manipulates the original pattern of each story to focus attention on her female protagonists’ hazardous quest for identity.3 Following the trend of her first two works, Stir Fry (1994) and Hood (1995), Kissing the Witch challenges normative heterosexual desire (Dutheil de la Rochere; Nolte-​Odhiambo; Orme) and explores the potentialities of female bonding (Martin; Palko) for female emancipation, whilst maintaining dialogue with the fairy-​tale genre. As Dutheil de la Rochère and Coppola have noted, the author plays with the reader’s familiarity with the genre, inserting intertextual references that serve to highlight both resemblances and deviations. In this way, Donoghue uses the fairy tale scheme as a blank page where contemporary issues can be rewritten, Roberts and MacCallum-​Setward conclude. 2

Female Voices for Female Stories

Driven by second and third-​wave feminist foundations and the postmodernist interest in rewriting, Emma Donoghue challenges the boundaries of female emancipation in the traditional fairy-​tale plot, subverting them through the many processes and situations that her protagonists undergo to explore their agency. Formal structure is altered for this ultimate purpose, and so the volume displays a set of literary strategies among which retrospective retelling stands out.4 In Kissing the Witch, each tale is linked to the next by an invisible thread of memory and shared hardship. Donoghue escorts the reader from the protagonist’s story to that of the minor character’s who, in turn, becomes the heroine of the following tale. In the interim between one story and the next, the orality of the short story tradition becomes prominent through a recurrent dialogic formula in which the protagonist asks ‘Who were you before …?’ and the second character invariably replies ‘Will I tell you my own story? It is a tale of a …’. This way, each new story is told at the encounter of two female subjects, both eager to listen and to speak their own truth. With this ritual Donoghue unfolds

3 Kissing the Witch was originally written for adults and published in the US for Young Adults. Its singularity did not go unnoticed: the book was shortlisted for a James Tiptree Award and named an ala Popular Paperback for Young Adults. An adaptation of five of Donoghue’s stories became a full-​length play and it was world premiered by San Francisco’s Magic Theatre in 2000. 4 The originality of this device, one of the many metatextual elements detectable in her collection, has attracted scholarly attention. For a more thorough analysis, see the works of Harries and Joosen, respectively.

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a retrospective ‘lineage of female storytellers’, in Joosen’s words (“Reclaiming the Lost Code”, 172), and creates a chain of stories ‘crafting a subtle genealogy of women’ (Palko 919). The result is an original ‘intertextual dialogue’ (Dutheil de la Rochére 16) where fairy tale and storytelling merge. Undoubtedly, the thirteen female narrative voices are a powerful driving force that gives formal and structural singularity to the collection. Each unnamed first-​person narrator speaks with her own distinctive voice and presents subjective and unique accounts of her quest for emancipation. As the stories unfold, Donoghue narrows the distance between the protagonist and the reader, singling out her universe ‘to create unique positionalities in the matrix of social power’ (Barros-​del Río “Emma Donoghue’s”, 241). Conceptually, the collection rejects the notion of womanhood as a universal and static category and offers the reader multiple and shifting alternatives that do not accommodate with the fairy-​tale scheme. This device gives new insights into the individual contexts of the protagonists, unveiling the many forces that support and deter their advancements. 3

Intersectionality and the Deviations of the Female Plot

Following these premises, Donoghue’s rewritings can be considered personal narratives where situated (female) subjects negotiate their identities within a network of relationships. As in any given tale, each character departs from a social position which is in turn conditioned by certain categorical identity markers. Hence, oppressing and privileging practices are shaped by categories such as gender, sexual preference, class, age, race, lifestyle, ethnicity, ability/​ disability, and so on. These do not only intersect and affect the subject deterring or fostering her agency, but also evolve and mutate in time and space. Furthermore, the interrelations of these facets are mutually constitutive, that is, they are exerted in interconnected centers of power that condition the possibilities of emancipation (Yuval-​Davies). For my purpose, intersectionality is a helpmeet to deconstruct the binary oppositions and universalism upon which the fairy-​tale model has traditionally been constructed (Davis). Furthermore, intersectionality ‘can highlight the dynamics of agency and structural constraints as a series of situated interplays in which categories can have different roles, weights and consequences in designing power dynamics’ (Colombo and Rebughini 446). Given these considerations, intersectionality is an optimal analytical tool to outline the devices that enable patterns of subversion and submission in Kissing the Witch. More particularly, McCall’s approach to intracategorical analysis (1774) is an appropriate analytical means to focus on the

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diversity and differences within the group of study, i.e., the female protagonists of Donoghue’s fairy tales, as well as the strategies utilized and the results achieved. From this perspective, intersectionality illuminates how Kissing the Witch displays audacious and complex strategies for female emancipation within and beyond the boundaries of the fairy-​tale genre. The departing point for this analysis is the different forms of gender inequality present in all thirteen tales. Their protagonists are women who escape, or try to escape, oppressive situations in search of alternative solutions. All of them are negatively affected by a patriarchal organization of values that keep them in a subordinate position. Traditionally, beauty, modesty, caring, and ultimate heterosexual marriage for reproductive purposes have been dimensions that sustained a fixed symbolic representation of female characters in fairy tales such as ‘The Beauty and the Beast’, ‘Snow White’, and many other traditional tales. Donoghue’s rewritings deviate from traditional representations, as some protagonists are beautiful but others are not; some are raised to believe that they are wonderful whereas others feel they are ‘the louse in their bed’ (Donoghue 13); some are industrious and others are idle. By this means, Donoghue aligns with the notion of ‘woman’ as a ‘site of multiple, complex, and potentially contradictory sets of experiences’ (Braidotti 4), as the variety of female characters presented in her work confirms. To all of them, wedlock remains an imposed destination to which they must comply, as expected in traditional versions. Conversely, a distinctive particularity of Donoghue’s stories is their discomfort with this normative behaviour. In some stories, Donoghue contests ‘the idealized outcomes of fairy tales and their representations of gender and female identity’ (Haase 20), as in ‘The Tale of the Spinster’, where the narrator declares: ‘I wouldn’t have married even if I could have; I was a woman of business now, a woman of affairs, far too far gone to make a good wife’ (Donoghue 125). Donoghue uses this example to question the limitations of agency for female characters and denounces the mutually excluding gendered spheres embedded in patriarchal society, so frequently reproduced in the fairy-​tale tradition. In other stories, the protagonists do marry, but too often wedlock turns into an embellished prison despite the material and social rewards it encompasses. This idea is particularly explicit in ‘The Tale of the Bird’, where a poor young girl marries an older and wealthier but overprotective man. His manor becomes her confinement while she longs for wider spaces, as her words attest: ‘In their smooth leather, my feet itched for the stubble of the open fields, and my eyes strained for a far horizon’ (Donoghue 19). A similar situation can be found in ‘The Tale of the Needle’, where the patriarchal logic of confinement in the domestic realm clearly intersects with class and the young maid is confined by her parents to the manor to preserve

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her health and purity. In both aforementioned tales, as well as in ‘The Tale of the Shoe’ and ‘The Tale of the Apple’, this form of captivity comes with leisure and wealth for the higher classes, whereas it implies hard household work for those pertaining to poorer groups. Although the situated categories of gender and class intersect differently, they nonetheless result in dynamic processes that deviate from the norm. Both types of confinement function as a form of control and provoke the protagonists’ feelings of entrapment and longing for wider and more open spaces. As an alternative, confinement is sometimes eluded through intellectual awakening. Hence, the protagonists metaphorically move away from oppressive symbolic representations of femininity and follow the path set by their foremothers. To that end, Emma Donoghue uses metatextual references to the fairy-​tale tradition and dismantles its legitimacy, as in ‘The Tale of the Needle’, where the narrator laments that in her childhood, ‘the only stories were family stories, and they were all the one story’ (Donoghue 172). This form of rejection is expressed more directly in ‘The Tale of the Rose’, where the protagonist admires the queen for ‘[…] refusing to do the things queens are supposed to do […]’ (Donoghue 39–​40). Similarly, once she has married the prince, the young maid of ‘The Tale of the Handkerchief’ reflects: ‘I thought of how both of us had refused to follow the paths mapped out for us by our mothers and their mothers before them, but had perversely gone our own ways instead’ (Donoghue 80). Quite adeptly, these passages suggest an emerging degree of awareness and objectivity among the protagonists, whilst seeking complicity on the side of the reader at the same time. Although Donoghue’s protagonists try hard to escape their fate, they usually need a friendly hand to help them in their struggle. Often, this takes the form of an older and wiser woman, a secondary character who lives in a tower or a cave.5 These helpers, who are known as witches and sorcerers, become the protagonists of the following stories and impersonate their particular intersection of categories where mature age, (single) status and/​or (homo)sexual orientation stand out as especially disadvantaging axes. Remarkable is Donoghue’s dexterity in using female outcasts as support elements in the emancipatory

5 A marked element in this volume is the use of a female minor character to support the young heroine in her identity construction process. This device had been used before by other Irish women writers, particularly in the Bildungsroman format, as in The Country Girls Trilogy, by Edna O’Brien and The Land of Spices, by Kate O’Brien. According to some studies (Barros-​del Río, “Thematic Transgressions”; D’hoker), this literary technique is a necessary device to face the impossibility of articulating an emancipatory adventure for one girl alone, which in the case of Kissing the Witch is limited by the traditional fairy tale format.

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processes of the protagonists. Their disadvantaged situatedness not only becomes a precious assistance to the young protagonists but also deconstructs the male-​rescuer archetype as the dominant figure (Fernández Rodríguez; Zipes Fairy Tales). These sororal relationships, which sometimes develop into lesbian love, have a twofold function: on one hand, they render the male role in fairy tales unnecessary, and they evince age and experience among female characters as valuable assets on the other. With this device, the limitations of the unitary subject are challenged, and the concepts of beauty and love are broadened beyond the boundaries of the traditional fairy-​tale genre. The style used in ‘The Tale of the Needle’ when the old woman imprisoned in the tower instructs the young girl is almost poetic: Listen, girl, she said, they’ve tried to stop me from teaching any of the things I  know. Now they’re trying to prevent you from learning all the things you don’t. But gifts can only be delayed. donoghue 178

Undoubtedly, Donoghue seeks compensation for the shortcomings of her young protagonists and expands the concept of heroine into a self-​reinforcing sisterhood. At the same time, she displaces authority from structural categories and social practices, and favours female bonding, experience and knowledge. One tale after another, the reader realizes that the witch was once a young woman also trying to find her own path and so, by naturalising their stories, the author alters fixed meanings of womanhood and forces the reader to admit that to kiss the witch may be a legitimate and natural action after all. In Kissing the Witch, mobility is a recurrent strategy. The young protagonists frequently run away from a claustrophobic physical setting, a device of dissidence that deviates from the fairy-​tale plot. But here again, differences among the life narratives stand out too, underlining the multiplicity of stories and the diversity of their protagonists. In some plots, the voyage is a means to escape danger, as in ‘The Tale of the Skin’, when fearing incestuous sexual assault, the protagonist abandons the castle. But rebellion traditionally entails punishment in the fairy-​tale framework and by putting some distance between herself and her father, the protagonist’s positionality changes dramatically. In this tale, sexuality stands out as a relevant category that clearly intersects with age and class. Because of her rejection of sexual intercourse, the heroine loses her class privileges, becomes a vagrant and her possibilities of agency remain on the fringes of society. Quite differently, in ‘The Tale of the Handkerchief’ the voyage becomes an opportunity for the maid, who swaps roles with the princess. Here, the category of class determines the new positionality of the

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subject and allows her upgrading and royal marriage.6 As these examples show, categories can be ambivalent. Even though their intersections dictate the boundaries of female agency at a given moment, they are also dynamic, affecting the subject’s potentialities. In a broader sense, Emma Donoghue uses space as a resource that can be both liberating and isolating. She frequently situates her mature characters in secluded and wild places, like caves and forests, where despite their isolation they can feel free from social constraints. Even though they are outcasts to society, they are also feared and powerful characters. Ironically, they are invested with an aura of wisdom that uplifts them in the eyes of the young protagonists, as the following excerpt from ‘The Tale of the Hair’ shows: ‘The woman was my store of knowledge, my cache of wisdom’ (Donoghue 85). Notably, their ambivalent status frequently comes from deviation from the standard paths of marriage, motherhood, beauty or submission. Their audacity is what makes the locals attribute certain powers to them, as is explicitly mentioned in ‘The Tale of the Kiss’: ‘Power […] was invested in me by a village’ (Donoghue 213). From an intersectional perspective, this inconsistency can be read as the result of the subject’s alteration of positionality at the crossroads of certain axes subject to change, such as status and class, with other given axes such as age, intelligence, or fertility.7 Their workings, considered from McCall’s approach to intracategorical analysis, disclose one of Emma Donoghue’s greatest achievements, namely, her use of categories as ‘political tools’ (Colombo and Rebughini 447). In her stories, the protagonists take an active role and consciously play with those intersections within the limits of their performativity. The results, in terms of female empowerment, are not always satisfactory but usually produce some insightful and revealing lessons both for the heroines and the reader, as the protagonist of ‘The Tale of the Rose’ reflects: ‘This was a strange story,

6 Notice that Donoghue repeatedly recurs to society and nature as opposite contexts, identifying the former with norms and the latter as an apt space for resistance and freedom. In social environments the burden of the norms is metaphorically represented with oppressive complements such as a barrel, in ‘The Tale of the Handkerchief’, a shoe, in ‘The Tale of the Shoe’, or a mirror, in ‘The Tale of the Apple’. On the contrary, in nature, where human essence is evident and cannot be hidden, socially constructed differences tend to disappear, particularly in ‘The Tale of the Bird’ and ‘The Tale of the Handkerchief’. 7 Among the several categories used by Emma Donoghue in Kissing the Witch, race is a missing axis of difference, as Roberts and MacCallum-​Stewart have detected. In this volume, Emma Donoghue does not challenge the racial hegemony of the Western fairy-​tale tradition, a fact that may be due to her strong influence of American and English-​speaking critics and authors. Hence, this has not been taken into consideration for analysis.

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one I would have to learn a new language to read, a language I could not learn except by trying to read the story’ (Donoghue 39). 4

Conclusions

In Kissing the Witch, Emma Donoghue reconsiders the boundaries of the traditional fairy tale implementing formal and thematic innovations. Through the lens of intersectionality, Kissing the Witch displays different levels of complexity through which the author denounces the limitations of the traditional genre and unveils the differences and potentialities inherent in the category of ‘woman’. Her compilation denounces the ‘multiple and conflicting experiences of subordination and power’ (McCall 1780)  embodied in its female characters, and underlines personal change as the only alternative for its ‘nomadic subjects’ (Braidotti). The stories illustrate their protagonists’ capacity of mediation and resistance in their emancipatory processes, which usually require the support of an older female character. Furthermore, Donoghue incorporates a political dimension to her fairy tales, as she recurs to objects and altered characters to identify the traditional tales that lie underneath her adaptations. With this device, the reader’s attention is diverted from the protagonist and the politics behind come to light (Barros-​del Rio, “Emma Donoghue’s”). Consequently, each story is framed by a system of beliefs and norms that limit the agency of the female characters in different ways. As in traditional fairy tales, Donoghue plays with gender, age and class as determining axes and adds sexual orientation in her re-​makings. Using intersectionality as an analytical tool, Kissing the Witch demonstrates that those categories are not fixed, but ambivalent, an uncertainty that makes the female characters’ search for self-​identity much more complex than in the formulaic structure of the wonder tale. Marriage and reproduction are frequently avoided and belittled. The promised fulfillment within manors and palaces is often misleading. Alternatively, isolation in the wild functions as shelter and confinement. Space, age, sexual orientation and class intersect with the protagonists’ search for identity in unexpected ways. Finally, and in spite of granting great relevance to the innovative ways female identities intersect with and are constituted by other social factors, Emma Donoghue vindicates the centrality of women’s processes of self-​discovery within the frame of the fairy-​tale genre, a founding idea that the protagonist of ‘The Tale of the Bird’ clearly articulates: ‘It was a bird that helped me, when I was young, but it could have been anything: a stick, a stone, whatever happened by. The thing is to take your own life in your hands’ (Donoghue 11). In

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conclusion, reading Kissing the Witch through an intersectionality lens is far from a simple and amusing voyage into fairy land. On the contrary, it becomes a challenging and engaging act of rebellion.

Works Cited

Barros-​del Río, María Amor. ‘Emma Donoghue’s and James Finn Garner’s Rebellious Cinderellas: Feminism and Satire for Empowerment in Contemporary Fairy Tales’. International Journal of Applied Linguistics and English Literature 7.5 (2018): 239–​246. Barros-​del Río, María Amor. ‘Thematic Transgressions and Formal Innovations in Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls Trilogy and Epilogue’. Estudios Irlandeses 13.2 (2018): 77–​89. Bourke, Angela, Siobhán Kilfeather, Maria Luddy, Margaret Mac Curtain, Gerardine Meaney, Mairín Ní Dhonnchadha, Mary O’Dowd and Clair Wills (eds.). Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing Volumes IV & V:  Irish Women’s Writing and Traditions. Cork: Cork UP in association with Field Day, 2002. Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects. Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. Columbia: Columbia UP, 1994. Colombo, Enzo, and Paola Rebughini. ‘Intersectionality and Beyond’. Rassegna Italiana di Sociologia 57.3 (2016): 439–​460. Coppola, Maria Micaela. ‘The Gender of Fairies: Emma Donoghue and Angela Carter as Fairy Tale Performers’. Textus 14.1 (2001): 1000–​1015. Davis, Kathy E. ‘Intersectionality as critical methodology’. Writing Academic Texts Differently: Intersectional Feminist Methodologies and the Playful Art of Writing, Nina Lykke (ed.). New York: Routledge, 2014. 31–​43. D’hoker, Elke. Irish Women Writers and the Modern Short Story. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016. Donoghue, Emma. Kissing the Witch. Old Tales in New Skins. New  York:  Harper Collins, 1997. Dutheil de la Rochère, M. H. ‘Queering the Fairy Tale Canon: Emma Donoghue’s Kissing the Witch’. Fairy Tales Reimagined:  Essays on New Retellings, Susan R. Bobby (ed.). London: MacFarland, 2009. 13–​30. Fernández Rodríguez, Carolina. ‘The Deconstruction of the Male-​Rescuer Archetype in Contemporary Feminist Revisions of “The Sleeping Beauty” ’. Marvels & Tales 16.1 (2002): 51–​70. García Zarranz, Libe. ‘ “The Whole City’s our Bawdy-​House, My Lass”: Affective Spaces and Disoriented Bodies in Dionne Brand and Emma Donoghue’s Fictions’. Peer English: A Journal of New Critical Thinking 9 (2014): 89–​107.

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Harries, Elizabeth Wanning. Twice Upon a Time: Women Writers and the History of the Fairy Tale. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2001. Haase, Donald. Fairy Tales and Feminism. New Approaches. Wayne State UP. 2004. Joosen, Vanessa. ‘Reclaiming the Lost Code: Feminist Imaginations of the Fairy-​Tale’. Postmodern Reinterpretations of Fairy Tales: How Applying New Methods Generates New Meanings, Anna Kerchy (ed.). Lewiston/​Queenston/​Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 2011. 163–​180. Joosen, Vanessa. Critical and Creative Perspectives on Fairy Tales: An Intertextual Dialogue between Fairy-​Tale Scholarship and Postmodern Retellings. Detroit:  Wayne State UP, 2011. Martin, Ann. ‘Generational Collaborations in Emma Donoghue’s Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins’. Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 35.1 (2010):  4–​25. JSTOR. Web. 24 March 2019. McCall, Leslie. ‘The Complexity of Intersectionality’. Signs, 30.3 (2005): 1771–​1800. Moloney, Caitriona and Helen Thompson. Irish Women Writers Speak Out. Voices from the Field. New York: Syracuse UP, 2003. Nolte-​Odhiambo, Carmen. ‘Unhoming the Child: Queer Paths and Precarious Futures in Kissing the Witch’. Pacific Coast Philology 53:2 (2018): 239–​50. Orme, Jennifer. ‘Mouth to mouth:  queer desires in Emma Donoghue’s Kissing the Witch’. Marvels & Tales 24.1 (2010): 116–​130. Palko, Abigail L. ‘ “No mother nor nothing to me”: Excavating the Maternal Figure in Kissing the Witch’. Women’s Studies 44.7 (2015): 917–​939. Roberts, Jude, and Esther MacCallum-​Stewart (eds.). Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Popular Fantasy: Beyond Boy Wizards and Kick-​ass Chicks. London and New York: Routledge, 2016. Ue, Tom. ‘An Extraordinary Act of Motherhood:  a Conversation with Emma Donoghue’. Journal of Gender Studies 21.1 (2012): 101–​106. Young, Emma. ‘ “Annihilate but Space and time, and Make Two Lovers Happy”:  National Homelands and Lesbian Relationships in Emma Donoghue’s Landing’. Peer English 9 (2014): 108–​121. Yuval-​Davis, Nira. The politics of belonging: Intersectional contestations. Sage, 2011. Zipes, Jack. Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion: The Classical Genre for Children and the Process of Civilization. Second edition. New York and Oxford: Routledge. 2006. Zipes, Jack. The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton UP, 2012.

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Fairy-​Tale Reflections: Space and Women Host(age)s in Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy, Snow, Bird Paula Barba Guerrero Abstract In her novel Boy, Snow, Bird (2014), Helen Oyeyemi retells the classic tale of ‘Snow White’, relocating the story in 1950s America. In doing so, Oyeyemi attempts to challenge those ideological constructs that have entrapped women for centuries, outlined in the Western conception of beauty. Realism and fantasy intertwine giving way to spaces as rooted in reality as they are in fiction. Through magical realism, Oyeyemi examines gender and race relations to denounce the way in which they cause violence and marginalization. As a fantastic aura lingers over the narration, the concepts of canonical beauty and normative female identity get deconstructed to unravel the dangers they conceal. Through an ethical reformulation of the concept of hospitality and a refigured portrait of contemporary femininity, Oyeyemi produces a modern tale wherein fairy-​tale magic takes place against a background of social inequality and political constructs. Throughout the narrative, the protagonists have to overcome the figurative meanings that haunt them to redefine their agency in relation to one another. From Grimm to Disney, Boy, Snow, Bird challenges previous depictions of this classic fairy tale in an attempt to rescue differential womanhood in narrative space. In the story, female protagonists are introduced as hostages of the reality they live in, and it is only in the undoing of racial and gender-​based norms that they can adopt a true hospitality and become hosts of their own spaces and masters of their stories.

Keywords Helen Oyeyemi –​narrative hospitality –​space –​gender identity –​Snow White

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© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | DOI:10.1163/9789004418998_005

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Fairy tales represent hundreds of years of stories based on thousands of years of stories told by hundreds, thousands, perhaps even millions, of tellers. The mind reels at their influence, omnipresence, phosphorescence: like a star or a planet, they shine, ubiquitous and necessary as gravity, as air or ice. kate bernheimer, ‘The Affect of Fairy Tales’

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Please tell a story about a girl who gets away […] from the happy ending that isn’t really happy at all. Please have her out and run off the page altogether, to somewhere secret where words like ‘happy’ and ‘good’ will never find her. You don’t want her to be happy and good? I’m not sure what’s really meant by happy and good. I would like her to be free. helen oyeyemi, White Is for Witching

∵ 1 Introduction1 The presence of fairy tales in our contemporary social and literary panorama seems as pervasive as it is hard to deny, for it is difficult not to relate, recall or, at least, be attracted to those stories that used to satisfy our childish hunger for new discoveries. After all, these are the bedtime tales we were told as children, the stories we have grown to reimagine. The ubiquity of fairy tales is, as Kate Bernheimer suggests in the foreword to Fairy Tales Reimagined, a fundamental part of our conception of literature and the world, for ‘[f]‌airy tales contain us like a picture or poem, and reflect back to us in language, image, and trope’ (2). They are an integral part of ourselves and of the ways in which we conceive our society. As such, fairy tales speak to and of readers. They reflect upon different 1 The research carried out for the writing of this paper has been co-​funded by the Junta de Castilla y León and the European Social Fund (Operational Programme 2014–​2020 for Castilla y León). This work has also been supported by the Erasmus+ research project «Hospitality in European Film» Ref. No. 2017-​1-​ES01-​KA203-​038181, and by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness through the research project «Critical History of Ethnic American Literature: An Intercultural Approach» Ref. No. FFI2015-​64137-​P.

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human experiences as much as they touch on the sociopolitical structures that govern our lives. Fairy tales are essential in the process of identity construction. They convey ethical values and social patterns which we unconsciously acquire by reading and unwittingly apply when we measure our self-​worth. They articulate cultural constructs and lull us into thinking that social roles are somehow predetermined. What is more, in their normativity, they figure as a form of cultural transmission, communicating magical stories as well as a dangerous threat to plurality and gender identity. The resonance of detrimental gender assumptions has pervaded fairy and folk tales for centuries. And even when these stories emerged as sociopolitical counternarratives, for oral tales aimed at denouncing class conflict in feudal times (Zipes, “Breaking” 120), their hidebound negotiation of gender identity has made them perpetuate negative views on womanhood. Fairy tales remain fairly conservative in this aspect, offering binary representations of the characters and situations they speak of, especially when it comes to gender: good and bad, happy and sad. Their judgement tends to be absolute, their characters monochromatic. Not for nothing do scholars like Jack Zipes or Kevin Smith refer to the divide between the inaction of the helpless heroine and the agency of the hero, or oppose the princess’s passivity to the active role of demonized women (Zipes, Fairy 24; Smith 140). Good or evil, female characters seem equally entrapped in one-​dimensional representations, in an inability to be free. In her study of female models, Alice Neikirk posits that ‘fairy tales change and evolve depending on the biases of the interpreter’ (41). That means that we cannot dissociate stories from the historical moment in which they are produced, but also that there is a chance to rewrite them as to fit new ideological and aesthetic purposes. Nowadays, several women writers have taken up the task of reclaiming fairy tales to rewrite femininity against the norm, as multifaceted, to reflect the ‘diversity of current fairy tale offerings’ (Redington 8). One of these authors is the Nigerian-​born British writer Helen Oyeyemi, who, in her novel White Is for Witching (2009), already anticipated the need of female identities to be boundless and uncontained. This idea is recuperated in her later novel Boy, Snow, Bird (2014). In it, Oyeyemi relocates ‘Snow White’ to a 1950s American context, where racial segregation and violence are commonplace. In doing so, the author not only questions the need to reformulate the female protagonist’s agency, but also plays with her whiteness, opposes it to other characters’ blackness, breaks it down and transforms its cultural meaning. Oyeyemi’s revisionism points to a cultural urge to reconsider fairy tales from new formal and ideological perspectives, from the influence of feminism, Donald Haase would say (28). It suggests that we ought to examine the reflections

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and refractions of these classic tales and re-​evaluate their cultural significance. In this paper, I draw on Cristina Bacchilega’s notion of the ‘intertextual and geopolitical fairy-​tale web of reading and writing practices’ (Fairy Tales ix) to consider Boy, Snow, Bird as a significant constituent of the contemporary feminist trend aiming to adapt and rework classic fairy tales. Departing from Zipes’s notion that ‘there is no such thing as the fairy tale [but] hundreds of thousands of fairy tales’ (Zipes, “Introduction” xv), I will briefly analyze the ethical role these retellings play to later delve into Oyeyemi’s innovative revision. I thus argue that it is only in the rendering of narrative spaces as welcoming homes and in the reconstitution of female relationality that Oyeyemi’s protagonists can move from being hostages of a patriarchal system—​narrativized in the constrictive representation of fairy-​tale women—​to hosts of new narrative rooms wherein a myriad of untold stories can be voiced, processed and heard. By moving the focus away from canonical renderings of fairy tale and into new forms of representation (Haase 31), Helen Oyeyemi helps her characters find the independence, agency and freedom they require from new ethical sites of narrative hospitality. 2

Fairy-​Tale Ethics

In his definition of fairy tales, Steven Swann Jones argues that these stories ‘depict magical or marvelous events or phenomena as a valid part of human experience’ (9). Though somewhat simplified, Jones’ interpretation helps us descry a basic scheme of this genre’s primary features: a taste for mystery as an adequate platform to represent human experience. But whose experience is depicted in these tales? Marcia Lane and Jack Zipes help us discern truth from error by highlighting the genre’s connection to the past (Lane 5) and its constant evolution towards new forms of expression (Zipes, Fairy 3). They bring to the fore a generic desire to fantasize about history deeply tied to present ideologies and aesthetics. Contemporary fairy tales seem to challenge past ontologies from a modern standpoint. Their earlier adscription to bourgeois moral codes and apparent depoliticization (Dégh 65–​66; Zipes, Fairy 6) are thus overcome in the act of rewriting, retelling, re-​occupying history. The postmodern fairy tale develops as an ethical response to misrepresentation, repression and silence. It inscribes the hurtful memories of those deemed Other in magical landscapes to give testimony, acknowledging their suffering. As Zipes suggests, ‘fairy tales are informed by a human disposition to action’, contingent upon the writer’s wishes ‘to transform the world and make it more adaptable to human needs’ (Zipes in Bacchilega, Fairy Tales 3). And this is precisely the purpose of

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contemporary fairy-​tale magic: to open up narrative spaces of healing where the biases of our present and past can be called on, questioned and debunked. In their reconfiguration of genre, postmodern fairy tale authors write against the canon in content and in form. Their rupture with these traditional structures calls for an immediate halt in the inaccurate conception of fairy tales. Frequently dismissed for being ‘escapist’, ‘a mere narrative formula’ without sociopolitical grounding (Smith 104, 155; Armitt 15), contemporary fairy tales delve into fantasy not to elude their critical responsibility, but as a way to fulfill it. They break gender and genre boundaries (Preston 210) to challenge cultural assumptions. Contemporary fairy tales have the ability to expand and contract the stories they contain, to modify their essence and offer vistas into new versions of their past. They become a social act based on the ethical recognition of other voices, and a creative mediation of the artist who reformulates its structure to hint at a reconfiguration of the canon. Boy, Snow, Bird unfolds a myriad of untold stories that underplay conservative values and motifs for the reader to uncover its message. The relation between the work of art and the reader is now active and led by the author’s desire to reframe, reclaim or reconsider aspects of a past hitherto unspoken. The book becomes an intertemporal mediation that connects us with a harmful past, but also with those residual forms that we continue to endure in the present. The ‘writing out and writing through [past] traumatic experience’ (Henke xii) is not only therapeutic then for the women allowed to access healthy forms of relationality and self-​ definition, but also an act of narrative hospitality that gives voice and visibility to truths so far unexplored. To do so, Oyeyemi reconfigures narrative spaces and the forces at work in them. Many space theorists have pointed out the direct relation between narrative and spatial practices. From De Certeau’s notion of the ‘reading’ of the city (92–​93)—​‘the long poem of walking’ (101)—​to Gillian Rose’s feminist geographies and engendered landscapes, which conceal patriarchal ‘unstated assumptions’ (2) in the form of narrativized truths, the place of the narrative and the narrative of places seem intrinsically bound. Doreen Massey masterfully postulates that ‘[f]‌rom the symbolic meaning of spaces/​places and the clearly gendered messages which they transmit, to straightforward exclusion by violence, spaces and places are not only in themselves gendered but, in their being so, they both reflect and affect the ways in which gender is constructed and understood’ (179). Their correlation impeccably responds to Oyeyemi’s call for a reformulation of exocanonical2 female identities and the spaces they occupy. 2 This term was coined by Daniel Escandell in his 2017 article ‘Prado sin Ríos: Espacios en el Canon Metaliterario de la Narrativa de la Memoria’.

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Because systemic forces are at play in gendered spaces, female characters are reduced to mediated social definitions, hostages instead of hosts in the spaces they reside in. When Jacques Derrida speaks of hospitality, he maintains that we know ‘no unconditional welcome, no unconditional passage through the door’ (210). Using the metaphor of the liminal threshold, Derrida refers to a process of conditional and conditioned reception in which the guest is only allowed to enter the realms of the host if he complies with ‘the law of the household’ (210). That is, for as long as he accepts the ruling of the host over the property that (s)he has become. Contemporary hospitality is a trap, then, ‘a radical act of incorporation that apparently dissolves all limits and demarcations’ cannibalizing the Other (Manzanas and Benito 84) into a system of profit. For this reason, René Schérer affirms that hospitality ‘has and is an economy’ (126), as it keeps the world in motion with the promise of a selfless welcome that, in contemporary society, will never fully materialize. In contrast to this perception—​perhaps to alleviate its effects, Paul Ricoeur speaks of narrative hospitality, an ethical act that takes place in the exchange of cultural memories (8). He posits that we must go beyond ‘clichés and anathemas concerning tradition’ and take ‘responsibility, in imagination and in sympathy, for the story of the other, through the life narratives that concern that other’ (6–​7). For only in hospitable narrative spaces can the agonic ambivalence of the Other be processed and worked through. The ambiguity of hospitality—​the openings and closings of space—​is summarized in narrative, in the words of Lane, as a conflictive message:  ‘ “Stay here! Here you are safe. Out there demons abound!” […] “You must journey to become more than you are!” ’ (11). Both the choice to remain static and the possibility to satisfy a historical hunger for mobility and freedom are paths fairy tales open. It is thus the task of the writer to enter the uncomfortable zones of ‘narrative hospitality’ in order to understand the Other. If we apply this to the ill-​represented female identities available in fairy tales, narrative hospitality becomes an act of inclusion and voicing, whereby a plurality of female personalities is presented beyond stereotypes to consider the aftereffects of silenced traumatic experience, the functioning of human relationality and the need for spatial belonging—​as these tales are rooted in the real spaces of memory and the past. If these stories figure as representational yet spatial entities, their ethos moves from the ontological indeterminacy of the fantastical and the unknown, which seems implausible and merely fictive, to the realness of actual topological grounding. Though magical, the spaces these novels occupy relate to actual historical places in need of reassessment, a desire to reconsider historical

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spaces that arises from the genre’s evolution. Fairy tales, Bacchilega contends, have ‘successfully morphed to codify social norms and to nurture a desire for change’ (“Extrapolating” 181). Through a feminist re-​reading of classic fairy tales, Oyeyemi’s novel becomes a foldable space, a map where readers can seek new meaning, find forms of ethical relationality, empathize with historical Others and question the biases of the traditional fairy-​tale genre and the systems sustaining them. The narrative topology of Boy, Snow, Bird mirrors the ideological boundaries that, for centuries, have restricted women. Recalling a sense of place characteristic of Marc Augé’s studies—​the site to which one’s identity is bound, Oyeyemi’s novel ascribes to narrative hospitality in an ethical attempt to open up spaces of belonging, providing women, to paraphrase Virginia Woolf, with the historical room of their own, which classic fairy tales have repeatedly denied them. Fairy-​tale ethics thus respond to the responsibility to understand, care and draw attention to the margins and what moves in them.3 3

Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy, Snow, Bird

As they are not explicitly didactic, fairy tales have been considered ‘second-​ class’ fiction only meant to entertain children and the illiterate since bourgeois times. However, their mythified conception of gender and race politics/​identity turns them into a formative art form (Wardetzky) bound to serve political agendas. Authors like Helen Oyeyemi, though, realize that in the genre’s communicative potential lies the possibility of reformulating harmful constructs that (re)produce gendered and racialized views on identity. Boy, Snow, Bird thus figures as an attempt to adapt the classic dilemma of beauty that ‘Snow White’ posits to a modern context and to examine and debunk the workings of normativity, beauty and appearance in search for new models of womanhood and relationality. The novel tells the story of Boy, a young woman in her twenties who escapes her abusive father into a community in Flax Hill, Massachusetts. After a rushed departure, Boy finds herself having to negotiate her way through communal lifestyle from non-​belonging to attempted assimilation and, in the end, deconstruction. Her liminal reconfiguration is hinted at in spatial terms, in the form of a ‘pitch-​black tunnel’ (Oyeyemi, Boy 14) into her new home. In the novel, feminine identities are negotiated from a static definition of beauty. This is not new, however. In fairy tales, a sense of mythical continuity 3 This is an indirect reference to Toni Morrison’s brilliant 1993 Nobel prize lecture.

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characterizes female representation. From the Grimms’ conception of the female villain as ‘ugly, jealous and old’ (Neikirk 41) to Disney’s adaptations, femininity figures as a search for beauty and youth that aims for the superficial and produces artificial identities. Oyeyemi approaches the dilemma of appearance through the traditional figure of mirrors to denounce the staticity of those renderings ‘ossified into a mythical structure’ (Smith 157). ‘Nobody ever warned me about mirrors, so for many years […] I’d hide myself away inside them’ (Boy 3), asserts Boy in the opening lines of the novel. Boy warns us against the social construction of beauty, which responds to Oyeyemi’s desire to escape our preconceptions towards the pictorial, which we relate to ‘the entirety of a person or of a situation’ (“Interview”). Mirrors appear as symbolic and spatial entities: a space of normative reproduction, but also a space of spaces where identity is reformulated in the examination of reflections. This is perhaps most evident in the transformation of the Whitman (White-​ man) family Boy becomes part of. After marrying Arturo, Boy births a black child, Bird. Her appearance bears family secrets and triggers social demise, as the family’s ‘passing’ is discovered. Appearance is deconstructed and resignified in the novel to hint at the cruelty, marginalization and violence African Americans endured during the 1950s. Evocative of the original fairy tale, social relationality and hospitality appear to be directly connected to looks. It is the Whitmans’ ‘magic transformation’ that alters their social status and leaves them helpless to experience Derridean ‘hostipitality’ (Bacchilega, “Extrapolating” 181; Neikirk 39).4 The influence of appearance in the construction of social hierarchies is a constant in this novel outlined in Bird’s inability to sometimes ‘find [herself] in mirrors’ (156). Though Bird attempts to comprehend her irrefractability, the only logical conclusion she can draw is that her social invisibility arises from ethical negligence, for she is not considered human or normal, but an enchanted ‘enemy’ (162–​163). At a formal level, the recognition of the intertextual reference gives another layer of meaning to the story’s symbolism (Tatar 43), which helps us recognize the relational shift Oyeyemi posits. In Boy, Snow, Bird, female characters are entrapped in an ill relationality—​a spell—​based on gender and race constructs. Oyeyemi cautions against these dynamics drawing on Lacanian interpretations 4 The term ‘hostipitality’ coined by Jacques Derrida points to the interconnected nature of hospitality and hostility. It refers to the conditional ethos of contemporary welcomes, which, for Derrida, illustrate how selfless receptions are no longer attainable and how, instead, hospitality is repeatedly transformed into hostility, as one only receives the other to make him/​ her comply with ‘the law of the household’ (210) he manages, to make him/​her yield to the power of a host now turned into a master.

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of the mirror. She introduces the ‘fantasies that proceed from a fragmented image of the body, [from the] ‘orthopaedic’ form of its totality’, which produce an alienating identity that marks the characters’ self-​concept and self-​worth with its rigid structure (78): They initially define themselves by the parts they see reflected, those assumptions they ‘believe […] to be trustworthy’ (Oyeyemi, Boy 3). Their perception is progressively altered, though, and, in the end, the protagonists fight against those reflections and absences in mirrors that tell more about their predetermined social status than they are willing to take. As they do so, women behave unethically to one another. From the beginning, Boy is organically drawn to Snow, a bond that emerges from love, but that later turns into jealousy: ‘I think this girl is mine, and that when she and I are around each other, we’re giving each other something we never had, or taking back something we’ve lost [a mother]’ (Oyeyemi, Boy 109). Boy’s words appear to reflect a feeling of wholeness only attainable through selfless relationality. They also point to the intricate relations between social status and beauty that begin to be perceptible in the figure of Snow Whitman (White). With the arrival of her biological daughter, though, Boy’s feelings towards Snow change. She mothers Bird and others Snow, adhering to the stereotyped model of fairy-​tale step-​motherhood. Oyeyemi herself has clarified on several occasions that hers is a retelling of the ‘wicked stepmother’ and female relationality in a broader sense: the way in which women disappoint each other. It is also about how women ‘handle beauty without it being to do with men’ and seek each other’s social approval as their only relational bond (Oyeyemi, “Interview”; Hoggard online). The complexity of the novel relies, then, on Oyeyemi’s taste for uncomfortable themes and unsympathetic characters. The writer’s attempts to revise the validity and psychological depth of the ‘wicked stepmother’ (Oyeyemi “Interview”) may not be as satisfactory for her reader as she expected. In her search for ‘all the different lives a woman can live’ (Hoggard online), Oyeyemi voices the ‘unimaginable, and unspeakable’ ethos of witnessing and experiencing trauma (Edkins 2). At the same time, she gives visibility to ‘the historically unspoken’ that comes in the form of fragments and imperfect identities that might be considered deceptive for fairy-​tale readers. Over the centuries we have acquired a conscience of the fairy tale: what it is, the right way to look at it. Oyeyemi’s tale, though, cannot be considered under this light. The destabilized ‘production of linearity’ (Edkins 15) figures in the novel as the formal platform from which suffering and confusion are accounted. Because the protagonists feel alienated, the most adequate stage to tell their stories is one that imbues an ambiguous sense of resolution, a partial grasp on the novel’s topic; a genre that speaks of gendered experiences in content and in form.

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Feminine relationality is key in Boy, Snow, Bird and, though unclear by the end of the novel, the best prism to look at it seems to be Ahmed’s notion of female solidarity. In an interview, Oyeyemi states that, in her novel, female characters are working out their relationality, trying to establish ‘how far to trust each other beneath the surface’ (Oyeyemi, “Interview”). Their apparent reticence to share, believe and walk in each other’s shoes seems to be related to the materialization of their bodies and to the capitalization of their worth. Socially conceived as ‘beautiful objects’, property under ‘the law of the household’ (Derrida 210), women have to deconstruct the artificial identities imposed on them in the form of spatial hostility: mirrors, homes and cities they are trapped into. The deconstruction of those roles that impinge upon their rights is contingent upon the processing of trauma, which implies going back to the site where the traumatic event took place. This journey backwards hints and impulses narrative hospitality, for it opens up relational spaces wherein trauma can be assessed and healed. 4

Conclusion

In her novel, Oyeyemi challenges those ideological constructs that have entrapped women for centuries, outlined in the Western conception of beauty that led to violence and marginalization. As Kimberly Lau beautifully puts it, it ‘calls forth the haunting specters of historical and cultural violence to disturb the everyday and shake loose the extraordinary lurking in the familiar’ (372). As a fantastic aura lingers over Oyeyemi’s narration, the concepts of canonical beauty and normative identity get deconstructed to unravel the dangers they conceal. In Boy, Snow, Bird, common expectations are never met. One would expect archetypes and universal themes from a fairy-​tale adaptation and, yet, this novel makes Oyeyemi’s readers face the ambiguity of the symbolic time after time. Through a reformulation of the concept of hospitality and a refigured portrait of contemporary femininity, Oyeyemi produces a modern tale that speaks of the biases against a magical background. Boy, Snow, Bird introduces a progression in its very title, a lineage of women bearing symbolic names that condition their experiences. Throughout this narrative, these protagonists have to overcome the figurative meanings that haunt them to redefine their agency in relation to one another. As Oyeyemi herself mentions, ‘all of the [characters] want to be observers rather than to be observed, so there’s always this real struggle between them as intellects and, then, as objects’ (“Interview”). In the story, female protagonists are introduced as othered hostages of the reality they live in. It is only in the undoing of racial

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and gender-​based bias that they can adopt a true relationality through the ethics of narrative hospitality and reconstruct past spaces to become hosts and masters of their past, present and future.

Works Cited

Ahmed, Sarah. Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge, 2004. Armitt, Lucie. Contemporary Women’s Fiction and the Fantastic. London: Palgrave, 2000. Bacchilega, Cristina. ‘Extrapolating from Nalo Hopkinson’s Skin Folk:  Reflections on Transformation and Recent English-​Language Fairy-​Tale Fiction by Women’. Contemporary Fiction and the Fairy Tale, Stephen Benson (ed.). Detroit:  Wayne State University Press, 2008. 178–​203. Bacchilega, Cristina. Fairy Tales Transformed?. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2013. Bernheimer, Kate. ‘Foreword: The Affect of Fairy Tales’. Fairy Tales Reimagined: Essays on New Retellings, Susan Redington Bobby (ed.). London: McFarland, 2009. 1–​4. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988. Dégh, Linda. Folktales and Society. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1969. Derrida, Jacques. ‘Hostipitality’. The Derrida-​Habermas Reader, L. Thomassen (ed.). Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2006. 208–​230. Edkins, J. Trauma and the Memory of Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. Escandell Montiel, Daniel. ‘Prado sin Ríos:  Espacios en el Canon Metaliterario de la Narrativa de la Memoria’ Ogigia, Revista electrónica de estudios hispánicos 21, 2017: 5–​24. Haase, Donald. Fairy Tales and Feminism. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2004. Henke, Suzette. Shattered Subjects. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. Hoggard, Liz. ‘Helen Oyeyemi: “I’m interested in the way women disappoint one another” ’. The Guardian 2 March 2014, http://​www.theguardian.com/​books/​2014/​ mar/​02/​helen-​oyeyemi-​women-​disappoint-​one-​another. Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. New York: Norton, 2006. Lane, Marcia. Picturing a Rose: A Way of Looking at Fairy Tales. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1993. Lau, Kimberly J. ‘Snow White and the Trickster: Race and Genre in Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy, Snow, Bird’. Western Folklore 75.3–​4 (2016): 371–​396. Manzanas Calvo, Ana Mª and Jesús Benito. Hospitality in American Literature and Culture. New York: Routledge, 2017. Massey, Doreen. Space, Place and Gender. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1999. Morrison, Toni. ‘Nobel Lecture’. The Nobel Prize. 7 Dec. 1993, https://​www.nobelprize. org/​prizes/​literature/​1993/​morrison/​lecture/​.

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Neikirk, Alice. ‘ “… Happily Ever After” (or What Fairytales Teach Girls About Being Women)’. Hilo: U of Hawaii, 2014. Oyeyemi, Helen. Boy, Snow, Bird. London: Picador, 2014. Oyeyemi, Helen. ‘Interview: Helen Oyeyemi—​Boy, Snow, Bird’, by Librairie Mollat. Youtube. June 4, 2016. Oyeyemi, Helen. White Is for Witching. London: Picador, 2009. Redington Bobby, Susan. Fairy Tales Reimagined. London: McFarland, 2009. Ricoeur, Paul. ‘Reflections on an Ethos for Europe’. Philosophy & Social Criticism 21.5/​ 6 (1995): 3–​13. Rose, Gillian. Feminism and Geography. Cambridge: Polity, 1993. Schérer, René. Hospitalités. Paris: Anthropos, 2004. Smith, Kevin Paul. The Postmodern Fairytale. New York: Palgrave, 2007. Tatar, Maria. The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales. New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1987. Wardetzky, Kristin. ‘The Structure and Interpretation of Fairy Tales Composed by Children’. The Journal of American Folklore (1990): 157–​176. Zipes, Jack. ‘Breaking the Magic Spell: Politics and the Fairy Tale’. New German Critique 6 (1975): 116–​135. Zipes, Jack. Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion. London: Routledge, 2006. Zipes, Jack. ‘Introduction: Towards the Definition of the Literary Fairy Tale’. The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales, Jack Zipes (ed.). Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000.

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Un-​Training the Imagination through Adaptation: an Exploration of Gender through Neil Gaiman’s The Sleeper and the Spindle Jade Lum Abstract By analyzing Spivak’s notions of ‘training the imagination’ with Sigmund Freud’s ideas of pleasure within creative writing and the imagination, this paper will consider how an un-​coercive process of ‘un-​training’ the imagination can occur, particularly in fairy-​ tale adaptation literature. While considering different modes of pleasure in adaptation and this un-​training, which this paper examines as a process of steps that lead to a reevaluation, it becomes clear how fairy-​tale retellings, such as Neil Gaiman’s The Sleeper and the Spindle, can guide readers through a process that un-​trains the imagination from hegemonic and heteronormative views of the female gender. While considering the hegemonic images of Snow White, this paper looks at how The Sleeper and the Spindle creates a fantastic space that questions woman’s relations in fairy tales, hegemonic fairy-​tale values, a woman’s sense of agency, and finally the image of a female figure in fairy tales.

Keywords imagination –​fairy tales –​adaptation –​Neil Gaiman –​gender –​The Sleeper and the Spindle

1

The Process of Un-​Training the Imagination

Training the imagination is a pedagogical priority for Gayatri Spivak. It is a concept which she discusses in many of her academic works that focuses on the process exercised by literature on the reader’s imaginative psyche. Spivak considers the imagination as ‘an in-​built instrument of othering ourselves’ (Sharpe 622). Literature can be utilized to train the imagination instrument as it ‘may give us entry to the performativity of cultures’ (Spivak, Death of a

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Discipline 13). However, she also states that the training should not be forceful or coerce the imagination, but try to draw an ethical response and reflection from the reader (Spivak, Death of a Discipline 13). Literature also has the power to work the imagination without forcing the training or the ‘other’ upon the reader through the use of the creative fantastic. Sigmund Freud states in ‘Creative Writers and Daydreaming’ that ‘many excitements which, in themselves, are actually distressing, can become a source of pleasure for the hearers and spectators at the performance of a writer’s work’ (4). Aspects and issues of reality become palatable, and in some cases even enjoyable, through the fantastic in creative writing. The pleasure of fantasy through literature may allow some readers to go through an ‘un-​training’ of the imagination. I will be considering this un-​training as a process of steps that lead to a reevaluation. These steps include readers ‘othering’ themselves through their imagination and the creative text, subconsciously reflecting the text to their own imagination and values, and finally, consciously questioning or changing their own values in the real. In this chapter, I will be exploring how specifically fantastic literary adaptations, such as Neil Gaiman’s The Sleeper and the Spindle, can be employed to open up a pedagogical space to draw pleasure from the creative work to enable an un-​coercive process on the readers’ imaginations, particularly an un-​training from hegemonic and heteronormative values. I will consider how pleasure can be evoked from literature through the act of adaptation, through certain steps of the actual un-​training process. Then, I will delve into The Sleeper and the Spindle to examine how Gaiman’s adaptations of familiar fairy-​tale stories and characters are able to break hegemonic and heteronormative conventions of gender to discuss issues such as relationships between women, women’s agency, and visual representations of women. 2

The Pleasures of Adaptation Literature and Fairy Tales

Adaptation literature in particular is very effective in the case of un-​training the imagination, as the adaptation aspect adds another layer of pleasure through reflection and comparison. When writing literary adaptations, the author takes an already familiar world and ‘rearranges the things of [the] world in a new way which pleases him’ (Freud, ‘Creative Writers and Daydreaming’ 4). By applying changes to an already recognized and known story, the author is able to bring new purpose and interpretations to the story, while making readers reflect on what they might consider the norm. Applying Perry Nodelman’s principles of ‘pleasures of literature’ to the method of adaptation, there are multiple forms of pleasure that can be evoked through reading adaptation

46 Lum literature, including the ‘pleasure of formula’ and the ‘pleasure of newness’. Marianna Missiou discusses the ‘pleasure of formula’ in her article ‘Retelling “Hansel and Gretel” in Comic Book and Manga Narration’ stating that ‘The reader, who already knows the tale, draws from a “repertoire of plots” (Nodelman 10) to enter the interior of the book, probably feeling secure that he will find another version […] with its familiar hero, motifs, and plot’ (262). The reader’s sense of security is tested through new elements being applied by the author in the adaptation, and the newness in the story can become a different experience of pleasure and comparison, which can really spark reflection, the process of un-​training, and change in the reader’s conscious. Pleasure can also emerge from the reader during the process of un-​training itself. An element of Nodelman’s pleasure of literature theory includes ‘the pleasure of escape’, which he states is ‘stepping outside of ourselves at least imaginatively and experiencing the lives and thoughts of different people’ (21). The pleasure of escape relates to what I  consider the first step of the un-​training, which is othering oneself through the imagination instrument. The reader undergoing different experiences, challenges, and even identities through fiction, not only invokes pleasure, but can also possibly draw understanding for the characters in the story, or what the characters represent in the real. Nodelman’s pleasure of literature points out that this understanding can also stimulate pleasure. He affirms that the ‘pleasure of understanding’ is ‘seeing how literature not only mirrors life but comments on it and makes us consider the meaning of our own existence’ (21), relating the stages of reflection and reevaluation in the un-​training process. Pleasure can be drawn from both the content of the fiction and the act of reading and reflecting as well. By examining the tower scene, narrative changes, and illustrations in Neil Gaiman’s The Sleeper and the Spindle, which retells the familiar fairy-​tale stories of ‘Snow White’ and ‘Sleeping Beauty’, one can see where and how these different modes of pleasure in adaptation and the use of fairy tales can guide readers through a process that un-​trains the imagination from hegemonic and heteronormative views of the female gender. 3

Woman Helping Woman in Fantastic Spaces

During the climactic tower scene in The Sleeper and the Spindle, one aspect that is heavily focused on and reimagined is the relationship between women, specifically how women are able to save and empower one another. The emphasis on turning Snow White into a figure who wants to help other women victims, like herself, can possibly lead readers to compare the text to the

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heteronormative values and relationships seen in the direct pre-​texts, ‘Snow White’ or ‘Sleeping Beauty’, other fairy-​tale stories, or in the real. In The Sleeper and the Spindle, which takes place immediately after the events of Snow White’s individual story, Snow White, referred to as just the ‘Queen’ in this story, journeys to the neighboring kingdom to stop a spreading sleeping curse. As the Queen investigates the sleeping plague, they soon find out that waking up the sleeping girl at the top of the castle can apparently break the sleeping curse. Similar to the Queen’s sleeping death, the way to wake up the sleeper is through a kiss. However, the story never mentions ‘true love’s kiss’. The conception of true love’s kiss is a common contemporary fairy-​tale and heteronormative romantic trope, which does not actually derive from traditional fairy tales. For example, in Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s Kinder-​und Hausmärchen version of ‘Little Snow-​White’, Snow White is awakened not from a kiss, but when a servant dislodges a chunk of poisoned apple stuck in her throat. Through the repetitive implementation of true love’s kiss in adaptations and retellings of ‘Snow White’ and other fairy tales, true love’s kiss was normalized. With Neil Gaiman not conjuring up the idea of ‘true love’ when the queen kisses the sleeper in the tower, there is the implication that she does it to rescue others and to get the job done. When the group of dwarfs debate who is going to kiss the sleeper, the Queen steps in and ‘kissed the sleeping girl long and hard’ (49). The way Gaiman interprets the kiss is not out of love or affection, but rather a woman trying to save another woman. Since Snow White was also the victim of a sleeping curse, she feels it is her duty and responsibility to save everyone from the curse by being the one to kiss the sleeper. The kiss between the two women is then normalized through the story, and the Queen’s kiss also shows that it does not have to be a prince or a male figure saving the day, the kingdom, or the woman. The concept of the kiss might allow the reader to experience ‘pleasure of formula’, as it is a very common and recognizable trope, but Gaiman’s change of the context of the kiss allows a ‘pleasure of newness’. It shows a scene that contrasts the conventional heteronormative kiss. The kiss is just one example of how pleasure in adaptation literature allows readers to other themselves, actively compare what they have seen in different, more conventional fairy-​tale stories, and then consider their own values and visions. During the tower scene, the Queen also frees another woman in a sense by empowering her to stand up for herself. The scene displays how women can support one another, rather than being pitted against each other. In numerous fairy tales, including ‘Snow White’ and ‘Sleeping Beauty’, women are so often placed against each other due to forms of jealously and resentment, that characters such as the evil stepmother, stepsister, and witches are seen as customary. In contrast, in The Sleeper and the Spindle, after the Queen’s kiss, the

48 Lum beautiful sleeping girl does wake up. However, it is evident that the beauty is actually the witch, using the sleeping curse to take total control of the masses and suck away life from those asleep. The old watcher woman, who was found awake in the tower, is revealed to be the actual princess, who was tricked to prick her finger on the spindle that put her world to sleep. As her kingdom slept and the princess aged, she took care of the people of her domain and watched over the witch. Before the Queen’s arrival, the old woman attempted to kill the witch many times as she observed her sleep:  ‘She said aloud, “If I drove this spindle through your heart then you’d not be so pretty-​pretty, would you?” […] She walked towards the sleeping girl in the dusty white dress. Then she lowered her hand. “No. I cannot. I wish to all the gods I could” ’ (38). The princess did not have the ability or power, due to the curse, to harm the witch as she slept, until Snow White aids her and literally passes the power to her. ‘She reached out her hand. “Here,” she said. “This is not mine.” She passed the spindle to the old woman beside her’ (59). In this scene, the queen empowers the old woman to finally kill the witch by handing her the responsibility of the spindle, or what had become of the princess’s life. Through the action of the Queen, Gaiman creates a fantastic representation of how women can support each other, rather than bring each other down. Gaiman’s take on both the kiss and the confrontation scene not only goes against heteronormative views, but also showcases relationships between women, and women helping women, which can lead to readers reevaluating their own values and imagination. 4

A Woman’s Agency and Choice in Her Happily Ever After

Gaiman’s interpretive shifts also give Snow White more agency in her actions and choices in comparison to the traditional Grimms’ or adapted Disney counterpart, and in doing so, readers are able to un-​train their imagination against the norm. The themes of choice and the questioning of one’s role, in both senses of title and gender, are very prominent in The Sleeper and the Spindle. In the beginning of the story, the Queen is about to get married, or what she believes is ‘the end of her life […] if a life was a time of choices’ (14). She is plagued by thoughts of marriage, childbirth, reigning over her kingdom for the rest of her life, and falling into this set role with absolutely no agency or choice in the matter. The Queen’s inner turmoil and questionings contrast the heteronormative idea with that of high social position, marriage, and family being a woman’s happy ending, which is also materialized and perpetuated through a range of other fictional texts.

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Throughout the story, Snow White contemplates her choices, especially when others, like the witch, try to force the Queen into a role. The sleeper confronts the queen after she is kissed awake:  ‘ “I will need someone to be my eyes and ears, to administer justice […]. You will not rule with me, but beneath me, […]” ’. And she adds, ‘ “All will love me, and you who woke me, you must love me most of all […]”. […] The queen did not smile’ (59). The sleeper, in a superior and condescending manner, demands that the Queen must rule under her, protect her, but most of all, ‘love’ her, since she was the one who woke her up. The scene questions what love is, and also presents the issue of agency and the choice in identity. The sleeper attempts to force the Queen into the role of her ‘knight’, but the Queen does not even respond to the sleeper. Instead, she leaves after giving the old woman the spindle, and breaks away from the controlling witch. It is during this confrontation when the Queen truly transforms into the embodiment or representation of agency and choice in the story. Gaiman discusses oppressive forces vs. the active woman through the fantastic representations of the witch vs. Snow White. Where the Queen is used as a figure of the woman’s action, empowerment, and choice, the witch is the personification of oppression and restriction to one’s agency. The witch’s sleeping curse is a clear indication of the witch acting as a repressive power. The witch explains the spell, ‘[…] I slept, and they slept, and as each of them slept I stole a little of their life, a little of their dreams […] I grew strong […] and I built myself a world of sleeping slaves’ (52). The witch’s plague of sleep took away thousand’s of people’s abilities to make decisions and left them as sleeping zombies, visually and mentally. Through her magic, she could also literally puppeteer and control any of the sleepers she wanted to. The witch and her curse can be read as a fantastic representation of how there are many systems and forces in the real that may attempt to steal one’s lives, dreams, and choices. In contrast, the Queen represents the power, particularly a woman’s power, to overcome and fight the witches and systems of oppression. Through the Queen’s story and her trials, readers are able to consider how they can find themselves and grasp their own lives and choices. At the end of the story, the queen once again contemplates her future and her freedom to make her own decisions. ‘There are choices, she thought when she had sat long enough. There are always choices. She made one’ (66). With resolve, she walks away from her fiancé, her kingdom, and her role as queen to continue her adventures with her dwarf companions. The adaptation questions hegemonic fairy-​tale values, such as marriage and status being the ultimate ‘happily ever after’, as well as a woman’s sense of agency and the act of not conforming so easily into forced identity roles or systems. Through the questions

50 Lum that arise in the book, the reader may reflect on the hegemonic agency and roles that appear in reality. 5

Images and Representations of Womanhood and Femininity

The Sleeper and the Spindle also incorporates striking visual illustrations by Chris Riddell to accompany Gaiman’s adapted story, which may also attempt to challenge the reader’s imagination to an extent. When one imagines Snow White, many picture Disney’s adapted character wearing her flowing blue and yellow puffy-​sleeved dress. Disney’s visual interpretation is very hyper-​ feminized with wide doe-​like eyes, soft facial features, blushing cheeks, and a demure and delicate demeanor. In The Sleeper and the Spindle, the Queen is portrayed as a beauty, but her features are not hyper-​feminized. The queen’s face is stern and her eyes are small and pointed, and at some points she almost looks disgruntled, contrasting with the cheery Snow White many are familiar with. In certain scenes, the queen’s visual manner and attitude also come off as very powerful and commanding, which is very different from the very scared figure seen in Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Riddell’s illustrated adaptation of Snow White contrasts with the hegemonic Disney fairy-​tale princess, and in extension, the heteronormative ‘performance’ of the female gender. Though The Sleeper and the Spindle’s illustrations of Snow White portray the image of strength and non-​hyperfemininity, the images do not completely diverge from hegemonic values, especially in regards to female beauty standards. Though Snow White is not portrayed as hyper-​feminine, there is no denying that some of the Queen’s, as well as the sleeper’s, attributes retain hegemonic beauty standards, including their slim figures and white skin. By repeating or sustaining these hegemonic images of beauty and gender, these visual attributes could possibly counteract an un-​training process, to a ‘re-​training’ of these hegemonic views of beauty and gender. As Judith Butler states in ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution’, gender is ‘an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts’ (1). Through repetition, the gendered beauty standards are maintained and a process of ‘reconfirmation’ of hegemonic values occurs. Similarly in films like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, through the repetition of the hyper-​feminine princess figure, the beautiful pure princess became associated with being female and feminine. Overall, though, The Sleeper and the Spindle contradicts most of the heteronormative and stereotypical gender performances through its illustrations, and shows that not all princesses, and not all women, act in the same hyper-​feminized way. Riddell’s visual

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adaptation allows readers to compare and challenge their pre-​existing images of Snow White, and in doing so, allows the reader to consider and question heteronormative gender performances. 6

Socially Constructed Gender through Products and Language

As discussed, The Sleeper and the Spindle, through the changes that Neil Gaiman employs, can be utilized as a space to prompt the process of un-​training the imagination from hegemonic and heteronormative gender values, but it must be discussed that gender itself is a social construct, and came to existence through a different type of ‘training’ process. Judith Butler argues in her article, ‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination’ that ‘genders are appropriated, theatricalized, worn, and done; […] gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original; in fact, it is a kind of imitation that produces the very notion of the original as an effect and consequence of the imitation itself’ (313). If there is no original gender, this means that there is also no original image of femininity or original ‘standard’ gender roles. The question that arises, though, is what exactly is being imitated then that creates this concept of gender? All these aspects of gender have actually emerged from social ideological notions, so there is no actual physical model. However, these social ideologies take form through tangible material goods, which include art, dolls, and, of course, literature. The images of gender that come from the material goods then become ‘normal’ through the constant performance of that gender image. For example, through multiple reiterations of gendered and heteronormative performances in fiction, these gendered ideologies are able to persist. As discussed in previous sections, ideas such as true love’s kiss, animosity between women, and marriage and family being the ultimate happy ending, were perpetuated through fantastic fiction and then became the norm. It is these material goods and images that preserve, ‘re-​train’, and even ‘mis-​train’ people into reflecting these gender and social constructs. As seen in the example of gender, products, such as literature, can be utilized to exercise the imagination in different ways, for better or for worse. 7

The Desire to Untrain

Gaiman’s creative changes to the stories of ‘Snow White’ and ‘Sleeping Beauty’, both narratively and visually, create a space that raises the issues of gender relationship, roles, and images, through the different pleasures of literature,

52 Lum which can then lead readers to experience a process of self-​reflection. In regards to the training of the imagination, Spivak is attentive to the ‘uncoercive rearrangement of desires’ (Sharpe 625) and how training should not be forced. Sigmund Freud discusses desire in his chapter, ‘Why the Dream Disguises the Desires’. He states that, ‘The desire itself is either one repressed, foreign to consciousness, or it is closely bound up with repressed ideas’ (72). It is really up to readers and their self-​conscious choices during the un-​training, or the process of reevaluation, to either actually consider and think about what is being presented or questioned in the creative work, or continue to repress what is being confronted in the mind. Rather than directing ‘what to do’, Gaiman uses his adaptation to interrupt conventions and allow readers to question the stakes of hegemonic and heteronormative values that many fairy tales perpetuate, including the ideas that women need to be saved by princes or that marriage is the ultimate ‘happy ending’. Freud states, ‘for many things which, if they were real, could give no enjoyment, can do so in the play of fantasy’ (‘Creative Writers and Daydreaming’ 4). It is in this play and pleasure of fantasy, where the process of reevaluation can occur. As seen through Gaiman’s work, the desires of the imagination can be redirected, so that ‘the play of fantasy’ through creative literature can produce training, which can then change and question values in the real.

Works Cited

Butler, Judith. ‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination’. The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, David M. Halperin (eds.). New York: Routledge, 1993. 307–​320. Butler, Judith. ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory’. Theatre Journal 40.4 (1988): 519–​531. Freud, Sigmund. ‘Creative Writers and Daydreaming’. On Freud’s Creative Writers and Daydreaming, Ethel Spector Person, Peter Fonagy, Augusto Figueira (eds.) James Strachey (trans.) London: The International Psychoanalytical Association, 2013. 3–​13. Freud, Sigmund. ‘Why the Dream Disguises the Desire’. Dream Psychology: Psychoanalysis For Beginners. M.D. Eder (trans.) Auckland: The Floating Press, 2008. Gaiman, Neil and Chris Riddell. The Sleeper and the Spindle. New York: Harper Collins, 2015. Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm Grim. ‘Little-​Snow White’. Kinder-​und Hausmärchen, 2005 http://​www.pitt.edu/​~dash/​grimm053.html. Missiou, Marianna. ‘Chapter 13: Retelling “Hansel and Gretel” in Comic Book and Manga Narration –​The Case of Philip Petit and Mizuno Junko’. Grimms’ Tales around the

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Globe: The Dynamics of Their International Reception, Vanessa Joosen and Gillian Lathey (eds.). Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2014. 257–​272. Nodelman, Perry. The Pleasures of Children’s Literature. New York: Pearson, 1996. 20–​21. Sharpe, Jenny, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. ‘A Conversation with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: Politics and the Imagination’. Signs 28.2 (2003): 609–​624. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Dir. William Cottrell, David Hand, Wilfred Jackson, Larry Morey, Perce Pearce, Ben Sharpsteen. usa. 1937. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia UP, 2003.

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‘There Are Always Choices. She Made One’: an Existential Approach to Neil Gaiman’s The Sleeper and the Spindle Alba Torres Álvarez Abstract Neil Gaiman’s The Sleeper and the Spindle (2014), a retelling of ‘Snow White’ and ‘Sleeping Beauty’, can be read as a work of children’s fiction that explores existential freedom as seen in Jean-​Paul Sartre’s works. The evil forces in the tale that use magic to impose sleep as a control mechanism that robs people of free will can be said to represent predetermination as inherently negative. In opposition, there is a recognition that knowing your own emotions and making your own choices is essential to live authentically. In this chapter, I  argue that the townsfolk forced to sleep can be interpreted as an allusion to the Allegory of the Cave, and that assuming agency necessarily makes the female protagonist question her life to eventually build her own identity. Furthermore, I propose that choosing a female protagonist allows Gaiman to elaborate on the question of existential freedom. Existentialists believe that the pressure of expectations prevents people from being free, and this becomes reinforced in the case of women, who have to deal with the pressure imposed on them by gender expectations.

Keywords Neil Gaiman  –​fairy tales  –​retelling  –​existentialism  –​Sartre  –​The Sleeper and the Spindle

1

Introduction

Neil Gaiman’s The Sleeper and the Spindle is a retelling of two classical fairy tales: ‘Snow White’ and ‘Sleeping Beauty’. In a video presentation of this book, Gaiman tells us that he was asked by some friends ‘to take an existing story and do a sequel, a twist or a change about it’ (‘The Sleeper and the Spindle’), and the anthology went on to be published under the title Rags & Bones in 2013.

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The Sleeper and the Spindle appeared in 2014 as an independent volume beautifully illustrated by Chris Riddell. Gaiman is a fairy-​tale master. He believes that these stories have power. As he explains in The View from the Cheap Seats, he was once invited to a symposium of myths and fairy tales. After listening to academics dissect different fairy tales, the author grew ‘irritated and dissatisfied, on a deep and profound level’ (Gaiman 65) due to the academics’ attitude: ‘an attitude that implied that those tales no longer had anything to do with us’ (Gaiman 65). Instead of arguing against this assumption, the author wrote a story which mixed elements from ‘Sleeping Beauty’, ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarves’ and ‘Blue Beard’ called ‘Snow, Glass, Apples’, an utterly terrifying and dark story which combines murder, rape, necrophilia, people being buried alive and hearts carved out of bodies. Gaiman has described it as ‘one of the strongest pieces of fiction I have ever written […] it can be disturbing’ (66). Thus, Gaiman did not try to convince academics of the importance of fairy tales by telling them, but by showing them.:  ‘[Fairy tales] work so very well. They feel right. Structurally, they can be simple, but the ornamentation, the act of retelling, is often where the magic occurs. Like any form of narrative that is primarily oral in transmission, it’s all in the way you tell ‘em’’. (Gaiman 432). Furthermore, fairy tales have also proved to be an effective way for the author to explore philosophical questions. Gaiman has explored philosophy in his previous works: Hume in American Gods (2001), Aristotle in Coraline (2002) or the banality of evil from Hannah Arendt in Neverwhere (1996) are just some examples analyzed in Bealer, Luria and Yulen’s Neil Gaiman and Philosophy (2012). In this chapter I argue that The Sleeper and the Spindle advocates for a fierce defense of free will, calling to mind the existentialist thoughts of Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, who believed that we should lead authentic lives by means of making conscious choices. At the very beginning of the story, the young queen, Neil Gaiman’s version of Snow White, reflects upon her future: ‘A week from today, I shall be married’ (14). The line of thought that follows this unwanted destiny reflects her uneasiness towards it: It seemed both unlikely and extremely final. She wondered how she would feel to be a married woman. It would be the end of her life, she decided, if life was a time of choices. In a week from now, she would have no choices. She would reign over her people. She would have children. Perhaps she would die in childbirth, perhaps she would die as an old woman, or in battle. But the path to her death, heartbeat by heartbeat, would be inevitable. (14)

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By considering this situation, the queen experiences what existentialists call anxiety: ‘In Sartre […] the imperative to live authentically, to understand one’s project in life, and to affirm one’s place in the world, underscores the very meaning of existence, meaning which is created by the individual subject itself. But this is occasioned by anxiety, a sense of the uncanny or of not-​being-​ at-​home with the situation one finds oneself in’. (Tally Jr 170). Inevitability is what renders the protagonist powerless. Both her sex and her social position entail that lack of choice. However, by acknowledging death, the queen takes a first step, an excellent starting point to find meaning in life according to existentialists: ‘As the undisputed end of that story [our life story], death provides the necessity to find meaning and structure in the life that precedes it’ (Newhouse 118). On the other hand, existentialists believe that excuses and bad faith can hinder free will. The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy quotes Sartre’s definition of bad faith from his work Being and Nothingness (1943): the ‘inauthentic and self-​deceptive refusal to admit to ourselves and others our full freedom, thereby avoiding anxiety in making decisions and evading responsibility for actions and attitudes’ (70). Thus, bad faith can happen due to the pressure exerted by social forces. In Gaiman’s retelling, for example, it is expected of the queen to marry. Another form of self-​deception could be the lack of knowledge. Sleep is the metaphor Gaiman uses in The Sleeper and the Spindle to portray the consequences of a society without free will. As in ‘Sleeping Beauty’, both the sleeper (formerly a princess) and the common people are under a spell that keeps them asleep. The evil enchantress makes them sleep to control them, to make them her slaves, ‘to bring them all and in the darkness bind them’ (Tolkien 49) just as Sauron wanted to do in The Lord of the Rings. Sleep intrinsically involves being in the dark, literally and metaphorically, an idea which will be developed in the second section. Finally, the third section examines how, in most traditional fairy tales, female characters had to wait until they were rescued by a prince; they were not given agency. In The Sleeper and the Spindle, on the other hand, it is the queen herself who rescues everyone, therefore allowing for a feminist reading of the story. I believe traditional gender roles work as the perfect embodiment of determinism, existentialists’ worst enemy. 2

Sleep as a Control Mechanism

In the tale, a magic spell has been cast on the princess and on the people of the neighbouring country who are now asleep. As the queen talks to the few people

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who are still awake, a negative association with destiny is revealed: ‘ “Doom!” […] “Doom is coming!” ’ (15). People are falling asleep everywhere and there is no way to stop it. The sot explains: ‘There is nowhere for us to go to escape it. Tomorrow, everything here will be asleep. Some of us have resolved to escape into drunkenness before the sleep takes us’ (18). I  see this forced sleep as a metaphor for not being able to make conscious choices. The sot’s attitude is what existentialists would call acting in bad faith or giving excuses instead of assuming the responsibility of our actions. As Gary Cox describes, ‘if you want to obtain the holy grail of authenticity […] you have to totally quit making excuses like a reformed alcoholic has to totally quit drinking alcohol’ (84). As the sot believes it is impossible to stop the sleep plague, he gives in to a substance that weakens his perception of his surroundings and his ability to act, a highly inauthentic behaviour. Furthermore, when one does not decide how to live, it is very easy to be manipulated. The evil enchantress who has put everyone to sleep confirms this: ‘ “I like them asleep. They are more … biddable” […] “I have a million sleepers under my control” ’ (56), a clear reference to the dream of every authoritative regime: a society which does not question their methods. When people are not aware of reality, when they can only see shadows and cannot decide for themselves, they are enslaved. The sleeping townsfolk in this tale remind us of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave wherein a group of people are living inside a cave, chained permanently, unable to walk away and blinded from reality. As the townsfolk slowly start following the queen, one of the dwarfs suggests to stand their ground, to which the queen answers: ‘ “There is no honour, […] in fighting an opponent who has no idea that you are even there” ’ (35). She knows that these sleepers are not free; they are not choosing to follow them. They are clearly being manipulated. They could also be seen as zombies since they are not dead, but neither are they alive in the sense that they have no free will. Another example of a stolen life by means of forced sleep can be found in the yarn the evil enchantress gives the old woman: ‘The old woman hefted it, thoughtfully. She began to unwrap the yarn from the spindle with arthritic fingers. “This was my life”’ (59). Naturally, this would be unacceptable for existentialists, as ‘[r]‌obbing a person of their experiences, no matter how traumatic, would interfere with their authenticity’ (Yuen 142). Finally, when the queen confronts the evil enchantress, she reveals her true colors: ‘as each of them slept I stole a little of their life, a little of their dreams, and as I slept I took back my youth and my beauty and my power. I slept and I grew strong. I undid the ravages of time and I built myself a world of sleeping slaves’ (52), and later on ‘ “Love me […] All will love me, and you, who woke me, you will love me most of all”’ (59). That is exactly what makes the enchantress evil: her wish to make everyone love her and avoid death, an impossible premise for

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existentialists, for you cannot force people to do things they do not want to do, and you cannot live forever. 3

Breaking Free from Traditional Gender Roles and the Romantic Plot

Quoting again from the Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, determinism is ‘the view that every event or state of affairs is brought about by antecedent events or states of affairs in accordance with universal causal laws that govern the world’ (228). As this theory includes moral choices, free-​will is ruled out. As Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar point out, ‘female characters in fairy tales are often passive and destined to remain mute, similarly to real-​life women in traditional societies, who were forbidden to write or express themselves freely’ (in Klapcsik 12). The fact that female characters in fairy tales have no say in their lives could be understood as a type of determinism, thus contributing to the asymmetrical relationship between men and women as seen by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex that translates into a lack of freedom: ‘Being a woman poses unique problems to an autonomous human being today’ (815). De Beauvoir defends the idea that women have come to be considered inferior to men not due to biological factors but through nurture. Gaiman’s portrayal of female characters differs from this gendered determinism. The queen is a warrior even if she thinks she does not have choices at the beginning of the story. When she thinks about her future, she considers the possibility of dying in battle, and she owns an armour. She is not portrayed as a passive damsel in distress; she is given agency: “I am afraid,” said the queen, “that there will be no wedding tomorrow.” She called for a map of the kingdom, identified the villages closest to the mountains, sent messengers to tell the inhabitants to evacuate to the coast or risk royal displeasure. She called for her first minister and informed him that he would be responsible for the kingdom in her absence, and that he should do his best neither to lose it nor to break it. (21) Later on, the townsfolk are telling the queen that both men and women have tried to reach the castle before: ‘“Aye, and brave women too, they say, have attempted to travel to the Forest of Acaire, to the castle at its heart, to wake the princess, and, in waking her, to wake all the sleepers”’ (16). That should prepare the reader for a big diversion from the original tale of Sleeping Beauty, which

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might lead us to think that this is a feminist retelling: a gender role reversal. In The Sleeper and the Spindle there is no Prince Charming. The queen will save herself (and everyone else) with a little help from her friends—​three dwarfs—​ rejecting the traditional ‘romance’ plot. Interestingly enough, romance is ruled out, but collaboration with friends is not. Favoring friendship over romance Gaiman deviates from the classical structure of fairy tales. It could be argued that making the queen kiss the sleeper allows for a lesbian re-​reading of the classical fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty. However, I believe what Gaiman is hinting at is a change in the plot: ‘In keeping with the author’s she-​first approach, it is the queen who delivers the kiss that wakes a Sleeping Beauty, but the move is coldly tactical rather than sapphic. Snow White is not, in this instance, the romantic type’ (Cox Gurdon 1). This might be Gaiman’s try to bid farewell to romance as the center of stories. Despite Gaiman’s effort to rewrite traditional gender roles, there is still inequality in his retelling: ‘She called for her fiancé and told him not to take on so, and that they would still be married, even if he was but a prince and she a queen, and she chucked him beneath his pretty chin and kissed him until he smiled’ (21). Even though there is a powerful reversal of roles in this scene, the queen still treats her fiancé as an inferior, both because of her superior status, but also because she does not discuss her plans with him, rendering him an infantilized version of a person. This can be read as a parody of the usual opposite situation between women (passive elements) and men (active characters). In this respect, the story does not offer actual innovation, as gender roles are simply reversed. And while this might be necessarily empowering towards the female character, it does not provide the reader with a sense that both men and women could work together as equals, as a team, to fight the common menace, as second-​wave feminism actually strives for. According to Klapcsik, ‘Gaiman’s ironic stories illustrate the all-​encompassing influence of postmodern parody and hypertextuality in popular genres, and demonstrate the contemporary urge to rewrite fairy tales from a feminist perspective’ (14). Contrary to female characters in traditional fairy tales, Gaiman’s queen is portrayed as an intelligent and brave young woman who learns from previous experiences, is able to read maps and does not base her knowledge on assumptions or beliefs. Once she has defeated the evil enchantress, the queen realizes she does not want to marry at all but instead embarks on a new adventure in company of the dwarfs. That is her authentic self, and ‘Authenticity is the central virtue that the existentialists, like Sartre and Kierkegaard, argue for. Authenticity is a person being true to themselves, living life honestly, rather than pretending to be someone else by conforming to what others expect of them’ (Yuen 139, original italics).

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The Creation of One’s Identity

According to existentialism, we need to know ourselves well in order to be able to build our own identity. Gaiman has explored this concept previously in his children’s novel Coraline: ‘Coraline discovers that possessing a true understanding of herself is necessary in order to fully exist’ (Lytle 96). This reminds us of Descartes’ aphorism ‘know thyself’, which in spite of belonging to French rationalism can be easily connected to existentialism: ‘The cat’s guidance and support allow Coraline to change from a being who relies on others to help her understand herself and make decisions to a person who values her autonomy and understands the importance of free will’ (Lytle 94). It is precisely in challenging situations that we question our choices and even our identity. That would explain why books marketed to children and young adults often portray a protagonist who sets out on a quest that will eventually help them discover who they truly are. Yet are they actually discovering themselves? As with Coraline’s previous example, Gaiman’s characters often undergo life-​changing situations that force them to choose. Gaiman makes them responsible for their own fate. ‘In many of Gaiman’s novels the hero’s journey is one of self-​ discovery, while also being a quest of self-​making’ (Tally Jr 169, original italics). Naturally, self-​reflection and introspection are key to knowing ourselves well. However, we are not finished works of art; we are perfectible. In fact, according to existentialists, we are responsible for that: ‘Existentialism holds that you can only truly change the way you think and feel about your life by acting differently […] by asserting your will rather than simply allowing yourself to be swept along by circumstances, by always talking responsibility for yourself and what you do’ (Cox 5). The Sleeper and the Spindle suggests that the protagonist is actually a white canvas; she does not even have a name as she is often referred to as ‘Your Majesty’, so she can decide who she wants to be. In Gaiman’s world, choice is the ultimate expression of freedom: ‘the liberty to define your reality completely and independently’ (Bossert 48). Once the dark forces are defeated, the dwarves assume that they are all going back home so that the queen can get married as is expected of her. However, the queen takes a different path and decides to head east instead. The queen might not know what her next step in life is but she has learned to be strong and to follow her instincts so she does not want to go back and marry. She becomes aware of her freedom and she walks into the unknown, into her new adventure and possibly, a new search for meaning. ‘There are choices, she thought, when she had sat long enough. There are always choices. She made one’ (66, original italics). In the light of existentialism, she is being authentic: ‘Living a good life isn’t determined by what happens to you. It’s determined by how you develop

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your character in response to what happens. Thinking of a good life as a life that we value for its own sake, which necessarily is a moral and authentic life, gives us a sense of empowerment. It’s not fate or chance that lets some people live good lives’ (Yuen 143). Thus, in the end, ‘The queen felt something stirring in her heart. […] Learning how to be strong, to feel her own emotions and not another’s, had been hard; but once you learned the trick of it, you did not forget. And she did not wish to rule continents’ (59). In opposition to how she felt at the beginning of the story, when she thought she had no choices, she has now learned to trust herself and use her free-​will to design her life. 5

Conclusions

In The Sleeper and the Spindle a lack of free will is seen as inherently negative; in opposition, knowing your own emotions and making conscious choices is presented as essentially positive. As he previously did in his book for children The Graveyard Book, Gaiman shows us that a fairy tale can take ‘concepts from philosophy amalgamating ancient and modern ideas-​[…] telling us, in the process, a lot about how our real world works’ (Rosenbaum 49). Its protagonist, a determined young queen who is eager to take on the responsibility of saving the neighbouring kingdom, assumes agency and wins over the evil enchantress, who stands for authoritarianism. Thus, Gaiman breaks free of traditional gender roles for female characters in classical fairy tales and the romantic plot as the only narrative available. In her actions, the queen acknowledges her free will and chooses not to marry and to continue travelling instead. In addition, sleep is presented as a control mechanism. From an existentialist perspective, we see how by making the young girl sleep, the evil enchantress deprives her of the possibility to choose, thus robbing her of life. Forcing the townsfolk to sleep, the enchantress tries to have her own army of slaves, who can be compared to the people in the Allegory of the Cave as they can only see shadows and not the truth. Interestingly enough, existentialist author Gary Cox uses fairy tales as an example of what life cannot be: ‘you can’t create a genuinely honest and worthwhile life for yourself on the basis of a fairy tale. You have to build your life on an understanding and acceptance of how things really are, otherwise you will always be fooling and deluding yourself as you hanker after impossibilities like complete happiness and total fulfilment’ (21). Neil Gaiman subverts this assumption, creating an existentialist fairy tale that allows the protagonist and the readers to fashion themselves as they wish by means of authentic, responsible choices.

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Works Cited

Audi, Robert (Ed.) The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy. New  York:  Cambridge UP, 1999. Bossert, Ray. ‘To Survive, You Must Believe’. Neil Gaiman and Philosophy, Tracy L. Bealer, Rachel Luria and Wayne Yuen (eds.). Chicago: Open Court, 2012. 37–​48. Cox, Gary. How to be an Existentialist. New York: Continuum Books, 2009. Cox Gurdon, Meghan. ‘Old is New Again; Snow White postpones her wedding, dons battle dress and rides out to break the magic spell’. Wall Street Journal (online) 25 September 2015, https://​search.proquest.com/​docview/​1716351012?accountid=15299. de Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-​Chevallier (trans.) New York: Vintage, 2010. Gaiman, Neil. The Sleeper and the Spindle. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014. Gaiman, Neil. The View from the Cheap Seats. London: Headline Publishing Group, 2016. Klapcsik, Sándor. ‘Neil Gaiman’s Irony, Liminal Fantasies, and Fairy Tale Adaptations’. Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies. Vol. 14 No 2 (Fall 2008): 317–​334. Lytle, Kandace. ‘Seeing Isn’t Believing’. Neil Gaiman and Philosophy, Tracy L. Bealer, Rachel Luria and Wayne Yuen (eds.). Chicago: Open Court, 2012. 85–​96. Newhouse, Wade. ‘Coming of Age with the Ageless’. Neil Gaiman and Philosophy, Tracy L. Bealer, Rachel Luria and Wayne Yuen (eds.). Chicago: Open Court, 2012. 113–​126. Rosenbaum, Richard. ‘American Monads’. Neil Gaiman and Philosophy, Tracy L. Bealer, Rachel Luria and Wayne Yuen (eds.). Chicago: Open Court, 2012. 49–​57. Tally Jr, Robert T., ‘Nobody’s Home’. Neil Gaiman and Philosophy, Tracy L. Bealer, Rachel Luria and Wayne Yuen (eds.). Chicago: Open Court, 2012. 169–​182. ‘The Sleeper and the Spindle: Neil Gaiman and Chris Riddell on collaboration’. YouTube 2015, https://​www.youtube.com/​watch?v=76p5i861rds&feature=youtu.be. Tolkien, J. R R., The Fellowship of the Ring. London: Harper Collins, 2001. Yuen, Wayne. ‘The Dead Teach Us How to Live’. Neil Gaiman and Philosophy, Tracy L. Bealer, Rachel Luria and Wayne Yuen (eds.). Chicago: Open Court, 2012. 135–​143.

­c hapter 6

The British Empire’s Lost Slipper: Dangerous Irish Cinderellas Abigail Heiniger Abstract In The Irresistible Fairy Tale (2012), Jack Zipes ties a sense of wonder to the subversive fairy tale. He claims the subversive fairy tale often takes shape as a dystopia that ‘still pulsates with [the] utopia fervor’ (136) of the tradition it subverts. Popular British women writers like Christina Rossetti, George Egerton, and Angela Carter famously tapped into this fairy-​tale wonder in their subversive fairy tales, reshaping the traditional Victorian fairy tale as a vehicle of social critique in the hopes of changing a new generation. By contrast, Irish authors such as Julia Kavanagh, Molly Keane, and Maeve Brennan use the Victorian fairy tale tradition as a pernicious force in the lives of their displaced and marginalized heroines. This chapter examines how the Cinderella fairy tale particularly encourages complacency which dooms the marginalized heroine who must forge her own happiness against the tide of mainstream culture. These fictional characters created by Kavanagh, Keane and Brennan resonate with political references to ‘Cinderella’ in Irish newspapers and pamphlets under British colonial rule. Thus, these narratives are also a part of a tradition of highly politicized Cinderella tales, in which Cinderella is stripped of wonder and positioned as a dangerously passive creature who threatens both the individual and the nation in the Irish cultural imagination.

Keywords Irish women writers –​Cinderella –​wonderless –​fairy tale –​post-​colonial –​ novels

1

Shadows of Colonial Oppression

Harry Clarke was recognized as the most celebrated Irish illustrator working during the golden age of fairy tale illustrations (Engen 10; Bowe 66–​7). In The Age of Enchantment (2007), Rodney Engen identifies Clarke as ‘Ireland’s only

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | DOI:10.1163/9789004418998_008

64 Heiniger great Symbolist artist who virtually gave the Irish Renaissance its iconography in ‘a splendid afterglow’ of unearthly and eccentric genius’ (23). Despite the ethereal quality of Clarke’s work, his iconic images do not attempt to lift the Irish fairy tale canon out of Ireland’s colonial context. In the Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault (1922), Clarke’s images of Cinderella resound with the echoes of colonial oppression. People of color are relegated to servile positions; they often blend into the shadows and wood work of the setting or function as a contrast for the heroine’s whiteness (Figures. 6.1, 6.2, and 6.3). Although this does not necessarily strip away wonder from the white heroine’s story, it does leave the post-​colonial audience aware of the dual existence of the privileged fairy-​tale characters and the exploited colonial-​other who enables the fairy-​tale privilege but cannot ascend into it. Similarly, in the hands of Julia Kavanagh, Molly Keane, and Maeve Brennan, Cinderella becomes a dangerous tale for women trapped in a doubly colonized position, marginalized by gender and ethnic identity. These wonderless tales bear a striking resemblance to the anti-​Cinderella tales produced

­f igure 6.1  Clarke’s ‘She Left Behind One of Her Glass Slippers’. Perrault’s Fairy Tales.

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­f igure 6.2  Clarke’s ‘Front Piece’ for ‘Cinderella’. Perrault’s Fairy Tales.

by African-​American authors in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.1 Like their disenchanting transatlantic counterparts, these dangerous Irish fairy tales transform and deconstruct fairy-​tale wonder, instead of channeling it into a new form, like subversive tales. The concept of the disenchanting fairy tale or anti-​Märchen is not new. A conference on the anti-​(fairy) tale was held in Glasgow, Scotland in 2010. According to Catriona McAra and David Calvin’s ‘Introduction’ to Anti-​Tales: The Uses of Disenchantment (2011), the conference focused on defining the anti-​ tale, and to that end relied almost exclusively on the works of mainstream authors (5–​6). The work of Cristina Bacchilega on postmodern fairy tales was central to that conference (McAra and Calvin 2–​3), and her politics of wonder remain a touchstone here.

1 Reidar Christiansen contextualizes the dual Cinderella tradition that developed in Ireland within the international Cinderella cycle in ‘Cinderella in Ireland’ (1950). He confirms the evolution of the traditional Cinderella alongside both the ‘Hairy Rucky’ Cinderella and the Irish Cinderlad narratives (104).

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­f igure 6.3  Clarke’s ‘Cinderella Moral’. Perrault’s Fairy Tales.

This paper embraces the idea of the anti-​tale from the distinctive outlook of the doubly colonized author or character. Perhaps the difference is only in degree, but the twin towers of capitalism and colonization that Bacchilega discusses in her introduction to Fairy Tales Transformed? (2013) institutionalize a different kind of wonder-​sapping oppression in these tales (ix). While mainstream anti-​tales may be defined by their pessimism and dissonance, they are not explicitly characterized by the loss of wonder observed in this particularly

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Irish Cinderella tradition (McAra and Calvin 3). As Bacchilega points out, the inclusion of new voices in fairy tale criticism is necessarily going to expand or create new paradigms (202). This abbreviated study functions as an introduction to this Irish Cinderella tradition. It does not explore the bifurcation of Irish literature across linguistic and cultural lines (Weekes 10); it only gestures towards the complex social, economic, and political context that produced these narratives. Nor does it contextualize this politicized Cinderella within the more robust Cinderella tradition that developed in Ireland.2 The doubly colonized position of Irish women writers has been well established.3 However, Abigail Palko recently demonstrated the extent to which Irish women have consistently voiced their resistance to systemic oppression through the vehicle of prose fiction in ‘From The Uninvited to The Visitor: The Post-​Independence Dilemma Faced by Irish Women Writers’ (1–​5). Kavanagh, Keane, and Brennan present another facet of this literary resistance. They repeatedly rework the Cinderella narrative, stripping it of wonder as a political critique. The prolific nineteenth-​century novelist Kavanagh is the earliest writer in the wonderless Cinderella tradition studied here. She is the only Catholic Irish woman novelist of the Victorian era to gain widespread recognition during her lifetime.4 She stands apart from her Protestant Anglo-​Irish contemporaries, who were ‘almost without exception’ (Weekes 21) members of the landed gentry and separated from the oppressed Irish majority by language, politics, and religion (Weekes 10). Cinderella functions as an extended metaphor in most of Kavanagh’s novels, including Adele (1858), Bessie (1872) and Daisy Burns (1853). However, her giftbook fairy tale collections for children, like Forget-​Me-​ Not (1878), lack any Cinderella variations. It is as if this dangerous fairy tale is unsuitable for children; it can only be approached by adults with the tools to deconstruct and question it. Molly Keane’s Good Behaviour (1981) and Loving and Giving (1988) use epic Cinderella fails to explore Ireland’s shift from colony to republic, and Maeve Brennan’s In and Out of Never-​Never Land (1969) uses Cinderella as a way to

2 See ‘Passing as the American Cinderella: Disenchanting Fairy Tales in the Writings of Hannah Crafts, Charles Chesnutt, and Jessie Fauset’ (2018) by Abigail Heiniger (222–​4). 3 Ann Owens Weekes’ reconstruction of a tradition of Irish women’s writings in Irish Women Writers (1990) establishes the doubly colonized position of Irish women writers (1–​2, 10–​15). 4 Biographer Eileen Fauset demonstrates Kavanagh’s widespread respect among her contemporaries (6–​7), and she is the only Irish woman writer included in the 1897 collection Women Novelists of Queen Victoria’s Reign (251–​61).

68 Heiniger analyze the failure of the Republic to fulfill the promise of freedom for women who remained trapped in a doubly-​colonized position. Post-​colonial authors Keane and Brennan were on the two separate sides of cultural and literary tradition still dividing Ireland (Weekes 10–​11). Keane was born a part of the Anglo-​ Irish aristocracy in 1904 in County Kildare, while Brennan was the daughter of Irish Republicans who worked closely with Eamon de Valera (Palko 2–​3 20). The fictional characters created by these women resonate with political references to ‘Cinderella’ in Irish newspapers and pamphlets under British colonial rule. In The Nation’s ‘The Cinderella of the Empire’ (1867), Ireland’s identity as ‘the Cinderella of the family of Great Britain’ (1) is debated; Cinderella is used as a derogatory term to demonstrate that ‘the Irish are “poor devils”, who are incapable of doing anything to save themselves’ (1). Similarly, The Nation’s ‘Cinderella Erin’ (1874) mocks and caricatures the Irish (1). Thus, a tradition of highly politicized Cinderella tales develop, in which Cinderella is stripped of wonder and positioned as a dangerously passive creature who threatens both the individual and the nation in the Irish cultural imagination. 2

Cinderella’s Identity Crisis

Perhaps the most iconic aspect of Cinderella for readers is the final recognition test, which has the ability to promise readers a stable identity that no amount of soot and ashes can hide. That is the first broken promise in these wonderless Cinderella tales. It resonates with the identity crisis of colonial and post-​ colonial Ireland (Weekes 16–​17; Meaney xvi-​xvii). All Kavanagh’s Cinderellas wrestle with fairy-​tale labels. For example, in Adele, Adele de Courcelles initially identifies herself as a Cinderella being rescued by William Osborne: ‘I see you want to turn my life into a fairy tale. What was I when you found me? A little Cinderella, obscure and forlorn … And you have given me back the kingdom I had lost …’ (246). However, other characters use the label to taunt her (89). The label’s value remains in flux as it is employed by different characters. The struggle of Kavanagh’s characters is best summed up in Bessie where Irish expatriate Bessie explicitly rejects the Cinderella label as pejorative (Kavanagh, Bessie v3 97). While Kavanagh’s characters are unsure of their fairy-​tale status, they know themselves, in contrast with later heroines, Rose, Nicandra and Aroon, do not know themselves. Thus, Cinderella becomes a nebulous fairy-​tale glitter thrown over an already slippery sense of self. For example, in Keane’s Good ­Behaviour, the Cinderella label slides uneasily between Aroon, and her adorable younger brother. Ironically, it is Aroon’s brother who sets her up as Cinderella,

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like a fairy god-​brother, complete with a token of recognition and regular rendezvous with Prince Charming: Richard. Aroon wears the token and performs her role, dancing with Richard each night, but her shifting language for their relationship shows that she is unsure what is happening around her. For example, as she reflects on the time that Richard came and laid down next to her in her bed, she debates whether that qualifies her as being Richard’s lover:  ‘I’ve had a man in my bed. I  suppose I could say I’ve had a lover. I like to call it that. I do call it that’ (Keane, Good Behaviour 128). In the end, she is the only character who remains unaware that Prince Charming was having an affair with her brother and using her as a beard. When Richard’s father tells Aroon that Richard ran off to Kenya with a young man, Aroon’s response is: ‘Richard loved me’ (272). She determines to wait indefinitely for him to finish ‘a thousand safaris’ (274) and return to her because she is trapped in her heteronormative fairy-​tale paradigm. Similarly, in Keane’s Loving and Giving and Brennan’s In and Out of Never-​ Never Land, both Cinderella figures are perpetually insecure in their identities. For example, Nicandra in Loving and Giving does not fit the too-​small boots her mother insists she wear to develop good posture (Keane 7). She literally cannot fit the identity her mother is giving her. Like Cinderella’s signifying slipper, these ill-​fitting shoes are emblematic of everything in the protagonist’s life. In In and Out of Never-​Never Land, Rose’s experience at the ball culminates in a series of contradictory statements that demonstrate she not only lacks self-​knowledge, she does not know what role she is supposed to perform in a changing society. She ends up hiding in a back room with a maid, who also has a failed Cinderella narrative (Brennan 263–​72). For these characters, Cinderella is consistently an outside label projected onto them by others, without being incorporated into their internal monologues. Just as ‘Cinderella’ is a derogatory name in the fairy tale, it is a pejorative term here, forced on the heroines by an exploitative colonial and post-​ colonial society. However, these heroines remain trapped, even if they receive the hoped-​for marriage to Prince Charming. 3

Magical Helpers Wanted

If Cinderella’s slippery identity is a mark of colonial oppression, the epic failure of helpers—​supernatural or otherwise—​is the inaccessible tower of capitalism in these wonderless atu 510 tales, a category defined by its magical helpers. In Kavanagh’s Daisy Burn, Edith Thorton is explicitly identified by Daisy as her ‘fairy godmother’ (37) at the beginning of the novel. However, instead

70 Heiniger of supporting Daisy’s romance, Edith runs off with Daisy’s rich, Anglo-​Irish Prince Charming. In a rather incestuous twist, Daisy ends up with the disenfranchised Irish artist father-​figure who raised her. Instead of preparing her for the ball, her fairy godmother leaves her poorer and more powerless in the sociopolitical structure of colonial Ireland. Similarly, Bessie has a dangerous relationship with the ‘fairy’ (Kavanagh, Bessie v1, 265)  in her life. Bessie kisses the Fairy Queen and falls under her spell:  ‘Oh! surely there is magic in the sweetness of that early bondage, to which we all more or less succumb; for who are they so matter-​of-​fact or so cold as not to have kissed once on a time the lips of the Fairy Queen … and … become her slave?’ (Kavanagh, Bessie v1, 265)  This seductive relationship threatens Bessie’s romance, separating her from the Irish Prince Charming she originally loved (Kavanagh, Bessie v1, 47). The Fairy Queen, Elizabeth, also saps Bessie’s emotional and material resources, threatening her tentative security (Kavanagh, Bessie v1, 265–​6). Brennan’s Rose Derdon and Keane’s Nicandra in Loving and Giving are also thwarted by their godmother figures. Rose’s mother actually sits Hubert down and tries to convince him not to marry Rose because of her tarnished reputation (Brennan 211–​14). Nicandra’s fairy godmother, Aunt Tossie, arranges for Nicandra’s coming-​out ball with the local gentry, then ruins it with her excessive drinking (Keane 47–​52). However, Nicandra still ends up with the philandering Prince Charming who marries her for her inheritance and indirectly leads to her death (Keane 124). Good behaviour epitomizes the conflict between dead-​mothers and Cinderellas. The Cinderella character, Aroon, opens the novel by indirectly choking her mother to death with rabbit stew, like one of the evil-​step-​sisters in some Irish Cinderella tales (Keane 6). She spends the rest of the novel reflecting on the doomed path that led her to a lonely and broken life. Like the other failed returning dead-​mothers, Aroon’s mother is emotionally and financially draining. Cold and verbally abusive to Aroon (Keane, Good ­Behaviour 217), she leaves her daughter unable to accept romance when it finally comes her way (253). For decades, Aroon supports her mother with her dwindling inheritance (1–​2 291). However, Keane complicates this emotional and financial abuse, positioning Aroon’s mother as another victim of the patriarchal colonial system. Aroon’s mother lost her fortune to her philandering husband, a symbol of England’s drain on colonial Ireland (289–​91). The role of the fairy godmother or returning-​dead-​mother in atu 510 narratives is to provide the protagonist with material support to enable their rise or restoration. The failure of the maternal helper in these narratives may be interpreted as the bankruptcy of the problematic figure of Mother

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Ireland5 to offer her daughters the material support necessary to rise out of their doubly colonized position. Weekes documents the progressive disenfranchisement of Irish women under British colonialism (12–​13). After the Great Famine, when Kavanagh was writing, the loss of economic freedoms was particularly accelerated: ‘Gaelic-​Irish women had some economic independence before the famine, but they had little independence of any kind after this event’ (Weekes 13). Kavanagh herself was forced to support herself and her mother through her writing, according to biographer Eileen Fauset (2). Although the 1922 Constitution of the Irish Free State promised unequivocal freedom for women as well as men, women were financially disenfranchised by a progressive series of laws and amendments that attempted to enshrine maternity and force women back into the domestic sphere. For example, in 1932 married women lost the right to work as teachers, and in 1936, the government assumed the right to limit the number of women working in all branches of industry.6 According to Palko, Brennan’s Republican family was especially disillusioned by the repressive measures instituted in the new Irish Republic (2–​4). The loss of material support from maternal helpers reflects the economic layering of oppression and lack of resources that forced women to remain in doubly colonized spaces in Ireland. 4

Destroyed by Fairy-​Tale Hopes

These wonderless fairy tales are not just disappointing, they are dangerous to the female protagonists who become trapped within them. The hope that the Cinderella fairy tale can either fulfill happiness or ‘unlock social and public possibilities’ (Warner xx; Bacchilega 5) is destructive to the women who pursue it in these narratives. In Kavanagh’s novels, this destruction is complex. Although the romantic plights of Kavanagh’s Cinderellas are resolved into acceptable Victorian happy endings in the final page or final paragraph of her three-​volume novels, the conclusion to her expansive narratives is inadequate at best. These endings seem to reflect the dual voice and dual audience of the marginalized writer,7 and resonate with the ‘strategies of survival’ 5 See Meaney’s discussion of the problematic maternal Ireland (21–​40). 6 Palko addresses the progressive loss of women’s financial rights (1–​3), and in Border Crossings (2000), Kathryn Kirkpatrick explores the continued suppression of women’s voices and rights in the new Republic of Ireland (11). 7 In ‘The Slave Narrative and Revolutionary Tradition of American Autobiography’ (2007) Robert Levine’s theory about the dual voice and dual audience of marginalized writers in slave

72 Heiniger (Weekes 16) that colonized women have traditionally used to negotiate the double weight of mainstream expectations about gender and ethnicity. Bessie concludes with the heroine weeping for the loss of her friend and Fairy Queen, Elizabeth, who leaves France with her estranged husband. The reestablishment of heteronormative fairy-​tale romances forever destroys their relationship. Once Elizabeth and Bessie’s Irish Prince Charming are gone, Mr. Herbert steps up and takes his place beside Bessie. Bessie concludes the loss of Elizabeth with Mr. Herbert’s assumption of power over her life: ‘His voice was so gentle, his look was so kind, that I turned to him with involuntary emotion. He asked for no pledge, and I gave him none—​but I was his from that moment, and he knew it’ (Kavanagh, Bessie v3, 339). Thus, the fairy tale destroys Bessie’s closest remaining relationship rather than bringing about a closer union of two people. Kavanagh conforms to the mainstream convention without truly endorsing it. Adele, Kavanagh’s heroine who contemplates suicide on two occasions—​an unforgivable sin for the staunchly Catholic Kavanagh—​is the Cinderella who best sums up the danger of the fairy tale. Adele repeatedly tried to reimagine her life as a fairy tale (Adele 89, 93, 137, 147, 153). Her decision to marry Osborne is positioned as the culmination of this fairy tale, restoring Adele to her rightful position: ‘And you have given me back the kingdom I had lost …’ (246). However, Adele learns that Osborne only married her because he was responsible for losing Adele’s money in the first place (346). Afterwards, Adele reads a fairy tale to her stepdaughter and reflexively tries to place her life within the narrative: ‘Prince Charming, having delivered the princess … made her queen of all he had … Why, I am queen of all Monsieur Osborne has’ (367–​8). However, the gap between these fairy-​tale hopes and Adele’s life drives her into a dangerous depression (368–​9). The destructive nature of fairy-​tale hope carries consistently through later Irish Cinderellas. In Keane’s Good behaviour, the danger impacts both Aroon and her brother. The failed hope of fairy-​tale promises—​not any explicit abuse—​inspires Aroon’s murder of her mother. Her rage is triggered by the failure of the fairy-​tale promise she had been fed. Furthermore, Aroon’s brother is killed in a car accident caused by their shared Prince Charming, the car ride symbolic of the pursuit of impossible hope. In Loving and Giving, Nicandra’s literal pursuit of her profligate Prince Charming leads to her meaningless death. Her hope in the fairy-​tale promise is

narratives may also be applicable here in understanding Kavanagh’s position as an Irish female author writing to a British colonial audience to support herself and her mother.

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her destruction. Distracted by her thoughts of the possible happy reunion, she falls into the hole in the floor: Lifted back by their silence into her unearthly flight of happiness … She ran, almost waltzing forwards across the boards, bared as for dancing, until—​blind and unknowing—​she plunged down through the gap where rotten boards were torn away and the empty drop was left unprotected. (124) The hope of happiness is more seductive than the man to whom she is ­returning. In Brennan’s stories there is a twist:  Rose’s initial Cinderella-​like performance condemns her to a life of martyrdom in marriage. After Rose’s death, Hubert decides that ‘he had fallen in love with her for the exact qualities that were not hers at all’ (244). In this romance, it is Hubert’s fairy-​tale hopes that doom their relationship—​he believed Rose could be his Cinderella, and she failed to deliver. Thus, fairy-​tale hope is emotionally, psychologically, and physically dangerous to the marginalized protagonists who pursue it. The Cinderella dream becomes a doomed web, strung between the twin towers of capitalism and colonialism. Chasing it threatens or destroys the Cinderella heroine. 5

Loss of Wonder

All of this leads to a loss of wonder in these narratives. Plate 58, 59 and 60 from Bacchilega’s Fairy Tales Transformed? (192–​3) are the strongest definition for wonder that I have encountered. These word-​trees emphasize the importance of curiosity and continued intellectual exploration as integral to wonder. A happy ending is not necessary, but some sort of forward momentum of the spirit must continue. In these dangerous Irish Cinderellas, curiosity dies. The quiet acceptance of marriage and married life at the conclusion of Kavanagh’s novels creates a loss of wonder even as it fulfills fairy-​tale expectations of the Victorian reader. Adele’s happiness is predicated on mindless quiet, like a child or a plant. ‘Nothing in Adele distracts that happy quietude … The sun is glad to shine, and she is glad to live and love without caring why or how’ (673). She has lost any sense of wonder in her thoughtless life, sacrificing the inquisitiveness that defined her early life. Similarly, Bessie, and Daisy Burns retreat into a mindless quiet that may be reflective, but it lacks any future projection of spirit. Bessie’s ‘happy’ ending

74 Heiniger is one of silent acceptance that suggests a deadening of her desire, curiosity, and interest in life. Although Daisy Burn’s narrative ends with her beginning to write her novel, her life is one of past reflection rather than future vision and curiosity. In fact, she writes while she cares for her sister-​in-​law and her husband travels to Spain (Daisy Burns 389–​90). Her writing provides a diversion from thinking rather than an exercise in voice or wonder (390–​1). Thus, Kavanagh’s heroines lose their personal sense of wonder in their fairy-​tale endings. Mothers are the agents of silencing wonder in Keane and Brennan. Aroon’s mother crushes her curiosity and drives Aroon into a silent life of comfort eating that symbolizes the inward turn of existence (Keane, Good Behaviour 217, 229, 264). Similarly, Rose’s mother berates Rose’s father for asking her questions and giving her hope. ‘What does that child know and what good would it do her if she did know anything? What chance has she got, and why can’t you leave her alone and let her learn her lessons? […] She won’t thank you later in life. Giver her ideas is all you are doing’. (252) This set-​down ends Rose’s outlet for her curiosity. After this, she keeps her questions to herself. Wonder seems to live a small life within her, but it is not given voice again. This loss of wonder particularly evident in Loving and Giving. The death of Nicandra quells any sense of wonder in its meaningless. There is nothing to excite further curiosity or awe on the part of the reader. There is not even a sense of astonishment at Nicandra’s fatal fall through the floors of her moldering family home. Although Marina Warner demonstrates that ‘wonder has no opposite’ (Warner 3; Bacchilega 5), the antithesis of wonder may be apathy. In exploring the concept of wonder Arthur Frank asks: ‘How does [this] story change people’s sense of what is possible, what is permitted, and what is responsible or irresponsible?’ (Frank 75; Bacchilega 195). When unlocking social and public possibilities becomes unimaginable, un-​wonder is produced. This sets the doubly colonized Cinderella narrative apart from the mainstream anti-​tale explored in Glasgow in 2010. Those anti-​tales were aptly compared with other mainstream anti-​art movements, like Dadaism. These wonderless tales are not anti-​ art as much as they are indictments of the limits of colonial oppression. Irish women writers remain in a doubly colonized position after colonial rule ends in the Republic of Ireland. Out of these fringes, they create a Cinderella tale that models the loss and disillusionment of fairy-​tale promises that depend

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upon magic only available to those who are not doubly excluded from power in a society.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the Appalachian College Association (aca) for making this research possible with a Summer Faculty Fellowship in 2018. I would also like to thank all the curators and librarians who aided my search for disenchanting fairy tales, especially Niamh MacNally, Assistant Curator of Prints and Drawings at the National Gallery of Ireland, for allowing me to explore Harry Clarke’s prints.

Works Cited

Bacchilega, Cristina. Fairy Tales Transformed?: Twenty-​First-​Century Adaptations and the Politics of Wonder. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2013. Brennan, Maeve. In and Out of Never-​Never Land. New  York:  Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1969. Bowe, Nicola. Harry Clarke: The Life and Work. Dublin: The History P Ireland, 2012. ‘Cinderella Erin’. The Nation. 1874 (n.p.), Newspaper Database. National Library of ­Ireland. ‘The Cinderella of Empire’. The Nation. 1867 (n.p.), Newspaper Database. National Library of Ireland. Clarke, Harry, ill. ‘Cinderella Or The Little Glass Slipper’. Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault. London: George Q. Harrap and Co., 1922. Christiansen, Reidar. ‘Cinderella in Ireland’. Bèaloideas. vol. 20, no. 1/​2 (1950): 96–​107. Constitution of Ireland. Department of the Taoiseach. Department of the Taoiseach, 1 November 2018. https://​www.gov.ie/​en/​publication/​d5bd8c-​constitution-​of-​ireland/​. Engen, Rodney. The Age of Enchantment: Beardsley, Dulac and Their Contemporaries. New York: Scala Art Publishers, Inc., 2007. Fauset, Eileen. The Politics of Writing: Julia Kavanagh (1824–​77). Manchester: Manchester UP, 2009. Frank, Arthur. Letting Stories Breathe: A Socio-​Narratology. Chicago: Chicago UP, 2010. Heiniger, Abigail. ‘Passing as the American Cinderella: Disenchanting Fairy Tales in the Writings of Hannah Crafts, Charles Chesnutt, and Jessie Fauset’. Marvels & Tales, vol. 32, no. 2, 2018: 221–​244. Kavanagh, Julia. Adele: A Tale. New York: D. Appleton and Co, 1858. Kavanagh, Julia. Daisy Burns. New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1853.

76 Heiniger Kavanagh, Julia. Bessie. Vol 1–​3. London: Hurst and Blackett, 1872. Keane, Molly. Good Behavior. London: Hatchette Digital, 1981. Keane, Molly. Loving and Giving. London: Virago, 1988. Kirkpatrick, Kathryn. ‘Introduction’. Border Crossings: Irish Women Writers and National Identities. Tuscaloosa: U Alabama P, 2000. Levine, Robert. ‘The Slave Narrative and the Revolutionary Tradition of American Autobiography’. The Cambridge Companion to the African American Slave Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. 99–​114. McAra, Catriona and David Calvin. ‘Introduction’. Anti-​Tales: The Uses of Enchantment, Catriona McAra and David Calvin (eds.). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars P, 2011. 1–​17. Meaney, Gerardine. Gender, Ireland, and Cultural Change:  Race, Sex, and Nation. New York: Routledge, 2010. Palko, Abigail. ‘From The Uninvited to The Visitor:  The Post-​Independence Dilemma Faced by Irish Women Writers’. Frontiers:  A Journal of Women Studies. 31:2 (2010): 1–​34. Weekes, Ann. Irish Women Writers. Lexington, Kentucky: UP Kentucky, 1990. Warner, Maria. Wonder Tales:  Six French Stories of Enchantment. New  York:  Oxford UP, 2004. Zipes, Jack. The Irresistible Fairy Tale. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2012.

­c hapter 7

Cinderboy and Snow White and the Seven Aliens: Analysis of the Rewriting of Two Classic Tales and Their Translations to Spanish Ana Pereira Rodríguez and Lourdes Lorenzo García Abstract This chapter contains an analysis of the reformulations of Cinderella and Snow White produced during the 1990s by Laurence Anholt. In spite of not fitting Lurie’s (1998) definition of subversive literature as a work that transgresses social norms, these tales contain more than a hint of rebelliousness and irreverence along the lines of great masters like Antoine de Saint-​Exupéry, Roald Dahl, Christine Nöstlinger, or Lewis Carroll. The in-​depth review of the original texts will pave the way for a critical study of the translation strategies which were used by the cultural mediator to provide appropriate solutions to complex translation issues: linguistic iconicity, overt knowledge areas, and proper names. With this goal in mind, the level of translation coherence in relation to the norms which were adopted to convey meaning between languages will be assessed, following Toury’s (1980, 2012) assumption that norms are the primary choice of translators at the time of foreignizing or domesticating the resulting text. This critical examination will make it possible to verify whether both the original versions and their translations could be part of the so-​called ‘gender literature’, according to the parameters set out by the project entitled Gender Identity: Child Readers and Library Collections (G-​Book) (2017/​2018) funded by the European Union (Creative Europe Programme).

Keywords rewritings –​gender positive literature –​translation norms –​iconic language –​cultural referents –​ proper names

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | DOI:10.1163/9789004418998_009

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Introduction

On many occasions, children and young people’s literature in translation together with translators’ choices within the boundaries established by the author of the original text (OT) are fundamental concepts that tend to go hand in hand. This ‘re-​creation’ to which Valero (“Internacionalización” 249) refers follows textual acceptability patterns in the target culture, as Pascua and Marcelo (214–​215) point out, thus aiming at offering readers with limited world experience a book they may be able to understand. Therefore, in the continuum of interventionism—​for didactic, moralising, or language policy reasons, among others—​whose extreme points are absolute foreignization and complete domestication (Venuti), it is the mediators’ responsibility to select which degree is more appropriate. However, regardless of the level of manipulation, translators still need to be coherent; in other words, working with a text traditionally considered a minor genre (Hermans 8) does not allow for the application of domesticating strategies in one place and foreignization just a few pages later. This paper analyzes the choice of translation strategies used to convey language iconicity (noises, music, and onomatopoeia), overt knowledge areas, and proper names from English to Spanish in two rewritings of traditional tales, assessing whether the mediator was coherent with the norm initially adopted (Toury Descriptive). Given the nature of the materials under analysis, it will be possible to appraise the connection between source text, translation, and gender literature, defined as ‘gender positive children’s literature in terms of roles and models, a literature that is open-​minded, plural, varied, free from stereotypes, that encourages respect and diversity’(European Union). 2

Analysis of Two Rewritings of Classical Tales from the Perspective of Humour and Gender

The OTs which were reviewed, Cinderboy (1996) and Snow White and the Seven Aliens (1998), penned by Laurence Anholt and illustrated by Arthur Robins, are two seminal titles in the series Seriously Silly Stories, composed of twenty-​four reformulated classics published by Orchard Books. Their goal is to promote reading and teach the almost unaware reader through the medium of humour (Anholt online). Three main elements interact in these rewritings: ‘first, the already known story, in whatever versions are circulating at the time of production, together with other stories of similar types or including similar motifs; second, the current social preoccupations and values … and third, the textual forms through

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which the story is expressed’ (Stephens 92). Although modernized, the parallels between Anholt’s tales and traditional stories can be identified by young readers, but significant changes cause surprise and become a source of entertainment while facilitating the transmission of values. For instance, blurring the frontiers between roles and gender stereotypes, therefore avoiding traditional ‘male and female models children may adapt to, which typically leads to a set of roles to be fulfilled, and stereotypes to reproduce, based solely on the characters’ biological masculine or feminine traits and, by extension, the young readers’ (León 348, our translation). Another difference with respect to traditional stories, which participates in this blurring, is the main character’s gender shifting. Cinderboy, for instance, emerges from the tale of ‘Cinderella’. A boy passionate about football lives with his step-​father and step-​brothers, who are a pack of hooligans. While they watch matches on television, Cinderboy prepares and serves them meals. One day, the step-​father decides to take his children to see the Cup finals, but Cinderboy is excluded and stays home, cleaning around. He keeps doing the housework and watches the finals on television. Unfortunately, his team, Royal Palace United, is going under. During the commercial break, a televisual fairy godmother shows up and makes his dreams come true: he will help Royal Palace win the finals as a mysterious masked player in silky pink gear, like the rest of the team. Everything goes as expected: the team wins and Cinderboy leaves the pitch wearing just the one boot before the umpire blows the whistle, like the fairy godmother requested. After such feat, the coach goes door to door in search of this sporting prodigy, reaches Cinderboy’s home and witnesses the step-​ brothers struggling to put on the glorious boot. In the end, one of the step-​ brothers manages to slide into the boot, but Cinderboy’s silky pink gear proves too much for the barrel-​chested peanut-​eating glutton. The coach takes Cinderboy with him and, being the softie that he is, decides to forgive his step-​ family, gives them free tickets for every single match, and pays for the surgical procedure that will free his step-​brother’s foot from the tightest boot he had ever worn. This tale proposes a form of masculinity that veers off stereotypes, roles, and activities traditionally associated with male bodies, including beliefs and forms of conduct attributed to males and females (Ros 334). Thus, Anholt’s Cinderboy does the housework, and readers can see him cry, as well as be generous and obedient, which are characteristics more commonly associated with other genders, and distanced from stereotypical masculine patterns (Méndez 134). In addition, the color pink is detached from femininity, to the point of being naturally integrated into the world of football.

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The second rewriting subject of analysis does not feature a gender shift. The naïve princess of the classic, with her mother-​of-​pearl skin and jet-​black hair, gives way to a decisive young girl who dreams about growing to be a hit singer. Just like her counterpart, she lives with her father and step-​mother, a vocalist whose star no longer shines and who has lost her voice and her mind. In a fit of anger, the step-​mother forces her husband to stand behind a mirror and reply only in the way she likes: ‘your nose is beautiful’ (Anholt, Snow White 13). Sick and tired of so many lies, there comes a day when the husband confesses that her nose—​and everything attached to it—​is horrible, which enrages her and leads her to make a rather Machiavellian wish: he will throw Snow White into the gutter, chop her nose off, and bring it back to her on a platter. The father does abandon her daughter, but he does not dare sever her nose, so he creates a fake appendix using plasticine, and serves it to her wife wrapped in mayonnaise. In the meantime, Snow White finds a job cleaning floors at a night club, where she stumbles upon a mediocre rock band called The Seven Aliens. Hearing her sing, they ask her to jump onto the stage and be their lead vocalist. Her success is incontrovertible, but the step-​mother finds out and goes to her dressing room one night in the garb of Hank Hunk, Snow’s childhood idol. When she realizes it is indeed her step-​mother, stage fright invades her and the Seven Aliens carry her, now petrified, to the stage. There, the real Hank Hunk requests a song—​quite aware of his seductive powers—​Snow immediately recovers from her afflictions, the whole country starts dancing to her tune on Christmas Day, and they all live happily ever after, wedding and repentant step-​mother included. Although this retelling reproduces the pattern of the classical tale with a happy ending placing the male figure at the center, it may be stated, following Zanfabro (8), that Anholt’s Snow White belongs to the group of ‘strong, independent girls with a well-​defined agency. Moreover, their stories are published and marketed as being both for girls and for boys’. 3

Translation Strategies

3.1 Conveyance of Sound Transferring noises, music and onomatopoeias from one language to another constitutes a problem for the translator, who may opt for diverse solutions, such as finding an equivalent (muac in Spanish, and smack in English), adapting the orthographic form (ji ji ji in Spanish, and hi hi hi in English), or preserving the original form (Mayoral, Valero “Traducción”). Most American comic book translators chose the latter option during the 60s and 70s, which resulted

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in a large influx of English onomatopoeias into Spanish, either in their original or adapted forms, and it continues still today. The strength and success of these forms was so remarkable that Spanish authors began to adopt them (Santoyo 171); for instance, crac, the sound of something breaking, which is a phonetic adaptation of to crack, now included in the rae (Real Academia Española) reference dictionary. In the 90s, in response to this wave of English onomatopoeias, the trend shifted towards the use of more authentic forms, to the detriment of those of foreign provenance. If there were no equivalents, some authors (Valero, “Internacionalización” 87)  propounded several different strategies that went from total omission, to the use of explanatory notes, other conventional symbols, visual metaphors, orthographic signs, and even the substitution of onomatopoeias for verbal language (e.g., Oops! became ¡lo siento!, ‘I’m sorry’ in English). Similarly to the case of comic books, onomatopoeias abound in literature for young readers, to the extent that it may be considered one of its defining characteristics; therefore, the strategies and trends of both genres are conveyed in a similar and comparable manner. The translation of Cinderboy poses a challenge in this respect, since the OT and its accompanying illustrations make repeated use of this resource. Anholt goes one step further by combining different onomatopoeias (ker-​bam, keerr-​ blam …), reinforced by little doodles of stars and magical rays. In this same vein, when the step-​father and step-​brothers go to the football match, Cinderboy manages to clean the whole house before the television broadcast begins. The first half turns out to be a complete disaster, and the result is 10-​nil. On top of that, the star player is injured and has to be carried away on a stretcher. During halftime, Cinderboy sobs uncontrollably and that is when his fairy godmother decides to show up. She tells him that he will be going to the match and, every time he pushes the right buttons on the remote, (KERBAM!) he is magically dressed in football gear, or right next to a wonderfully luxurious limousine. On the pitch, Cinderboy shows off his grace, elegance and, most of all, mastery of the sport (KERBAM, KERBOOM, KERBLAM, KERWOOMPH) by scoring 10 goals and (KEERRPOW) breaking the tie with a magnificent acrobatic number. The translator did not feel constrained by onomatopoeic transcription; on the contrary, the original forms were substituted by new ones which were not unfamiliar to the Spanish reader. However, part of the magical meaning is lost by suppressing the introductory particle of the English versions by resorting to the strategy of simplification—​quite common in literature for young readers (Fernández), thus reducing the variety of Spanish alternatives (only two, against five in English). Table 7.1 shows the translator’s choices to convey each of the onomatopoeic forms of the English original.

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table 7.1 Translator’s choices to convey onomatopoeias in Ceniciento

English

Spanish

Kerbam Kerboom Kerblam Kerwoomph Keerrr pow

Catapum Catapum Pumba Catapum Caatta pum

One possible way of reproducing meaning and variety in translation would have been to combine several different forms which are frequently found in magic-​related contexts (e.g., a magician producing a rabbit from a top hat: tachán) with a series that takes pum (onomatopoeia for a quick hit) as a point of departure, and then keeps adding particles cumulatively, as it is done in children’s songs. Table 7.2 shows alternative solutions for this translation issue. table 7.2 Alternative solution for conveying onomatopoeias in Ceniciento

English

Spanish

Kerbam (sudden magical appearance)

Tachán, Tatachán, Tatatachán Pum Catapum Catapum chin chin Recatapum chin chin

Kerboom (quick hit) Kerblam (quick hit) Kerwoomph (quick hit) Keerrrpow (quick hit, ascending movement)

Surprisingly, in the translation of Snow White and the Seven Aliens, the same translator chooses to employ literal transcriptions of the original onomatopoeias, so young Spanish readers hear the step-​mother’s maleficent laugh as: AH, HA, HA, HAH, HAARR! In this particular case, orthographic adaptation would be the most appropriate solution (AH, JA JA JA JA JAAAA). 3.2 Conveyance of Culture Overt knowledge areas (Rabadán 164–​168; Shuttleworth and Cowie 118–​119) could be defined as a set of dimensions in which the members of two separate

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cultures differ. These elements belong to areas of expertise that readers of source texts and their corresponding translations do not share. Consequently, to fill the cultural gap, mediators often resort to strategies of substitution or explanation. In prior publications (Lorenzo and Pereira, Pereira and Lorenzo) we suggested that translators do not find it difficult to pinpoint the elements themselves; rather, they may have trouble deciding how unknown or unfamiliar these elements are for the receivers of the translations, and thus select the most appropriate translation strategy. In this sense, the general trend in children and young people’s literature during the 90s was to keep those elements which allude to cultural aspects of the source (Fernández). However, to prevent culture shock, omission or the inclusion of explanatory notes would be preferred. The translator of Cinderboy and Snow White and the Seven Aliens made use of different strategies to convey cultural references—​present in the source text—​to the target readers. Let us observe what takes place in instances (a), (b) and (c): a) But not poor Cinderboy. He wasn’t even allowed to watch. He had to wait on his stepbrothers hand and foot, and bring them cups of tea and bowl after bowl of peanuts, which were their favourite snack. (p. 8) The next morning he had to wake up earlier than ever to prepare peanut butter sandwiches for his horrible brothers … (p. 13). Pero al pobre Ceniciento no lo dejaban ni mirar. Tenía que hacer de criado para sus hermanastros y servirles el té, y luego llevarles un bol tras otro de cacahuetes, que comían sin parar. (p. 8) A la mañana siguiente tuvo que levantarse más temprano que de costumbre para preparar sándwiches de manteca de cacahuete para sus horribles hermanastros … (p. 13) b) Snow White and the Seven Aliens leapt into the spotlight and began to play. Across the nation, every family threw down their Christmas crackers and began gyrating to the fantastic sounds on TV. (p. 59) Blancanieves y los Siete Alienígenas empezaron su actuación. En toda la nación la gente se quedó boquiabierta ante los fantásticos sonidos que salían del televisor. (p. 59) c) That’s funny, honey, I feel quite perky, come downstairs and have some turkey. If you’re good, you never know, I  might get out the mistletoe. (p. 61) Vamos, querida, que hoy es Navidad, deja que en ti renazca la bondad. Ven, vamos a montar nuestro belén y ya verás cómo te sientes bien. (p. 61) In Cinderboy (a)  the choice was to preserve the English tea-​drinking tradition and the reference to peanuts and peanut butter, perhaps thinking that

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‘cultural globalization’ through the audiovisual media does have repercussions in children-​oriented products. Nevertheless, in Snow White and the Seven Aliens, the mediator selected the strategies of omission and substitution at the time of dealing with English cultural references. In case (b), Christmas crackers is omitted perhaps because an explanatory note might have been too verbose, while a footnote would have been entirely inadequate for a child in the 6–​8 age range. As for (c), the traditional turkey dinner is substituted for the Spanish custom of setting up a nativity scene with little figurines (belén). In this case, it would be fair to assume that the intention was to avoid exposure to unfamiliar content. 3.3 Conveyance of Anthroponyms Unlike the foreignizing trend that is typical of the translation of proper names in many texts aimed at adult readers, young and young adult literary works feature translation and/​or morpho-​phonological adaptation. For instance, Jiminy Cricket becomes Pepito Grillo in Pinocho; or the Italian form of Pinocchio itself, introduced as a foreignizing element in English, which is made to fit the mould of Spanish orthophonic norms to become Pinocho; or the name of the royal butler in The Lion King, whose phonetic components shift remarkably by turning an English paroxytone, Zazu, into an oxytone in Spanish, Zazú (Pereira and Lorenzo 67). In the present case, to translate anthroponyms, the translator considered intertextuality, which, after a slight modification of Hatim and Mason’s (119) definition, we could describe as the knowledge young readers have of other texts. Traditional tales of ‘Cinderella’ and ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’, which most will know from written or audiovisual renditions, are essential to fully understand Anholt’s retellings. In fact, a parallel comparison between those traditional tales and these modernized stories riddled with quenotypes, or innovative images derived from the modern world, as Nikolajeva (145–​151) understands them, are core constituents of humour and surprise in Anholt’s texts. Thus, Cinderella and Cenicienta transform into Cinderboy and Ceniciento, respectively. The dreamy palace of the prince becomes Royal Palace United and Palacio Real C. F. The fairy godmother adapts to the zeitgeist turning into a TV Godmother (Telemadrina in the Spanish tale). However—​and quite surprisingly—​a translation faux pas assimilates the role of coach Eddy Prince in the retelling to that of the prince in the classical tale, but no explicitation (príncipe) is provided in the Spanish adaptation of the proper name, consequently cutting short the connections between the traditional tale and its alternative. Surely, the final version in Spanish might have profited from the consistent application of the strategy of choice to convey anthroponyms and

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proper names, changing Eddy Prince into Edu Príncipe, and thus neutralising the opacity of such connection. Particularly noteworthy are the different forms in which Anholt uses Cinderboy to refer to his main character and let the reader know the type and degree of engagement between the narrator, the protagonist and the rest of the characters. Table 7.3 shows the forms of appellation other characters employ to refer to Cinderboy. table 7.3 Forms of appellation to refer to Cinderboy

Narrator Step-​father Step-​brothers Fairy godmother

Cinderboy Cinders Cinders Cinderboy, Cindy, Cindy doll

The repertoire of forms used in the original brings to light three different types of relationship. On the one hand, a neutral attitude that is typical of omniscient narration which tells the story using the third person and chooses to refer to the main character using his full name (Cinderboy). On the other hand, there is an imbalance of power between Cinderboy, his step-​father and his step-​brothers, since the former is subject to his family’s will, in spite of their continued mistreatment and abuse, evinced by their choice of appellative (Cinders). Finally, the fairy godmother shows kindness and affection towards Cinderboy, as revealed by the selection of hypochoristics she employs (Cindy, Cindy doll). Again, the main form of meaning conveyance is simplification, but the original four forms used by Anholt become just two in the Spanish version. Table 7.4 synthesizes this translation issue with its various options. table 7.4 Translator’s choices to convey forms of appellation in Ceniciento

Narrator Step-​father Step-​brothers Fairy godmother

Ceniciento Ceni Ceni Ceni, Ceni querido

In this case, regardless of the number of variants the mediator selects, it is the change in meaning that really matters, since the attitude of the step-​father

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and the step-​children towards Cinderboy is equated to that of the fairy godmother, which may not have been Anholt’s intention. The solution proposed in table  7.5 might reproduce the objectives and effects of the original more faithfully. table 7.5 Alternative solution for conveying forms of appellation in Ceniciento

Narrator Step-​father Step-​brothers Fairy godmother

4

Ceniciento Cenizo/​Cenizas Cenizo/​Cenizas Ceni, Cenicillo, Ceni cariño

Conclusions

From the analysis of the translation strategies used to convey iconic language, overt knowledge areas, and proper names in Snow White and the Seven Aliens and Cinderboy it follows that there are two instances in which deviation from the norm of choice leads the translator to an unresolved lack of coherence, which, in turn, has observable repercussions in the quality of the final target version. In one case, the Spanish readers are presented with an evil character who laughs (or yells?) in a rather unnatural way. In another, the connection between the characters of the classical tale and those of the retelling, which is made explicit through a domesticating translation of anthroponyms, is dramatically severed in the prince/​coach dyad. For an attentive reader, these solutions will probably cause a certain level of alienation and slight carelessness on the mediator’s part. For this, a reasoned demand for coherence, as it is propounded in this paper, stands as a key factor, more prevalent still than the strategies used to convey certain traits of the OT. This study has found examples of simplification procedures, as in the case of onomatopoeias that lose the magical or fantastical elements they were imbibed with; or that of neutralization of linguistic variants, therefore preventing the Spanish reader from detecting shifts in inter-​character appellations. Certainly, such solutions deprive the final version of part of its linguistic richness, which might perhaps have been preserved, but, contrary to the strategies that veer off the initial norm, this detriment could only be perceived by those who compare the original text with its translation. Anholt’s retellings assign new roles, activities and attitudes to his protagonists, and these elements may appear unexpected to the target reader, creating

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new expectations and paving the way for new models that deviate from the stereotypes typically found in classical tales, from which they derive. Without a doubt, these retellings and their translations contribute to balance the presentation of gender models to children. Their importance in the construction of a fairer and more egalitarian society gives weight to the argument that they cannot be considered as a minor literary genre. Far from being too niche, or negligible, mediators should pay attention to the strategies they select for the conveyance of meaning, which will produce more coherent and functional target versions.

Works Cited

Anholt, Laurence. Cinderboy. London: Orchard Books, 1996. Anholt, Laurence. Ceniciento. Carlo Frabetti (trans.) Madrid: Santillana, 1999. Anholt, Laurence. Snow White and the Seven Aliens. London: Orchard Books, 1998. Anholt, Laurence. Blancanieves y los siete alienígenas. Carlo Frabetti (trans.) Madrid: Santillana, 1999. Anholt, Laurence. Laurence Anholt. Multi-​million selling author of 200 books in 30 languages 14 May 2019, http://​www.anholt.co.uk. European Union. Gender Identity: Child Readers and Library Collection (G-​Book). European Union, 2017/​2018, https://​g-​book.eu. Fernández, Marisa. Traducción y literatura juvenil. Narrativa anglosajona contemporánea en España. León: Universidad de León, 1996. Hatim, Basil and Mason, Ian. Discourse and the Translator. London/​New York: Longman, 1990. Hermans, Theo (ed.). The Manipulation of Literature. Studies in Literary Translation. Abingdon: Routledge, 2014. León, Rosalí. ‘Un acercamiento a las investigaciones de la representación de género en la literatura infantil’. Desde el Sur 10.3 (2018): 347–​362. Lorenzo, Lourdes and Pereira, Ana. ‘Blancanieves y los siete enanitos, radiografía de una traducción audiovisual:  la versión cinematográfica de Disney en inglés y en español’. El cine: otra dimensión del discurso artístico, J. L. Caramés et al. (eds.). Oviedo: Universidad de Oviedo, 1999. 469–​483. Lurie, Alison. No se lo cuentes a los mayores. Literatura infantil, espacio subversivo. Madrid: Fundación Germán Sánchez Ruipérez, 1998. Mayoral, Roberto. ‘Formas inarticuladas y formas onomatopéyicas en inglés y en español. Problemas de traducción’. Sendebar 3 (1992): 107–​139. Méndez, Nuria. ‘Un acercamiento al cuento infantil desde la perspectiva de género. Estereotipos en el cuento infantil’. Revista Electrónica Educare 7 (2004): 127–​140.

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Nikolajeva, Maria. Children’s Literature Comes of Age. Toward a New Aesthetic. New York/​ London: Garland Pub., 1996. Pascua, Isabel and Marcelo, Gisela. ‘La traducción de la LIJ: relevancia, posición y tendencias actuales’. Literatura infantil y juvenil: tendencias actuales en investigación, Veljka Ruzicka et al. (eds.). Vigo: Universidade de Vigo, 2000. 211–​220. Pereira, Ana María and Lorenzo, Lourdes. ‘Notting Hill:  un ejemplo de traducción audiovisual como herramienta metodológica al servicio de técnicas generales de traducción’. La traducción audiovisual: investigación, enseñanza y profesión, Patrick Zabalbeascoa, Laura Santamaría, and Frederic Chaume (eds.). Granada: Comares, 2005. 241–​249. Rabadán, Rosa. Equivalencia y traducción. Problemática de la equivalencia traslémica inglés-​español. León: Universidad de León, 1991. Ros, Esther. ‘El cuento infantil como herramienta socializadora de género’. Cuestiones pedagógicas 22 (2012/​2013): 329–​350. Santoyo, Julio César. El delito de traducir. León: Universidad de León, 1989. Stephens, John. ‘Retelling Stories Across Time and Cultures’. The Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013. 91–​107. Shuttleworth, Mark and Cowie, Moira. Dictionary of Translation Studies. New York: Routledge, 2014. Toury, Gideon. In Search of a Theory of Translation. Tel Aviv: The Porter Institute for Poetic Studies, 1980. Toury, Gideon. Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond. Amsterdam/​Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2012 (rev. ed.). Valero, Carmen. ‘Internacionalización y multiculturalismo de la LIJ en castellano: la importancia de la traducción’. Literatura infantil y juvenil: tendencias actuales en investigación, Veljka Ruzicka et al. (eds.). Vigo: Universidade de Vigo, 2000. 241–​251. Valero, Carmen. ‘La traducción del cómic: retos, estrategias, resultados’. Trans, revista de traductología 4 (2000): 75–​88. Venuti, Lawrence. The Translator’s invisibility. A History of Translation. Londres: Routledge, 2008 (2nd ed.).

­c hapter 8

Resistance and Revolt: Cinderella, Snow White and Sleeping Beauty Re-​Viewed Sarah Bonner Abstract This chapter explores the construction, repetition and dissemination of idealized femininity in popular fairy tales and how, in contemporary visual re-​workings, these conventions are being challenged. Philosopher Judith Butler’s theories of gender construction and performance underpin my analysis of how gender, as a series of acts and physical states, is constituted in fairy tales. The archetypal heroine of fairy-​tale fame is constructed according to a perceived social consensus of ideal femininity—​she must be pretty, pure, obedient, youthful and morally sound—​a model repeated through a number of tales. The artworks analyzed in this chapter, by Cornelia Parker, Carrie Mae Weems and Gérard Rancinan, show how subversive repetition can serve to interrupt, challenge, transgress and even reverse conventional expectations of femininity. The application of Butler’s theories to the fairy-​tale genre, and their visual reiterations, reveals the potential to change perceptions of gender through subversive repetition. It is this subversive repeat, a mis-​ repetition, which allows for the possibility of change that will be examined here.

Keywords gender –​femininity –​fairy tale –​Judith Butler –​art –​popular culture

1

Femininity and Fairy Tales

Gender roles are an overarching concern in both traditional and contemporary versions of the fairy tale, although, of course, the concern is largely left implicit in traditional fairy tales. The most popular fairy tales are often female-​orientated and often feature the girl disabled in some manner, either physically or by circumstance, for example, Sleeping Beauty (through imposed sleep) and Cinderella (through class and domestic position). Although industrious, the heroine is often alone; cast out of society, she accepts her

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | DOI:10.1163/9789004418998_010

90 Bonner situation until discovered and rescued by a male figure. In this chapter I will investigate how the traditional model of femininity, via codes of beauty, has been revised in contemporary visual renditions of ‘Sleeping Beauty’, ‘Snow White’ and ‘Cinderella’. The concept for this study is based upon the construction, repetition and dissemination of idealized gender norms in popular fairy tales and how, in contemporary visual re-​workings, these conventions of femininity are being challenged. I have selected philosopher Judith Butler’s theories of gender construction and performance to underpin my analysis of how gender is formed in fairy tales. The two key points of interest in Butler’s theories, as outlined in her text Gender Trouble:  Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (2006), are the construction of gender norms and the possibility to undermine that construction. Butler’s understanding of gender, as being constructed of a series of repeated socially consensual performative acts relates well to the repetition of gendered types found throughout the fairy-​tale genre. For example, the popular tales feature archetypal heroines that emblemize ideal feminine characteristics. This female type is constructed according to a perceived social consensus of ideal femininity—​she must be pretty, pure, obedient, youthful and morally sound—​a model repeated through a number of tales. Gender, according to Butler, exists in flux and fundamentally in relation to society. I propose that, although representations of femininity shift over time, the fundamental qualities of ideal femininity endure through popular fairy tale characters and plots. Thus, Butler’s belief that gender can be challenged and potentially changed through repetition is crucial to this chapter (Gender Trouble 191–​201). The artworks I address show how subversive repetition can serve to interrupt, challenge, transgress and even reverse conventional attitudes towards gender. My application of Butler’s theories to the fairy-​tale genre, and their constant repetition in literary, and more recently visual, form since the seventeenth century, reveals the potential to change perceptions of gender through subversive repetition. As I will argue, the contemporary visual artists attended to in this chapter reproduce fairy tales by repeating familiar tropes and symbols; however, in addition, they introduce a subversive element that undermines a conventional understanding of gender. It is this subversive repeat, a mis-​repetition that allows for the possibility of change. 2

The Beauty Ideal and Constructing Femininity

Judith Butler’s theories of performing identity as the attainment or maintenance of beauty is a fundamental performance of gender. In her work

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‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory’ (519–​531), Butler critiques the construction of normative models of masculine and feminine as a repeated and consensual performance. Thus, she excavates the notion of gender being a natural state, exposing instead the artifice of this proposition. As beauty is perceived as naturally intrinsic to femininity, her theories are valuable to expose the contingent foundation of this premise. Although Butler addresses gender identity more broadly, it is possible to apply her concepts to beauty ideals in the millennial age. Butler, citing Simone de Beauvoir’s claim, examined in the text The Second Sex (1949), that womanhood is not a biological fact but rather a cultural application, comments that gender is not a stable identity and, in fact, shifts over time and within historical conditions (“Performative Acts” 522). Butler examines the notion of performing an identity, which, repeated over and over, becomes the accepted constitution of that given identity, in this case female. Thus, the identity is instituted and takes on the appearance of substance, when it is, in fact, more accurately considered a self-​perpetuating constructed identity, ‘a performative accomplishment’ (“Performative Acts” 520). Establishing gender through a performative act is, for Butler, a strategy of cultural survival. To perform and therefore advertise a discrete gender ensures inclusion; not to perform a gender can function as a way of opting out of a socially given hierarchy (given only in terms of the fact that genders are performed) (“Performative Acts” 528). As Butler observes: Gender is, thus, a construction that regularly conceals its genesis; the tacit collective agreement to perform, produce, and sustain discrete and polar genders as cultural fictions is obscured by the credibility of those productions—​and the punishments that attend not agreeing to believe in them; the construction “compels” our belief in its necessity and naturalness. Gender Trouble 190

Gender is therefore not an innate essence; it can more usefully be described as a social construction based on aspects of bodily style that shift according to historical consensus. However, as Butler points out, the style is never individually designed as it is shaped by history and the social consensus that delimits the expression of gender. Gender norms, according to Butler, are repeated acts of fiction and not actualities or biological fact. The gender performance is exhibited with costume, gesture, attributes, vocal tone, etc., as well as props appropriate to the role being acted. The beauty qualification associated with and legitimized as belonging to the female gender is therefore self-​perpetuating.

92 Bonner According to Butler’s model, however, gender norms can be changed. Elsewhere, Butler continues her argument to propose the potential of change through repetition: If the ground of gender identity is the stylised repetition of acts through time, and not a seemingly seamless identity, then the possibilities of gender transformation are to be found in the arbitrary relation between such acts, in the possibility of a different sort of repeating, in the breaking or subversive repetition of that style. “Performative Acts” 520

If beauty is seen as being specifically gendered, the notion of constituting identity through repeated performances can be observed in beauty rituals. The surface signification of beauty rituals supports Butler’s notion that gender is internalized but is not essential: it is a public act rather than a private essence. Yet if, as Butler suggests, gender is reducible to nothing but an act, then the cultural signification is temporary and lacks credence without a sustained performance. In the previous quotation, Butler identifies the potential, through repetition, to change the grounds of constituted gendered identity. This potential has been, I argue, tapped in the adoption of the fairy tale by the visual arts in the late twentieth century. Subversive repetition is employed by some artists to expose gender as a construction that takes place via act and image. By intervening in the fairy tale as a repetitive performance of gender roles, artists employ the familiar to reveal the unfamiliar, highlighting the temporal foundations and the contingency of gender as it is experienced and understood in the Euro-​American context. To apply Butler’s theory of performative acts and gender constitution to fairy tales reveals the scope of the genre for both purveying ideological standards, but also its potential openness to intervention and critique. However, whilst the Disney Corporation dominates fairy-​tale production, from films to merchandising, the task of intervention and critique is more challenging. Disney has developed a sophisticated understanding of the power of performing a role. Thus, not only are children able to watch Disney fairy-​tale versions at the cinema; since the 1970s or 1980s they have had the vhs and, more recently, the dvd versions of the films to watch repeatedly within the home. The various types of cinematic viewing described invoke Laura Mulvey’s 1975 psychoanalytic concept of ‘pleasurable structures of looking’ (18) that, ‘developed through narcissism and the constitution of the ego, comes from identification with the image seen’ (18). As a function of ‘ego libido’ (19), the child becomes fascinated with what she recognizes as her like. Add to this Disney merchandising

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whereby little girls can purchase costumes of her favourite characters, and suddenly young girls are able to perform fairy-​tale roles as seen on their television sets. These roles, with the aid of props, are thus literally performed and girls grow up to understand that a show of beauty and composure is sufficient to succeed in life (by succeed, read: gain a rich husband). Butler’s performative act here constitutes a constructed identity that is based on a constructed fantasy in the hands of Disney (predominantly) via the traditional messages of fairy tales. Gender fictions overlap and are sustained as truth, obscuring what Butler describes as the ‘phantasmatic effect of abiding identity as a politically tenuous construction’ (Gender Trouble 192). By presenting ideal models of white heterosexual femininity as fact, in short, Disney versions of fairy tales convey messages about femininity to girls which are arbitrary, unrealistic, and based on surface appearance and attitude, thus capable of invoking deep-​seated anxiety in terms of their individual worth. 3

Sleeping Beauty, Snow White and Cinderella

‘Sleeping Beauty’, despite the fact that it narrates the significant attributes of femininity as these have developed in white Euro-​American culture, has not been widely adopted by artists or other visual media. The central character is not strong and little happens in the tale. Yet the visual language in the tale is powerful and provides a platform for performance artists to bring into question the notion of beauty as femininity. Cornelia Parker’s1 collaboration with actress Tilda Swinton, The Maybe (1995), evokes visual readings of ‘Sleeping Beauty’. Exhibited at the Serpentine Gallery in 1995, the performance piece consisted of Swinton seemingly sleeping for eight hours a day whilst enclosed in a raised glass tank. The visual imagery of this work invokes both the ‘Sleeping Beauty’ and ‘Snow White’ tales, shifting their language into the twentieth century. Located in the Serpentine Gallery situated in the middle of London’s Hyde Park, the site evokes the forest backdrop of the traditional tales. A royal princess is substituted with a British independent film actress, the significance of royalty in feudal times neatly transferred to the cult of celebrity in the closing years of the twentieth century. In this piece, Swinton is displayed to be viewed and, by extension, valued as a precious object (as was Snow White). The concept

1 British artist Cornelia Parker works with a variety of mediums and is well known for her sculpture and installation pieces that deal with themes of existential fragility and materiality.

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­f igure 8.1  The Maybe© Cornelia Parker, 1995. Installation at the Serpentine Gallery, London. A collaboration between Cornelia Parker and Tilda Swinton. the photograph is by hugo glendinning. courtesy of the artist and frith street gallery, london.

derived from the display and value of contemporary celebrity provides one interpretation of this work. However, the contribution of meaning endowed by location (in the middle of Hyde Park), manner of display (in a glass case), and the celebrity status of Swinton demands more interpretation. The display of the female body has traditionally been associated with beauty; in this piece, Parker and Swinton undermine beauty and the notion of gender. Applying Butler’s theory of performing gender, it could be interpreted that Parker and Swinton challenge the constitution of gender by the (non-​) performance of the sleeping figure of Swinton. Applying Butler’s theories, it can be suggested that whilst asleep neither males nor females perform nor act; the gender constitution that is performed in waking is suspended when sleeping. The gender-​neutral clothes worn by Swinton further qualify this reading. The

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gender ambiguity in The Maybe is further emphasized by Swinton’s critical recognition only two years earlier in the title role of Orlando, a film based on a 1928 novel by Virginia Woolf. The character of Orlando is a cross-​gender figure that travels through time, visiting various historical periods as initially male and then female. Parker and Swinton strike an uneasy balance in this work between the fairy tale connotations and the familiar territory of female as an object to look at, and, through looking, possess. At the same time, they undermine the fundamental performance of gender in that Swinton sleeps, absenting the actress from her gendered position, and confounding (to some extent) female objectification. Conventional fairy tales often teach that feminine beauty is a valuable commodity and is rewarded through little effort by the heroines of the tales—​all Sleeping Beauty has to do is lie there and wait for the prince to come and wake her; as Bruno Bettelheim posits, ‘she is the incarnation of perfect femininity’ (Bettelheim 236). The beauty ideal is a potent force inducing jealousy, malicious acts and various types of tribulation—​generally visited upon those considered the most beautiful. Yet the parameters are strict in terms of acceptable beauty: the girl has to be white, pure, patient, quiet and helpful. Feminist artists working in the 1980s explicitly addressed the way in which female ideals enacted through fairy tales pivoted around whiteness. Carrie Mae Weems2 has consistently addressed gender and racial stereotyping as methods of oppression in her work since the mid-​1980s. In her Ain’t Jokin series, she interrogates prejudice based on skin color. In Mirror Mirror (1987–​88), she takes issue with the fairy tale ‘Snow White’ from a black woman’s stance to highlight embedded cultural stereotyping and prejudice. Mirror Mirror combines photograph and text, and parodies the scene where the queen consults her magic mirror. A  black woman is depicted holding a frame as if a mirror, yet turns away from it. Within the frame, although not confined by it, we can see another woman of indeterminate race dressed in white and holding a glittered star up to the surface of the mirror (like Cinderella’s fairy godmother). The photograph is closely cropped, making the piece claustrophobic and intensifying the aggressively sardonic response of the mirror. The caption that accompanies the piece is: ‘Looking into the mirror, the black woman asked, “Mirror mirror on the wall, who’s the finest of them all?” The mirror says, “Snow White, you black bitch, and don’t you forget it!!!” ’ Engagement with this piece challenges the viewer, invoking ‘dilemmas of

2 Carrie Mae Weems is an American artist who works with a range of media and explores themes of culture, politics and power in her work.

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­f igure 8.2  Carrie Mae Weems Mirror Mirror, 1987–​2012, gelatin silver print. 27 x 23 1/​4 inches (print) ©carrie mae weems. courtesy of the artist and jack shainman gallery, new york.

identification for both black and white women who encounter the work, inviting each to question the notions of beauty in which they situate themselves’ (Reckitt & Phelan 137). Weems has taken here the common understanding of ‘Snow White’ to expose implicit racial prejudice. The black woman is made other in relation to the white feminine ideal. She is not absent in the tales, but not fully present either.

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Weems’s work can be understood as functioning within Butler’s notion of using repetition to break the relentless white versions of Snow White in particular, and the fairy tale more broadly. The jolt that Weems gives the viewer reveals the brutal inequities of the genre and the blatant level of racism practiced in the repeating of various tales. If the protagonist of the fairy tale is always described and depicted as white, what relation do black audiences have to the tales, and more specifically the relation of black women to protagonists such as Snow White? Although not included in his fairy-​tale collection, in a work from his Trans-​ Fashion Lab series (2006),3 Gérard Rancinan4 directly references the Grimm’s ‘Cinderella’ narrative and explicitly critiques the notion of beauty embedded in the tale. Here the Cinderella character is far from recognisable as the hard-​done-​by heroine of the popular tale. In this work, Rancinan explores the theme of violence as intrinsic to the beauty ideal, referencing both the fairy tale and the socially accepted beauty rituals that women visit upon their bodies. In this piece, Adriana Karembou, the European Wonderbra model is cast as a bare-​breasted Amazon, overtly sexualized and aggressively defensive. Wearing only a torn and dishevelled skirt, the figure conveys the violence of the ‘Cinderella’ narrative. There is blood smeared on her forehead, hands and feet, significantly coming from wounds on her heel on one foot and the big toe on the other, referencing specifically the Grimms’ action played out by the ugly sisters. In this work, Cinderella and her sisters are combined, made one through their extreme commitment to beauty as a vehicle of social ­ascendancy. Rancinan emphasizes the theatricality of this work, as well as the sense of claustrophobia. Surrounding the central figure, suspended from the inverted walls or strewn about the floor, are numerous Barbie dolls. These small plastic figures echo the physical state of the young woman. Most are damaged in some way, either through loss of limb, decapitation, torn clothing, naked, or even morphed into fantastic shapes. The references to beauty are overt in this piece; what is more unexpected is the extreme violence that is apparent, yet this matches the Grimm version. Rancinan’s use of tortured (white) Barbie dolls adds a darkly humorous twist.

3 ‘Trans Fashion Lab_​Pink Exhibition’, 080 Barcelona Fashion. Viewed on 13 April 2016, http://​ www.080barcelonafashion.cat/​en/​activitats-​paral-​leles/​febrer16/​trans-​fashion-​labpink-​ exhibition. 4 Gérard Rancinan is a French photographer. Through his fine art photography, he examines contemporary beliefs and how these play out in culture, politics and society.

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Conclusion

Beauty, and by implication ideal femininity, is a perception, a set of physical conditions that meet a historically and culturally arrived at consensus. Yet it is a construct upon which social value is contingent and constantly shifting, especially in the Western world. Beauty is a product of a dominant ideological belief; in the Euro-​American model, that belief is predominantly patriarchal. In relation to fairy tales, the embedded values of beauty are critiqued and revealed to be constructions dependent on cultural convention and used as a method of social control. Without intervention, fairy tales are active in perpetuating ideal (or, in fact, non-​ideal) normative beauty standards. As Laura Mulvey argues, the psychological process of viewing a fictional character acts on the ego libido as a form of recognition (18–​19). The contemporary and radical artists discussed in this chapter who deal with fairy-​tale beauty employ a variety of methods, but have in common deconstruction, parody, and intervention techniques. These are necessary to interrupt and expose the seemingly innocent emphasis Western society places on physical appearance. Moreover, the methods utilized reveal the conscious construction and reproductive nature of beauty in fairy tales, and, in turn, how these are fed back into society as normative ideals. These ideals are, however, prejudiced, exclusionist, subject to fashionable trends and contingent on a predominant set of ideological standards.

Works Cited

Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment:  The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. London: Penguin, 1976. Butler, Judith. ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory’. Theatre Journal, vol. 40 no. 4 (December 1988): 519–​531. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. Oxon: Routledge, 2006. Mulvey, Laura. Visual and Other Pleasure (2nd ed.). Basingstoke:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Reckitt, Helena and Phelan, Peggy. Art and Feminism. London: Phaidon, 2001.

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Empowered Fairy-​Tale Heroines Reinvent Happily-​Ever-​After Lisa L. Ortiz and Sheila M. Rucki Abstract Traditional folk and fairy tales have been a barometer defining social values, behavioral norms, gender roles, and preconceived constructs of happiness. Through fairy tales, young children learn about their social and cultural heritage and build cultural capital (Smith 426). The fairy-​tale discourse was also intended to socialize children by modeling gender-​specific identities and behaviors (Haase, Critical Approaches 24). Walt Disney’s recreation of the sanitized fairy tale indoctrinated children early with blooming flowers, anthropomorphized wildlife and dainty female lead characters. A virtuous girl’s happy-​ending is provided externally: either a handsome prince or a generous fairy rewards beauty and obedience above all. This chapter illustrates two contemporary examples of female fairy-​tale characters rebooting their storyline, battling individual villains, rescuing themselves, and forging their own path towards liberation and happiness. The media analysis and discussion reflect a growth of gender equality in Western society, a re-​examination of traditional beauty standards, and the ongoing emancipation of the fairy-​tale heroine.

Keywords fairy tales –​Brothers Grimm –​Snow White –​Princess Fiona –​feminism

1

Introduction

Our first case study examines the literary character Snow White and the transformations she goes through, coming into the modern age. She was first introduced by the Grimm brothers in the early 1800s as an innocent child victimized by her mother. Over the course of 200 years, Snow White has morphed into a stealth warrior queen on the big screen played by Kristen Stewart in Snow White and the Huntsman (Rupert Sanders, 2012). Our second case study

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features a contemporary fairy-​tale heroine, Princess Fiona (voiced by Cameron Diaz), who transforms from the archetypal maiden in the tower (Smith 425) in Shrek (2001), to empowered heroine inspiring change in several Disney princesses in Shrek the Third (2007). Princess Fiona is also the only ‘fairy tale princess’ we see juggle motherhood, marriage, and adult friendships while saving kingdoms. The first edition of volumes i and ii of the Kinder-​und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Tales), was published in 1812/​1815 and contains the original stories collected by folklorists Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm. This early collection of stories evolved from the oral traditions of European peasants, craftsmen, ministers, teachers, middle-​class women and aristocrats as well as existing literary sources (Zipes, “Foreword” xxxiv; Haase, Critical Approaches 23). Primary contributors to the story collection were also German spinners, women who gathered communally to spin fleece and share the oral traditions of their region (Neikirk 38) as a means of entertainment and bonding. The six subsequent editions of Kinder-​und Hausmärchen resulted in progressively more embellished and often sanitized revisions of the stories. The seventh and final edition, published in 1857, was considered the definitive work. The editorial interventions and rewrites by Wilhelm Grimm over the years made the collection more appealing to a larger audience, including parents and children, downplaying overt cruelty and eliminating potentially offensive tales, reflecting compatible views of a German bourgeois audience (Zipes, “Foreword” xxxi; Smith 424; Haase, Critical Approaches 24). Ideological control is significant when it comes to young children’s literature because dominant, generally male voices reinforce and naturalize views into the mainstream (Smith 426). The commercially successful updates to the stories continued to perpetuate the Christian, patriarchal values of nineteenth-​century Germanic culture (Haase, New Approaches 10; Neikirk 38; Zipes, “Foreword” xxxi) and represented the puritanical ideology and artistic preferences of the Brothers Grimm (Zipes, “Foreword” xxxvii). For example, in the stories of both ‘Snow White’ and ‘Hansel and Gretel’, the biological mother is the one abusing and abandoning her children. By the 1819 revision, the biological mother was replaced with an evil stepmother, reflecting the Grimm’s personal feelings holding motherhood sacred (Zipes, “Foreword” xxxviii). Fairy-​tale scholars have also examined the Grimm’s polarized view of women including variations of the demonizing older woman, evil queen, unloving mother figure competing with the young, virginal and obedient daughter figure (Haase, Critical Approaches 26). The classic story of ‘Snow White’ checks several of these gender-​ conforming boxes.

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Snow White’s Innocence becomes Empowerment

The discourse of Snow White, persecuted for her youth and beauty, has been retold and re-​enacted countless times through the generations, in virtually every media format for a multitude of audiences. Underlying themes expose universal human conditions present in every culture and time period, ranging from innocence and virtue, vanity, aging, jealousy, patriarchal control, and elusive beauty standards to the complex relationships between women, specifically mothers and daughters (Zipes, The Enchanted Screen 119). This brief discussion will be limited to three milestone adaptations of ‘Snow White’: the inaugural story published by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Walt Disney’s first animated feature film, and a modernized cinematic remake by Universal Pictures. Each chronological example shows Snow White aging more into the foreground of her narrative, rivalling in importance the seductive relationship between the archetypal evil queen and her patriarchal magic mirror, which has been researched at length. With each retelling, Snow White increasingly becomes more emancipated as audiences continue to expect fairy tales to reflect current cultural norms including feminism, gender politics, and shifting values. The original tale of ‘Little Snow White’ was included in the Grimm’s 1812 first edition of Kinder-​und Hausmärchen. This literary version is the most gruesome and emphasizes the cruel narcissism of Snow White’s birth mother, who out of jealousy of her daughter’s emerging beauty summons a huntsman to murder the child when she is just seven years old. The queen’s plot to murder princess Snow White continues throughout the story: ‘Take the child out into the forest to a spot far from here. Then stab her to death and bring me back her lungs and liver as proof of your deed. After that I’ll cook them with salt and eat them’, the queen tells the huntsman (Grimm and Grimm 171). The huntsman showing mercy for the young girl releases her in the forest and delivers the organs of a wild boar to the evil queen. Meanwhile, a group of working-​class dwarfs offer Snow White safety in exchange for her domestic servitude: ‘If you’ll keep house for us, cook, sew, make the beds, wash, and knit … you can stay with us and we’ll provide you with everything you need. When we come home in the evening, dinner must be ready’ (173). Obsessed with the beauty rhetoric of her magic mirror, the evil queen continues to attempt to murder Snow White. With the third attempt, Snow White succumbs to a poisoned apple. Believing Snow White is dead, the dwarfs display her lifeless body in a glass coffin. A prince passing through the region falls in love with Snow White on sight and begs the dwarfs to sell him the coffin with the dead child inside, ‘because he couldn’t live without gazing upon her, and he would honour her and hold her in high regard as his most beloved in the world’ (177). Rather than sell Snow

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White to the prince, the dwarfs give her away, pitying the prince’s obsession with the girl. Falling in love with a dead child is accepted as natural. While in the prince’s possession, Snow While is jostled by one of the prince’s servants and the poisoned apple piece releases from her throat, breaking the curse and waking her. Upon waking, the child Snow White agrees to marry the prince the next day. At the story’s conclusion, the evil queen attends Snow White’s wedding to the prince and is forced to dance in red-​hot, iron shoes until she is burned to death (178). The second pivotal example of the ‘Snow White’ legacy is Walt Disney’s first, feature-​length animated film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), produced specifically for children and families. This breakthrough film set the visual standard for what we will forever symbolize as Snow White, the first and youngest Disney Princess with her iconic short black hairdo with a red bow, and her dress with the blue bodice and flowing yellow skirt. Disney recreated the discourse of ‘Snow White’ into a “sentimental love story and musical promoting industriousness and innocence” (Zipes, The Enchanted Screen 121). In this animated version, the evil queen is also introduced as Snow White’s stepmother. Snow White herself has been aged from a seven-​year-​old child to a young preteen girl. This Snow White participates in the storyline, by talking and singing her way through the narrative, rather than portraying the obedient child-​decoration from the inaugural Grimm version. The story introduces Snow White while she is singing into a well, ‘wishing for the one I love, to find me today’ (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs). It is evident that she already understands that her main purpose is to secure a husband. She later sings her iconic anthem, ‘Someday, my prince will come …’ and while cleaning the dwarf’s cottage, she sings, ‘whistle while you work’ (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs). Throughout the tale, we see Snow White dependent on the animals in the forest to rescue her after the huntsman releases her. Then we see her serve the benevolent dwarfs who take her in, reinforcing the expectation of domestic role of females. The prince falls in love with Snow White while she is still alive, eliminating the previous overtones of necrophilia presented in the earlier Grimm rendition (Joosen 10). Finally, we see Snow White ride into the proverbial sunset with her prince, a thematic ending presented in most fairy tales. By contrast, the latest large screen adaptation is the live-​action Hollywood blockbuster, Snow White and the Huntsman (2012). Sharing the lead role with the evil queen and the huntsman, this Snow White displays a depth of character and fierce determination never previously explored onscreen. Again, Snow White has been aged several more years and ‘was adored throughout the kingdom for her defiant spirit, as well as her beauty’ (Snow White and the Huntsman). After the treasonous murder of her father the king, her new stepmother

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the evil queen Ravenna imprisons Snow White. When circumstances allow, Snow White rescues herself and escapes the castle. She later befriends the huntsman, who has been hired by the evil queen to murder her. Like previous Snow Whites before her, she observes and communicates with birds, animals and beasts, although not through song. Her list of allies grows to include the huntsman, the dwarfs and a childhood friend who happens to be Prince William from the next kingdom. Snow White transforms from a young teen prisoner to a leader, fighting like a warrior and saving local villagers, as well as the huntsman along the way. Visually, this Snow White evolves from a young girl in a lace-​trimmed dress in well-​lit royal settings, to an armoured Joan of Arc lookalike in dark and grungy settings. Interestingly, when Snow White finally succumbs to the long-​established curse of the poisoned apple, it is the kiss of the huntsman, rather than the Prince, that breaks the curse and wakens her. The seven dwarfs, while included in the film’s plot, fulfil a minimal role of comic relief and familiarity to the original story. The film concludes with Snow White killing the evil queen and regaining the crown of her kingdom. The film’s writer and director chose not to end the film with Snow White marrying either the huntsman or the prince, for ‘this Snow White has to remain a lone heroine, a role model for the independent woman –​at times in full armour’ (Warner 169). The most contemporary film adaptation of ‘Snow White’ thus reveals a liberated young woman, free to construct her own happily-​ever-​after, without riding with any prince into any sunset. 3

Princess Fiona Redefines Beauty Standards

DreamWorks Studio broke the fairy-​tale mould with the animated film Shrek in 2001. The Shrek franchise is a twenty-​first-​century mash up of numerous traditional fairy-​tale characters interwoven into fresh experiences by clever writing and impressive animation. Using upside-​down storytelling conventions, directors Adamson and Jenson challenged each main character’s archetype –​the Hero, the Villain, the comedic Sidekick, and of course the Beautiful Princess. As with ‘Snow White’, the characters of Shrek also began in a book. However, the unnamed princess in William Steig’s Shrek! was even uglier than Shrek. In the original book, a witch tells Shrek, ‘A donkey takes you to a knight. Him you conquer in a fight. Then you wed a princess who –​is even uglier than you’ (Steig n.p.). When Steig’s Shrek meets Donkey, they discuss the journey and Donkey confirms, ‘… to the nutty knight, who guards the entrance, to the crazy castle, where the repulsive princess waits’ (Steig n.p.).

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This chapter will limit the discussion to the evolution of Princess Fiona as reimagined in the DreamWorks film franchise. ‘The story is about self-​acceptance and that things aren’t always as they appear’, says Vicky Jenson on the dvd’s director’s commentary track, ‘we definitely turn the concept of beauty on its ear, which I think is a powerful theme’ (Shrek, Director’s Commentary). The series protagonist Shrek, is a cranky green ogre, tasked with rescuing the damsel in distress to save his beloved swamp. The beautiful Princess Fiona is imprisoned by a fire-​breathing dragon in a tower far, far away. When we first meet Fiona, she appears to be a cliched meld of Sleeping Beauty and Snow White –​beautiful and petite, sleeping on a pedestal holding a bouquet of flowers, patiently awaiting her rescue. It should also be noted that Princess Fiona is an adult woman; she is not a prepubescent child or teenager as are most female protagonists in fairy tales. Fiona’s demeanour and language illustrates her expectation of the traditional beautiful princess being rescued by the handsome prince, including offering Shrek her dainty handkerchief as a reward. As the film progresses, we learn that Princess Fiona has a sharp wit and is a superhero martial artist who rescues Shrek and their Donkey sidekick more than once. She single-​handedly beats up Robin Hood and six of his Merry Men, to which Shrek replies impressed, ‘Hold the phone …’ (Shrek). Fiona is no damsel in distress; she has agency and determination. Throughout their animated antics, Shrek and Fiona fall in love. Fiona also has a secret: she is under a witch’s spell rendering her an ogress after sundown. She explains to Donkey that she needs ‘true love’s first kiss to take love’s true form’ (Shrek). At the end of the first film, Fiona’s secret is finally revealed to Shrek, they kiss and the curse of conventional beauty is finally broken. Director Vicky Jenson confirms that Fiona was ‘born an ogress with a “pretty” curse on her’ (Shrek, Director’s Commentary). Fiona remains a chubby, green, ogress throughout the remaining films and is still referred to as ‘Princess’ by Donkey, among others. At no point does Fiona appear distraught over her green, ogress appearance; rather she displays modern-​day body confidence. Fiona is the epitome of a contemporary fairy-​tale heroine: she is smart, resourceful and in control of her destiny. Over the course of the numerous Shrek films, Fiona consistently forges her own destiny. She stands up to her controlling father, the King who does not like Shrek, numerous times throughout the films. In Shrek 2 (2004), Fiona and Shrek are both temporarily transformed into conventionally beautiful human forms after drinking Happily Ever After potion. Given the choice to make the change permanent, Fiona determines that she and Shrek will return to their more comfortable ogre selves and remain in their swamp. In Shrek the Third (2007), Fiona finds herself acting as temporary queen of Far, Far Away, when her father the King takes ill. The story’s antagonist Prince Charming

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invades the land with the intention of taking the kingdom and imprisons Fiona and her mother. Fiona, pregnant with triplets, organizes and trains the more traditional Disney princesses, to fight back in rebellion. She gives an impassioned speech about not waiting for rescue and encourages the other princesses to be independent. Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and an unknown transgender stepsister, all join Fiona and her mother in escaping prison, rescuing the male characters, and ultimately saving the kingdom from the evil Prince Charming. It is clear throughout the film series that Fiona is determined to maintain her autonomy and face her challenges with a sense of humour. 4

Conclusion

By examining the literary evolution and media interpretations of Snow White, as well as the introduction of Princess Fiona, this chapter demonstrates how the fairy-​tale princess trope continues to reflect the ever-​changing values of its audience. Specifically, the cultural effects of feminism have liberated some classic fairy-​tale heroines and introduced independent new ones. Contemporary values of equality, intelligence, determination, assertiveness, and physical fitness are replacing previous patriarchal ideologies of women including passive obedience, fragility, silence, youth, and unrelenting beauty. In current Western society, the status of hegemonic masculinity has slowly become open to challenge (Smith 427), and through entertainment media geared toward children and young adults, traditional gender roles and beauty standards are being challenged and subverted. The fairy tale, as a storytelling device, can either reinforce, challenge, or recreate gender roles, beauty standards, and behavioural norms for audiences. The current message of female empowerment is very clear, whether the delivery is the soft-​edges and family-​friendly, animated comedy of the Shrek series, or the dark and gritty, live-​action drama of Show White and the Huntsman (2012). However, further emancipation of fairy-​tale heroines is still needed. Even today, Cinderella is still trapped in a metaphorical glass slipper somewhere waiting for some handsome prince to rescue her from her own life. Maybe, Snow White and Princess Fiona should organize a rescue party.

Works Cited

Grimm, Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm. The Complete First Edition –​The Original Folk & Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm. Jack Zipes (ed. and trans.). New Jersey: Princeton UP, 2014.

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Haase, Donald. ‘Feminist Fairy Tale Scholarship: A Critical Survey and Bibliography’. Marvels & Tales 14, no. 1 Fairy Tale Liberation –​Thirty Years Later (2000): 15–​63. Haase, Donald. ‘Feminist Fairy Tale Scholarship’. Fairy Tales and Feminism:  New Approaches, Donald Haase (ed.). Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2004. 1–​36. Joosen, Vanessa. ‘Feminist Criticism and the Fairy-​Tale –​The Emancipation of “Snow White” in Fairy-​Tale Criticism and Fairy-​Tale Retellings’. New Review of Children’s Literature and Librarianship 10:1, (2006): 5–​14. Neikirk, Alice. ‘ “… Happily Ever After” (or What Fairytales Teach Girls About Being Women)’. HoHoNu –​Journal of Academic Writing 7 (2009): 38–​42. Smith, Angela. ‘Letting down Rapunzel:  Feminism’s Effect on Fairy Tales’. Children’s Literature in Education 46 (2015): 424–​437. Shrek. Dirs. Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson. usa. 2001. Shrek. Director’s Commentary. Dirs. Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson. Shrek dvd, commentary track enabled. usa. 2001. Shrek 2. Dir. Andrew Adamson. usa. 2004. Shrek the Third. Dirs. Chris Miller and Raman Hui. usa. 2007. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Dir. Walt Disney. usa. 1937. Snow White and the Huntsman. Dir. Rupert Sanders. usa. 2012. Steig, William. Shrek!. New York: Farrar, 1990. Warner, Marina. Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale. United Kingdom: Oxford UP, 2014. Zipes, Jack. The Enchanted Screen:  The Unknown History of Fairy Tale Films. New York: Routledge, 2011. Zipes, Jack. The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre. New Jersey: Princeton UP, 2012. Zipes, Jack. ‘Foreword’. The Complete First Edition –​The Original Folk & Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm. Jack Zipes (ed. and trans.). New Jersey: Princeton UP, 2014.

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The Strongest of the Fairies: Reworking Gender and Villainy in Walt Disney’s Maleficent Lydia Brugué and Auba Llompart Abstract In keeping with feminist critiques of the representation of women as evil, together with a growing tendency to humanize villains and give them psychological complexity, some recent adaptations of fairy tales—​both literary and cinematic—​retell the stories from the point of view of the female villain. The reworking of this fairy-​tale character is most patent in the case of ‘Sleeping Beauty’, whose villainess has evolved from nameless character in Charles Perrault’s ‘Sleeping Beauty in the Woods’ (1697) to title character in Walt Disney’s 2014 film Maleficent. The purpose of this chapter is to examine Disney’s characterization of the evil fairy in both the 1959 and the 2014 adaptations, as well as the ideological shift between both versions. We examine how, in an attempt to satisfy the expectations of modern audiences who demand more complex and positive female characters, in Maleficent Disney revises its own previous adaptation of ‘Sleeping Beauty’, which polarized women into virtuous but passive, and active but evil. On the other hand, we also argue that this new revision of the evil fairy is not without its problems, for it seems to be part of a trend that might be leading us towards undesirable justifications of villainy in fiction for the young.

Keywords Walt Disney –​Maleficent –​gender –​fairy tales –​film adaptation –​Sleeping Beauty

1

Introduction

The tale of ‘Sleeping Beauty’ has been retold multiple times in both film and literature, and in recent retellings, the female villain has undergone transformations that exemplify a cultural shift in audiences’ expectations of how women are represented in fiction. In fact, from Charles Perrault’s nameless villainess to Walt Disney’s fully fleshed-​out Maleficent (played by Angelina Jolie), it

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can be affirmed that this character has suffered even more alterations than Sleeping Beauty herself. This chapter examines how Disney’s 2014 film Maleficent, written by Linda Woolverton and directed by Robert Stromberg, revises and rewrites the female antagonism of the classic fairy tale, turning the evil fairy into the protagonist of the story and Sleeping Beauty’s helper, thus doing away with her previous role as opponent, emphasized in older versions of the tale, especially in Disney’s 1959 adaptation. We therefore aim to look into how Disney rewrites their own previous version of this highly popular fairy tale, in an effort to please contemporary audiences with a film in which female characters start out as enemies, but evolve to become allies. In recent years, Disney has released numerous live-​action films that reimagine classic stories and revisit older fairy-​tale films made by the company, as is the case with Maleficent, Into the Woods (2014), Cinderella (2015) or Beauty and the Beast (2017). This is giving Disney the opportunity to rework these stories and update them for contemporary audiences. Present-​day viewers, particularly adults, clearly expect a more critical and complex representation of actions and characters, at the same time that they do not want to lose classic fairy-​ tale elements and expect to detect some similarities between the old and the new versions. What is more, castles, battles, swords and magnificent dresses continue to be sought out by audiences, who still want to enter daydream and wonderful places. As Elena di Giovanni points out, ‘Disney’s microcosm offers a clever balance between realism and fantasy, novelty and standardization, up-​ to-​date as well as timeless references, thus appealing to young but also adult viewers in every corner of the earth’ (207). We argue that this is precisely what Maleficent does: it takes us back to the ‘Sleeping Beauty’ story that audiences know and love, but with a modern, adult twist. In addition to Disney’s new trend of reworking their own fairy-​tale films, Maleficent is also the result of a growing interest in rewriting fairy tales from the villain’s point of view and complicating the villain/​hero(ine) statuses, as happens in Gregory Maguire’s novels Wicked (1995) and Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister (1999), or in abc and Disney’s television show Once Upon a Time (2011–​2018), just to mention a few. As Claudia Schwabe points out, ‘there is a growing trend in American popular culture that moves toward the celebration and exaltation of fantastic Otherness, the anthropomorphization of and identification with supernatural beings, and the rehabilitation of classic fairy-​tale villains and monsters’ (n.p.). In this chapter, we concentrate on Maleficent’s characterization and how a backstory for the character is provided in order to explain away her villainy and emphasize that villains are not born, but made. Moreover, the idea that Disney filmmakers try to break with negative representations of female power and emphasize female bonding (Crosby; Aranjuez; Torres Begines) is also taken

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into consideration. Last but not least, this paper also interrogates the extent to which this fairy-​tale retelling truly provides an empowering reworking of the female protagonist and a desirable representation of villainy. 2

Transformations of an Evil Fairy

In The Hard Facts of the Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Maria Tatar states that There are three types of ogres in [the Grimm’s] Nursery and Household Tales. The first comprises beasts and monsters […]. The second group consists of social deviants […]. The third (and this group easily outnumbers the members of both other categories) is composed of women. These are the various cooks, stepmothers, witches, and mothers-​in-​law with voracious appetites for human fare, sometimes even for the flesh and blood or for the liver and heart of their own relatives. (139) In the case of ‘Sleeping Beauty’, and particularly in its three best-​known versions (Giambattista Basile’s, Charles Perrault’s and the Brothers Grimm’s), the main characters’ opponents are indeed women:  a jealous queen in Basile’s ‘Sun, Moon and Talia’ (1634); an evil fairy and an ogress in Perrault’s ‘Sleeping Beauty in the Woods’ (1697); and an evil wise woman in the Brothers Grimm’s ‘Briar Rose’ (1812). In all these different variants, the female villain is a secondary character. In fact, the evil fairy that casts the curse does not even appear in Basile’s version. Instead, the fact that Talia will fall into a deep sleep as a result of a splinter of flax going underneath her fingernail is predicted by a group of wise men after casting her horoscope. It is presented, thus, as a prophecy, not as a curse. Female villainy, however, is still present in the tale under the figure of the evil, jealous queen that attempts to kill Talia and her children when she finds out that her husband the King is infatuated with her. In Perrault and the Grimms, on the other hand, the evil fairy is introduced, but her only purpose is to utter the curse that will unleash subsequent events. After the baby princess’s christening, she disappears and is never mentioned again. She is not even punished for her evil deeds. It was in Pyotr Iliych Tchaikovsky’s ballet, which premiered in St. Petersburg in 1890, that this character was given a name—​Carabosse—​for the first time, as well as a more prominent role in the plot. Significantly, unlike its fairy-​tale precedents, Carabosse is punished in the end. Drawing heavily on the ‘Sleeping Beauty’ ballet, in Walt Disney’s 1959 adaptation, Carabosse becomes Maleficent, who possesses all the conventional

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characteristics of a Gothic villain: she is clad in dark robes; she is an outcast living in a dark ruined castle; she has demonic powers; and just like Carabosse, she is duly defeated and punished in the end. This final eradication of evil is, according to Bruno Bettelheim, a necessary ingredient in fairy tales: The happy ending requires that the evil principle be appropriately punished and done away with; only then can the good, and with it happiness, prevail. In Perrault, as in Basile, the evil principle is done away with.1 But the Brothers Grimm’s version [of ‘Sleeping Beauty’] […] is deficient because the evil fairy is not punished. (230) Bettelheim is not the first to highlight the importance of the happy ending in fairy tales. In his essay ‘On Fairy Stories’ (first published in 1947), J.R.R. Tolkien already claimed that ‘all complete fairy-​stories must have it’ (75), and this is a convention that Disney complies with in all his children’s films. The 1959 adaptation of ‘Sleeping Beauty’ recovers this eradication of the evil principle, absent in the Grimms, so that the joy of the happy ending can be properly delivered. Yet, this has other effects on the story that cannot be overlooked. On the one hand, it strengthens the moralizing dimension of fairy tales and children’s fiction and, on the other, since the evil principle is embodied by a woman, it inevitably reinforces and perpetuates the sexual stereotyping and the misogyny that some critics have identified in the fairy-​tale tradition that often represents female characters as rivals or enemies, as is the case of Maleficent and Aurora (Elle Fanning). As Shuli Barzilai affirms, ‘This motif of intra-​female hostilities carries over into the canonical versions [of ‘Sleeping Beauty’]. Unlike male aggression, a need to elide it never seems to arise’ (64). By ‘male aggression’, Barzilai refers to the rape scene in the episode of Zellandine and Troylus in Perceforest that is later reproduced in ‘Sun, Moon and Talia’,2 which did not make it to either Perrault’s or the Grimm’s retellings, not to mention Disney’s. Thus, while the negative representation of Sleeping Beauty’s prince has been mitigated in canonical versions of the tale, female villainy and rivalry have been preserved. This is precisely the aspect of the story that Maleficent seems intent on revising. 1 In Perrault’s version, the villainous character that is done away with is the prince’s mother, the ogress who threatens to devour Sleeping Beauty and her children. The fairy who cast the curse, on the other hand, is never punished. Similarly, Basile does away with the evil queen. 2 In Basile’s version, Talia is not woken up by a prince’s true love’s kiss, but she is raped while she sleeps by the King. As a result, she gives birth to two children that wake her up as they suck on her finger.

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‘The Story Is Not Quite as You Were Told’

The representation of women in Walt Disney’s classic children’s films has been largely criticized. Jack Zipes, for example, points out how ‘The Disney films repeatedly tend to demonize older women and infantilize young women’ (214), and this is one of the aspects that Maleficent, in line with other recent Disney films, attempts to revise. This modern retelling of ‘Sleeping Beauty’ opens with a woman’s narrative voice addressing an imaginary audience: ‘Let us tell you an old story new, and we’ll see how well you know it’, she states. With these opening lines, the film not only alludes to its folktale precedent and the oral tradition to which it belongs, but it also clarifies that this time the story will be told from a female character’s point of view. In the end we find out that this narrative voice belongs, not to Maleficent as we may assume, but to Aurora, who claims that ‘The story is not quite as you were told. And I should know, for I was the one they called “Sleeping Beauty” ’. The fact that it is Aurora who tells Maleficent’s story and not Maleficent herself is one of the elements that have led film critic Monika Bartyzel to mistrust the film’s pretence of progressiveness, as ‘[Maleficent’s] story is limited by the parametres set by the conventional ‘Sleeping Beauty’ tale […] because—​despite the films’s title—​Maleficent’s story is not her own after all. It is still Princess Aurora’s’ (online). Nonetheless, Linda Woolverton’s reimagining of this classic fairy tale still places emphasis on showing that Maleficent’s story has always been told from masculine points of view and that the film attempts to revise this. At this point, it should be highlighted that the number of women working as screenwriters or directors is higher than decades ago. As Crosby states, ‘For example, Brave has a writer/​director Brenda Chapman (who later left the project), one of Frozen’s directors is Jennifer Lee, and Maleficent’s screenplay writer is Linda Woolverton’ (97). Thus, their participation in the production of films may be partly responsible for the forging of new interrelations between female characters. In fact, most of the recent princess films released by Disney try to show how princesses become active heroines. This is the case of Merida in Brave (2012), the Scottish princess whose mother is not proud of her at the beginning, because of her tomboyish behaviour. Besides, there is no male hero in this film, as the main characters are Merida and the Queen. Something similar happens in Frozen (2013), where Princess Anna does not turn out to be as delicate and sweet as other previous Disney princesses, and she becomes the heroine that tries to save her sister Elsa. In both cases, as in Maleficent, there is emphasis on the relationship between two female family members—​ mother-​daughter, sister-​sister, and fairy godmother-​princess—​rather than on heterosexual romantic love.

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Moving back to Maleficent, in line with a contemporary tendency to sentimentalize villains and complicate the roles of hero(ine)/​victim and villain, Maleficent’s cursing Aurora in Woolverton’s script is motivated, not just by not being invited to the christening, but by a different kind of offence: in the past, Maleficent fell in love with Aurora’s father, King Stefan (Sharlto Copley), who not only broke her heart, but also cut off and stole her wings, leaving her mutilated and powerless. Maleficent, however, soon regrets what she has done and becomes Aurora’s protector, eventually developing motherly feelings for the young girl and taking on the role of the fairy godmother. It is therefore only through motherhood that the evil fairy redeems herself (Schwabe). The focus in the story thus shifts from heterosexual romantic love to maternal love, and from sexual awakening to reconciliation between the two female characters. In fact, Aurora’s love story with Prince Philip (Brenton Thwaites) is granted very little attention and very little screen time, and it is altogether forgotten when Philip’s kiss does not succeed in waking Aurora. Villainy, on the other hand, is attributed, not to a female character, but to a man, Stefan, thus bringing the male aggression mentioned by Barzilai back into the story. What is more, both Bartyzel and Schwabe metaphorically read the scene in which Stefan drugs Maleficent and cuts off her wings as a rape scene and, in turn, Maleficent’s evil act of cursing Aurora as ‘a rape revenge fantasy’ (Bartyzel). If we adhere to this metaphorical reading of Stefan’s aggression, Maleficent could also work as a response to Basile’s text in which Talia is raped by the King, who gets away with it. Maleficent is described in the film as being ‘both hero and villain’: she does commit an act of villainy when she curses Aurora, but this is justified by Stefan’s treason, and Maleficent herself is redeemed by her repentance. As Aranjuez puts it, Maleficent’s backstory and the circumstances in which she cast the curse don’t mitigate the severity of her ‘evil’ act towards Aurora. But, in giving us the considerations that had informed her decision-​making, Maleficent shifts its conception of evil from one that is intrinsic to a person and into something that is precipitated by events in a person’s life […] the film emphasizes that it is not Maleficent herself, but rather how she chooses to act, that is evil. (14) However, we believe that by complicating the victim/​abuser status in contemporary retellings of fairy tales, we might also be blurring the boundaries between good and evil that had been so clearly and firmly established—​perhaps for good reason—​by traditional fairy tales. As Bettelheim stresses, ‘The figures

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in fairy tales are not ambivalent—​not good and bad at the same time, as we all are in reality. But since polarization dominates the child’s mind, it also dominates fairy tales’ (9). It could be argued that contemporary fairy tales like Maleficent are aimed at older children that might already be capable of grasping more complex and nuanced characters. However, the fact that Maleficent is a development of the archetypal evil fairy of older versions and that audiences expect to recognize traits of the classical character on which Maleficent is based complicates matters. For one thing, filmmakers opted for having her commit the very same act of villainy as her predecessors and, curiously, they also chose to preserve her 1959 name. One might ask why the 2014 character is still called ‘Maleficent’ in the first place if she is not an embodiment of pure, intrinsic evil as her 1959 counterpart was. Thus, introducing a backstory for her and showing that, in the past, she suffered, too, might not be enough to make her character plausible and reach a more satisfying representation of powerful female characters. Furthermore, as Torres Begines puts it, referring to Maleficent and Once Upon a Time, the constant need to provide explanations for villainous characters’ behaviour might be leading us to undesirable justifications of villainy (51). According to Torres Begines, evil in children’s fiction has a didactic purpose which is teaching children to avoid and keep away from people who might do them harm (51), and we may not be doing them a favour by sending them the message that a person’s tragic past can justify their evil acts. 4

Conclusions

Maleficent is an example of contemporary fairy-​tale retelling that revises the portrayal of gender and villainy found both in classical versions of ‘Sleeping Beauty’ and in Disney’s own 1959 adaptation, in an attempt to respond to the needs of our times. We have seen how, with Maleficent, Disney seems to be pursuing a two-​fold ideological and marketing agenda: on the one hand, they provide a more complex psychological portrayal of villainy, as opposed to the archetypal villains of fairy tales that simply embody pure evil and no sympathy is attributed to them. This is achieved by means of giving the villain, in this case the evil fairy from ‘Sleeping Beauty’, a backstory as well as the opportunity to repent and redeem herself by becoming Aurora’s protector. On the other hand, this film also gives Disney the chance to revise the old-​fashioned representation of gender roles of their 1959 adaptation of the tale and rework it, not only to appeal to modern audiences by retelling a beloved old story differently, with popular actors and actresses and modern technology, but also to show them that advances in feminism are being taken into consideration by the company.

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In 2014, Maleficent is no longer the female villain that curses another woman and has to be destroyed by a male character. On the contrary, she is turned into Aurora’s godmother, her protector and her friend, and it is her true love’s kiss that finally wakes the Sleeping Beauty, not the Prince’s, thus emphasizing the importance of female bonding and cooperation. Yet, although the effort to modernize stories and characters is certainly there, Disney screenwriters and filmmakers still seem to be struggling to create new powerful female characters without falling into undesirable justifications of their evil deeds, mere reversals of gender roles, or typecasting women as maternal figures. For all the reasons discussed throughout this chapter, we believe that whether Maleficent is a successful attempt to portray female characters in a more positive light or not is largely debatable. One could ask if such an act of villainy—​cursing a baby because of what her father did—​can ever be justified, and if this pessimism over men and women’s incapability to form successful alliances is a healthy view of gender roles and relationships to pass on to younger generations.

Works Cited

Aranjuez, Adolfo. ‘A Different Shade of Evil: Questions of Ethics in Maleficent’. Screen Education, 76 (2015): 8–​17. Bartyzel, Monika. ‘Girls on Film:  Maleficent is less progressive than 1959’s Sleeping Beauty’. The Week, 13 June 2019, https://​theweek.com/​articles/​446342/​girls-​film-​ maleficent-​less-​progressive-​than-​1959s-​sleeping-​beauty. Barzilai, Shuli. ‘While Beauty Sleeps: The Poetics of Male Violence in Perceforest and Almodóvar’s Talk to Her’. The Cambridge Companion to Fairy Tales, Maria Tatar (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015. 60–​78. Basile, Giambattista. ‘Sun, Moon and Talia’. The Pentamerone. Project Gutenberg, 1 February 2016, https://​www.gutenberg.org/​files/​2198/​2198-​h/​2198-​h.htm. Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment:  The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. London & New York: Penguin Books, 1991. Crosby, Sarah Chase. ‘Letting gendered spaces go: striving toward gender and nature balance through bonding in Disney’s Frozen and Maleficent’. Graduate Theses and Dissertations. 2016, https://​lib.dr.iastate.edu/​etd/​15162/​. di Giovanni, Elena. ‘Cultural Otherness and Global Communication in Walt Disney Films at the Turn of the Century’. The Translator 9.2 (2003): 207–​223. Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm. ‘Briar Rose’. Fairy Tales. Project Gutenberg, 1 February 2016, https://​www.gutenberg.org/​files/​2591/​2591-​h/​2591-​h.htm#link2H_​4_​0008. Maleficent. Dir. Robert Stromberg. United States of America. 2014.

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Perrault, Charles. ‘The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood’. Tales of Times Past. Project Gutenberg, 1 February 2016, https://​www.gutenberg.org/​files/​33511/​33511-​h/​33511-​h.htm. Schwabe, Claudia. Craving Supernatural Creatures: German Fairy-​Tale Figures in American Pop Culture. Detroit, Michigan: Wayne State UP, 2019. Kindle edition. Sleeping Beauty. Dir. Clyde Geronimi. United States of America 1959. Tatar, Maria. The Hard Facts of the Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003. Tolkien, J. R. R. ‘On Fairy Stories’. Tolkien: On Fairy Stories Expanded Edition, with Commentary and Notes, Verlyn Flieger and Douglas A. Anderson (ed.). London: HarperCollins Publishers, 2008. 27–​84. Torres Begines, Concepción. ‘Soy mala porque el mundo me ha hecho así: la evolución de las malvadas brujas—​madrastras de Blancanieves y La Bella Durmiente’. Espéculo, 55 (2015): 43–​51. Zipes, Jack. ‘Media-​hyping of Fairy Tales’. The Cambridge Companion to Fairy Tales, Maria Tatar (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015. 202–​219.

­c hapter 11

‘There’s Always a Bright Side’: Poppy, a Positive Role Model in Trolls Sara Martín Abstract DreamWorks’s animated children’s film Trolls (Mike Mitchell & Walt Dohrn, 2016) is a singular fairy tale, inspired by the Good Luck Trolls designed in 1950s Denmark by Thomas Dam. Trolls not only invents a fairy-​tale plot (with songs) for the popular dolls but also thoroughly re-​conceptualizes their original appearance. The central character, Princess Poppy is, indeed, cuteness personified. She is also one of the most positive, resilient female characters in recent cinema of any type. Her double mission of helping her depressed friend Branch to regain his true colors and of teaching the monstrous Bergens to enjoy happiness—​and stop eating her fellow trolls—​succeeds because Poppy is supremely confident that she can succeed. Her cheerfulness and optimism give Poppy a high value as a role model, especially because she aims at securing her community’s welfare rather than her personal fulfilment, unlike most fairy-​ tale ­princesses.

Keywords: fairy tale –​animated films –​children’s films –​cuteness –​happiness –​Trolls –​ Poppy

1

Trolls, a Happy Fairy Tale

‘This DreamWorks product’, Giesen sentences in reference to Trolls (2016), ‘is a pathetic mishmash. The characters are no real dramatis personae, they have no true personality. They are simply designed to make money hand over fist’ (168). It may be unwise, in view of this hostility, to praise directors Mike Mitchell and Walt Dohrn for their outstanding contribution to animated children’s cinema but this is my aim here. Giesen’s irritation is quite useful, actually, to explain why despite its popularity, confirmed by the ubiquitous merchandising

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | DOI:10.1163/9789004418998_013

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products,1 Trolls has failed to garner critical respectability. First, DreamWorks lacks Pixar’s prestige and has somehow always been considered a partly ineffective Disney spin-​off.2 Second, children’s films must be approached with a childlike spirit by adult viewers, which is clearly missing in Giesen’s averse judgement. Finally, films that do well at the box-​office, as Trolls did, also deserve critical respect, for all films, including modest indie productions, aim at financial success. These three factors—​the negative comparison with Pixar/​Disney, the dismissal of the plot as too maudlin, and the highlighting of the commercial features—​are present in most contemporaneous reviews. Slightly more benevolent than Giesen, Chang protests that whereas Disney/​Pixar’s Inside Out is ‘a moving, sophisticated’ call to convey ‘both sorrow and joy’, audiences may find Trolls ‘emotionally blunt and bullying by comparison’. He grants, nonetheless, that it is ‘hard to resist its silly, utopian vision of a world where happiness reigns, love wins and the mere sound of [Justin] Timberlake’s voice carries the promise of salvation’ (Chang online, my italics). Trolls is ‘a comedy adventure with music’ (Dohrn in Thompson online) which uses popular songs in key scenes (Cindy Lauper’s ‘True Colors’ plays a major role). Justin Timberlake was the executive musical producer, apart from voicing the main male character, Branch. He wrote for the end segment the Oscar-​award nominated hit song ‘Can’t Stop the Feeling’, which no doubt contributed to popularizing Trolls. Why this invitation to enjoy happiness has been received so ungraciously is an issue that deserves consideration, especially since, as Jack Zipes notes, ‘Fairy tales map out possible ways to attain happiness, to expose and resolve moral conflicts that have deep roots in our species’; this is where ‘their utopian appeal’ lies (1). Trolls certainly is a fairy tale intended to work as fairy tales do in Zipes’s description. Co-​director Mitchell has declared that he and Dohrn ‘like fairy tales’ (in Mendelson online) and their film must be read as one:  indeed, the first words audiences hear are ‘Once upon a time …’. Trolls, however, has been misread confusedly regarding its genre adscription because unlike most fairy-​tale films it is not an adaptation. In addition, although its central character Poppy (voiced by Anna Kendrick) is a princess, she is not human but a pink-​skinned, fuchsia-​haired troll. Chang is possibly right to connect her to Mike Leigh’s heroine Poppy (Sally Hawkins) in Happy-​Go-​Lucky (2008), a film with a similar 1 Trolls has also inspired the short film Trolls Holiday (2017) and the TV series Trolls: The Beat Goes On! (2018-​). The sequel Trolls World Tour will be released in 2020. 2 Jeffrey Katzenberg, founder and ceo of DreamWorks Animation, was the chairman of Walt Disney Studios from 1984 to 1994.

118 Martín message, rather than to any Disney princess. Poppy, however, cannot be read using the same critical parameters we use for girls and women, whether in animated or in live action films, which adds an extra layer of difficulty to the task of exploring (and endorsing) her characterization. Poppy is a relevant example, above all, of the great potential that non-​human characters in children’s fiction of all kinds have as role models. She and others like Judy Hopps in Zootopia (2016) or Anais Watterson in the Gumball series (2011-​)—​incidentally, both rabbits—​may be far more appealing female characters than any princess, yet they have been so far bypassed in academic criticism which, of course, is not written by the little girls (or boys) who do value them. This limitation cannot be possibly corrected but at least an invitation can be sent to approach Trolls with the open-​mindedness of its target audience. 2

Transforming the Original Trolls into the Film Trolls

Trolls is not alone in taking its inspiration from a toy instead of a text—​ franchises like Toy Story, Transformers and the Lego movies work on the same principle. The Good Luck Trolls on which this film is based connect, of course, with the trolls of Scandinavian folklore (see Lindow). Danish woodworker and fisherman Thomas Dam (1915–​1989) made the original doll in 1957 as the only birthday gift he could afford for his daughter Lila. Trolls are usually represented as spine-​chilling monsters but in Dam’s own local folklore they are creatures which can only be seen by children and bring good luck if hugged—​hence the open arms and the wide smile of his dolls. A Danish toy seller saw commercial potential in Dam’s figurines, and eventually they crossed the Atlantic to unleash a first craze which swept the usa between 1963 and 1964. The dolls, by then made in plastic rather than wood, fascinated college and high-​school girls because of their psychedelic look, particularly their brightly colored shock of hair. Sales mounted, being only second to Barbie’s (Mansour 497). The appeal of Dam’s trolls lay in their being ‘comically ugly and goofy in appearance’ (Mansour 498), rather than cute as most dolls are. Mitchell, among many others, calls them ‘ugly cute’ (in Alexander online) and with good reason, since they boldly cross aesthetic boundaries which might seem separate. Younger children learned to appreciate the unique appeal of the troll dolls as well, which generated new fads in the 1980s and 1990s. Some troll dolls are even valued collector items. Dam himself had plans for a movie with his trolls, using stop-​motion techniques. His family company, Dam Things, could not set this project in motion

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before his death (in 1989) because they were ‘tied up in efforts to stop imitators’ (Alexander online) until 2003, when they could finally reclaim their rights in the usa. In 2008 they contacted DreamWorks executive producer Dannie Festa and she was part of the 2013 deal by which the animation company bought the intellectual rights to the trolls, ‘with a clear eye toward a franchise’ (Alexander). Unlike Pixar/​Disney, DreamWorks delegates responsibility for each project to the directors, assuming the risk of having a less homogeneous studio style but also welcoming in this way innovation. In the case of Trolls, the two directors and their team found themselves with no ‘back story’ and no ‘mythology’, a situation which they met as ‘a fun challenge [that] energized our entire crew’ (Dohrn in Mendelson online). This exciting ‘blank slate’ (Dohrn in Mendelson) was filled in with a script written by Jon Aibel and Glenn Berger, based on a story by Erica Rivinoja. Aibel and Berger are the writers behind the Kung Fu Panda series, Rivinoja the screen playwright for Cloudy with Meatballs 2. I have found no comments in the interviews consulted about Rivinoja’s specific role and, since the script is a collaboration, it is practically impossible to ascertain which aspects of Poppy’s characterization come from her and which from Aibel and Berger, or the directors (even producer Gina Shay). There are two types of troll in the film: six-​inch trolls like Poppy and friends, with their hair taking about half their size, and the human-​sized, ogreish Bergens of Bergentown. The morose, monstrous Bergens have convinced themselves that they can only enjoy happiness by eating the always joyful, tiny trolls for which they celebrate a yearly holiday, known as the Trollstice. Trolls begins with Poppy narrating to the children of her community crucial events of their past, which she presents as a fairy tale (using a scrapbook as a prop). Twenty years before, when she was a toddler (which gives a hint about her age), her father King Peppy heroically rescued everyone trapped in the Trollstice tree by replacing them with wooden figurines (Dam’s original toy). He led them then to a safe haven in the woods, thus condemning the Bergens to long years of unhappiness. Disregarding the warnings of grumpy survivalist troll Branch (the only one with no bright colors), Poppy throws a massive party to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of their lucky escape. Unfortunately, this attracts the attention of Chef, a female Bergen forced to undertake exile after the fiasco of the last Trollstice (she was supposed to cook the creatures). Chef captures some of Poppy’s friends and she decides to rescue them, having learned from her father that no troll should be left behind. Branch joins Poppy’s quest only because he wants to escape the company of the other trolls, now occupying his anti-​Bergen fear bunker. Once in Bergentown, Poppy realizes that the key to liberating his friends and ensuring the safety of the whole community passes through teaching the Bergens to find an inner source of happiness. Poppy sets

120 Martín up then a Cinderella-​type plot to get young King Gristle Jr. interested in scullery maid Bridget, who secretly loves him. On her side, a grateful Bridget helps the tiny trolls to undermine Chef’s plans to crown herself Queen. Poppy succeeds, aided by Branch and her other troll friends, and old King Peppy offers her his crown as a reward. There are, then, some fairy-​tale elements in the romance between King Gristle Jr. and Bridget, in which the glass slipper is comically replaced by a pretty skate (the film has a 1970s atmosphere and their first date includes roller-​skate dancing). Yet this is a subplot rather than the main plot, which can be subdivided into two main storylines. On the one hand, Poppy must solve the problem she herself has created by endangering the community and end the Bergens’ nasty habit of eating trolls; on the other, Branch needs to be happy again to regain his true colors and this can only happen if he accepts Poppy’s philosophy that ‘There’s always a bright side’. The directors feared that boys would not be interested in Trolls, because despite the original intention to work with no specific audience in mind, their film seemed ‘geared towards girls’ (Mitchell in Thompson online). They were surprised to see that as production designer Kendal Cronkhite-​Shaindlin notes (in Thompson), ‘The Branch character is completely relatable’ to boys. His grumpiness balances Poppy’s cheerfulness in ways that are comical in the first half of the film. In the second half the explanation for the loss of his colors—​ his loving grandmother Rosiepuff was eaten by a troll while trying to protect Branch as he sang oblivious to the world—​is a reminder that what is at stake is surviving fearsome predators, as it happens in many fairy tales. Branch and Poppy save each other several times but the fundamental note of their friendship is sounded when, seeing her start losing her colors in despair at Chef’s villainous actions, he overcomes trauma to start singing again. Boys may have also been interested in the fact that the bond between Poppy and Branch does not develop into romance like in conventional princess films. Their final image together is certainly romantic but not sexual:  hugging, which all trolls love, and not kissing is its culmination. In fact, Queen Poppy uses her new powers to decree that hugging time will not be just once an hour but all the time. Before I turn to a more specific analysis of Poppy, I wish to highlight the importance of a key aspect often overlooked in film criticism, which tends to be narrowly focused on plot. I refer here to production design. Reviewing and film criticism tend to deal in a rather cavalier, patronizing way with the more technical facets of filmmaking, taking for granted the effort made by any other crew members beyond the director and the actors. In the case of Trolls there are many reasons to praise Kendal Cronkhite-​Shaindlin’s excellent work as production designer, which reverses what might be expected of an allegedly sugary fairy-​tale film. Taking its cue from the psychedelic colors of the original .

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trolls, she turned the film into a celebration of bright color and, most interestingly, of texture. Poppy loves scrapbooking, which she uses to illustrate her narration of past events but also to anticipate her plans. The production design connects, then, not so much with other fairy-​tale films (or, rather, not at all) but with illustration in children’s books and with children’s abilities to produce their own artwork through Poppy’s amateurish scrapbooking. Animators went to great lengths to give the scrapbooking sequences an almost material feel (which worked wonderfully in 3-​D), whereas other segments of Trolls, such as Poppy’s mad dash into the forest as she sings ‘I’ll Get Back Again’ (by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul) are an elegant, exciting comment on children’s illustrated books,3 and also on Poppy’s combined cuteness and resilience, which are the focus of the next section. 3

Poppy and the Search for Inner Happiness

Top character designer Craig Kellman stresses that ‘The more you observe life, the more truthful and unique your work will be’ (in Griswold online). Kellman participated in Trolls with concept work for most characters, later developed in its final shape by art director Timothy Lamb (Schmitz 24). This is a specific aspect of production design little known by spectators which is essential in animated film. Neither Poppy nor Branch, or the other trolls, would have a personality (pace Giesen) without the dedicated contribution of the animators. Kellman defines these professionals as ‘actors with pencils’ who base their work on constant observation, as he does (in Griswold online). The success of characterization is, therefore, most visible in the minor scenes. During their journey to Bergentown, Poppy insists on singing before sleeping because it relaxes her, but Branch stubbornly stresses, once more, that he does not sing. When he turns his back on her, Poppy mocks him by silently mimicking his words. This small moment (suggested by animator Mark Donald) makes Poppy true in the sense Kellman points out and reveals the immense effort made by the whole production team to bring her personality to life. Poppy and the other trolls are a cute variation on Dam’s original dolls. Their chubby body, big ears, wide nose, and the signature shock of brightly colored hair are rather similar, but their eyes are quite different. Dam’s dolls 3 Cronkhite-​Shaindlin’s team included visual development artist Priscilla Wong (in charge of Poppy’s scrapbooking), fiber artist Sayuri Sasaki Heman, and French children book’s illustrator Amélie Fléchais. Heman and Fléchais did concept work, subsequently modified by Wong and the other artists. See Schmitz.

122 Martín have wide-​open black eyes with no whites, surrounded by the folds that raising your eyebrows produces; this is intended to make them look friendly, but their stare can also seem creepy and unnerving. In contrast, Poppy and friends have smaller eyes with an iris and whites. Their slightly short-​sighted look gives them an amusing, quizzical look. Their hair, which can grow at will in an instant to form an extremely strong rope to be used as a prop or a weapon, gives them a kind of ‘superpower’ (Mitchell in Desowitz online). It must be noted that these movie trolls do not look as charming as plush or plastic dolls and that their animated image works better in the film than in the television series. The diminished cuteness of these variations is clearly connected to the flattening of any of the head and face features, which look best as 3-​D images. Also, to size: curiously, troll dolls bigger than their size in the film or much smaller do not look as attractive, with the ideal size being about twelve centimeters, including the hair. These details are worth mentioning because the transmission of Poppy’s philosophy of happiness depends on her being cute rather than pretty, or beautiful, as the Disney princesses are (an interesting exception is cute Vanellope von Schweetz in the Disney Wreck-​it Ralph franchise, started in 2012). Cuteness had been explored before as a significant aesthetic category by others, but the launching of Cute Studies must be credited to Jonathan Dale and to the monographic issue which he edited for the East Asian Journal of Cultural Studies in 2016 (the same year Trolls was released). The debate then started has focused mainly on that geographical area, with Japan as a sort of world leader in cuteness thanks to popular creations such as Hello Kitty. I have no room to explore this issue here, but it might be argued that Asian concepts of cuteness do have an influence on American films, like Trolls. At most, I can offer the guess that audiences used to Japanese ideas of cuteness are more receptive to alternative kinds of animation. The pleasure that cuteness provides us with is still poorly understood but it combines aspects as diverse as our natural inclination to feel protective towards babies and the popularity of kitten videos on YouTube. Prettiness and beauty (Anna and Elsa in Frozen) inspire either a wish to imitate or to admire, giving the animated characters that possess them an aura of superiority. Cuteness, in contrast, places the onlooker in a position of superiority which, of course, makes it harder for cute characters like Poppy to be taken seriously. Arguably, the team behind Trolls uses cuteness to undermine the audience’s resistance to their defense of happiness: at worse cute Poppy comes across as charmingly naïve rather than as silly or ridiculous, which they may have feared. Of course, the situations and the dialogue must also reinforce Poppy’s position. Thus, when Branch, here still unable to explain what happened to him, reminds her

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quite angrily that ‘Bad things happen and there’s nothing you can do about it’, Poppy replies ‘Hey, I know it’s not all cupcakes and rainbows. But I’d rather go through life thinking that it mostly is, instead of being like you’. The cuteness is here dropped for an instant to send the message that really matters. Not only Cuteness Studies, but also Happiness Studies have grown in recent years. Springer’s Journal of Happiness Studies started publication in 2000 and the field has been growing since then, connected besides with the extra-​ academic interest in self-​help. In 2012 the uno instituted International Happiness Day, founded by Jayme Illien; this is celebrated on 20 March to coincide with the Spring solstice. Trolls director Mitchell did certainly fuse a diversity of trends connected with happiness in the film: ‘I looked at ted talks, a Harvard study, a lot of Eastern, Buddhist philosophy’ and other sources, he notes (in Desowitz online). His colleague Dohrn openly declares that ‘We want people to learn the power of optimism, especially kids’ (in Desowitz). He hopes that Trolls ‘creates a conversation with families’ (in Jessica online) about the urgent need to allow others to guide you in the search for your inner happiness to face our pessimistic times—​the very same lesson which Poppy teaches. This philosophy of happiness is often rejected on the grounds that it selfishly seeks individual fulfilment without attempting to alter the fabric of the social system. In traditional fairy tales the marriage of the princess and the prince supposedly brings happiness to their community, but in fact only their personal joy matters. Frozen (2013) broke new ground by having Elsa find satisfaction in her relationship with her sister Anna, but even so the community she reigns over is presented as mere background. Poppy’s stance is quite different, for she does seek the happiness of her community, and even of their enemies the Bergens, without aiming at personal gain. The troll village can by no means be read as a representation of any real-​life society: it is a fantasy of constant partying—​a totally gay lifestyle (in the original sense of gay) which applauds hedonism. The trolls love and enjoy each other’s company, and Poppy’s function is that of an event manager rather than a politically empowered leader, either as princess or queen. If she assumes the mission to rescue the trolls whom Chef has captured this is because it is in Poppy’s nature to treat everyone as a friend. Before she sets out on her journey, Poppy cheers herself up:  ‘With her friends safely hidden, Princess Poppy set off to rescue her other friends, confident she’d make it to Bergen Town on her own’. Her self-​confidence is often pure recklessness (and thus gently mocked), which is why Branch’s help is needed to counterbalance it. He is the only dissident troll but as the plotline shows, once he overcomes trauma, Branch is happy to join the fun again. If he relents at all, this is because Poppy considers him a friend even when he is least friendly. Her effective emotional skills and generous inclusiveness of

124 Martín feeling guarantee in this way the happiness of all her community and, through Bridget, also that of the Bergens. To conclude, Trolls is a remarkable contribution to the genre of the fairy tale in its filmic variant. Its merits are many: it is the result of a notable effort to tell a new story (with only some elements borrowed from ‘Cinderella’ for Bridget’s sub-​plot), its production design deserves much praise for its innovative use of texture in animation, and its character design improves on the original troll dolls with the cute, well-​received new trolls. Poppy, in particular, offers not only an excellent role model based on her optimism, friendliness and defense of happiness for the whole community but also a most welcome alternative to the traditional princess (or queen) whether in traditional fairy tales or in the Disney/​Pixar versions.

Works Cited

Alexander, Bryan. ‘Trolls Trip to the Big Screen is Wild-​haired, Ugly-​cute Story’. USA Today, 3 November 2016. https://​eu.usatoday.com/​story/​life/​movies/​2016/​11/​03/​trolls-​ movie-​doll-​craze-​justin-​timberlake-​anna-​kendrick/​93141776/​. Chang, Justin. ‘Delirious Animated Musical Trolls is both Craven and Charismatic’. Los Angeles Times, 3 November 2016. https://​www.latimes.com/​entertainment/​movies/​ la-​et-​mn-​trolls-​review-​20161028-​story.html. Dale, Joshua. ‘Cute Studies: An Emerging Field’. East Asian Journal of Popular Studies 2.1 (2016): 5–​13. Desowitz, Bill. ‘Trolls:  How DreamWorks Embraced a Happy, Fuzzy Immersion’. IndieWire, 26 October 2016. https://​www.indiewire.com/​2016/​10/​trolls-​ dreamworks-​animation-​directors-​mike-​mitchell-​walt-​dohrn-​interview-​fuzzy-​ dolls-​1201740488/​. Giesen, Rolf. Acting and Character Animation: The Art of Animated Films, Acting and Visualizing. Boca Raton, FL: Taylor & Francis, 2018. Griswold, Christine. ‘Emmy and Annie Award Nominee Craig Kellman, Character Designer’. Artzray, 16 March 2015. http://​artzray.com/​emmy-​and-​annie-​award-​ nominee-​craig-​kellman-​character-​designer/​. Jessica. ‘Trolls Cast Interviews + Trolls Inspired Rainbow Fruit Salad Recipe’. The Healthy Mouse, 1 November 2016. http://​thehealthymouse.com/​trolls-​cast-​interviews-​trolls-​ inspired-​rainbow-​fruit-​salad-​recipe/​. Lindow, John. Trolls: An Unnatural History. London: Reaktion Books, 2014. Mansour, David. ‘Troll Dolls’. From Abba to Zoom: A Pop Culture Encyclopedia of the Late 20th Century. Kansas City: Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2005. 497–​498.

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Mendelson, Scott. ‘Interview: Trolls Directors on Cinematic Bliss and What Defines a DreamWorks Toon’. Forbes, 7 February 2017. https://​www.forbes.com/​sites/​scottmendelson/​2017/​02/​07/​interview-​trolls-​directors-​on-​cinematic-​bliss-​and-​what-​ defines-​a-​dreamworks-​toon/​. Schmitz, Jerry. The Art of Trolls. London: Titan Books, 2016. Thompson, Christa. ‘Interview with the Creators of Trolls–​The Happiest Film on Earth’. The Fairy Tale Traveler, 1 November 2016. https://​thefairytaletraveler.com/​2016/​11/​ 01/​interview-​trolls/​. Trolls. Directed by Mike Mitchell and Walt Dohrn, DreamWorks, 4 November 2016. Zipes, Jack. The Enchanted Screen:  The Unknown History of Fairy-​ tale Films. New York: Routledge, 2011.

pa rt 2 The Darkness of Contemporary Fairy Tales

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Far from Beastly: Monstrous Imaginations in Postmodern Fairy-​Tale Films Claudia Schwabe Abstract Ever since the latter third of the twentieth century imaginations of the monstrous in cinematic and televisual fairy-​tale adaptations have begun to deviate from the villainous creatures that are traditionally associated with the term ‘monster’. Instead, a new trend is noticeable on the small and silver screen which portrays monstrous beings in a positive light and desirable fashion. My chapter illuminates how today’s media celebrates the beauty of Otherness and promotes alterity in fairy-​tale films. I begin with a discussion of the ‘humanity’ of the amphibian creature and the ‘monstrosity’ of his human captors in Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water (2017). The film promotes the desirability and sex-​appeal of alterity. Monsters also function as helper types, thus opening up therapeutic possibilities, as for example seen in the films Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) and A Monster Calls (2016). Finally, popular fairy-​tale adaptations such as Monsters, Inc. (2001), Lilo & Stich (2002), or the Shrek films (2001, 2004, 2007, 2010) illustrate how monsters are infantilized, trivialized, and ‘cutified’ in innovative ways. This reimagining of the idea of the monster is a trend that reflects a greater tolerance of other marginalized groups (in regard to race, ethnicity, ability, age, gender, sexual orientation, social class, religion, etc.) and acceptance of diversity in our society today.

Keywords otherness –​ monster –​ beast –​ film –​ postmodern –​ diversity

1

Introduction

Once upon a time, a crafty wolf gobbled up sweet Little Red Riding Hood and her poor, sick grandmother. Clearly, the wolf is the savage beast in this fairy story, a ferocious, deceitful wretch that deserves its deadly punishment at the end of the popular Grimm tale. Other stories of Grimms’ Kinder-​und Hausmärchen

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130 Schwabe (Children’s and Household Tales, 1812) follow the same black-​and-​white pattern when it comes to the separation between the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ guys or the heroes and the villains. Among the broad panoply of fairy-​tale miscreants are well-​known monstrous creatures, including wicked witches, nasty ogres, cannibalistic giants, furious dragons, evil fairies, terrible trolls, and so forth. After all, what would a fairy tale be without a proper evildoer? What would the valiant knight do if there was no fiery dragon to slain? The tale of ‘Sleeping Beauty’ is firmly ‘spun’ around the curse of the evil fairy and without her jealous stepmother, Snow White might have never left the castle to have a chance encounter with her prince. Monstrous villains are a staple of the traditional fairy tale as we know it and, for centuries, have aided to steer our moral compass. Richard Kearney stated that monsters ‘keep us awake at night and make us nervous during the day’ (4). Ever since the latter third of the twentieth century, however, imaginations of the monstrous in cinematic and televisual fairy-​tale adaptations have begun to deviate from the villainous, horrific creatures that are commonly associated with the term ‘monster’. Instead, a new trend is noticeable on the small and silver screen which portrays monstrous beings in a positive light and desirable fashion. I focus primarily on fairy-​tale adaptations in film rather than literature because, as Alexa Wright has aptly noted, ‘monstrosity is by definition a visual phenomenon’ (3). This chapter illuminates how today’s media celebrates the beauty of Otherness and promotes alterity in fairy-​tale films. By inviting viewers to look through the lens of monstrous imagination, I  argue, contemporary fairy-​tale adaptations promote diversity and tolerance of marginalized groups in our society with regard to race, ethnicity, ability, age, gender, sexual orientation, social class, religion, and so forth. Some of the films examined are perhaps not, strictly speaking, fairy-​tale films but the motifs, characters, and plots have been borrowed from fairy tales. 2

From Sexy Sea Creatures to Therapeutic Tree Monsters in Live-​Action Films

The Shape of Water (2017) by Guillermo del Toro is one of the most recent fairy-​ tale films, featuring an erotic monster tale that addresses Otherness favorably. The film introduces viewers to a heroic, sexually attractive, amphibian man-​ beast (Doug Jones) who personifies the noble savage. Set in 1960s Baltimore, Maryland, the story revolves around Elisa (Sally Hawkins), a mute woman drudging as a janitor at a high-​security government laboratory. One day, she discovers a humanoid creature from the Amazon river that is held captive in the laboratory and, over time, she becomes enamored with the imprisoned

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fish man. The vocally impaired cleaning lady bravely rescues the aquatic beast, who is worshiped by natives as a deity, from his prison. At the end of the diegesis, the amphibian man’s healing touch allows Elisa to grow gills and breathe under water so that both can live happily ever after together. The Shape of Water is a fairy tale about the transcendent beauty of alterity, the ugliness of discrimination and xenophobia, interspecies love that crosses all barriers, and overcoming disability. Del Toro foregrounds in his work the fact that the merman and the mute heroine, the ‘monster’ and the ‘freak’, are effectively more humane than the ‘normal’ people surrounding them. The film invites audiences to relate not only to the Other but also to identify with the protagonists’ unique romance and to commiserate with their struggles. The Shape of Water suggests that bullies, abusive people, and those who discriminate against other individuals, especially those considered different, are the real monsters among us. At the forefront is the brutal government agent Strickland (Michael Shannon) who resorts to intimidation tactics and sadistic torture to wield power over everyone in his path. Strickland does not shy away from using a high-​voltage electric shock cattle prod to tantalize the amphibian creature and also makes sexually charged insinuations when he is alone with Elisa in his office. His abhorrent actions, his sense of entitlement, and his conviction of white privilege make him a monster in more than one regard. It seems especially fitting that, in the year of the #MeToo movement, the film debunks Strickland with his toxic masculinity to be the true monster and antagonist. Throughout the narrative Strickland’s character grows increasingly revolting. His despicable persona is metaphorically also reflected in his developing ‘monstrous’ physicality. In an act of self-​preservation, the merman severs two of Strickland’s fingers, which the cruel government agent then has medically reattached because he cannot bear the thought of being ‘abnormal’ due to a disfigurement. The fingers, however, are slowly rotting on his hand and become more and more gangrenous, dripping with pus. Strickland’s desperate attempt of maintaining a ‘normal’, non-​handicapped body, his idea of a ‘whole’, ‘complete’ man, renders him physically hideous, further emphasizing the monstrosity of his malign nature. In The Shape of Water audiences are presented with a sexualized, sympathetic sea creature that is far removed from its beastly predecessor, the antagonistic Gill-​man (Ben Chapman) in The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), which served as an inspiration for del Toro’s work. Already his earlier film, Pan’s Labyrinth/​El laberinto del fauno (2006), centers on the portrayal and characterization of unique monstrous figures. Set against the backdrop of fascist Spain in 1944, the dark tale follows Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) who is

132 Schwabe sent along with her mother (Ariadna Gil) to live with her new stepfather Captain Vidal (Sergi López), an officer in the Spanish army. Similar to the childlike, voiceless heroine Elisa, the child protagonist Ofelia is overlooked by those around her and builds a relationship with a beastly creature underground. The monster, which is only visible to the girl, is a faun (Doug Jones), a towering figure with a goat-​like face and horned head, but made of dirt, leaves, trees and rocks. Intricate, decorative, circulate patterns are adorning his flesh as if carved into tree bark. The faun tells Ofelia that she is a princess but must prove her royalty and immortality by surviving three gruesome tasks. If she succeeds she will return to the underworld and be reunited with her true father, the king. The faun appears to be a fairy-​tale helper sent to aid Ofelia as the messenger of the king of the underworld. However, as Jack Zipes has pointed out, ‘the trustworthiness of the faun, who is immense and weird-​looking, ancient and sphinxlike, is clearly meant to be ambiguous; he appears to be kind and gentle sometimes and mean and menacing at other times’ (238). Being neither good nor bad, the faun is essentially a trickster figure. He is a creature of destruction on one hand and a creature of nurturing and life on the other, very much like the forces of nature. Because the faun oscillates between parental concern and a questionable desire for Ofelia, he remains an ambiguous, puzzling character throughout the film. The real ‘beast’ in Ofelia’s life is not the faun but Captain Vidal, who personifies the horrors of fascism. Viewed through the lens of Faerie, the Pale-​Man, a vile, hideous, and rebarbative humanoid creature with pale elastic skin and insatiable appetite for children, can be interpreted as an expression of Vidal’s monstrosity. Indeed, the Pale-​Man appears to represent the institutional evil of fascism that ‘devours’ the helpless and innocent. Because Vidal is the ‘monster’ that supplants the good but dead father at the beginning of the diegesis, he represents del Toro’s gender reversal of the wicked stepmother in fairy tales. Reminiscent of Strickland, Vidal’s body becomes increasingly disfigured as the narrative progresses so that his physicality mirrors his internal monstrosity. It is up to the audience to decide whether the mystical beings and monsters that Ofelia encounters are ‘therapeutic’ fictions of her imagination to cope with the harsh realities of a fascist Spain, or whether they are real. Can a monster be a therapeutic agent that helps a protagonist to come to terms with grief and trauma? And if so, how? J.A. Bayona’s A Monster Calls (2016) gives us the answer to these questions. Based on Patrick Ness’s eponymous novel, the film adaptation narrates the dramatic tale of Conor O’Malley (Lewis MacDougall), a twelve-​year-​old boy whose mother (Felicity Jones) is terminally ill with cancer. To cope with his mother’s daily struggles and the

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slowly progressing of her disease, Conor taps into his imaginative reservoir and subconsciously conjures up a tree-​like creature that appears to him in the middle of the night. Voiced by Liam Neeson, the monster is a giant humanoid yew tree that tells Conor three ‘true’ stories, after which the monster expects the boy to tell his own story, uncloaking the truth of his recurring nightmare. Although Conor assumes the anthropomorphic yew tree came to save his mother from certain death, the monster only exists for Conor’s sake to help him overcome his angst, fury, and anguish.1 The fourth tale, Conor’s personal story, will ultimately liberate the boy from his self-​tormenting anxieties and feelings of guilt for wanting his mother’s disease to be over so that he does not have to feel pain anymore. A Monster Calls highlights the monster or beast not so much as the horrifying Other within us that needs to be feared, tamed, and overcome but rather, as a metaphor for our own intrinsic truth, courage, strength, and faith. At first, Conor is afraid of the gigantic tree monster but it turns out that the creature is a therapist in disguise, dispensing psychological truths along with each empowering tale it tells. Just like Pan who is only visible to Ofelia and seems threatening at times, the tree monster appears initially as a frightful creature that can only be seen by Conor, the boy who summoned him. The humanoid yew tree is taller than a building with burning hot insides, fiery glowing eyes and spiked branches for a spine. Throughout the film, however, viewers learn that the anthropomorphic creature is a savior figure in the sense that it came to save Conor’s health. The therapeutic approaches of the gruff tree monster are unconventional but effective. When Conor is scared, the yew tree does not tell him to stop being afraid but urges the boy to lean into the fright. Instead of soothing Conor’s rage, the tree monster encourages the child to wreak havoc on a parson’s house in his imaginary realm which turns out to be his grandmother’s living room in reality. At school, the monster tells Conor the story of an invisible man and spurs him on to beat up the school bully. During these emotional outbursts of fury, Conor draws on the monster’s power and, visually, both appear to become one entity. The monster becomes Conor’s guide and counselor on his journey of psychological healing and enables the young boy to accept the underlying mental cause of his nightmare, in which Conor lets go of his mother’s hand as she falls down into a dark abyss.

1 Compounds found in the bark of yew trees are known today to have efficacy as anti-​cancer agents.

134 Schwabe 3

Comedic and Cute Beasts in Animation Films

Although the films of del Toro and Bayona portray fantastic beasts that display, at first glance, monstrous and intimidating attributes, they are, at closer inspection, far from beastly in character and purpose. This is no coincidence because a look at today’s American and European media landscape suggests a growing trend of positive visualizations of the monstrous. In some fairy-​tale adaptations, monsters have been completely stripped of their beastly features and metamorphosed into creatures that are diametrically opposed to the traditional monstrous imagination. In a nutshell, there is nothing distinctly ‘beastly’ left about these contemporary monsters because horrific becomes cute, ugly becomes adorable, dangerous becomes friendly, scary becomes funny, and so forth. Pixar’s computer animated comedy film Monsters, Inc (2001) comes to mind with its two good-​natured monsters James P. ‘Sulley’ Sullivan (John Goodman), a huge, furry, blue beast with horns and large purple spots, and his buddy Michael ‘Mike’ Wazowski (Billy Crystal), a green, opinionated, feisty, short, one-​eyed monster with skinny limbs. The loveable creatures are the top scare team at Monsters, Inc., the scream-​processing factory in Monstropolis. However, when a little human girl enters their world by accident, it is the monsters that are scared silly, and it is up to Sulley and Mike to get the girl back home. The film promotes the idea that monsters can be cute, funny, and endearing, and features the twist that monsters are more scared of children than vice versa, because monsters consider human children to be toxic. Monsters, Inc. was a box office hit and marked the beginning of the Monsters, Inc. franchise, which includes several films, video games, theme park attractions, toys, apparel, costumes, accessories, and stuffed animals, among other things. Just one year after Monsters, Inc was released, another adorable animated monster creature became a popular success, a small, blue, koala-​like extraterrestrial known as Stitch or Experiment 626 (Chris Sanders). Disney’s Lilo & Stitch (2002), which was nominated for the 2002 Academy Award for Best Animation Feature, tells the fantastic story of the Hawaiian girl Lilo Pelekai (Daveigh Chase) and the creature she adopts as her ‘puppy’ and names Stich. In the opening scene, viewers learn that the alien was genetically engineered in an illegal experiment for which the mad scientist Doctor Jumba Jookiba (David Ogden Stiers) stands trial at the Galactic Federation Headquarters. When the extraterrestrial beast is brought forward as evidence for the scientist’s unethical behavior, exhibiting extremely aggressive tendencies, one of the council members poses the question, ‘What is that monstrosity’? Doctor Jumba informs the council that Experiment 626 is no monstrosity but the first of a new species, a bulletproof, fireproof, being of unparalleled intelligence

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and strength with the only instinct to destroy everything it touches. The head council member concludes ‘So it is a monster’ and the scientist replies ‘Just a little one’. Because the council considers Experiment 626 deranged and an affront to nature, the creature is sentenced to exile. However, the blue alien with its oversized ears, four arms, claws, two antennae, and three spikes on his back, manages to escape to earth and poses as a dog. At the outset, Stitch may look and act like a monster but as the diegesis unfolds it becomes clear that the sentient creature is simply lonely and lost, evoking the trope of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818). Stitch discovers a fairy-​tale book in Lilo’s bedroom of Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Ugly Duckling’ and asks the girl to explain the pictures to him. Stitch identifies with the ugly duckling in the tale, not least because one of Lilo’s friends called him ‘the ugliest thing’ ever seen. Although he was designed to be vicious and destructive, Stitch undergoes a character transformation as the bond with Lilo and her older sister Nani (Tia Carrere) deepens. The Hawaiian concept of ‘ohana, which means family in an extended sense of the term, becomes the leitmotif throughout the film. In the woods, Stich re-​enacts a picture from the fairy tale ‘The Ugly Duckling’ by crying ‘lost’ in the hope to find a family. Finally, Stich’s bond with Lilo and Nani, his new family, causes him to defy his intended destructive purpose and to shed his beastly manner. Although capable of both, benignity and malignance, Stitch chooses in the end to be gentle, caring, polite, and loving to keep his family together. The trend of stripping beastly creatures of their monstrous features and endowing them with cutesiness, humor, and appeal instead has increased tremendously since the twenty-​first century. Popular examples include the reimagination of ogres and trolls for purposes of comic relief as seen in the Shrek films, in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (2001), in The Hobbit film series, and more recently in Disney’s Frozen (2013) and in the computer-​ animated musical film Trolls (2016). The animated Shrek character (Mike Myers) is a green, cranky, grumpy, misanthropic ogre who speaks with a Scottish accent, adding to his comedic ogre profile. Despite his reputation in the fairy-​ tale world, Shrek is a generally peaceful creature and does not want to hurt anyone. In traditional fairy tales, for example ‘Little Thumbling’ and ‘Puss in Boots’, ogres exhibit monstrous traits, such as cannibalism and a taste for infants. The fairy-​tale mash-​up Shrek films, however, promote the idea of a humorous, heroic, and amicable ogre and draw viewers’ attention to the themes of alterity, marginalization, and being an outsider. Shrek prefers to live secluded in his swamp because people have either teased him, screamed at him in fear, or tried to kill him for being an ogre. Viewers learn from a conversation between Shrek and his sidekick Donkey (Eddie Murphy) that the ogre became

136 Schwabe a recluse after trying and failing to find acceptance by the outside world. In one scene, Shrek laments that he is always judged by others simply for being different: ‘Look, I’m not the one with the problem, okay? It’s the world that seems to have a problem with me. People take one look at me and go ‘Aah! Help! Run! A big stupid ugly ogre’! They judge me before they even know me. That’s why I’m better off alone’ (Shrek, 2001). The film emphasizes the beauty of the marginalized Other by focusing on the tropes of magic, enchantment, and the relationship between Shrek and his love interest Princess Fiona (Cameron Diaz). Subverting traditional fairy-​tale structures, the film depicts the permanent transformation of the princess into an ogress after kissing her true love Shrek who makes her realize that she is indeed beautiful in this ‘beastly’ form. One final example is the figure of the troll, which is traditionally depicted as gigantic, ugly, fearsome, hideous, and murderous. We find this beastly figure prominently in Norwegian tales, e.g., ‘Three Billy Goats Gruff’ and ‘The Boy Who Had an Eating Match with a Troll’, collected by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe who first published them in their Norske folkeeventyr (Norwegian Folktales, 1841–​44). In Norse mythology and Scandinavian folklore this monstrous creature is usually described as extremely old, very strong, dim-​ witted, slow, and a man-​eater. Today, however, cinematic fairy-​tale adaptations draw on the figure of the troll for comic relief or infantilize the troll to appeal to child audiences. In Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, a gigantic mountain troll battles with Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) and Ron (Rupert Grint) in the girls’ bathroom at Hogwarts. Harry manages to shove his wand up the troll’s nose and after the battle is won, extracts it covered in goo with the words: ‘Ew. Troll bogies’. The scene trivializes the troll by turning the creature into an object of ridicule. Troll snot jokes are also used in a scene from The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey when several stone trolls gather around the fire to cook their supper. After one troll sneezes, sending snot into their cooking pot, another troll remarks that this might improve the flavor. The trolls are portrayed not so much as monstrous but rather hilarious characters. Other examples of film trolls that have been exploited for comic effect or ‘cutified’ can be found in the fairy-​tale adaptations Frozen and Trolls. Both animation films foreground small, magical trolls as loving and family-​oriented beings who are always cheerfully dancing and happy to provide musical entertainment. 4

Conclusion

We think we know fairy-​tale monsters: the witches and the ogres, the bluebeards and the wolves, the dragons and the beasts. But do we still recognize them in the

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twenty-​first century? So many popular fairy-​tale monsters have been reimagined in the postmodern fairy-​tale landscape that they no longer can be easily categorized or labeled as ‘monster’ and ‘villain’. To sum up, contemporary fairy-​ tale monsters are far from beastly. Instead, today’s small and silver screen depicts these creatures in a very different fashion, e.g., as sexy, funny, sympathetic, helpful, therapeutic, adorable, or happy figures. Fairy-​tale adaptations entertain viewers by allowing them to root for, cheer with, relate to, or identify with the mediated monster. Indeed, as this chapter demonstrates, American and European media celebrate Otherness and alterity by highlighting monstrosity as something very positive, desirable, attractive, and heroic. By portraying a humane amphibian creature, a therapeutic tree monster, or a comedic ogre, fairy-​ tale adaptations call on audiences to appreciate and value diversity. Although contemporary society encounters marginalized groups of all types with more tolerance, acceptance, and understanding than ever before in history, there still exists a yawning gap between the representation and the reality of embracing Otherness wholeheartedly in twenty-​first-​century Western societies.

Works Cited

A Monster Calls. J.A. Bayona. Spain/​UK/​USA. 2016. Asbjørnsen, Peter Christen, and Jørgen Moe. Norske folkeeventyr. Christiania:  Johan Dahl. 1841–​44. Grimm, Jacob, and Wilhelm Grimm. Kinder-​und Hausmärchen gesammelt durch die Brüder Grimm. 3 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Insel, (1812) 1974. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone). Chris Columbus. UK/​USA. 2001. Kearny, Richard. Strangers, Gods and Monsters:  Interpreting Otherness. London and New York: Routledge. 2003. Lilo & Stitch. Dir. Chris Sanders. usa. 2002. Monsters, Inc. Dir. Pete Docter. usa. 2001. Pan’s Labyrinth (El laberinto del fauno). Dir. Guillermo del Toro. Spain/​Mexico/​ USA. 2006. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. Dir. Peter Jackson. New Zealand/​USA. 2012. The Shape of Water. Dir. Guillermo del Toro. usa. 2017. Shrek. Dir. Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson. usa. 2001. Wright, Alexa. Monstrosity:  The Human Monster in Visual Culture. London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2013. Zipes, Jack, ‘Review of Pan’s Labyrinth’. Journal of American Folklore 121.480 (2008): 236–​ 40.

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Echoes of Fairy Tales: Fantasy and Everyday Horrors in Guillermo del Toro’s Filmography Gema Navarro Goig and Francisco Javier Sánchez-​Verdejo Pérez Abstract Guillermo del Toro’s filmography uses recurrently old formulas such as archetypal folk and fairy-​tale motifs and characters, adapting them to contemporary culture and society. The fantastic acts as a parallel universe to our logical world. His films describe a supernatural reality that intertwines with the ordinary world, using the archetypes of these narrations in the real world. Del Toro claims the figure of the monster as one of his outstanding characters, showing that the classical monsters are usually represented as vulnerable creatures subjected to the brutality of the human being. His films have a utopian spirit, mixed with fairy tales exclusively for adults, morality, goodness or the capacity of sacrifice of his protagonists, the overcoming of obstacles and the deepening of a state of knowledge and virtue. Fantasy serves the director as a vehicle to introduce political and social issues through a series of metaphors, which are appreciable in films such as Pan’s Labyrinth, Crimson Peak or The Shape of Water.

Keywords fairy tales –​cinema –​fantasy –​Gothic –​monsters –​Guillermo del Toro

1

Introduction

The rewriting of fairy tales has been reaffirmed in recent decades as a phenomenon that arises without a doubt from the inspiring power of these stories, their complexity and the fascination they arouse. Since the seventies, interpretations of fairy tales in literature, cinematography or art have often experienced a shift toward more critical positions. It is not merely about representing the original stories with images, but about adapting them for an adult audience, but reversing the original meaning through works whose images are loaded with symbolic value. In this sense, a significant part of Guillermo del Toro’s

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filmography appropriates images, symbols and structures of the fairy tale, as expressed by himself in an interview in 2017 after a projection of The Shape of Water, in which he described the genres of the movies that he makes as ‘fables or fairy tales or parables’ (del Toro online). One can preserve the structure of a fairy tale and go on deconstructing the characters or one can try to deconstruct the fairy-​tale structure and preserve the simplicity of the characters (Carrasco 17–​18). In this director’s filmography, one can appreciate that fantasy serves as a vehicle to introduce political and social topics, to elaborate metaphors around fear and hatred and to revalue a series of characters that have suffered rejection or marginalization. 2

The Faun in His Labyrinth and the Three Tests of Ofelia

The film Pan’s Labyrinth by Guillermo del Toro (2006) can be seen as a paradigm of the adhesion of its director to fairy tales, the Gothic and the fantastic. The fantastic acts as a parallel universe, perceptible by certain characters and by the viewer. Set in Franco’s Spain, the protagonist is a girl, Ofelia (Ivana Baquero), who walks into a supernatural and timeless world as an escape from her unbearable reality. This fairy-​tale world allows her to develop the courage to face the darkness of her times, and the journey to the underground kingdom becomes a journey towards maturity. The film draws a parallel between the ordinary world and the supernatural one, reminding us of the codes of Gothic horror films, among other aspects due to the circularity of its narrative or the spatial and magical displacement of the heroine as a figure caught between two realities, between a historical narrative and another fantastic one that can only be explained from the symbolic scope of the fairy tale. At the beginning, when the protagonist lies on the ground, her eyes function as a symbol to express the subjective vision of the character and her own world. Somehow, del Toro associates Ofelia with Snow White, a persecuted heroine who finds refuge with the seven dwarves in the forest (Kérchy 2011; Blair 10). Ironically, del Toro’s Snow White will not find refuge in a large country house. Instead of living happily with the seven dwarves as protectors, she will be threatened by the cruel Captain Vidal (Sergi López) and killed by him. However, this first scene reveals that she is alive after her death, and that she will return in another body, in another place and at another time (Zipes “Pan’s” 238). At the beginning of the film, and after following a mysterious insect, the girl finds in the forest a stone eye of a small totem, which initiates the protagonist’s first contact with the supernatural world. By fitting it into this toem, magic is unleashed at the moment when a fairy disguised as a praying

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mantis appears on the head of the statue. Ofelia sees her and recognizes her as a fairy. She runs after her and discovers the labyrinth of the faun, a messenger of the king of the underworld, who sets forth a series of tests for Ofelia to prove that she is the real princess Moanna, doomed to return to the wonderful underground world. She receives the Book of Crossroads from the faun, whose pages are filled with texts and images, as fantasy and the real world interact. From that moment on, Ofelia has a double perception that allows her to move between two worlds at the same time, trying to use the symbols and signs of her imaginary space to survive in a social world devoid of dreams and full of ruthless brutality. Tragically, she will not be able to reconcile these two worlds. The journey to the underground kingdom becomes a journey towards maturity and an apprenticeship in which she has to pass a series of tests. In this case, the protagonist’s initiation rite towards maturity is loaded with symbols, in which evil manifests itself as a symbolic entity. From the beginning of the film, the dreamlike quality of the adventures experienced by Ofelia is emphasized and the viewer is positioned and codified in a specific genre: the fairy tale for adults. We can see several references to certain fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm, such as ‘Hansel and Gretel’, or by Perrault, such as ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, in which innocent children roam in the dark through the woods facing danger. There are also echoes of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, both in the dress of the protagonist, and in the entrance to the tree, in this case to find the toad, a recurrent animal in many traditional stories. Del Toro calls upon the viewers’ prior knowledge of these stories to signify that Ofelia is entering a ‘wonderland of her own, albeit much darker and scarier’ (Saeger 227). What good is it to read fairy tales or even view fairy-​tale films in times of darkness? […] del Toro poses in a chilling film that does not mince words nor delude us about the cruelty in our world. Del Toro wants to penetrate the spectacle of society that glorifies and conceals the pathology and corruption of people in power. zipes 237

There is a series of tests that Ofelia has to overcome, specifically three, a number loaded with symbolism. They will be performed before the next moon by order of the faun. In the first one, she confronts a giant toad from which she has to retrieve a key. In the second, she must open a small door where a dagger is found in the room of the underground kingdom where the pale man lives, a faceless old man who guards a table full of delicacies. Finally, the faun tells her that, in order to access the underground world, Ofelia has to shed innocent

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blood, her young brother’s. In the end she will do it with her own blood, to save her brother. The existence of evil, as an inescapable element in the fairy tale, is present in the figure of Captain Vidal, who represents both the fairy-​tale villain and the historical villain:  ‘a predominant feature of fairy tales is their simplification and their intensification toward the extremes (such as evil) and […] the fairy tales predilection for cruelty’ (Deveny 3). In a metaphorical sense, the watch mechanism that he cleans and cares for obsessively is a projection of how, in his relationships with other characters, he prioritizes control and precision over affective values. 3

The Shape of Water or a Fable about a Monster

In The Shape of Water (2017), del Toro again contemplates monstrosity as a metaphor or representation of irrational thoughts, pathologies or conflicts repressed by reason; the monstrous element again sets up the question of the nature of evil. In different interviews, del Toro has explained that ‘monsters are a religion for me. They’re spiritual, they represent many things. And I wanted to tell the story of the patron saint of otherness, of outcasts which was this creature’ (Menzel online). Following Gaudette (online), the Amphibian Man is no mere monster but rather ‘an elemental river god’. Speaking about the Amphibian Man’s aesthetics, Zahed (online) provides Paul Austerberry’s explanation: ‘I envisioned him emerging from the pool […] We wanted him to look as if he were emerging in front of the sun figure on this temple’. This is a film with an impeccable production design in which, besides the idea that the monstrous is necessary and can be beautiful, the ‘magical realism’ to which the director himself refers stands out (Cooper 26). In this sense, the monster in the movie The Shape of Water is not the reincarnation of evil, it is not a threatening entity, but a vulnerable creature subjected to the brutality of the human being (Solaz online). The most direct inspiration for this film is Creature from the Black Lagoon, by Jack Arnold (1954), which starts from the tradition of the fantasy genre rooted in ancient myths that narrate the relationship between human and anthropomorphic amphibian creatures. In all honesty, del Toro pays tribute to the film that struck him as a child and achieves a kind of redress after the frustration that the relationship between the anthropomorphic amphibian and the woman was not consummated. From the literary point of view, the monster is also reminiscent of the aquatic creatures of H.  P. Lovecraft’s horror stories, specifically from the

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novella The Shadow over Innsmouth (1936). In describing the aquatic beings it seems that we are seeing the creature of The Shape of Water since its shapes were vaguely anthropoid, the head was that of a fish with prodigious bulging eyes, next to the neck they had throbbing gills and in their members they had interdigital membranes. On the other hand, there are many other influences in the film, the result of the director’s interest in cinema, such as James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) or Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast (1946). Del Toro chooses the fable as an effective means of communication with the viewer, told with the cadence of a fairy tale for adults and with an atmosphere that takes us back to the cinema of other times, vindicating the classic tradition of the cinema of monsters. Considering part of Beauty and the Beast as an outstanding influence, here, however, it is the beast who changes the beauty. In a twist to the classic story, it is the heroine who finally saves the monster. The action takes place in 1962, at the height of the Cuban missile crisis, the greatest period of tension during the Cold War. Given the unmistakable influence of the B-​series cinema, there are a series of archetypal characters: the young naive girl, the villain, the scientist, and, of course, the monster. The film combines a spy thriller, a monster story, melodrama, musical nostalgia, action movies and romance between humans and anthropomorphic creatures. All the constants of the director are here: a narrative that develops in a convulsive political period of the recent past—​in this case, the Cold War; a creature that suggests that the truly monstrous being is not the one we believe; love as sad; the imaginary as a palliative, reflected in the protagonists’ love for movies; a melancholic portrait of homosexuality and the customary bitter racism. It addresses, thus, issues of current relevance, from the imagination and as a political tool. The characters do not fit completely into the world around them:  Elisa (Sally Hawkins) and her friend and neighbour Giles (Richard Jenkins) have a very special bond and complicity; for example, they love the musicals of other times. Elisa is the great protagonist, a fragile character in appearance, but whose convictions are as clear and powerful as her courage when making crucial decisions. Giles, her friend and neighbour, cartoonist and publicist inspired, in some way, by James Whale, the director of the iconic Frankenstein of 1931. Whale was also a painter and illustrator and his homosexuality caused his lack of appreciation in the film industry. For the director, an important moment of the film is when Giles draws with new inspiration when he meets the monster. Colonel Strickland (Michael Shannon), the villain of the movie, is the real monster with a human face, he is in charge of taking the strange creature from the Amazon River (continuing with the homage to Arnold) to the secret

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scientific-​military laboratory in which the story unfolds. There is an element that is not expressed as openly in other films: the sexual dimension. This is perhaps the first film in which del Toro delves into love and sex. For the filmmaker, this is important, or at least in this context, and he sees it as a naturalistic, everyday and beautiful element. The non-​verbal communication of the woman and the monster propitiate it, they understand each other perfectly and surprisingly in this way. 4

Crimson Peak and the Tradition of Fairy Tales

The atmospheric tale of love and death of the film takes place in the decaying mansion known as Crimson Peak, located in northern England. The ancestral home holds a great amount of dark secrets, making sinister actions happen in rapid succession. The house feels like an enchanted castle taken from a fairy tale. The house is really a rotting representation of the family that has inhabited it, a typically Gothic haunted house: it is like a cage, a trap, where characters feel like the insects we see along the film, trapped and about to die of suffocation. Echoing Gothic classics like Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë), Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë) or Rebecca (Daphne du Maurier), del Toro made Crimson Peak (2015) based on his love of horror, fairy tales and Gothic stories. He wanted to combine and mix these genres. In fact, fairy tales and the Gothic do share many similarities. Inspired by the Brothers Grimm’s fairy tales among others (Chávez, 2011), and a fairy tale called ‘Bluebeard’s Wives’, we can find a great tradition leading to Crimson Peak.1 Fairy tales, Gothic stories and the horror tradition are three forms of literature that are very closely related. One can read the most horrifying story and yet some elements define it as a fairy tale. Most of the time, the Gothic tale involves romance, meaning not just a love story, but a poetic longing for a past. Horror always has elements different from the other two (Worley 67–​80). Crimson Peak is labelled by critics as a Gothic romance, horror and a Victorian Gothic (Debruge online; Kohn online; Jolin online; Nicholson online). It has also been called a ghost story or a Gothic horror (Schaefer online;

1 Guillermo del Toro’s production presents the love triangle of having two competing wives who cannot coexist in peace. The heroine must act to save her life and preserve her marriage. The husband must choose, being unable to do so, dying in the end.

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Shaw-​Williams online). Ebiri (online) states upon this complex generic referencing by noting: ‘Crimson Peak […] doesn’t always seem to know what it wants to be’. Del Toro wanted to make a movie that was a mixture of all these things that he loves. Guillermo del Toro’s ghosts are scary enough to keep the viewer attentive and unquiet. Crimson Peak’s ghosts are red like blood and like the red clay the characters’ house stands on. Spectres are translucent, confronting the vividly crimson color. Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak provides viewers with an example of tactile contact between humans and ghosts, when, at the beginning of the film, the black hands of a female spectre touch the heroine’s shoulder. Borderline horror lies in the idea that to bridge the gap between human and the supernatural it is necessary to endow the dead with properties of living beings (Hearn 237). Crimson Peak echoes some elements of Pan’s Labyrinth, The Shape of Water (and, in some parts, The Devil’s Backbone) related to mythology, realism and fantasy. When we read a fairy tale, we as spectators are astonished when facing the beauty of the visuals and the grandness of the scale. In an era where cinema productions are endowed with superheroes, technology, special effects, robots and dinosaurs, it is a great idea to remind ourselves that excitement and entertainment can also be found in a love story full of ghosts, fantasy and fairy-​tale elements. Crimson Peak and fairy tales share their imaginative character: they are partly true, and partly pure fantasy. Ghosts are a metaphor for things of the past, a past that reminds us of the time when fairies were part of human lives. Crimson Peak also bears traces of Charles Perrault’s French folktale, ‘La Barbe Bleue’ (Bluebeard),2 namely when Edith is warned by Thomas never to take the mansion’s indoor elevator—​which leads to its subterranean area—​and when Lucille refuses to give her a set of keys to the mansion because some rooms are unsafe. In this film, as in traditional fairy tales, the emphasis lies upon a ‘prohibition and its transgression’ (Hermansson 3). As in Perrault’s folktale, and in traditional tales, Edith’s curiosity is too strong; her disobedience, wandering into restricted areas of the mansion, places her in danger. Whereas in a great majority of fairy tales good characters are rewarded, and evil ones are punished, soon showing signs of redemption, Crimson Peak’s female characters resemble those of fairy tales, suggesting a resemblance between Victorian angels and monstrous women.

2 For a detailed discussion on how Crimson Peak evokes ‘Bluebeard’, see Salisbury (2015).

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Conclusions

Guillermo del Toro is one of the contemporary filmmakers who keep going back to fairy-​tale stereotypes, relying on hypertextual aesthetics (Kotecki 236). Del Toro resorts to the juxtaposition of real and fantastic worlds to achieve his purpose but, at the same time, constructs an eloquent parallelism between the representation of monstrosity and beauty, a theme that is recurrent in fairy tales. He was (and is) the acknowledged master of the ghost story, dealing with a narrative of Gothic Romance that preserves the fairy-​tale enchantment. Lucie Armitt (46) argues that fairy tales and the Gothic share the confrontations with the uncanny, and according to Hultgren, del Toro understands his work in relation to the fairy tale indicating that his work mirrors late Victorianism: It also continues a trend from the Victorian period in which the fairy tale was a genre that united many different kinds of non-​realist writing. Del Toro’s reliance on the fairy tale genre to describe his films suggests an intellectual debt to the Victorian period, as well as a fascination with enduring stories and the preservation of a great variety of popular past art forms and narratives. hultgren 155-​156 Atmosphere, settings and characters, everything feels really intense. Ultimately what Guillermo del Toro does with his stories is show that humans are far more terrible creatures than restless spirits, not very far from fairy tales.

Works Cited

Armitt, Lucie. Theorizing the Fantastic. London: Arnold, 1996. Blair, L. N. ‘Pan’s Labyrinth: Finding the Center’. Presented at the National Conference of the Popular Culture Association, New Orleans, LA, usa. 2009. Carrasco, Cristina, ‘Contestatory Fairy Tales and Liminal Spaces in Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth’, Revista de Humanidades. Tecnológico de Monterrey, 31–​32 (2011): 13–​30. Chávez, Daniel. ‘De faunos hispánicos y monstruos en inglés, la imaginación orgánica de Guillermo del Toro’. Tendencias del cine iberoamericano en el nuevo milenio: Argentina, Brasil, España y México, Juan Carlos Vargas (ed.). Guadalajara: Universidad de Guadalajara, 2011. 373–​410.

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Cooper, Rand Richards. ‘Monsters, Politics, Romance. “The Shape of Water” ’. Commonweal 23rd February 2018, https://​www.commonwealmagazine.org/​monsters-​ politics-​romance. Debruge, Peter. ‘Film Review: “Crimson Peak” ’. Variety 13th October 2015, http://​variety. com/​2015/​film/​reviews/​crimson-​peak-​film-​review-​1201613988/​. Del Toro, Guillermo. ‘The Shape of Water Q&A with Guillermo del Toro and Vanessa Taylor’. Directors Guild of America 2017, https://​www.youtube.com/​watch?v=04WoojFSejU. Deveny, Thomas, ‘Once upon a Time in Spain in 1944: The morphology of El Laberinto del Fauno’, Journal of Interdisciplinaries studies on film in Spanish 1.1 (2008): 1–​12. Ebiri, Bilge. ‘Crimson Peak Looks so Good that You Might not Notice its Half-​Baked Story’. Vulture 16th October 2015, http://​www.vulture.com/​2015/​10/​movie-​review-​ crimson-​peak.html. Gaudette, Emily. ‘Shape of Water Guillermo del Toro Reflects on Sex, Monsters and Catholic Saints’. Newsweek 1st December 2017, http://​www.newsweek.com/​2017/​12/​ 15/​guillermo-​del-​toro-​shape-​water-​sex-​catholicism-​727518.html. Hearn, Lafcadio. ‘Nightmare Touch’. Shadowings. New York: Cosimo, 2007. Hermansson, Casie E. Bluebeard. A Reader’s Guide to the English Tradition. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2009. Hultgren, Neil, ‘The Museum that Looks Back: Guillermo del Toro: At Home with Monsters’. Neo-​Victorian Studies 10.1 (2017): 152–​181. Jolin, Dan. ‘Crimson Peak Review’. Empire 15th October 2015, http://​www.empireonline. com/​movies/​crimson-​peak-​2/​review/​. Kérchy, Anna (ed.). Postmodern Reinterpretations of Fairy Tales. Lewiston, Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2011. Kohn, Eric. ‘Review: Why Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak is not your Average Gothic Romance’. Indiewire 14th October 2015, http://​www.indiewire.com/​2015/​10/​review-​ why-​guillermo-​del-​toros-​crimson-​peak-​is-​not-​your-​average-​gothic-​romance-​56645/​. Kotecki, Kristine. ‘Approximating the Hypertextual, Replicating the Metafic-​tional: Textual and Sociopolitical Authority in Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth’. Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-​Tale Studies 24.2 (2010): 235–​254. Menzel, S. ‘The Shape of Water Telluride Q&A featuring Guillermo del Toro’. 5th September 2017, https://​youtu.be/​bh2B6kDYVL0. Nicholson, Amy. ‘Guillermo del Toro’s Deliriously Artificial Crimson Peak is a Faithful Homage to a Foolish Genre’. LA Weekly 14th October 2015, http://​www.laweekly.com/​film/​guillermo-​del-​toros-​deliriously-​artificial-​crimson-​peak-​is-​a-​faithful-​ homage-​to-​a-​foolish-​genre-​6164642. Saeger, J. M. The Recuperation of Historic Memory: Recognizing Suppressed Female Voices From the Spanish Civil War and Francoist Repression. University of California: California Digital Library, 2009.

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Salisbury, Mark. Crimson Peak: The Art of Darkness. London: Titan Books, 2015. Schaefer, Sandy. ‘Guillermo del Toro to Direct Crimson Peak; Could ‘Mountains of Madness’ Happen?’, Screen Rant 4th December 2012, http://​screenrant.com/​guillermo-​ del-​toro-​crimson-​peak-​mountains-​madness. Shaw-​Williams, Hannah. ‘Guillermo Del Toro Says Crimson Peak is Shocking, Kinky, Gothic & Scary’, Screen Rant 1st July 2013, http://​screenrant.com/​guillermo-​del-​ toro-​crimson-​peak-​movie-​details/​. Solaz, Lucía. ‘Monstruos y demás parientes’. Encadena2. Revista de cine May 2009, http://​www.encadenados.org/​nou/​n-​61-​el-​mal-​en-​el-​cine/​monstruos-​y-​demas-​ parientes. Worley, L. ‘The Horror! Gothic Horror Literature and Fairy Tales: The Case of «Der Räuberbräutigam»’. Colloquia Germanica 42(1) (2009): 67–​80. Zahed, Ramin. ‘Strong color pallette brings a long-​held vision of “Shape of Water” to life’. Los Angeles Times 25th January 2018, http://​www.latimes.com/​entertainment/​ envelope/​la-​en-​mn-​crafts-​shape-​water-​design-​20180125-​story.html. Zipes, Jack. ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’. Journal of American Folklore 121.480 (January 2008): 236–​240.

­c hapter 14

From Fairy Tales to Slasher Films: Little Red Riding Hood and Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left Javier Martín-​Párraga Abstract As is well-​known, fairy tales have played a paramount role when educating and delighting the younger members of every Western community. Our ancestors gathered around a comforting fire and enjoyed the story of Little Red Riding Hood. Adults and children alike appreciated the mystery, fantasy and suspense of a story which is linked to our deepest fears and anxieties. In the case of children, this ancient story told them not to abandon the safety of the safe road, never to disobey adults or, even less, trust strangers. With the rise of capitalism families no longer had the time to tell stories and films and TV shows replaced fairy tales. Twentieth century teenagers were no longer delighted, shocked or educated by Little Red Riding Hood but by fantasy and horror films. Nonetheless, many horror films are not but straightforward adaptations of fairy tales. In this paper I analyze how the story of Little Red Riding Hood inspired a very successful movie in 1972: Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left. In this movie spectators find a teenage girl who wears not a red hood but a red blouse; who trusts not a wolf but a group of drug dealers; who is taken to the forest, brutalized and killed, and who is avenged by her father, who does not use an ax as in the original story, but its contemporary equivalent: a chainsaw.

Keywords fairy tales  –​Slasher Films  –​Little Red Riding Hood  –​The Last House on the Left  –​ Wes Craven

1

Fairy Tales, Then and Now

Fairy and folk tales have been told as bedtime stories from the most remote times. Consequently, these ancient, democratic, popular stories have contributed to the dissemination and consolidation of fundamental cultural and

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | DOI:10.1163/9789004418998_016

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social roles in a crucial manner. As Carolyn Heilbrun points out, ‘out of old tales, we must make new lives’ (109). Quoting Andrea Dworkin, ‘We have taken the fairy tales of our childhood with us into maturity, chewed but still lying in the stomach, as real identity’ (32). The paramount importance of fairy tales as educational tools can be explained according to several reasons. First of all, as oral traditions, they are virtually free to produce and transmit. While painting, sculpture and other arts did require both expensive materials and formal training to be produced, stories could be invented by common citizens, without prior technical or academic training at the same time they were free from any economic investments. The same applies to the audience of fairy tales. Being able to own a painting, sculpture or printed book required economic privileges which were only available to a very small elite. And the fact that creating tales did not require formal education resulted in cultural artifacts that were very easy to enjoy (unlike more sophisticated literary manifestations such as poetry). In other words, fairy tales can be considered the most democratic artistic manifestation ever produced. At this point it is important to establish a fundamental difference between simple and simplistic. Fairy tales were produced by common men and women and enjoyed by equally common audiences. Thus, they were not overly complex, and their language and other stylistic features must necessarily be defined as simple. But they are very far from being simplistic. As Bruno Bettelheim explains, ‘Through the centuries (if not millennia) […] fairy tales came to convey at the same time overt and covert meanings—​came to speak simultaneously to all levels of the human personality, communicating in a manner which reaches the uneducated mind of the children as well as the sophisticated adult’ (6–​7). Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar develop Bettelheim’s opinion in the following terms: ‘myths and fairy tales often both state and enforce culture’s sentences with greater accuracy than more sophisticated literary texts’ (36). The reason why the simple nature of fairy tales enabled them to transmit deeper messages than more complex literary manifestation is clearly connected to symbolism, since as Kimberly J. Lau explains, ‘the coupling of a tale’s structure with the social context of the culture in which it flourishes lends insight which is invaluable in deciphering its symbolic significance. In turn, its symbolic significance is crucial to understanding any social or cultural meaning which it might bear’ (233). As a matter of fact, the symbolic richness and deep complexities of fairy tales soon attracted psychologists and psychoanalysts such as Sigmund Freud, Carl Gustav Jung or Jacques Lacan, who devoted some of their most seminal studies to analyzing ancient stories. In this regard, it is necessary to recall how Freud re-​visited ‘The Sandman’ story when developing the concept of the

150 Martín-Párraga unheimlich. More recent examples usually focus on the therapeutic role fairy tales can play. A good example of this trend is Sheldon Cashdan’s book The Witch Must Die: How Fairy Tales Shape our Lives (1999). Another prominent element from fairy tales that is connected to their cultural and social importance is that of catharsis. As formulated by Aristotle, catharsis is a process by the means of which the individual and society as a whole become purified by the contemplation of certain artistic manifestations that shocked them in a profound manner (Nanay 1371–​1380). This concept must obviously be connected to that of sublimity, as formulated by Joseph Addison first, and later in a more persuasive manner by Edmund Burke. Catharsis and sublimity are inextricably linked to extreme physical and emotional violence. And fairy tales are, indeed, replete with bloody, cruel and disturbing scenes. As a matter of fact, some of the events described in fairy tales are more extreme than those contained in the goriest horror movie ever produced. Maria Tatar summarizes the brutal dimension of fairy tales as follows, For many adults, reading through an unexpurgated edition of the Grimms’ collection of tales can be an eye-​opening experience. Even those who know that Snow White’s stepmother arranges the murder of her stepdaughter, that doves peck out the eyes of Cinderella’s stepsisters, that Briar Rose’s suitors bleed to death on the hedge surrounding her castle, or that a mad rage drives Rumpelstiltskin to tear himself in two will find themselves hardly prepared for the graphic descriptions of murder, mutilation, cannibalism, infanticide, and incest that fill the pages of these bedtime stories for children. (3) Taking all the above-​mentioned elements into account, it is safe to affirm that fairy tales are not only beneficial to society, but necessary. With the advent of wild capitalism, middle class citizens started to lack the time to enjoy old-​ fashioned family gatherings in which fairy tales were told, at the same time that they became used to very different entertainment products. But this does not mean fairy tales ceased to exist or were forgotten at all. They simply became adapted to the new material and cultural atmosphere. Starting with Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s seminal 1944 work, The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception, many scholars have paid attention to mass media and how traditional entertainment and cultural artifacts have been adapted to fit its requirements. In this case I consider it suitable to quote Martin M. Wrinkle, who affirms that, ‘the light of the cinema […] instigated a profound change in Western culture—​from reading stories to viewing stories,

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from literature to image, from linguistic text to cinematic text. As much as this was a radical break with the past, it was also a continuation of the entire tradition of human civilization’ (4). Fairy tales have been able to survive in the context of mass media throughout several different manners. The most obvious case is that of direct adaptation, as it occurs with Disney’s famous adaptations of Cinderella, Snow White, etc. Nonetheless, Elizabeth S. Bird invites us to go beyond when studying the relation between folk narratives and pop culture:  ‘we need to forget about whether or not popular culture “transmits” folklore. Rather, we begin to consider that certain popular culture forms succeed because they act like folklore. To some extent they may have replaced folk narratives, but not with something completely new. Thus popular culture is popular because of its resonance, its appeal to an audience’s existing set of story conventions’ (195). In other words, fairy tales have also been able to mutate into completely new cultural expressions, as happens with Harry Potter; a saga which fulfills absolutely all the categories established by Vladimir Propp in his fundamental Morphology of the Tale (1958). As explained by Carol J. Clover in her influential book, Men, Women And Chain Saws:  Gender In The Modern Horror Film, the relation between fairy tales and horror movies is especially relevant: ‘Although many folklorists disown horror movies as products too mediated by technology, authorial intention, and the profit motive to be seen as folklore in any authentic sense, the fact is that horror movies look like nothing so much as folktales—​a set of fixed tale types that generate an endless stream of what are in effect variants: sequels, remakes and rip-​offs’ (10). Clover’s opinion is confirmed by Vera Dika, a scholar who analyzed horror films from a structuralist perspective which echoed Propp’s taxonomical efforts, in her remarkable 1987 paper. More recently, Richard Nowell adapted Propp’s morphology to fit virtually any horror film released since the 70s of the previous century (21). 2

Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left

As explained above, the folk and fairy tales we remember from our childhood could be adapted in order to be transmitted as films or tv series, or to inspire new cultural products which seem quite different from the source stories but would not be possible at all without them. However, the story of Little Red Riding Hood is probably the one which has inspired more horror films. After all, it contains all the elements spectators crave for when consuming slasher films. Thus, Carol J.  Clover asks us to consider the tale of Little Red Riding Hood as the very basis for Meir Zarchi’s 1978 rape and revenge film I Spit on

152 Martín-Párraga Your Grave, since ‘[the protagonist] strikes off into the wilderness only to be captured and eaten by a wolf (whom she foolishly trusts), though she is finally saved by a passing woodsman. Multiply and humanize the wolf, read ‘rape’ for ‘eat’, skip the woodsman (let Red save herself), and you have I Spit on Your Grave’ (124). In this chapter I am going to compare ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ with Wes Craven’s first film, The Last House on the Left (1972). Craven is one of the first and most popular directors inaugurating the slasher films in the late 70s of the previous century at the same time that he is responsible for the meta-​ resurgence of this genre in the mid-​90s, with the self-​referential and parodical Scream (Kvaran 964). Throughout his career, Craven directed 22 commercially successful movies, and some are considered as cult films. But his main contribution to pop culture is, without any doubt, the character of Freddy Krueger, which appeared for the first time in A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) and has featured 10 films (including a re-​boot), becoming a global pop icon. Krueger’s importance is such that Karra Shimabukuro defends the idea that this character will in the future be remembered the same way Cinderella or Little Red Riding Hood are: Some ideas have become so universal that we no longer stop to think about their origins. The dark man hiding in the shadows, the bogeyman under the bed, and the nebulous threat in the night punishing bad children—​these are all concepts we are familiar with. Perhaps we associate them in a vague sense with the fairy tales we read […] Freddy Krueger is the folkloric bogeyman who serves not only to represent cultural fears, but also to present a sense of justice. (45) The genesis of The Last House on the Left must be connected to the culture zeitgeist of America at the time it was produced. From a cultural point of view, Robin Wood defines horror films as a ‘collective nightmare’ (174). In the case of this film, the script is populated with images and ideas from the decaying hippie movement. As Matt Becker points out, the socio-​cultural atmosphere of the time also influenced the style of the movie, since ‘the ultraviolence of Last House on the Left was, indeed, aimed directly at key focal points of stress and tension, as the conspicuous social and political bloodshed of the era (i.e., assassinations, riots, the war in Vietnam) became increasingly difficult to reconcile with ideas of liberty, justice, and other core tenets imagined as the American Way’ (56). The violence in this film is, indeed, so extreme that, ‘On release in the UK it was prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act and refused video certification’ (Fiddler 288). But it is also

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necessary to highlight that the origins of this film are also linked to Craven’s obsession with creating a horror film which could transcend the genre by appealing to the audience’s inner fears and preoccupations, both collectively and individually. In order to offer a dreadful scenario in which audiences could project their most profound fears, the director based his feature film debut on a medieval German folk ballad of tragedy and revenge which had also inspired Ingmar Bergman’s 1960 The Virgin Spring. The two films could not be more different, but as K.A. Laity explains, ‘The flexibility of the ballad tradition easily encompasses both interpretations despite major changes in details and different production choices’ (180). This tragic German story included many elements which can be defined as universally fear-​inducing, such as the rape and murder of the offspring and the barbaric acts one can perform as a father who has suffered such a torment. Analyzing the resulting film, I believe that Craven succeeded with The Last House on the Left. From the point of view of capturing the complex period of Nixon’s America and the agony of the hippie dream, the film is now studied by film critics and historians alike, as Erika Tiburcio’s 2016 article proves. As far as connecting with audiences in a deep, psychological and meaningful manner, Craven was equally successful, since this movie became an instant hit at the box office, inspired many other movies which basically copied its premise and artistic style (such as Bo Arne Vibernius’ Thriller: A Cruel Picture [1974]) and received a 2009 remake. To fully understand the importance of The Last House on the Left as a film and cultural icon it is important to mention David Szulkin’s book, Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left: The Making of a Classic (1997), as well as Jeffrey Steven Podoshen’s ‘Home is Where the Horror Is: Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left and A Nightmare on Elm Street’ (2018). 3

Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left as a Postmodern Little Red Riding Hood

After considering the relations between folk and fairy tales and contemporary films and introducing The Last House on the Left I  will now study the many elements this movie shares with Little Red Riding Hood. As is well-​known, this ancient story has been told many times and some of the versions differ significantly from one another. Tracing the precise origins of this tale is almost impossible, but authors such as J.M. Ziolkowski affirm that some early versions of it were told by French and Italian peasants during the tenth century (1992). According to folklorists, some of those early narrations were quite ruthless and

154 Martín-Párraga included depictions of carnage, cannibalism and even pedophilia. The two most famous versions of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ are Perrault’s and the Brothers Grimm’s, written in 1697 and 1812, respectively. As Zohar Shavit explains in Poetics of Children’s Literature, Perrault’s story can be considered darker and explores in further depth the erotic undertones underlying the protagonist and the story itself while the German version is more appropriate for small audiences, since it exhibits a clearly educational vocation. Craven’s inspiration is certainly more connected with the gruesome version recorded by Perrault, but its ending (while not as happy) seems to be more similar to the Brothers Grimm’s version. The first connection between Craven’s movie and the fairy tale is the age of the protagonist and the piece of clothing which comes to symbolize her coming of age. While Little Red Riding Hood’s age is never made explicit in the original tales, there is little doubt that she is about to enter puberty. This is proven by the fact that she is permitted to enter the woods on her own without any adult protection as well as by the red hood she proudly wears. A red hood which, according to Erich Fromm (1957), Bruno Bettelheim (1976) and Alan Dundes (1989 and 1991) can only symbolize the character’s first menstruation. In Craven’s movie, the events take place immediately before the protagonist’s sixteenth birthday. In this case it would not make any sense for a twentieth-​ century teenager to wear a red hood at all, but red will still be an important and meaningful color since she now wears a tight red, semi-​transparent, blouse. It is important to note that she wears this blouse without a bra. As she later explains, she has chosen not to wear a bra because she is delighted with the way her body looks now, once ‘my breasts filled out [and] I feel like a woman for the first time in my life’. The second connection between the fairy tale and the movie is the protagonist’s disobeying her mother, since none of the protagonists pay any attention to parents’ common-​sensical warning of following the right path without wandering around or trusting any strangers they might meet. In the contemporary version, the parents ask the postmodern Riding Hood not to visit an especially dangerous neighborhood. As we were told by our grandparents, the original Red Hood trusted the big bad wolf and abandoned the main, presumably safe, path. In the case of Craven’s movie, Mary does go to the forbidden slum and trusts not a big bad wolf but a gang of four drug dealers. The results of the protagonists’ disobedience and lack of common sense are not very different. In the fairy tales, the wolf arrives at grandma’s house before the protagonist does, which enables the beast to devour both the old woman and the little girl. In The Last House on the Left, Mary’s decision of entering the dealers’ house (trying to buy some marijuana) results in her kidnapping, torture, rape and

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death. At this point it is fundamental to note that Mary is kidnapped in a dangerous part of the city, but she is taken to the forest to be abused and killed. As it becomes evident, Wes Craven chooses to follow the tradition established by folk and fairy tales of placing the uncanny and the sinister in the middle of the woods or the forest, far away from the sheltering presence of family, soldiers and priests. Perrault’s tale ends with the heroine and her grandmother eaten by the beast and offers a very clear moral: Children, especially attractive, well-​bred young ladies, should never talk to strangers, for if they should do so, they may well provide dinner for a wolf. I say ‘wolf’, but there are various kinds of wolves. There are also those who are charming, quiet, polite, unassuming, complacent, and sweet, who pursue young women at home and in the streets. And unfortunately, it is these gentle wolves who are the most dangerous ones of all. (104) Craven’s movie shows the humiliation, beating, rape and murder of Mary in a set of very brutal scenes shot in a realistic, documentary-​like, style which transmits exactly the same moral. Nevertheless, this is not the end of the film since the director opts for an ending which is somehow closer to the Grimm Brothers (even when a happy ending is out of the question once the disobedient and stupid but innocent Mary has been tormented and executed). Thus, in The Last House on the Left the contemporary wolves steal a peace sign necklace Mary’s father has given to her as an early birthday present after getting rid of her body. When they try to escape to Canada their car breaks down and they need to spend the night in the closer house around. A house that is, coincidentally enough, the victim’s. The stolen necklace makes Mary’s parents suspicious of their guests, so they decide to spy on them. Soon they discover what has happened. In the Grimm Brothers’ tale it was a huntsman who killed the wolf. In Craven’s movie, revenge will be executed by the victims’ parents. As it happened with the hood, it would not make much sense for a middle-​high class doctor as Mary’s father to own or use an old-​ fashioned axe. But he does have an electric chainsaw he has been using to keep his garden nice. The movie finishes with the last killer decapitated by this modern-​day axe. As it becomes evident, Craven gets inspiration for the ending of his movie from both Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, since his re-​interpretation of Little Red Riding Hood’s ending is as grim as desolate as Perrault’s was, but it also includes the revenge element contained in the Brothers Grimm’s version.

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Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor W., and J. M. Bernstein. The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. London: Routledge, 1991. Becker, Matt. ‘A Point of Little Hope: Hippie Horror Films and the Politics of Ambivalence’. The Velvet Light Trap 57 (2006): 42–​59. Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment:  The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. New York: Knopf, 1976. Bird, S. Elizabeth. For Enquiring Minds: A Cultural Study of Supermarket Tabloids. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1992. Cashdan, Sheldon. The Witch Must Die: How Fairy Tales Shape Our Lives. New York: Basic Books, 1999. Clover, Carol J. Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2015. Dika, Vera. ‘The Stalker Film, 1978–​1981’. American Horrors: Essays on the Modern American Horror Film, Gregory Albert Waller (ed.). Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1987. 86–​102. Dundes, Alan. Little Red Riding Hood: a Casebook. Madison: The U of Wisconsin P, 1989. Dundes, Alan. ‘Interpreting Little Red Riding Hood Psychoanalytically’. The Brothers Grimm and Folktale, James McGlathery (ed.). Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1991. 16–​55. Dworkin, Andrea. Woman Hating. New York: Dutton, 1974. Fiddler, Michael. ‘Playing Funny Games in the Last House on the Left: The Uncanny and the ‘Home Invasion’ Genre’. Crime Media Culture 9.3 (2013): 281–​299. Fromm, Erich. The Forgotten Language; an Introduction to the Understanding of Dreams, Fairy Tales, and Myths. New York: Grove Press, 1957. Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-​Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 2000. Heilbrun, Carolyn G. Hamlet’s Mother and Other Women. New York: Columbia UP, 1990. Kvaran, Kara M. ‘You’re All Doomed! A Socioeconomic Analysis of Slasher Films’. Journal of American Studies 50.4 (2016): 953–​970. Laity, K.A. ‘The Virgin Victim: Reimagining a Medieval Folk Ballad in the Virgin Spring and the Last House on the Left’. Folklore/​Cinema: Popular Film as Vernacular Culture, Sharon R. Sherman (ed.). Utah: Utah State UP, 2007. 180–​196. Lau, Kimberley. ‘Structure, Society and Symbolism: Toward a Holistic Interpretation of Fairy Tales’. Western Folklore 55 (1996): 233–​244. Nanay, Bence. ‘Catharsis and Vicarious Fear’. European Journal of Philosophy 26.4 (2018): 1371–​1380. Nowell, Richard. Blood Money:  A History of the First Teen Slasher Film Cycle. New York: Continuum, 2011. Perrault, Charles. The Complete Fairy Tales. New York: Oxford UP, 2018.

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Podoshen, Jeffrey. ‘Home Is Where the Horror Is:  Wes Craven’s the Last House on the Left and a Nightmare on Elm Street’. Quaterly Review of Film and Video 35.7 (2018): 722–​729. Propp, Vladimir I. Morphology of the Folktale. Laurence Scott (trans.) Austin: U of Texas P, 1968. Shavit, Zohar. Poetics of Children’s Literature. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2009. Shimabukuro, Karra. ‘The Bogeyman of Your Nightmares: Freddy Krueger’s Folkloric Roots’. Studies in Popular Culture 36.2 (2014): 45–​65. Szulkin, David A. Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left:  The Making of a Classic. New York: fab, 1997. Tatar, Maria. The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales:  Expanded Edition. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2019. Tiburcio Moreno, Erika ‘Estados Unidos a Través de la Cámara: El Cine de Terror como Discurso Histórico en la Última Casa a la Izquierda’. Cuadernos de Historia Contemporánea 38 (2016): 353–​376. The Last House on the Left. Dir. Wes Craven. usa 1972. Wood, Robin. Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan, and Beyond. New  York:  Columbia UP, 2003. Winkler, Martin M. Cinema and Classical Text:  Apollo’s New Light. New  York:  Cambridge Scholar Press, 2009. Ziolkowski, J. ‘A Fairy Tale from before Fairy Tales: Egbert of Liege’s ‘De Puella a Lupellis Seruata’ and the Medieval Background of Little Red Riding Hood’. Speculum 67 (1992): 549–​575.

­c hapter 15

Howling in the Woods: Angela Carter’s Metamorphosed Little Red Riding Hoods Nerea Riobó-​Pérez Abstract This paper examines Angela Carter’s reassessments of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’: The Werewolf’, ‘The Company of Wolves’ and ‘Wolf-​Alice’, the last three short stories in her collection The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979). Carter departs from Perrault and the Brothers Grimm’s cautionary tale in order to denounce both women and non-​ human animals’ objectification. It is my contention that the use of metamorphosis, anthropomorphism and zoomorphism serve the purpose of deconstructing traditional gender roles present in fairy tales and putting forward a new sense of subjectivity which blurs the Western human-​animal divide. By using metamorphosis as a literary device which signals liminal states and by interweaving hybrid literary genres like fairy tales or gothic narratives, Carter blurs the traditional opposition between animal and human aiming at female empowerment and at posing forward a radical conception of the self. Her Red Riding Hoods—​animalistic, hybrid, liminal others—​search for subject positions in their alterity. Carter’s postmodern taste agglomerates elements from folklore, Gothic literature, fairy tales and surrealism to open the path for the exploration of different possibilities of female identity and sexuality.

Keywords Angela Carter  –​Little Red Riding Hood  –​fairy tales  –​metamorphosis  –​Animal ­Studies –​ gender studies

1

Angela Carter and Literary Human-​Animal Studies

Carter rewrote the tale of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ in the last three short stories of the collection The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979): ‘The Werewolf’, ‘The Company of Wolves’ and ‘Wolf-​Alice’. For the purposes of this chapter, animal studies proves to be a useful tool to look into Carter’s portrayal of the

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | DOI:10.1163/9789004418998_017

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relationship between human and non-​human animals, since the latter have traditionally been regarded as the Other, mere objects or products to human consumerism. Literary depictions of such relationships have often been addressed by animal studies, thus becoming ‘a special target of concern for scholars’ of this discipline (McHugh, “Animal Farm” 32). As such, literary human-​animal studies focus on how animals are portrayed in literature, being mainly treated as mere symbols, metaphors or allegories for human subjectivity through anthropomorphism, but hardly ever addressed as empirical animals. Some scholars (Bartosch “Ghostly Presences”, “Storying”; McHugh “Animal Farm”, Animal Stories; Saphiro and Copeland) are more open to the possibility of analysing animals in literature from both a symbolical and a realist perspective, which, in their view, offers the possibility of breaking boundaries between humans and animals in order to create a space for animal agency (Bartosch, “Storying” 155). The texts as a whole create a space for dialogue between species and hybrid identities, in which anthropomorphism and zoomorphism are used to deconstruct preconceived ideas of identity and subjectivity, both human and animal. My argument, in tune with Bartosch’s ideas, is the creation of such space throughout Angela Carter’s collection, in which metamorphosis from animal to human and vice versa functions as a coherent unifying thread in the texts. In this chapter, I will search for the symbolic treatment of nonhuman animals as well as for the representation of empirical animals as such. By means of metamorphosis, Carter blurs the physical and imaginary borders which divide humans from animals and creates a space for hybrid identities where human and animal alterities can coexist as equals. Carter’s short stories empower both women and animals and exhort them to embrace their real nature. Thus, Carter not only uses animalistic characteristics to create different possibilities of subjectivity but also gives agency and voice both to women and animals in a predominantly patriarchal tradition which treated them as objects, as is the case of classic fairy tales. Between these two factions there is a question of empathy, being women and animals treated as commodities to be used, exploited, hunted or consumed as meat by patriarchal Western societies which consider bodies as flesh (Parry 112). In order to break the borders which separate animals from humans, Carter uses liminal times and spaces, hybrids from the Gothic imaginary and metamorphosis to reach the physical and imaginary frontiers that prevent them from developing subject positions. Liminality appears related to animals, supernatural monstrous creatures and humans, especially women. Borderline supernatural figures which are in a permanent state of in-​betweenness (Aftandilian 10), as suggested by Gothic tropes such as the werewolf, are, in Carter’s short stories, liberated from their static condition and are able to move across

160 Riobó-Pérez borders and states. In order to explore Carter’s subversive strategies in questioning traditional borders, I will follow Saphiro and Copeland’s three-​folded analysis proposal: 1. Deconstruct reductive, disrespectful ways of presenting nonhuman animals; and 2.  Evaluate the degree to which the author presents the animal “in itself,” both as an experiencing individual and as a species-​ typical way of living in the world. […] We add a third approach: that the critique includes an analysis of human-​animal relationships in the work at hand. (345) 2

Angela Carter’s Short Stories

Fairy-​tale ‘Red Riding Hood’ is mainly known through Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, who transformed the oral come-​of-​age story of a brave woman into a punishment for disobedience in a patriarchal society (Zipes 154). The tale helped to transmit the idea of the wolf and its folkloric expression—​the werewolf—​as a predator, the evil villain of the story. The werewolf embodied not only evil but also sexuality: ‘werewolves have also been linked to animal desires. […] A large number of shapeshifting texts focus on sexual relationships involving supernatural characters’ (McMahon-​Coleman 68). Thus, the Gothic appropriated the trope of the lycanthrope and embedded it with power: ‘One metamorphosis leads to, or melts into, another without much restraint. Thus, the figure of the wolf, werewolf or she-​wolf can also be rendered in classical Gothic mode, as demon, vampire or satanic lover’ (Braidotti 128). From the first to the last of the three stories, the complexity of the female protagonists increases as readers reach the end: ‘Carter revives the lost voices of “Red Riding Hood” by negotiating story with story (were)wolf with (girl)wolf. But this transformation works only if we are willing to read these stories intertextually’ (Bacchilega 66). In ‘The Werewolf’, Carter’s Red Riding Hood obtains her freedom; the second protagonist moves a step further and experiences her sexuality openly in ‘The Company of Wolves’. Finally, Wolf-​Alice experiences a complete discovery, first as a human being and then as a woman. Animals and their Otherness are an important element in the stories, offering the space between human and non-​human animal worlds where both can be subjects with an agency of their own. Carter subverts and deconstructs Cartesian dualistic thought, breaks the barriers between human and non-​human animals and locates them in a subject position: ‘Even though in Carter’s fairy tales male and female animals and their transformations are tackled in different ways, their

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bodies share a fundamental feature: openness, which signifies a collapse of the confines between the human and the animal’ (Pasolini 90). Following Saphiro and Copeland’s (2005) three-​step analysis, the first level looks into the ways in which Carter’s texts deconstruct traditional portrayals of animals and women in patriarchal societies, paying attention to questions such as empathy, animal and female subjectivity, agency and voice. ‘The Werewolf’ presents a world of violence and superstition where both human and non-​human animals are denied a voice of their own. Non-​human animal agency is limited to the behaviour of wild animals living in a ‘northern country; they have cold weather, they have cold hearts. Cold; tempest; wild beasts in the forest. It is a hard life’ (Carter 210). In such a setting, there is no room for empathic relations between species and, on the contrary, Carter presents a particularly superstitious society in which wolves function as scapegoats. By the introduction of the witch hunt as a theme in the narrative, Carter presents animals—​particularly the black cat—​as the Other, the uncanny element connected to the supernatural (evil) world: Wreaths of garlic on the doors keep out the vampires. […] When they discover a witch -​-​some old woman whose cheeses ripen when her neighbour's do not, another old woman whose black cat, oh, sinister! follows her about all the time, they strip the crone, search her for marks, for the supernumary nipple her familiar sucks. They soon find it. Then they stone her to death. (210) This reference anticipates the ending of the story, not only by predicting the death of the grandmother but also establishing a connection between her and the animals. As for the animal’s feelings, the narration offers a sole moment when the wolf’s pain is visible after its paw has been cut off: ‘The wolf let out a gulp, almost a sob, when she saw what had happened to it; wolves are less brave than they seem. It went lolloping off disconsolately between the trees as well as it could on three legs, leaving a trail of blood behind it’ (211). However, not even the girl is able to feel sympathy for the animal’s misery, being the events a survival scene of predator and prey. What is introduced in ‘The Werewolf’ is developed in ‘The Company of Wolves’: both settings suggest the problems of a harsh climate and the scarcity of food. The text is divided in two parts, while the first one is based on warnings about the dangers of the wolf (or werewolf) and the indoctrination from the literary fairy tale of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, the second one, similar to the fairy-​tale plot, subverts the previous warnings. The non-​human animals of the story represent farm animals—​which serve as food and companions to

162 Riobó-Pérez humans—​and wild ones which live in the forest. Among the latter, the focus of attention is the figure of the wolf, described several times in the story as the ‘carnivore incarnate’ (217). Even though they act as empirical animals, wolves are vilified by the narrator, which does not express any kind of sentiment of pity for them: ‘that mourning for their own, irremediable appetites, can never move the heart for not one phrase in it hints at the possibility of redemption; grace could not come to the wolf from its own despair’ (214), even though the text explains wolves’ search for humans as food due to the harsh climatology. On the contrary, the girl is inclined to sympathize with the wolves’ situation, especially when hearing the howling: ‘It is very cold, poor things, she said; no wonder they howl so’ (219). Her empathic connection goes beyond when knowing the hybrid metamorphic condition of the werewolf she unleashes her sexual desire for him. The werewolf—​described ironically as the hunter in Carter’s tale—​speaks and acts as a human; he laughs and flirts with the girl: Is it a bet? he asked her. Shall we make a game of it? What will you give me if I get to your grandmother's house before you? What would you like? she asked disingenuously. A kiss. (216) The girl corresponds to the hunter’s flirting, creating a mutual understanding between them. As for the animals’ feelings, the text offers moments of description where the wolves appeared as famished and undernourished (212). Their condition is also revealed through their sad and piercing howling:  ‘There is a vast melancholy in the canticles of the wolves, melancholy infinite as the forest, endless as these long nights of winter and yet that ghastly sadness’ (213–​ 214). The last story of the wolf trilogy does not present such a clear connection with the ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ fairy tale as the two previous ones. Wolf-​Alice is a feral child who is found living among wolves in the forest to the point that her nature is described as completely animalistic. She does not speak and tries to imitate animal sounds (221); she does not know how to walk (221) and uses her nose as a wolf would do: ‘Her long nose is always a-​quivering, sifting every scent it meets’ (221). The other main character is the Duke, a breed of werewolf and vampire who also challenges received conceptions of language, but he does it in a conscious manner. This mute pact between the two characters represents a union between them and Wolf-​Alice’s resistance to language connects her with the Duke (Lau 90). The Duke feels pain when he is hurt, an event which provokes sentiments of empathy and compassion in Wolf-​Alice at

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the end of the story: ‘Poor, wounded thing … […]. Then, she was pitiful as her gaunt grey mother’ (Carter 227). The second level of analysis focuses on how Carter portrays animals as symbols, as empirical nonhuman animals or even as hybrids with both a symbolic and real dimension. In ‘The Werewolf’, the ‘leg of a pig hung up to cure’ (210) clearly indicates nonhuman animals as meat, while the cat functions as a pet and the bear, the boar and the wolf incarnate empirical wild animals living in a harsh climate. Regarding symbolic meaning of animals, human superstitions align the black cat and the wolf to the level of witchcraft and evil forces. Thus, the wolf is seen both as a real animal and as a metaphorical trope. The werewolf, understood as an uncanny gothic element, combines the mixture of the alien and the familiar due to its human and beastly nature, emphasizing the red eyes of the creature: ‘It was a huge one, with red eyes’ (210). Acting like a wild animal—​with some reminiscences of vampirism—​the wolf ‘went for her throat, as wolves do, but she made a great swipe at it with her father’s knife and slashed off its right forepaw’ (211). After arriving to the grandmother’s house, the girl realizes the metamorphic liminal aspect of Granny: ‘And the wolf’s paw fell to the floor. But it was no longer a wolf’s paw. It was a hand […], she knew it for her grandmother’s hand’ (211). Carter deconstructs the traditional meaning of this male creature by playing with gender and words; instead of calling the tale a she-​wolf, Carter consciously uses the masculine term to challenge gender roles: ‘Thus, Carter’s positioning of the grandmother as werewolf, her drawing on a lesser-​known werewolf tradition against a vast popular history of werewolves as specifically male’ (Lau 82). As for ‘The Company of Wolves’, farm and wild animals—​especially wolves—​ are portrayed in the text as empirical nonhuman ones, acting and behaving as it is expected from them: the wolves interact with humans in search for food. They live in the woods, which serve as a liminal place where the boundaries between humanity and animality blur. Focusing on the two main characters, the hunter represents the figure of the werewolf and, as such, it is imbued with symbolic meaning. The werewolf in this tale responds to the typical mythology of these Gothic creatures and represents male sexual power:  ‘The werewolf contributes a more explicit sexual theme that is only implicitly present in the moralizing versions of the tale. In this sense, the modern young girl’s interior confusion of desire and anxiety links back directly to the grandmother stories of werewolves’ (Mulvey 250). In Carter’s portrayal, the werewolf is presented in a virile and powerful manner, evident in his metamorphosis: ‘He strips off his shirt. His skin is the color and texture of vellum. A crisp stripe of hair runs down his belly, his nipples are ripe and dark as poison fruit […]. He strips off his trousers and she can see how hairy his legs are. His genitals, huge. Ah! Huge’

164 Riobó-Pérez (Carter 217). Carter here emphasizes the hunter’s liminal animalistic appearance, a zoomorphic human animal, a representation of sexual desire. On the contrary, the human girl represents symbolical zoomorphism: while being always a human animal, she symbolically develops an animalistic individuality by embracing her sexuality. In ‘The Company of Wolves’, her experience with the hunter and her empathic connection with the wolves ignite in the character a process of symbolic animal metamorphosis, thus casting aside her passive role as the victim. By means of zoomorphism and animalization, Carter gives this female human character agency: the girl’s new sense of self springs from her rejection of traditional women’s roles as a sacrificial woman and her empowerment through sexuality. In the third story, the main point of the narrative concerns the development of identity for the girl who, since the very beginning, was living as a wolf: ‘Nothing about her is human except that she is not a wolf’ (221). Wolf-​Alice progressively acquires a certain conscience as a human being and will gradually experience the meaning of being a woman, but always retaining her animal side: ‘The girls in the stories who abandon their human separateness, of their own desire (or, who like Wolf-​Alice, are only now discovering it), are lovers of this mutant kind’ (Sage 78). The first step in the character’s own recognition is signalled by the mirror: ‘A little moisture leaked from the corners of her eyes since she knew she saw herself within it’ (Carter 226). Once this conscience of her own identity is acquired, the character shows an interest for other forms of socialization, as her need for clothes indicates. Nevertheless, the most important fact for her recognition as a woman is the movement from childhood to womanhood: puberty is seen as an empowering experience for women. The Duke is an anthropomorphic liminal creature who feeds from dead corpses found in the churchyard at night, and his face is described as ‘white as leprosy’ (223). His secluded life, sleeping during day and hunting at night, accentuates his alterity and inhumanity, represented in the vampiric non-​reflection in the mirror (222). He represents the role of the sacrilegious predator, the ‘carnivore incarnate’ from the previous text, whose eyes continue with the tradition of the wolf as evil: ‘At night, those huge, inconsolable, rapacious eyes of his are eaten up by swollen, gleaming pupil. His eyes see only appetite. These eyes open to devour the world in which he sees, nowhere, a reflection of himself’ (222). The last level of analysis focuses on the relationship between humans and animals, paying attention to how the girls and the wolves interact, breaking established boundaries and dualisms by forging a space for mutual understanding. ‘The Werewolf’ reveals a primitive society which treats animals as meat, companions or dangers. Carter uses this setting to exemplify how superstition portrays animals as Others, alienating them and separating the divide between

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animality and humanity. This vilification of animals prevents human characters from feeling empathy towards non-​human animals, and even towards humans who do not adjust to the patriarchal behavioural norms and gender roles. Carter not only transforms the grandmother into the predator wolf, but she also challenges the moral, educative and social intentions of the punitive tale. The girl and the neighbours identify the grandmother as a witch: ‘They knew the wart on the hand at once for a witch’s nipple’ (211) and, as a result of that, they kill her (211). The girl does not doubt nor feel remorse after killing her grandmother when she reveals herself as a wolf. The grandmother, accused of witchcraft, is seen as a danger for the community and has to be sacrificed, following the superstitious rituals mentioned at the beginning of the story. Carter reverses the happy ending of the traditional versions of the Red Riding Hood tale: ‘Now the child lived in her grandmother’s house; she prospered’ (211). The abrupt and ambiguous open ending brings to the fore the oral tradition of ‘Red Riding Hood’, where the girl becomes a woman through her grandmother’s flesh and blood. Carter’s subversion of the rite of passage lies in a ‘scapegoating ritual that ensures her own livelihood. She replaces the old woman […] through a violent severance that reproduces the wolf’s ferocity’ (Bacchilega 61). What is not clear is whether the girl inherited lycanthropy as well as Granny’s house and place in the community. With respect to the relations between human and non-​human animals in ‘The Company of Wolves’, the text establishes a clear-​cut divide between humans and wolves, which represent the Cartesian dichotomy of reason versus nature. The narrator uses superstition to reinforce differences and to doctrine in fear and disdain towards wolves. Carter digs into the traditional warnings of the fairy tale to create the superstition atmosphere. However, in the second part of the tale the relation between the girl and the wolfish huntsman defies such precepts. Carter’s use of the carnivore/​herbivore dichotomy to create the tension between both species with the reiteration of the wolf as the ‘carnivore incarnate’ is broken in the moment when, following the literary tradition of the fairy tale, the werewolf establishes ‘All the better to eat you with’ (Carter 219), and the girl’s reaction is laughing at the possibility of being devoured by a beast. This divide evolves into a subversion of both categories, not only by inverting the roles but by blurring the limits between animal and human identities. When Red Riding Hood approaches the hunter, she breaks free from her fears of sexual desire. The girl realizes that she should not be afraid of herself, of her sexual identity and of her own desires: ‘And, since her fear did her no good, she ceased to be afraid’ (219). There is a symbolic metamorphosis in her by embracing the liminal subjectivity represented by the werewolf. Both deconstruct the binary system in which the short story is constructed, and finally

166 Riobó-Pérez Red Riding Hood is able to develop an equal relation with the werewolf. In this way, she can live in the grandmother’s house with the werewolf in freedom and peace: ‘See! sweet and sound she sleeps in granny’s bed, between the paws of the tender wolf’ (220). As such, the human-​animal divide is blurred by reinserting the human in the natural world. Carter presents a hybrid and metamorphic self when Red Riding Hood accepts her instincts and her animalistic body. Carter’s subversion of the carnivore/​ herbivore binomial is developed throughout the three stories, reaching its highest moment in the last one. Interrelations in ‘Wolf-​Alice’ are more complex: instead of representing one of the characters as prey and the other as predator, both the girl and the Duke are positioned as carnivores. The girl thinks of herself as a wolf (221), until the discovery of her humanity and the Duke represents the union of two gothic tropes for predator: werewolf and vampire. However, the Duke—​a powerful creature—​is not aware of the dangers and gets hurt while Wolf-​Alice, being only a human, saves herself thanks to her animal instincts (227). They coexist in the same castle without any interaction between them until the end when she sympathizes with his situation and resolves to help him: ‘She prowled round the bed, growling, snuffing at his wound that does not smell like her wound. […]; she leapt upon his bed to lick, without hesitation, without disgust, with a quick, tender gravity, the blood and dirt from his cheek and forehead’ (227). The communion between animal and human traits in Wolf-​Alice results in her empathy, the need of healing and the sexual desire of this scene. Her caring and recognition develops into the final symbolic reappearance of the Duke’s reflection in the mirror: ‘Little by little, there appeared within it […], first, a formless web of tracery, the prey caught in its own fishing net, then a firmer yet still shadowed outline until at last as vivid as real life itself, as if brought into being by her soft, moist, gentle tongue, finally, the face of the Duke’ (228). As such, his humanity is recovered by Wolf-​Alice’s identification of him as an individual. 3

Conclusions

Saphiro and Copeland’s analysis applied to Carter’s three reassessments of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ allows exemplifying how Carter deconstructs traditional gender roles and reductive portrayals of non-​human animals by means of metamorphosis, anthropomorphism and zoomorphism. Instead of using binary oppositions which draw a clear divide between human and non-​human animals, Carter presents the construction of women’s identity in its full complexity. Thus, a progressive communion between the human and the non-​human

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animal is presented through the stories, which allows female characters to move freely from one direction to the other. Carter’s Red Riding Hoods learn to co-​exist equally with males, accept their animalistic features and blur the traditional Western dichotomy between human and animal. Thus, new hybrid identities are created, in-​between women who challenge the classical Western representation of humanity. Through these three protagonists, Carter signals at the possibility for women to break the patterns of victim and prey to construct their own identity.

Works Cited

Aftandilian. David (ed.). What Are the Animals To Us? Approaches from Science, Religion, Folklore, Literature, and Art. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 2007. Bacchilega, Cristina. Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1997. Bartosch, Roman. ‘Ghostly Presences:  Tracing the Animal in Julia Leigh’s The Hunter’. Creatural Fictions: Human-​Animal Relationships in Twentieth-​and Twenty-​First-​ Century Literature, David Herman (ed.). London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016. 259–​275. Bartosch, Roman. ‘Storying Creaturely Life’. Beyond the Human-​Animal Divide Creaturely Lives in Literature and Culture, Dominik Ohrem and Roman Bartosch (eds.). New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2017. 153–​165. Braidotti, Rosi. Metamorphoses:  Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002. Carter, Angela. Burning your Boats. Collected Short Stories. London: Vintage, 1996. 210–​ 228. Lau, J. Kimberly. ‘Erotic Infidelities: Angela Carter’s Wolf Trilogy’. Marvels & Tales 22.1 (2008): 77–​94. McHugh, Susan. ‘Animal Farm’s Lessons for Literary (and) Animal Studies’ in Humanimalia: a journal of human/​animal interface studies 1.1 (September 2009): 24–​39. McHugh, Susan. Animal Stories: Narrating across Species Lines. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2011. McMahon-​Coleman Kimberley, Weaver Roslyn. Werewolves and Other Shapeshifters in Popular Culture: A Thematic Analysis of Recent Depictions. London: Mcfarland & Co Inc. 2012. Mulvey, Laura. ‘Cinema Magic and the Old Monsters: Angela Carter’s Cinema’. Flesh and the Mirror: Essays on the Art of Angela Carter, Lorna Sage (ed). London: Virago, 2007. 248–​259. Parry, Catherine. Other Animals in Twenty-​First Century Fiction. Switzerland: Palgrave MacMillan, 2017.

168 Riobó-Pérez Pasolini, Anna. Bodies that Bleed:  Metamorphosis in Angela Carter’s Fairy Tales. Milan: Ledizioni, 2016. Sage, Lorna. ‘Angela Carter: the Fairy Tale’. Angela Carter and the Fairy Tale, Danielle M. Roemer and Christina Bacchilega (eds.). Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2001. 65–​79. Saphiro, Kenneth and Copeland Marion W. ‘Toward a Critical Theory of Animal Issues in Fiction’. Society & Animals 13.0 (December 2005): 343–​346. Zipes, Jack. Breaking the Magic Spell:  Radical Theories of Folk & Fairy Tales. Lexington: UP of Kentuky, 2002.

­c hapter 16

Red Shoes, Witches and Creatures of the Forest: Dolores Redondo’s Baztan Trilogy as Contemporary Fairy Tale Miriam Borham-​Puyal Abstract Dolores Redondo’s Baztan Trilogy (2012–​2014) proved a great publishing success. Its main character, Amaia Salazar, is a tough detective who has trained with the fbi and represents the advancements in scientific research. While she is the quintessence of a modern detective, at the same time she embodies the role of ancestral Basque women as the voices of the past and preservers of a rich tradition of folk tales. During her investigation, in fact, the creatures of these tales take over the narrative, and the past of the region returns to haunt contemporary Spain. This chapter will explore the trilogy’s generic hybridity, contending that it is both a detective novel and a contemporary fairy tale. Rewriting elements such as the breadcrumb trail, the red shoes, the cannibalistic witch, the three sisters or the fairy godmothers, Redondo’s detective fairy tale gives expression to the uncanny, to the threats that lurk in the forest. Generic hybridity will then add to the atmosphere and the tension of the thriller. Moreover, the fairy tale narrative will also provide a deeper reading of the connection between Amaia’s present and her own past. Finally, by briefly comparing the first novel with its film adaptation, this chapter will discuss how fairy tale tropes became an essential element to translate the written text into images.

Keywords: fairy tale –​detective fiction –​hybridity –​Dolores Redondo –​Baztan Trilogy –​ gender violence

1

Fairy Tales and the Noir

It is difficult to contend that there is a pure genre. Not even folk or fairy tales escape this observation; rather, the genuine quality of such genre depends on

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | DOI:10.1163/9789004418998_018

170 Borham-Puyal its ‘contamination’, its dialogue with other cultural discourses and texts (Zipes, “Cross-​Cultural Connections” 868–​9). Given the dialogic nature of the fairy or folk tale, it is not surprising that they can be approached from a variety of angles, or even that they can act as ‘shape-​shifters’, ‘morphing into new versions of themselves as they are retold and they migrate into other media’ (Tatar, “Why Fairy Tales” 56). Fairy tales transform and become transformative, in what Cristina Bacchilega has termed the ‘fairy tale web’: the multiple manners in which the genre is performed and revised in contemporary narratives, across different media (193–​8). Fairy tales pervade contemporary narrative and media in what Jorgensen sees as ‘fragments’ or ‘building blocks’, those motifs, characters or plots that blend into new genres and media to create ‘fairy tale pastiches’ (218). Independently of their genre, some of these narratives merely employ a ‘range of canonical images and themes’, such as a red hood or the magic slipper (Bacchilega and Rieder 26), while others develop a more complex hybridization. The fairy tale permeates, dialogues with other forms and matters, spanning over a wide variety of genres that often serve to manifest the ‘resurrection of the sexual, violent, and supernatural elements of folklore that existed in the oral tradition but were censored for children’s literature’ (Greenhill 9). The noir and the fairy tale, then, seem particularly apt to come together to develop this generic hybridization, as they share many common elements, such as their often circular structure in which the hero/​ine must set on a journey or quest so that, by the end of the narrative, he or she is wiser, no longer the same (Platten 121). Moreover, the noir responds well to the aforementioned original dark roots of the fairy tale tradition: the violence, the need to face evil or danger, which often takes the shape of a monster, and the political, social, or psychological readings of the world that such darkness enables the author to develop (Tatar Annotated; Zipes, Happily Ever After). Predators, men who are wolves to other men but especially to women, populate the pages of tales and thrillers alike, from ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ to Stieg Larsson’s Millennium novels. In this sense, the folk noir in particular could be understood as a more realistic performance of the fairy tale genre, in which forests and supernatural creatures are replaced by concrete buildings and criminals in the main character’s quest, or where traditional ‘fragments’ of fairy tales heighten the tension by enabling a palimpsestic reading of the narrative. A case in point is the recent adaptation for the Spanish television of Agustin Martinez’s thriller Monteperdido (2015), in which a young girl disappears in the forest and is captured by a predator. The red hood features prominently on screen and is a reference that would not be lost on the audience. Taken further, it would be possible to speak of a fantastic noir, in which the real and the fantastic coexist, blending

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the tropes of the detective narrative with elements from science-​fiction or, as in the object of the present study, traditional folklore and classic fairy tales. Dolores Redondo’s acclaimed Baztan Trilogy—​El guardián invisible (2012), Legado en los huesos (2013) and Ofrenda a la tormenta (2014)—​is a procedural narrative in which a skilled detective chases serial killers, while at the same time it is the tale of a child’s struggle to overcome the monsters that lurk in the dark with the help of protective spirits. It is a thriller that also pays homage to traditional Spanish mythology, full of benevolent and evil spirits, religious fanatics and references to death. Therefore, reality and fantasy intersect, as the novel explores both the uncanny and the marvellous, to use Todorov’s terminology (41–​43), either attributing rational explanations to the events in the narrative—​a sect and a manipulative mastermind are behind all the crimes—​ or assuming the existence of the supernatural—​the presence of natural spirits and actual witches, for example. In this context, Amaia Salazar, the main character, becomes a double visionary or link between both worlds. She is a professional investigator, but also a seer who encounters fantastic creatures, as well as the child who must escape becoming devoured by the evil forces. In this liminal capacity or role, Amaia will serve the purpose of highlighting the parallels between fantasy and reality, between the violence, child abuse and cannibalism found in beloved tales like ‘Hansel and Gretel’, for instance, and the real-​life case that inspired the novel, the ritual murder of a baby girl by a cult.1 2

Amaia, the Fairy Tale Hero(ine)

The first novel in the trilogy opens with a serial killer who murders young girls in a ritualistic manner. Amaia Salazar, a bright and young detective, must return to the village where she was born and face past and present forms of evil. The plots of the three instalments in the trilogy, then, draw on the connections between the crimes of all three novels, while they bring the heroine closer to understanding her own story, as her own traumas and the investigation soon conflate. The fact that Amaia first becomes aware of such connection by means of a medium and a deck of cards is significant: the fantastic and the spiritual irrupt in the procedural thriller just as the speaking animals, fairies

1 At the end of the third novel, Redondo explains that she found the inspiration for her trilogy in a brief piece of news on an unresolved crime: the sacrifice of a baby girl, Ainara, by a powerful sect with her parents’ complicity. From the scarce details provided on this open case, Redondo claims she constructed the story (Legado 541–​3).

172 Borham-Puyal and wizards peopled folk tales and subverted the listeners/​readers’ experience of what was actually possible. As a heroine, Amaia emphasizes the parallelism between the structure of Redondo’s noir and the tale, as she fulfils many of the functions described by Vladimir Propp (1977) in his morphology of the tale. There is an absence in her life: her father has died, and her mother has been replaced by an evil version of a maternal figure, a witch who has cannibalistic tendencies and wishes to sacrifice Amaia. She has two sisters, one of whom also attempts to drain or consume her, in this case by guilt. There are elements of magic that intervene in the advancement of the plot, both in the reading of cards and the rituals that her former fbi colleague performs to protect and guide her. As a detective and folk heroine, she must leave home in order to fulfil a mission and she encounters the ‘aggressor’, the evil figure or villain, who will try to confuse and trick her, even to kill her. When she becomes sexually involved with Markina, the criminal mastermind, Amaia will need to unmask the aggressor once and for all to save herself and those around her, hence concluding her quest and literally and figuratively returning home on the very last page of the third novel (Redondo, Ofrenda 539), a home she had abandoned for her affair, which symbolizes her misjudgement of, or rather attraction to, the villain. This leaving home is emphasized by the incursions Amaia does into dark and usually cold spaces—​the crime scenes, the forests, graveyards—​and her feeling of relief as she returns to her aunt’s house and fireplace:  the warm home, the warm arms of her husband. However, as her personal involvement becomes increasingly clear, the division starts to blur and the aggressor will find its way into her own family circle, again echoing Propp’s description of the abduction of a child (Amaia’s son) or the death of a family member (her twin sister). The heroine is then forced to confront the villain: she must solve the case and defeat the aggressor. And she must do so while preventing him from wolfing other girls and women, and her own self. In this sense, the novels abound with references to devouring creatures. The first one, for example, emphasizes the intertextuality with ‘Little Red Riding Hood’: one of the victims is seen with a hood, the young girls are on the threshold between childhood and adulthood, and find their end in the forest, lured by the ‘wolf’ (Guardián 51, 100, 165). Moreover, Amaia is described at one point as Little Red, in danger of losing her way in the woods and succumbing to the wolf (Redondo, Guardián 289), and yet, as a detective, she also embodies the hunts(wo)man of the Grimms’ version of the tale. In the next two novels, the Tarttalo and the Inguma also eat or consume their victims; they are other types of wolves that stand for the murderers and cult leaders. In addition, the first novel opens with an epigraph from Disney’s Snow White: ‘Pero querida niña, esta manzana no es

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como las demás, porque esta manzana tiene magia [My dear child, this apple is not like the rest, because this one is magic]’ (n.p.). This will not be the only reference to this famous tale. When Joana, a young girl, is found dead and covered in flowers, the detectives recall Disney’s film. A group of children who saw the body decided to take care of her and to play dwarfs to their ‘princess’ (232, 264–​5). Once more, this points at the darker nature of the fairy tale, which revolves around the attempted murder of a young girl just because of her beauty. Besides, there is another parallelism between tales and procedural thrillers: the importance of finding the right guide in one’s quest. This is emphasized by one of the main clues: a little pastry that the murderer leaves on the bodies. This typical Basque tart, the txantxigorri, leads the investigators down a complex but fruitful path, just as the little breadcrumbs enabled Hansel and Gretel to escape the forest. As an investigator, Amaia follows the clues or the crumbs, a recurrent metaphor in detective fiction, which in this case refer, literally, to where the pastries lead her. Again, the fairy tale can intertextually be juxtaposed to the crime novel the readers are expecting, and highlight the added elements of wonder or danger that it may include. As a police officer trained to believe in and find a rational explanation for all occurrences, there will be elements of her investigation that will be left unexplained, for instance, the sighting of the Basajaun or the Mari in the first instalment.2 This forces Amaia to awake to her nature as a ‘seer’ and come to terms with her encounters with the otherworldly. While in other narratives the liminal heroine might have no trouble reconciling to her double vision (Lukasiewicz 66–​7), Amaia increasingly accepts the fantastical as part of her heritage and the world she inhabits, and yet remains necessarily sceptic in order to perform her job as a sleuth. This duality is, of course, made explicit in the image of the twin sisters. As the plot unfolds, Amaia learns that she had an identical sister whom her mother suffocated, and understands that the young version of her self she sees in her dreams is the victim of the evil witch, the girl who was devoured by the cult. There is, therefore, the child trapped in the fairy tale nightmare and the adult detective attempting to make sense of her own life and the crimes, both different but also the same. Amaia’s dead sister is then a reflection of her self, trying to escape her mother’s violence, her witch-​like wish to ‘eat her up’. Nevertheless, the need to separate the two worlds, the fantastical and the real, the folk tales of spirits and the actual criminals who are murdering 2 The basajaun or ‘Basque Yeti’ is a mythological protective creature known as the lord of the forest, while the Mari, also called ‘the dame’ or ‘the mother’, is a deity connected to the Earth. She embodies the power of nature and manifests herself through storms.

174 Borham-Puyal innocent women and girls, exemplifies the, at times, problematic hybridization of the fantastic noir and the unsatisfactory resolution of some of the narrative threads of the trilogy. In this sense, Redondo seems to open de door to the fantastic, but never truly dares to cross the threshold, giving at times the impression that the fantastic creatures or otherworldly elements are the deus ex machina that other thrillers leave to coincidence or Providence. 3

Fairy Tale Tropes

In the fairy tale rewriting that Redondo is constructing, many are the elements that are taken from traditional folk tales. One in particular stands out: the role of women in the advancement of the plot as either good or evil forces. Amaia has two sisters, Flora and Rosaura, whose names also recall folk traditions. She is the youngest of three sisters, which is consistent with many fairy tales in which there are three siblings and the youngest becomes the hero/​ine.3 In this case, Amaia fulfils her fairy-​tale role, and she sets on her quest to destroy the wolves. Also, her older sister Flora is recurrently characterized as a ‘witch’ and an evil influence (Guardián 46, 157, 378). Folk traditions are full of alluring female presences, and Redondo’s novels are no different. If the femme fatale of hard-​boiled detective fiction can be interpreted as the heiress of the nymphs or white witches, so is Anne. In fact, by her nature as witch (belagile in Basque) and femme fatale, she very effectively serves to draw this parallelism between fantasy and fact, folk tale and procedural thriller. One of the victims of the miscalled ‘basajaun’ killer, she fulfils the role of the seemingly innocent woman who hides a sexually active life and manipulates men into submission, or drives them to insanity and suicide, and an enchantress who bewitches and curses the people around her (Guardián 63, 110, 169, 424). Highlighting this parallel reading, the novels also address the existence of these alluring women in traditional Basque tales. Throughout the trilogy, the ‘lamias’ are mentioned, sometimes by recalling how in folklore they are said to lure and kill men in the river (Guardián 87), and other times by characterising them as protective spirits of the forest, who claim justice for the river and nature (Ofrenda 534–​5). Finally, a maternal evil figure is also present. While Rosario is not a step-​ mother, the figure that is traditionally cold and distant towards the heroine in 3 This tradition is so recognizable that authors such as Jacinto Benavente parodied it in his rewriting of fairy tales. See Miriam Borham-​Puyal’s ‘Defensa de la lectura quijotesca en El príncipe que todo lo aprendió en los libros’.

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fairy-​tales, her detachment from Amaia and the difference she makes with her compared to her sisters do rewrite her as an unnatural or removed mother. The epigraph hints at Rosario as a cannibalistic figure, the old woman who wants to eat her young. This image is graphically emphasized both by Rosario’s constant verbal threats to eat Amaia up (Guardián 262), and her actual attempts to murder and ‘devour’ her daughter; for instance, she licks Amaia’s blood off her fingers after almost killing her as a child (Guardián 224) and in a state of semi-​unconscious frenzy she bites a nurse’s neck and swallows her flesh while calling her Amaia (Guardián 368). The detective, like Snow White, can confidently claim that her (step)mother wishes to kill her (Guardián 369). This cannibalistic ritual will also threaten Amaia’s son, Ibai, whose life is spared because of his sex: only baby girls are sacrificed. Rosario is also part of the evil forces that include Víctor, Markina or the midwife. These aggressors, or criminals in the language of the noir, not only fulfil the roles of wolf, trickster, or witch, they are connected with the folk roots of the plot. They pay homage to ancestral Basque rituals and spirits, which populate the pages of the novels. And while Redondo seems to acknowledge the existence of Evil, a capitalized force that drives the actions of the criminals, the mythological creatures contribute to shape or embody this idea. They are portrayed as the dark side of the more positive male and female forces: the basajaun, who is recurrently described as a good spirit, and who protects and helps Amaia (Guardián 94, 124, 129, 324); or the Mari, who grants the detective her wish to become a mother, looks after nature (125, 352–​4) and protects Ibai by making him a boy (Legado 53). Finally, Amaia’s aunt Engrasi acts as a fairy god-​ mother, using her magic to warn her of dangers, providing clues to solve the mysteries of her niece’s past. The names of both women, Rosario and Engrasi, related to Marian worship and the grace of the Lord, seem indeed to point at two sides of the same coin: two forms of motherhood or female protection, one failed and one successful. This is reinforced by Engrasi’s role as surrogate mother throughout Amaia’s childhood. Finally, another trope is the setting of the novels. While horror also finds its place among fine houses and warm bakeries, the forest gains prominence and is portrayed as a heterotopia, a place where the supernatural and the criminal take place. In folk tales and thrillers nature inspires awe, it is beautiful yet terrifying, and the novels keep emphasising their description of the forests and valleys of the area (Guardián 85, 88, 350). In both narratives, nature has been defiled, just as the bodies that were dumped there have been, and order must be restored to recover a balance between the aforementioned forces. As Mezquita (2018) has asserted, not only does Basque mythology permeate and shape the noir plot, but also the landscape. The valley, the forest, the river,

176 Borham-Puyal the mountains, the hostile environment is therefore relevant to understand the people, as well as the spiritual or mythological significance of Amaia’s surroundings, and to highlight the connection to the fairy-​tale tradition of dangerous natural spaces. 4

Translating the Fairy Tale on Screen

El guardián invisible was adapted to the screen in 2017. Directed by Fernando González Molina, it is the first in an upcoming trilogy to be continued in 2019 and it proves faithful to the atmosphere of the novels. As stated before, while contemporary narratives might not follow a particular fairy tale, viewers are well trained to recognize the tropes or the referents and the film adaptation uses this to its advantage. Emphasizing the presence of the forest as an eerie place, full of threats and magic, the film also employs fairy-​tale fragments, such as the red hood or the red shoes to enable viewers’ intertextual reading of the plot. In the novels the girls’ shoes always appear on the road to signal where the bodies have been placed, and these shoes are always beautiful and shiny, representing the young victims’ vanity. One of these pairs, in fact, revealingly reminds Amaia of the magic shoes of a ‘fairy-​tale princess’ (Guardián 61), showing it to be an important trope. Moreover, while the shoes have different colors, in the novel two pairs are red (Guardián 28, 216). Interestingly, they belong to the two victims who inaugurate the crimes, both in the past and the present. They, of course, allude to Hans Christian Andersen’s famous tale in which a young girl is punished for her vanity through a pair of enchanted red shoes. The two victims are described as beautiful and vain girls, which relates to Andersen’s heroine, her suffering and her final ‘redemption’ through death, at least in the mind of the criminal, who is bent on ‘purifying’ these girls. The film highlights this association and the appeal of the fairy tale hybridity by using the image of the red shoes as one of its promotional stills, and by ascribing them to the femme fatale, Anne, rather than to other girls. Another image that the film uses effectively is the red hood. At one point, Anne—​or her spirit—​appears in a red hood. They later find it in her closet, which does not happen in the novel. While in the narrative it is white corresponding to her nature as a white witch (Guardián 424), in the film they once more play with the color red to represent her in the midst of darkness as an alluring figure. Red is also associated with Rosario, as the audience sees her for the first time in a red dress and she is covered with Amaia’s blood after the attempted murder. Red can stand in fairy tales, as it does here, for sexual awakening and danger, as well as for the connection between mothers and daughters

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(Vaz da Silva 243–​4), and is contrasted to Amaia’s white skin or the white flour in which she is buried and which stops her bleeding. The film, then, emphasizes the traditional chromatic symbolism—​black, white and red—​found in classic tales to appeal to the audience’s familiarity with well-​known tropes and stories. 5

Conclusion

Redondo’s use of Basque mythology and classic fairy tale tropes or building blocks enriches her detective fiction, emphasising the eerie atmosphere in novel and film, but also establishing the hybridity of the noir genre itself. Moreover, it reminds readers and spectators that myths and folk tales are not the sanitized Disney versions of princes and princesses, and unquestioned happily ever afters. They often speak of violence, repression, fear and death. And so does crime fiction, which transposes the heroine’s quest against evil into a realistic narrative, and continues addressing, as folk tales did, both localized and universal concerns. Monsters, therefore, do not belong exclusively to fairy tales: they lurk in real life and in the pages of the thrillers that reflect our worst fears. Unfortunately, closure often belongs only to the realm of fiction, and cannot be granted in real life. Redondo’s tribute to the young baby who died is to create a tale for her in which the heroine fulfils her quest and the victim is vindicated. In her version of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, she chooses to let the female hunter finally kill the wolf.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the research project ‘Narrativas de resiliencia: enfoques interseccionales sobre literatura y otras representaciones culturales contemporáneas’ (Ref. FFI2015-​63895-​C2-​2-​R).

Works Cited

Bacchilega, Cristina. ‘Extrapolating from Nalo Hopkinson’s Skin Folk: Reflections on Transformation and Recent English-​Language Fairy Tale Fiction by Women’. Contemporary Fiction and the Fairy Tale, Stephen Benson (ed.). Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2008. 178–​203. Bacchilega, Cristina, and John Rieder. ‘Mixing It Up: Generic Complexity and Gender Ideology in Early Twenty-​first Century Fairy Tale Films’. Fairy Tale Films. Visions of

178 Borham-Puyal Ambiguity, Pauline Greenhill and Sidney Eve Matrix (eds.). Logan, Utah: Utah State UP, 2010. 23–​41. Borham-​Puyal, Miriam. ‘Defensa de la lectura quijotesca en El príncipe que todo lo aprendió en los libros’. OCNOS. Revista de Estudios sobre Lectura, 17.2 (2018): 46–​54. El guardián invisible. Dir. Fernando González Molina. Spain. 2017. Greenhill, Pauline. ‘Introduction. Envisioning Ambiguity: Fairy Tale Films’. Fairy Tale Films. Visions of Ambiguity, Pauline Greenhill and Sidney Eve Matrix (eds.). Logan, Utah: Utah State UP, 2010. 1–​22. Jorgensen, Jeana. ‘A Wave of the Magic Wand:  Fairy Godmothers in Contemporary American Media’. Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-​Tale Studies, 21.2 (2007): 216–​27. Lukasiewicz, Tracie D. ‘The Paralellism of the Fantastic and the Real: Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth/​El Laberinto del fauno and Neomaginal Realism’. Fairy Tale Films. Visions of Ambiguity, Pauline Greenhill and Sidney Eve Matrix (eds.). Logan, Utah: Utah State UP, 2010. 60–​78. Mezquita Fernández, Mª Antonia. ‘El influjo del locus de la saga de Sonny Baca, de Rudolfo Anaya, y la Trilogía del Baztán, de Dolores Redondo. Elementos mágicos y mitos locales’. Clásicos y contemporáneos en el género negro, Alex Martín Escribá and Javier Sánchez Zapatero (eds.). Santiago de Compostela:  Andavira Editora, 2018. 97–​104. Platten, David. ‘Into the Woods:  The Contemporary “Roman Noir” as Modern Fairy Tale’. Yale French Studies. Crime Fictions 108 (2005): 116–​130. Propp, Vladimir. Morfología del cuento. Lourdes Ortiz (trans.) Madrid: Editorial Fundamentos, 1977. Redondo, Dolores. El guardián invisible. Barcelona: Ediciones Destino, 2017. Redondo, Dolores. Legado en los huesos. Barcelona: Ediciones Destino, 2017. Redondo, Dolores. Ofrenda a la tormenta. Barcelona: Ediciones Destino, 2017. Tatar, Maria. (ed. and trans.). The Annotated Brothers Grimm. New  York:  W. W.  Norton, 2004. Tatar, Maria. ‘Why Fairy Tales Matter: The Performative and the Transformative’. Western Folklore 69.1 (Winter 2010): 55–​64. Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic:  A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Richard Howard (trans.) Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1973. Vaz da Silva, Francisco. ‘Red as Blood, White as Snow, Black as Crow: Chromatic Symbolism of Womanhood in Fairy Tales’. Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-​Tale Studies 21. 2 (2007): 240–​252. Zipes, Jack. ‘Cross-​Cultural Connections and the Contamination of the Classical Fairy Tale’. The Great Fairy Tale Tradition. From Straparola and Basile to the Brothers Grimm, Jack Zipes (ed.). New York, London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001. 845–​869. Zipes, Jack. Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales, Children, and the Culture Industry. New York: Routledge, 1997.

­c hapter 17

‘A Happy Person Never Phantasies’: Repression and Projection of the Self in John Connolly’s The Book of Lost Things Stephanie Weber Abstract This chapter applies the models of repression and projection presented in the works of Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung to show how fairy tales and fairy-​tale monsters, especially in a distorted form, are derived from reality and how they serve as an empty stage onto which fantasies and desires, as well as problematic aspects of the Self are transferred through the process of repression and projection. By projecting these aspects onto an ‘Other’—​an Other world, as well as the figure of the Other—​ they are no longer experienced as belonging to the Self. Therefore, it becomes easier to work these denied parts of the Self over, and the process of becoming conscious is evoked. Focusing on John Connolly’s novel The Book of Lost Things (2006), the distorted fairy-​tale elements—​the fairy-​tale world as well as the reworking of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ and ‘Rumpelstiltskin’—​are analyzed to highlight how the process of repression, projection and becoming conscious works in relation to monstrous fairy tales and fairy-​tale monsters.

Keywords fairy-​tale monsters  –​ psychoanalysis  –​ John Connolly  –​ The Book of Lost Things  –​ ­projection –​ repression

1

Introduction to the Fairy-​Tale World in The Book of Lost Things

According to J. R. R. Tolkien, every writer who creates fantasy and secondary worlds wishes to be a real maker and to create fantasy worlds deriving from reality (Tolkien 23). In a similar notion, Sigmund Freud compares the creativity of story writing and daydreaming with the creative play of children and points out that the driving force underlying it is the unsatisfying

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | DOI:10.1163/9789004418998_019

180 WEBER reality: ‘A happy person never phantasies’ (Freud “Creative Writers”, 146), he concludes. The Book of Lost Things, set during World War ii, is the story of David, a young boy who lost his mother and cannot deal with his father’s remarrying. He hates his stepmother Rose and when his baby brother Georgie is born, he finds his world falling apart. He experiences attacks and what he calls ‘waking dreams’—​glimpses of another world he suddenly finds himself swept into during short moments of unconsciousness in his real world. One night, after a particularly bad fight with his father and Rose, he is transported completely into the parallel world through a gap in a wall in their garden. This world is made of fairy tales and myths, yet these tales are distorted and much darker than the well-​known versions. Thus, it is not a safe hiding place for David, but he encounters and has to fight evil creatures who threaten not only him, but the entire fairy-​tale world. Many fairy tales and myths are worked into the storyline in different ways. Some are direct retellings; others make an appearance through characters who David meets in the course of his stay in the fairy-​tale world.1 The focus here is put on the main antagonists, the Crooked Man and Leroi, whom David has to defeat before he finds his way back home, to analyze how they reflect David’s fears and desires. 2

Repression and Projection

Repression and projection need to be understood as interdependent, as repressed aspects do not simply disappear but re-​emerge in some form or other, and thus influence how one’s own personality as well as the surrounding reality is experienced. In ‘Creative Writers and Day-​Dreaming’, Sigmund Freud compares the fantasizing and day-​dreaming of adults with the playing of children. He argues that, even though people cease playing the way children do, the pleasure they gained from playing is now gained through the substitute of fantasizing and day-​dreaming (Freud, “Creative Writers” 145). Day-​dreaming is therefore a direct response to the unsatisfying reality by creating a make-​ believe world which fulfils the desires and wishes:

1 In ‘On Fairy Tales, Dark Towers, and Other Such Matters. Some Notes on The Book of Lost Things’, John Connolly himself gives detailed account on the many tales and myths he worked into his novel, along with some background information (Connolly, “On Fairy Tales” 355–​502).

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We may lay it down that a happy person never phantasies, only an unsatisfied one. The motive forces of phantasies are unsatisfied wishes, and every singly phantasy is the fulfilment of a wish, a correction of unsatisfying reality. (146) Freud analyzes how the emergence of a neurosis or psychosis is linked to repressions of the Id and how they alter the way in which reality is perceived. In The Loss of Reality in Neurosis and Psychosis, he argues that both are an attempt of the Ego to break away from reality, yet while neurosis causes only a loosening of the sense of reality and ultimately tries to restore it at the expense of the Id (Freud, “Loss” 183), psychosis creates a new reality replacing the old one (184). Even though the repression of unconscious material and drives can have negative effects on the individual, society relies heavily on it and on the willingness of its members to sacrifice a part of their power (Freud, “Civilized” 186). Yet, as stated above, what is repressed is not simply gone, but waiting to surface again. The power of drives—​the strongest being the sex drive—​can be sublimated, focused on a different aim, which is what, according to Freud, society demands. He claims that the extent to which someone is able to meet society’s demand classifies this person as either villain or hero (187). In a similar notion, Robin Wood talks about basic and surplus repression; the former simply constituting us as humans, whereas surplus repression is what grounds us in culture and makes us accept the preconditioned roles within this culture (Wood 165). He applies this concept to the figure of the Horror monster, which he understands as both the dramatization of the Other and of ‘what is repressed (but never destroyed) in the self and projected outwards in order to be hated and disowned’ (168). The idea of projecting denied aspects of the Self onto a figure of the Other is also something C. G. Jung elaborates on. He distinguishes between a personal and a collective unconscious, the latter consisting of universal archetypes, basic structures of human mind and action. Especially the archetype of the Shadow, according to Jung the most accessible and easily experienced one, influences the Ego in a disturbing way. Revealing a lower level of personality, it resists consciousness as well as moral control. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-​knowledge, and it therefore, as a rule, meets with considerable resistance. Aion 8

182 WEBER These resistances cause the experienced emotions to be projected onto some other person instead of being recognized as one’s own (9). Jung makes it very clear that these projections happen unconsciously and are not deliberately made. ‘Hence one meets with projections, one does not make them’ (9). Projections of this kind also lead the subject away from reality. ‘The effect of projection is to isolate the subject from his environment, since instead of a real relation to it there is now only an illusory one’ (9). A more dramatic response to the unsatisfying reality is the dissociation of the personality. Jung describes the psyche as having a transcendent function, a form of self-​regulation attempting to unify the conscious and unconscious (Jung, “Transzendente” 254, 265). A neurotic or psychotic breakdown can then be understood as a violent breaking through of unconscious material, as an attempt of self-​regulation of the psyche in order to restore the balance between unconscious and conscious and to build itself up again in a more adaptive form (Jung, “Transzendente” 268, 275; Sharp online). David’s retreat into this fairy-​tale world can be understood as a symptom of his dissociation. The line between conscious and unconscious dissolves and the self-​regulation of his psyche takes place inside the fantasy world, which, for the duration of his adaptation process, replaces the old one. The transcendent function of the psyche needs an understanding of the unconscious, whose material can be gained through dreams, but also, and in this case more importantly, through spontaneous fantasies and artistic creations (Jung, “Transzendente” 263–​271). The fairy-​tale world, then, is such a product of the unconscious, especially the discrepancies between the original tales and the distorted versions David is faced with. 3

The Fairy-​Tale Monsters in The Book of Lost Things

3.1

The Crooked Man He was there when the first men came into the world, erupting into being along with them. In a way, they gave him life and purpose, and in return, he gave them stories to tell, for the Crooked Man remembered every tale. He even had a story of his own, although he had changed its details in crucial ways before it could be told. In his tale it was the Crooked Man’s name that had to be guessed, but that was his little joke. In truth, the Crooked Man had no name. Others could call him what they wished, but he was a being so old that the names given to him by men had no meaning for him: Trickster; the

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Crooked Man; Rumple—​Oh, but what was that name again? Never mind, never mind … Only the names of the children mattered to him, for there was a truth in the tale that the Crooked Man had given the world about himself: names did have a power, if they were used in the right way, and the Crooked Man had learned how to use them very well indeed. connolly, Book 292

The Crooked Man, who refers to ‘Rumpelstiltskin’, gains his power over people through stories and storytelling (Connolly, “On Fairy Tales” 358). Unlike in the original tale, it is not his name that has to be guessed, but he wants David to reveal Georgie’s name to him, as a way of sacrificing his brother to him. The link to ‘Rumpelstilskin’ is not arbitrary: The miller’s daughter in the original tale is forced to bargain with Rumpelstiltskin because of her father’s greed and lies, making it essentially a tale about a neglected child and a weak father (Connolly, “On Fairy Tales” 421). David finds himself in a similar situation. His father’s remarrying shortly after his mother’s death and having another child is perceived by him as a weak character (Connolly, “On Fairy Tales” 421). Eugen Drewermann interprets ‘Rumpelstiltskin’ as a split-​off part of the miller’s daughter’s soul (120). She sees herself not faced with a demon-​like creature, but with an evil force that is a part of her Self (120). The Crooked Man correlates to David’s Shadow, his low and dark personality traits, which he projects into the fairy-​tale world. So the evil force that wants to obtain power over his brother is really a result of his unconscious. Connolly claims that the Crooked Man, unlike Rumpelstiltskin, has no redeeming qualities. Yet, the writer also points out that the Crooked Man forces David to realize that he only projected his own emotions onto Rose and Georgie.2 Drewermann analyzes how the queen beats Rumpelstiltskin: she sends out messengers over her kingdom (= her consciousness) and gains knowledge of his name (= the process of becoming conscious) and can by these means beat the conflicting part of her soul. (Drewermann 120) The transcendent function of David’s psyche and the becoming conscious of his unconscious projection of his Shadow works in a similar way and is emphasized by his literal retreating into his fantasy world (i.e. his unconscious). Instead of revealing Georgie’s name to the Crooked Man, the process of becoming conscious is completed 2 John Connolly claims that unlike The Crooked Man, Rumpelstiltskin is not utterly malevolent and that he is, in fact, the only character to state explicitly what he wants and to follow his rules. Accepting to engage in the guessing game at the end of the tale is also, according to Connolly, an act of kindness (“On Fairy Tales” 359).

184 WEBER when he instead calls him ‘brother’ (Connolly, Book 322), therefore accepting him as a member of his family. The Crooked Man, the demonic aspect of David himself, tears himself apart out of anger at this. 3.2 Leroi The Loups, creatures that are half man half wolf, and particularly their leader Leroi, are the most prominent threat David has to face in the fairy-​tale world. The story of their coming into being is a very twisted reworking of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’: While her grandmother slept, the girl in red would wander among the trees, tasting the wild berries and strange fruit of the woods. One day, as she walked in a dark grove, a wolf came. It was wary of her and tried to pass without being seen, but the girl’s senses were too acute. She saw the wolf, and she looked into its eyes and fell in love with the strangeness of it. When it turned away, she followed it, traveling deeper into the forest than she had ever done before. The wolf tried to lose her in places where there were no trails to follow, no paths to be seen, but the girl was too quick for it, and mile after mile the chase continued. At last, the wolf grew weary of the pursuit, and it turned to face her. It bared its fangs and growled a warning, but she was not afraid. “Lovely wolf,” she whispered. “You have nothing to fear from me.” She reached out her hand and placed it upon the wolf’s head. She ran her fingers through its fur and calmed it. And the wolf saw what beautiful eyes she had (all the better to see him with), and what gentle hands (all the better to stroke him with), and what soft, red lips (all the better to taste him with). The girl leaned forward, and she kissed the wolf. She caste off her red cloak and put her basket of flowers aside, and she lay with the animal. From their union came a creature that was more human than wolf. He was the first of the Loups, the one called Leroi, and more followed after him […]. (Connolly, Book 87–​88, italics in original) Already in the well-​known version of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, sexuality plays an important part. Drewermann, for example, points out the sexual connotation of the mother’s warning not to stray from the right path and that the bottle of wine, as well as the picking of flowers are sexual symbols (114). The wolf stands on the one hand for Little Red Riding Hood’s awakening sexuality and on the other, by dressing up as her grandmother, it takes on the role of the punishing instance (114). The reworking in The Book of Lost Things reflects David’s understanding and dealing with sexuality, though with Little Red Riding Hood becoming the sexual aggressor, he takes on a very passive position.

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In From the History of an Infantile Neurosis, Sigmund Freud retells and analyzes the first remembered anxiety dream of a patient, who later becomes well known as the ‘Wolf Man’. Freud’s theoretical reflection is very interesting for the analysis of the Loups, as well as for the meaning of David’s passivity. The patient dreamt he was lying in his bed, when suddenly the window opened to reveal six or seven white wolves sitting on a tree. He emphasizes that the only action is the opening of the window, with the wolves staring intently but perfectly still at him (“History” 29). ‘We must naturally expect to find that this material reproduces the unknown material of the scene in some distorted form, perhaps even distorted into its opposite’ (34). What is distorted into the opposite are the position of subject and object, as well as activity and passivity (35). In The Book of Lost Things, the subject-​object relation is changed to Little Red Riding Hood becoming active and the wolf passive: […] what beautiful eyes she had (all the better to see him with), and what gentle hands (all the better to stroke him with), and what soft, red lips (all the better to taste him with.). connolly, Book 88, italics in original

The physical features, which are ‘all the better to …’ belong to the girl instead of the animal. The sexual connotation is foregrounded by the idea of stroking him with her gentle hands and by the devouring quality of her lips. The girl embraces her animalistic drives, which are reflected in her seductive physical features. Another distortion of active and passive, as well as subject and object, can be found in the aforementioned name-​guessing of the Crooked Man. Freud also sees a relation of the wolf-​dream and the primal scene, where the infant misinterpreted the love-​making of his parents as an act of violence (“History” 39). John Connolly suggests that Little Red Riding Hood becoming the sexually dominant part in The Book of Lost Things alludes to David’s own awakening sexuality, as well as his awareness of the sexual nature of his father’s and Rose’s relationship (Connolly, “On Fairy Tales” 374). So again, the weak father figure and the unwanted stepmother are reflected in David’s projections onto distorted fairy tales. It is interesting, though, that David does not defeat Leroi himself. Leroi kills Jonathan, who is not only the king of the fairy-​tale world, but a boy whose mysterious disappearance David had been preoccupied with in his real world. The Loups thus turn out to be a product of Jonathan’s fears, not David’s. Therefore, by killing Jonathan, Leroi kills himself (Connolly, Book 321–​323).

186 WEBER It is nevertheless possible to understand the fairy-​tale world and all its inhabitants as products of David’s mind.3 Leroi, being Jonathan’s nightmare instead of David’s, could be interpreted as a projection of his emotions onto another person which he does not become conscious of even until the end. His stance towards the animalistic, sexual part of his fears (or wishes?) is still denied to a point where it has to be projected (and destroyed!) onto the Other. The purpose of the transcendent function is to unify unconscious and conscious material to a point where the Ego can regain control. Yet, Jung points out that liberating too much of the unconscious would be as dangerous as its total repression, as the unconscious would then repress the Ego. (Jung, “Transzendente” 274) It seems like David’s personality is at a sufficient balance at this point, and he finds his way back home, better adapted to his reality. 4

Conclusion

Jacques Lacan recognizes in the recurring dream of the Wolf Man a pure, unveiled fantasm which is visible in the opening window (49). The anxiety the dream causes comes from this opening of the fantasm, which, according to Lacan, functions as a protective shield, hiding that which lies behind it. (Lacan 49) However, the fantasm also works as an empty screen onto which people can project their desires. It is not a place where desires are fulfilled, but a scene where desires are staged and articulated. (Žižek 9)  Looking back to Freud’s claim ‘every singly phantasy is the fulfilment of a wish, a correction of unsatisfying reality’ (“Creative Writers”, 145) as well as Jung’s description of projection: The effect of projection is to isolate the subject from his environment, since instead of a real relation to it there is now only an illusory one. Projections change the world into the replica of one’s own unknown face. Aion 9

the relationship between David’s problems and desires and the world of the distorted fairy tales with its monsters becomes very clear. The repression and projection model serves as a means to escape the unsatisfying reality by creating a new one. Fairy tales and fairy-​tale monsters work as an empty screen, as 3 Connolly suggests that David created in his mind a version of what could have happened to Jonathan and his sister, though if one accepts that the world is a product of his fantasy—​ which he states very clearly might not be the only possible interpretation—​what happened to them is left open (“On Fairy Tales” 422).

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fantasm that both stages and veils these desires and the dark aspects of personality. Especially as far as the monsters are concerned, the projection helps to overcome repressed elements since they can be, and will be, destroyed. Problems are not only solved, they are first and foremost accepted as being a part of the Self, and the process of becoming conscious begins. The episodes of dissociation that remove the Ego from the reality allow the psyche to be rebuilt and the individual re-​emerges better adapted to the real world than before.

Works Cited

Connolly, John. ‘On Fairy Tales, Dark Towers, and Other Such Matters. Some Notes on The Book of Lost Things’. The Book of Lost Things. London: Hodder, 2007. 355–​502. Connolly, John. The Book of Lost Things. New York: Simon&Schuster, 2011. Drewermann, Eugen. ‘Der Teufel im Märchen’. Archive for the Psychology of Religion 15.1 (1982): 93–​128. Freud, Sigmund. ‘ “Civilized” Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness’. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud: Jensen’s ‘Gradiva’ and Other Works, James Strachey (ed.), E. B. Hcrford and E. C. Mayne (trans.). Vol. 9, 1906–​1908. 177–​204. Freud, Sigmund. ‘Creative Writers and Day-​Dreaming’. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud: Jensen’s ‘Gradiva’ and Other Works, James Strachey (ed.), I. F. Grant Duff (trans.). Vol. 9, 1906–​1908. 141–​154. Freud, Sigmund. ‘From the History of an Infantile Neurosis’. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud: An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, James Strachey (ed.), A. and J. Strachey (trans.). Vol. 17, 1917–​1919. 1–​124. Freud, Sigmund. ‘The Loss of Reality in Neurosis and Psychosis’. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud: The Ego and the Id and Other Works, James Strachey (ed.), Joan Riviere (trans.). Vol. 19, 1923–​1925. 181–​188. Jung, C. G. Aion. Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self. Sir Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, Gerhard Adler and William McGuire (eds.), R.F.C. Hull (trans.). Collected Works Vol. 9 Part 2. 2nd ed. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton UP, 1970. Jung, C. G. ‘Die transzendente Funktion’, Archetyp und Unbewußtes, Helmut Barz, Ursula Baumgardt, Rudolf Blomeyer, Hans Dieckmann, Helmut Remmler and Theodor Seifert (eds.). Grundwerk Vol. 2. 4th ed. Olten/​Freiburg im Bresgau: Walter-​Verlag, 1990. 251–​278. Lacan, Jacques, Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book X. Anxiety. 1962–​1963. Cormac Gallagher (trans.) 2016, http://​www.lacaninireland.com/​web/​wp-​content/​uploads/​2010/​06/​ Seminar-​X-​Revised-​by-​Mary-​Cherou-​Lagreze.pdf.

188 WEBER Sharp, Daryl. Jung Lexicon. A Primer of Terms and Concepts, 2016, http://​www.psychceu. com/​Jung/​sharplexicon.html. Tolkien, J.R.R. On Fairy Stories. 10 January 2016, http://​brainstorm-​services.com/​wcu-​ 2004/​fairystories-​tolkien.pdf. Wood, Robin. ‘An Introduction to the American Horror Film’. Planks of Reason. Essays on the Horror Film, Barry Keith Grant (ed.). Metuchen, N.J., London: The Scarecrow Press, 1984. 164–​200. Žižek, Slavoj. Mehr Genießen. Lacan in der Populärkultur. Wien: Turia & Kant, 1992.

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‘Children were terrified of her’: Interpreting Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black as a Folktale Marta Miquel-​Baldellou Abstract In a later stage of creativity, Susan Hill has published a series of gothic narratives with evident Neo-​Victorian traits which share many features pertaining to the traditional folktale. This succession of gothic stories was inaugurated by the publication of her much acclaimed novel, The Woman in Black (1983), which established common narratological characteristics that would reverberate in many of her subsequent novels belonging to the same genre. Drawing on Vladimir Propp’s concepts of function and character-​function in his analysis of the folktale, Claude Lévi-​Strauss’ structural study of mythemes and the identification of an underlying pattern, and Carl Jung’s theories about the collective unconscious and archetypes, this article aims to interpret Hill’s novel The Woman in Black as a folktale by means of analyzing the features that it shares with the formula of classic folktales.

Keywords archetypes  –​ folktale  –​ functions  –​ gothic  –​ mythemes  –​ Susan Hill  –​ The Woman in Black

1

Introduction

In her book Howards End is on the Landing (2009), in which Susan Hill paid homage to her favorite literary works, she stated that ‘many volumes come and go but children’s books have earned a permanent place more than any other genre’ (109). After the publication of her highly-​praised gothic novel The Woman in Black (1983), Hill has published a series of gothic narratives with significant Neo-​Victorian traces which embrace evident narratological features not only belonging to the classic ghost story, but also to the traditional folktale. Many of Hill’s gothic narratives exemplify an important number

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | DOI:10.1163/9789004418998_020

190 Miquel-Baldellou of functions and characters which were compiled in Vladimir Propp’s seminal study, The Morphology of the Folk Tale (1928), insofar as they often focus on a hero who sets off on a journey and must defy a villain, whose menacing presence threatens the welfare of the community, but in the course of the hero’s adventure, he receives some valuable advice on behalf of a donor or benefactor in order to undertake the challenge. Likewise, Hill’s ghost stories also illustrate mythemes and binary oppositions as collected in Claude Lévi-​Strauss’ influential structural study of the myth, not only because it is possible to identify a common underlying pattern in most of her gothic novels, but also because her narratives often present a set of binary oppositions between characters concerning the folktale, such as ‘the witch’ and ‘the wise old woman’. Finally, drawing on Carl Jung’s theories of the collective unconscious, it can also be argued that Hill’s gothic narratives bring together a significant number of archetypal events, figures and motifs which arise along the course of the hero’s quest and sanction his symbolic transition or rite of passage from one stage of life to the next. Bearing in mind these tenets, this article aims to approach Hill’s gothic novel The Woman in Black from a narratological perspective with the purpose of analyzing it as a paradigm of the folktale. 2

A Morphological Analysis Involving Functions and Characters

Susan Hill’s novel, The Woman in Black, presents a series of narratological features in terms of structure, characters and motifs, which not only recur in subsequent texts of the author, but also underpin the intricacies of traditional story-​telling. Arthur Kipps, the homodiegetic narrator, gives voice to the tragic events of his youth that form the basis of the novel when his family asks him to tell them a ghost story on Christmas Eve. The plot thus unfolds following a concentric structure, as, through internal focalization, the narrator, who is also the main character of the novel, reveals a story within a story, first referring to his current years as an aging man, then recollecting the years of his youth when he became acquainted with the woman in black, and finally retracing the woman in black’s own story. Looking into the novel’s narrative structure, by means of a syntagmatic structural examination, it is possible to identify many of the functions which Vladimir Propp compiled in his Morphology of the Folk Tale, thus unveiling the different structural elements that The Woman in Black shares with the classic folktale. At the onset of the narrative, Arthur Kipps, who works as a junior solicitor, is summoned by his boss, Mr. Bentley, to leave London for a remote area in the

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country in order to look into their late client Alice Drablow’s personal documents at Eel Marsh House, soon after her recent demise. Nonetheless, upon arriving in Crythin Gifford, all the villagers refuse to talk to Kipps about Alice Drablow and the mystery surrounding a ghostly woman in black that only Kipps appears to have noticed upon attending Alice Drablow’s funeral. The juxtaposition of all these events comply with Propp’s initial functions of the hero’s absentation (function i, 26), the establishment of an interdiction (function ii, 26), the subsequent violation of this interdiction (function iii, 27), and the reconnaissance of the villain (function iv, 28), insofar as Kipps leaves home in order to start his quest, he becomes acquainted with the mystery surrounding Alice Drablow’s family, he disobeys this interdiction as he decides to unravel this puzzle, and he first beholds a ghostly woman in black, who can be regarded as the villainess of the story. All these introductory narrative elements pave the ground for the further development of the story and some of the subsequent functions in Propp’s morphology, starting from the villain’s trickery (function vi, 29) and continuing until the beginning of the hero’s counteraction (function x, 38). Kipps visits Alice Drablow’s house, and during his stay in the house, not only does he see the woman in black, but he also overhears the reverberating sounds echoing a terrible accident that took place many years before in the causeway path surrounding the house. This preternatural event nearly urges the hero to abandon his quest, but also helps him gather courage to counteract the woman in black’s evil power. At this stage of the novel, the course of the story faithfully follows Propp’s functions in relation to the hero’s departure (function xi, 39), the donor’s appearance (function xii, 39), the receipt of a magical agent (function xiv, 43), the struggle (function xvi, 51)  and the final liquidation (function xix, 53). Kipps decides to leave his abode in the village and move to Eel Marsh House. Likewise, he receives Samuel Daily’s guidance and advice, as Kipps is accompanied by his donor’s dexterous pet dog during the nights at the house, where he enters the locked nursery, and he manages to unravel the mystery upon perusing Alice Drablow’s sister’s letters. The closure of The Woman in Black is what mostly seems to differ from Propp’s syntagmatic analysis of the narrative elements in the folktale. Drawing on Propp’s morphology, the hero travels back home (function xx, 55), he must face a false hero (function xxiv, 60) and later on expose him (function xxviii, 62), he needs to solve a final task (function xxv, 60), the hero undergoes a transfiguration (function xxix, 62), the false hero is punished (function xxx, 63), and the hero finally gets married (function xxxi, 63). Hence, in relation to Propp’s categorization, in Hill’s novel, the order of the functions is reversed

192 Miquel-Baldellou and some of the functions are omitted: Kipps goes back home, he marries his fiancée Stella and has a son, the woman in black makes her last appearance to deprive Kipps of his family, Kipps undergoes a symbolic transfiguration as a result of this tragedy, and it is years later that he remarries, thus bringing his own story to an end. Nonetheless, it is also possible to interpret Kipps as the false hero of the story at this stage, since he cannot be regarded as the actual hero before his last encounter with the woman in black, and it is after undertaking this last challenge that he can actually be sanctioned as the hero of the story. He becomes symbolically transfigured as a result of this testing experience, and he can eventually get married. Hill’s The Woman in Black also exemplifies seven of the main character-​ functions that Propp contemplates in his analysis of the folktale. In the novel, Mr. Bentley, Kipps’ boss, becomes the dispatcher who creates the need for the hero’s quest, Kipps arises as the hero who reacts to the dispatcher and tries to thwart the villain, Samuel Daily turns into the donor who prepares the hero and gives him some magical object aimed to help him in his quest, Stella—​and later, Esmé, Kipps’ second wife—​plays the role of the princess whom the hero marries as a reward after having completed his quest, and Jennet Humfrye—​ the woman in black—​turns into the villainess of the story, as she is the evil character that challenges the hero, but also stimulates his struggle until the completion of his quest. As the pivotal character that centers the attention of this study, the ghostly villainess in The Woman in Black is first portrayed by the narrator and hero of the story, who describes her thus: she was suffering from some terrible wasting disease, for not only was she extremely pale, even more than a contrast with the blackness of her garments could account for, but the skin and, it seemed, only the thinnest layer of flesh was tautly stretched and strained across her bones, so that it gleamed with a curious, blue-​white sheen, and her eyes seemed sunken back into her head. (49) In his systematic compilation of folktale motifs, which was published just a few years after Propp’s Morphology of the Folk Tale, Stith Thompson couples together the folktale motifs of the ogre and the witch (35), as traditional elements recurring in folktales. In spite of the fact that the woman in black in Hill’s novel is actually a ghost, her portrayal, as rendered from the narrator’s perspective, highlights a series of features that characterize Jennet Humfrye as matching the folktale character of the witch. Judging her on the basis of Kipps’ depiction, she is all dressed in black, she is immediately perceived as

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an outcast who remains detached from the community, she is very pale, and she seems to suffer from a wasting illness which makes her look older than her actual age. The narrator’s particular concern to underscore her wasting condition also accentuates her aging traits, since, in his study as regards portraits of aging women, Herbert Covey argues that, in cultural manifestations, ‘by the nineteenth-​century, the older woman was firmly entrenched as the image of the witch’ (74), and thus, the woman in black’s aging condition appears to further contribute to categorizing her as representative of the traditional folktale motif of the witch. Anthropological studies by historians such as Keith Thomas have shown that, within communities, aging women were more likely to be regarded as witches because, given their condition as weak, poor, and dependable members, they often aroused feelings of both guilt and hostility within the community (568). In this respect, as Herbert Covey argues, older women became ideal scapegoats (74), to the extent that misfortunes such as deaths, illnesses, crop failures, and other undesirable situations which befell the community were alleged to be caused by aging women, who were accused of practicing witchcraft. Likewise, women who exhibited some stigmatizing behavior or indulged in what was considered acts of sexual deviance were also assumed to be witches by the rest of the community. Nonetheless, it was also the case that cunning and wise women who displayed extraordinary gifts to heal and divine, and considered themselves mediators between the mundane and the spiritual, were excluded from the community on the grounds of witchcraft, even though the actual reasons why they became ostracized were truly rooted in feelings of fear and power misappropriation on behalf of the community members. Similarly, in Hill’s novel, the sudden death of some of the children in the village is immediately alleged to be caused by Jennet Humfrye’s curse, who during her life, was bitterly detested and considered an outcast within the community as a result of her deviant behavior, of having had a child out of wedlock, and of having sworn revenge after having lost her child in tragic circumstances. As one of the neighbors, Samuel Daily, unveils to Arthur Kipps, Whether because of her loss and her madness or what, she also contracted a disease which caused her to begin to waste away. The flesh shrank from her bones, the colour was drained from her, she looked like a walking skeleton —​a living spectre. When she went about the streets, people drew back. Children were terrified of her. She died eventually. She died in hatred and misery. And as soon as ever she died the hauntings began. And so they have gone on. (The Woman 149)

194 Miquel-Baldellou Taking into consideration Daily’s account, the woman in black’s description closely matches that of a witch, especially since, as soon as she passes away, her curse begins to take effect and whenever her spectre is seen, one child in the community perishes in strange circumstances. As Thompson argues in his study of folktales, ‘in an important series of tales about witches or ogres the principal part is played by children’ (36), and he refers to the Grimms’ ‘Hansel and Gretel’ so as to exemplify the inextricable link which appears to bond together witches and children. In Hill’s narrative, given her close association with the folktale character of the witch, Jennet Humfrye is often related to the presence of children, since she first becomes excluded from the community as a result of having had a child out of wedlock, she swears revenge upon having lost her child, and even after her decease, she is believed to take away other women’s children to make up for the terrible loss of her son. 3

A Structural Study Comprising Mythemes and Binary Oppositions

If Propp’s syntagmatic analysis of folktales seeks to identify the functions or structural elements which appear in a fixed order, Claude Lévi-​Strauss’ structural study of the myth rather aims at uncovering the underlying pattern of a narrative, focusing on a paradigmatic analysis to detect the fundamental units of myth (211), as well as a series of juxtaposed binary oppositions and their ultimate reconciliation which outline the myth. In Hill’s novel, as Arthur Kipps begins to peruse late Alice Drablow’s personal documents, he gains insight into both sisters’ differing personalities and the eventual tragedy which ultimately befell their family. Drawing on Lévi-​Strauss’ conception of the myth as involving a set of binary oppositions (223), the characters of Alice Drablow and Jennet Humfrye represent opposing epitomes of femininity in Victorian times—​different mythemes or constituent units of a myth—​especially given the novel’s remarkable Neo-​Victorian features, which turn Hill’s narrative into a clear paradigm of Neo-​Victorian Gothic. As Kipps finds out upon looking into her late client’s letters, Alice Drablow personifies the figure of ‘the angel in the house’, as she is a respectable married woman who lives with her husband, Morgan Thomas Drablow, whereas her sister, Jennet, expects a child out of wedlock and, given the ethical constraints prevailing at the time, she is immediately ostracized and fulfils the role of ‘the fallen woman’, being banished from the house and forced to give her child, Nathaniel, for adoption to her sister Alice and her husband. As Kipps retraces the narrative involving the two sisters, he also discovers that Jennet is finally allowed to return to Eel Marsh House under the condition

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that her true identity is not revealed to her son, even if Jennet plans to run away taking her son with her. If Alice and Jennet initially represent the opposing symbolic roles of ‘the compliant’ and ‘the rebel’ in this story-​within-​a-​story, their parts are gradually reversed when Jennet’s son perishes in a tragic accident, as the carriage in which he is travelling gets caught in the muddy waters of the causeway surrounding the house, and Jennet blames her sister for this tragedy. From then onwards, Jennet turns into a victim, as she goes mad and contracts a skin disorder that causes her to waste away prematurely, while her sister, Alice, is perceived as a villainess who is to blame for Jennet’s son’s tragic death. Eventually, though, the two opposing roles that the two sisters initially played are reconciled, as both characters become inextricably linked to the curse that befalls the village of Crythin Gifford. According to Propp’s classification, one single character can engage in acts pertaining to more than one role, and conversely, the same role can be distributed among different characters. Taking this premise into consideration, it must thus be acknowledged that Jennet Humfrye plays the role of the villainess and her looks characterize her as a witch, but, her sister, Alice Drablow, who outlived her by many years and whose funeral Arthur Kipps is summoned to attend, is also depicted in similar terms, to the extent that some parallelisms can be established between them from the onset of the narrative. Alice Drablow’s characterization as a peculiar and secluded aging lady, together with the villagers’ reluctance to even approach her house out of dread and superstition, also lead her to fit within the particular folktale motif of the witch. In addition, Arthur Kipps admits having imagined Eel Marsh House, in which both sisters had lived together, ‘like the house of poor Miss Havisham’ (69), given the peculiar circumstances surrounding its dwellers. The fact that Kipps compares the sisters’ house with that of Miss Havisham acquires significant connotations both in relation to the mystery that the hero needs to unravel, but also as regards the characterization of these characters as paradigms of the folktale motif of the witch. In Charles Dickens’ novel Great Expectations (1861), when Pip first sets eyes on Miss Havisham, he immediately exclaims that ‘she looked like the Witch of the place’ (113). Nevertheless, even if both sisters are associated with the mytheme of ‘the witch’, some of their features, insofar as they are related to children, can also be equally ascribed to the mytheme of ‘the fairy’. In spite of the overall positive connotations that the mytheme of ‘the fairy’ exhibits in popular culture, folklorists and mythologists have often described fairies as fallen angels, demons or spirits of the dead. Likewise, some dangerous conducts have been attributed to fairies, since, as folklorist Katharine Mary Briggs claims, sudden deaths were

196 Miquel-Baldellou often thought to be caused by a fairy kidnapping (25), and according to Carole Silver, a significant amount of lore about fairies revolve around changelings (47), as fairy children were left in the place of human stolen children. These wicked features ascribed to the mytheme of the fairy bear a close resemblance with the malicious acts of both Alice Drablow and Jennet Humfrye as Alice deprives her sister of her son, while, in order to take revenge, after her death, Jennet divests the villagers of their children. Hence, the narrative involving these two sisters which the narrator, Arthur Kipps, manages to unravel complies with Lévi-​Strauss’ structural approach stating that myths are constructed through a set of binary oppositions, with elements contradicting each other, which eventually progress towards their reunification by means of other elements that mediate and resolve these oppositions. If Alice and Jennet initially arise as binary characters representing oppositional roles, the presence and absence of a child—​originally, of Jennet’s son, Nathaniel—​creates a bond and mediates between them, thus prompting their ultimate unification, moving from initial antithesis to eventual synthesis, and turning them into symbolic doubles of each other. Likewise, the intervallic decease of a child following the apparition of Jennet’s ghost in the village recreates the foundational event that gives rise to this reverberating event which permanently repeats itself within the narrative. 4

Approaching the Stages of Life through Jungian Archetypal Figures and Motifs

The mythical initially-​ binary and eventually-​ reconciled opposition of mythemes that the characters of Alice Drablow and Jennet Humfrye represent in Hill’s novel, to use Lévi-​Strauss’ structural terminology, goes hand in hand with the favorable and unfavorable archetypal figures of Carl Jung’s theories of the collective unconscious. According to Jung, archetypes are conceived as archaic patterns which derive from the collective unconscious and from which archetypal events, figures and motifs eventually emerge and turn into archetypal images or representations (Two Essays 108). As a case in point, it can be argued that the binomial Alice Drablow-​Jennet Humfrye represents the archetypal figure of the mother. Drawing on Jungian theories, an archetype of the collective unconscious can be regarded as an inner representation of the mother-​imago (The Archetypes 183), which may transform into the favorable figure of ‘the wise old woman’ or its negative counterpart, personified by the figure of ‘the witch’ or ‘the terrible mother’, to use Jung’s terminology, thus becoming opposing parental images in the domain of the unconscious.

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Within critical analyses of the folktale, Marina Warner argues that psychoanalytic interpretations of the folktale can be particularly fruitful, especially insofar as fairy tales may reveal significant hidden truths about the human condition and familial relations (125). As a matter of fact, archetypes are components of the collective unconscious which hold control of the human life cycle, and drawing on Jung’s theories, through the individual’s process of maturation, an archetypal plan unfolds on the basis of a programmed sequence which conforms to the stages of life. In this respect, taking into consideration the pervasive presence of folktale archetypes in Hill’s novel, this narrative can also be approached bearing in mind the hero’s development process, and the transition through different stages in life—​such as being parented, initiation, courtship, and marriage—​which are mediated by the presence of particular archetypal events, figures, and motifs. At the onset of the narrative, Arthur Kipps is engaged to be married to Stella before his boss, Mr. Bentley, asks him to leave home in order to begin a journey and take part in a quest that will put him to the test before being symbolically allowed to move forward in the Jungian programmed sequence of life. Kipps thus confronts different crucial stages in life, such as those of initiation, courtship, and marriage. Jung’s archetypal theory and his concept of the personal unconscious find their correlation in Lacan’s symbolic and imaginary orders respectively, as the symbolic order shapes the contents of the imaginary order, in the same way archetypes give rise to representations in the unconscious. Bearing the connection between the symbolic and the imaginary in mind, as the narrator and hero of the story retraces all these events to reconstruct Jennet Humfrye’s complete narrative and comes to terms with these different archetypes, personal and unconscious memories of his own childhood are also brought to mind. In an episode significantly charged with important psychoanalytic connotations, during his stay in Eel Marsh House, in analogy with Charles Perrault’s ‘Bluebeard’, Kipps notices there is a locked room from which his presence seems to be banned. As he begins to hear a strange, but familiar, noise coming from the locked room, Kipps feels the need to penetrate the room and discover its secrets. Significantly enough, once he manages to gain entrance, it is implied that the locked room was the nursery in which Jennet’s son, Nathaniel, was taken care of before his tragic death ensued. As a result of having entered this inaccessible room in Alice Drablow’s house and, symbolically, revealing its secrets, Kipps also confronts his own childhood, as he admits to himself, ‘those memories of childhood began to be stirred again and I dwelt nostalgically upon all those nights when I had lain in the warm and snug safety of my bed in the nursery at the top of our family house in Sussex’ (The Woman 123). Likewise, even though he is reminded of his childhood, Kipps also confesses that it is upon entering that locked room that

198 Miquel-Baldellou he first confronts death, as he mentions that, ‘the feelings that must accompany the death of someone as close to my heart and bound up with my own being as it was possible to be, I knew then, in the nursery of Eel Marsh House’ (The Woman 128). By entering the locked room, Kipps comes to terms with childhood and death concurrently, as this can be described as a symbolic rite of passage, figuratively enacting ‘the death of his childhood’, which will prompt his passage from one stage of life to another. Drawing further on Jung’s terminology, there are certain definite archetypes, such as the self, the shadow and the anima, which are inextricably connected with the archetypal plan that unfolds through the different stages of life. The self refers to the unity of the personality as a whole, the shadow represents the personal unconscious, and the anima archetype consists of the primordial image of woman and stands for the man’s sexual expectations of women. In order to attain the self and the wholeness of personality, Kipps must come to terms with the shadow and the anima, insofar as he unravels the latent events surrounding Jennet Humfrye’s tragedy and envisions his future with his fiancée Stella. As an embodiment of the shadow, Jennet Humfrye, the woman in black, personifies the darkest aspects of female sexuality and motherhood gone wrong. For Kipps, she stands for his fears about female sexuality and parenthood, and his need to confront them in order to progress onto the next symbolic stage of life. Conversely, his fiancée, Stella, would embody the archetype of the anima, as an idealized image of the young woman whom he aspires to marry. Likewise, the mystery that Kipps is compelled to unravel as regards the tragedy that befell Jennet Humfrye and her son Nathaniel is inextricably linked to a series of archetypal events—​such as birth, separation from parents, death—​ and of archetypal figures—​like the great mother, the absent father, the child, the wise old woman, and the wise old man. Drawing further on Warner’s study, she also argues that the folktale takes issue with premises about female sexuality (125). In this respect, as regards Jennet Humfrye’s story-​within-​a-​story, it can be argued that, having been abandoned by ‘the absent father’, Jennet, symbolically taken as ‘the great mother’, raises her child on her own, but given the fact that this is considered taboo by ‘the wise old woman’ and ‘the wise old man’, ‘the great mother’ is separated from her child, and this separation from ‘the great mother’ brings about the death of the child and, eventually, that of ‘the great mother’ as well. Furthermore, given her characterization and the role she plays as regards the hero, Jennet Humfrye also represents the archetypal figure of ‘the crone’, an old woman who often appears in folktales and is mostly ambivalent, inasmuch as she shares some characteristics with ‘the hag’ or ‘the witch’, as she is malicious and possesses magical gifts, but, as a character type,

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she can also be regarded as ‘the wise woman’ that prompts the hero’s advancement through the archetypal plan. Likewise, drawing on Robert Graves’ study about the ancestral triple goddess, ‘the crone’ represents part of the circle of life (670) together with the figures of ‘the mother’ and ‘the maiden’. In Hill’s novel, the bulk of the narrative is made up of Kipps’ recollections of the tragic events of his youth and how the woman in black’s curse also fell upon him and his family, as his wife Stella and his son Joseph also died as a result of the woman in black’s wicked curse. As he unfolds the events of his youth, Kipps is an aging man married to his second wife, Esmé, and lives with her and the children from her first marriage. Drawing on Graves’ terminology, in Kipps’ life, his fiancée Stella would stand for the archetypal figure of ‘the maiden’, Jennet Humfrye would represent ‘the crone’, and Kipps’ second wife, Esmé, would stand for the figure of ‘the mother’, thus completing the circle of life. At a symbolic level, as a malicious hag, the woman in black deprives Kipps of the maiden, his fiancée Stella, but as a wise old woman, she also endows him with the figure of the mother, as personified by Esmé. Likewise, the deaths of Stella and Joseph—​echoing those of Jennet Humfrye and Nathaniel—​contribute to re-​ enacting tragic events from the past that reverberate in order to be recollected, but also in an attempt to be amended through the course of time. 5

Conclusion

Hill’s fondness of children’s stories is brought to the fore in all the gothic novels she has published, in which children acquire a pervasive presence. A narratological interpretation of her gothic novels also reveals the close connection existing between the formula traditionally assigned to the classic gothic story and the basic structural elements of the folktale. This article has approached Hill’s ghost novel The Woman in Black as a folktale through the doctrines of theorists such as Vladimir Propp, Claude Lévi-​Strauss and Carl Jung, showing that Hill’s much-​acclaimed gothic novel presents many of the features commonly assigned to the folktale, thus showing the importance of the order of events and the pervasive presence of some common function characters, the identification of mythemes and binary oppositions that are eventually reconciled, and the reification of archetypes through the hero’s transition towards different stages of life. Nonetheless, taking into consideration that, in a later stage of creativity, Hill has published a series of gothic novels following the success of the publication of The Woman in Black, most of these tenets can also be extrapolated to some of her novels, such as The Mist in the Mirror (1992), The Man in the Picture (2007), The Small Hand (2010) and Dolly (2012), all of which

200 Miquel-Baldellou present an order of events, a series of character functions, a set of binary oppositions among different characters, and a sequence of archetypal figures and motifs that make it possible to approach them and interpret them as updated and contemporary folk tales.

Works Cited

Briggs, Katharine. The Fairies in English Tradition and Literature. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. Covey, Herbert. ‘Old Women as Witches’. Images of Older People in Western Art and Society. New York: Praeger, 1991. 71–​75. Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985. Graves, Robert. The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth. Grevel Lindop (ed.). London: Faber and Faber, 2010. Jung, Carl. Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. Collected Works of Carl Jung, volume 7. Gerhard Adler and R.F.C. Hull (eds.). Princeton: Bollingen, 1967. Jung, Carl. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Collected Works of Carl Jung, volume 9. Gerhard Adler and R.F.C. Hull (eds.). Princeton: Bollingen, 1969. Hill, Susan. The Woman in Black. London: Vintage, 1998. Hill, Susan. Howards End is on the Landing. London: Profile Books, 2009. Lévi-​Strauss, Claude, Structural Anthropology. Claire Jakobson (trans.) New York: Basic Books, 1963. Propp, Vladimir. Morphology of the Folk Tale. Laurence Scott (trans.) Austin: U of Texas P, 1968. Silver, Carole. Strange and Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. Thomas, Keith. Religion and the Decline of Magic. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1971. Thompson, Stith. The Folktale. Los Angeles: U of California P, 1977. Warner, Marina. Once Upon a Time:  A Short History of Fairy Tale. Oxford:  Oxford UP, 2014.

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The Broken Voice of History: Fairy Tales, Anti-​Tales, and Holocaust Representation María Jesús Martínez-​Alfaro Abstract In the last decades, and in parallel with the rise of trauma theory and memory studies, literature has increasingly turned to the Holocaust and its aftermath. This chapter focuses on one of the ways in which contemporary literature has attended to what Imre Kertész called—​in his 2002 Nobel lecture—​‘the broken voice’ of the Holocaust past. This broken voice can be heard in works of fiction that deal with the Holocaust by using traditional fairy tales as templates or background structures. The present analysis thus considers several Holocaust narratives that build on fairy-​tale intertexts—​ Kindergarten (1979), Briar Rose (1992), ‘Breadcrumbs and Stones’ (1993), The True Story of Hansel and Gretel (2003), and Gretel and the Dark (2014)—​in order to illustrate how the memory of the past is kept alive in the Holocaust anti-​tale, a hybrid form that partakes of the indirectness and dialogical nature typical of accounts of traumatic events. Attention is paid, too, to the reflection these works prompt on issues like perpetration and evil, the legacy of survival and victimhood, and the relational nature of remembering that links not only different generations of people, but also different stories of violence.

Keywords fairy tale –​ anti-​tale –​ Holocaust –​ trauma –​ memory –​ intertextuality

1

The Holocaust Anti-​Tale

In Why Fairy Tales Stick (2006) and Relentless Progress (2009), Jack Zipes approaches the evolution of fairy tales in the light of Darwinist analogies: as the environment in which the genre has to survive changes, the fairy tale changes to adapt itself, mutating and absorbing characteristics of other genres. In line with this, Vanessa Joosen explains that:

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | DOI:10.1163/9789004418998_021

202 Martínez-Alfaro The structure and style of traditional tales have been adapted in countless processes (e.g., novelization, versification, and picture book adaptation), and the content of the best-​known tales has been transformed in the form of parodies, updates, role reversals, sequels, and prequels. The traditional versions now coexist with an ever-​growing corpus of fairy-​tale retellings, which, like criticism, help to keep the interest in the old tales vibrant. (2) Joosen uses above the phrase ‘fairy-​tale retellings’, but there is in fact a mass of terms and concepts, one of them being the one I am opting for here: anti-​fairy tale, or anti-​tale for short. I have chosen it to highlight the clash between the main components of the hybrid form I am discussing: the Holocaust and the fairy tale. As I will try to show, though, both blend into a (narrative) whole capable of opening up the possibilities of representation, and of interpretation. But I will begin by reflecting on how, similarly, the tale and the anti-​tale are not as antithetical as the term ‘anti-​fairy tale’ may seem to suggest. The prefix ‘anti-​’ raises the question, but to what extent should ‘anti-​’ be equated with being against? As Catriona McAra and David Calvin put it, the anti-​tale has long existed as a shadow of the classic fairy tale and it should not be approached in terms of an outward opposition to the traditional form itself. Rather, the anti-​tale ‘takes aspects of the fairy-​tale genre, and its equivalent genres, and re-​imagines, subverts, inverts, deconstructs or satirizes elements of them to represent an alternate narrative interpretation, outcome or morality’ (4). An anti-​tale is an imitation with critical distance, a revision that often builds upon the undercurrents lurking beneath the surface of the traditional fairy tale. It also proves the malleability of the genre, the ability of an old form to renew itself and meet the concerns of our times. This is the case with the Holocaust anti-​tale, which grows out of the fruitful intersection of fairy-​tale revisionism with the ‘memory boom’ of recent decades and the related preoccupation with trauma in contemporary literature and culture. According to Roger Luckhurst, ‘the problem of Auschwitz’ has emerged as ‘the determining catastrophe that inaugurates the trauma paradigm, for after 1945 all culture must address this’ (5). Literature and the Holocaust have had an uneasy relationship. The problems surrounding Holocaust representation, as Sara Horowitz explains, lie not only with Holocaust fiction, but with writing generally, with telling (16). The relationship has been complicated but also fruitful, since it is through artistic recreation, including literature, that the black hole of Holocaust trauma can start to be bridged.1 Thus, Imre 1 See Sandra Bloom on the significance of the arts to cope with traumatic experience. As she explains, the function of all forms of art, like that of ritual and religion, is to transmit and integrate fearful or shocking knowledge into the collective unconscious (210).

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Kertész—​Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize for literature in 2002—​heard ‘the broken voice’ of our post-​Holocaust era ‘in modern European art’, and even asserted that he knew ‘of no genuine work of art that does not reflect this break’ (online). This ‘broken voice’ resonates with special intensity across a wide range of literary works, perhaps because, as Kertész himself remarked, ‘[t]‌he concentration camp is imaginable only and exclusively as literature, never as reality’ (in Sanyal 56). In discussing the representation of trauma, Judith Kelly argues that it requires ‘the assimilation of historical truth into metaphor and mythicization’, reconstructing the story in terms that can be ‘assimilated into popular collective memory’ (3). Thus, even if art and literature are seen as facilitating the indirect expression of trauma, in contrast with the frequent failure of direct attempts at articulation, there are arguably certain genres that are better suited to the task than others. This is the case with myth and fantasy genres, which function in a way similar to the dream-​work as described by Freud, at once acknowledging and attenuating or screening trauma. It is generally accepted, after Freud, Bettelheim and others, that fairy tales help children to work through both painful experiences and everyday psychic trouble, and so, it should not come as a surprise that fairy-​tale motifs and structures surface in other kinds of texts, about war and especially about the Holocaust (Kidd, “ ‘A’ is for Auschwitz” 122). As Zipes puts it, fairy tales are grounded in history: they emanate from an attempt to conquer through metaphors real terrors that have threatened our minds and communities in very concrete ways (Spells of Enchantment 9). No wonder, then, that writers like Peter Rushforth (1979), Lisa Goldstein (1993), Jane Yolen (1992, 1994, 2018), Eva Figes (2003), Louise Murphy (2003), and Eliza Granville (2014),2 among others, should use the fairy-​tale template as a suitable allegory—​an indirect means—​to narrate the Holocaust, the result being a hybrid form, the Holocaust anti-​tale. In it, traumatic events reconfigure the fairy-​ tale intertext, blending the registers of history and fantasy. The choice of intertext is especially significant here, since fairy tales participated in the creation of beliefs and norms in Nazi Germany. Its leaders’ recognising the need to create a policy regarding folk and fairy tales reveals they were fully aware of their cultural impact (Zipes, Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion 135). Because fairy tales are so meaningful culturally, Holocaust anti-​tales can make even more real what may seem less so at the remove of several decades. They allow for the exploration of trauma as well as its containment, bringing us ‘closer to truth 2 Due to space constraints, not all the works referred to here will be discussed in what follows but full data have been included in the ‘Works Cited’ section. See also María Jesús Martínez-​ Alfaro for a more in-​depth analysis of Goldstein 1993 and Murphy 2003 as Holocaust narratives rewriting ‘Hansel and Gretel’.

204 Martínez-Alfaro […], if not necessarily the truth of historical accuracy’ (Kidd, Freud in Oz 188). Like all Holocaust art, they are subject to controversies ranging from disputes about the ‘authenticity’ of the imagined experience to conflicts about specific representational modes and strategies. Holocaust art is generally understood as ‘art within the limits’, limits based on ‘the combination of historical and ethical constraints’ (Lang ix). They also impinge Holocaust anti-​tales and may render specific works inappropriate—​the hot debates about Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful (1997) come to mind here—​without this meaning that the resort to the fairy tale for Holocaust representation should amount in itself to going beyond the limits. 2

Exploring the Uses of the Fairy Tale in Holocaust Narratives

In most Holocaust anti-​tales there is an emphasis on the relevance of narrative, of telling, when it comes to working through the traumas of the past. Lisa Goldstein’s short story ‘Breadcrumbs and Stones’ (1993) uses the ‘Hansel and Gretel’ intertext to pit a survivor’s daughter against her mother, who is judged for her inability to tell. The story illustrates how silence and secrets may lead to a transgenerational transmission of trauma as elaborated by Abraham and Torok (1994) in their ‘theory of the phantom’: the gaps left in the child by the parent’s secrets become a phantom that haunts its host for experiences outside the child’s lived experience. In Goldstein’s tale, there are certain aspects of Lynne’s and her sister’s lives and personalities that only make sense as stemming from their mother’s trauma. The mother, Margaret, is a Holocaust survivor who began a new life in the States after the war. She married, had children, but never talked about her past until shortly before dying. The story she tells her daughters can be read as a dark version of ‘Hansel and Gretel’, with Margaret in the role of Gretel (a short name for Margarete). Goldstein’s Margaret, though, was unable to save her brother, who died in Auschwitz. The story is unsettling in that, when the mother opens her heart at last, she has to face the harsh judgement of her daughter Lynne, who narrates the story. The girl blames her for depriving her and her sister of an essential part of the family’s past in a way that makes Margaret appear not as Gretel, but as the wicked stepmother. By not telling the truth, by keeping silent about her fears and her story, she deserted her children somehow, leaving them to their own devices in the forest of life: she gave them ‘breadcrumbs instead of stones’, as Lynne puts it in the story’s closing paragraph (Goldstein 406). The pain and loneliness of the survivor gives way, by the end of the tale, to the pain and loneliness of the survivor’s child, which prompts reflection on the fact that memory needs

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words that connect descendants to their forebears’ losses. Otherwise, trauma and suffering are infused with new life and are more likely to survive beyond a single generation. In Jane Yolen’s Briar Rose (1992) ‘the answer is clear: salvation lies in storytelling’ (Gomel 183). In the novel, the protagonist’s grandmother, Gemma, transforms the tale ‘Briar Rose’ (‘Sleeping Beauty’) to communicate traumatic experiences that she does not seem fully aware of, but that haunt her unconscious. When she dies, her granddaughter Becca starts an investigation into Gemma’s life, narrated by an external narrator in the even-​numbered chapters. The odd-​numbered chapters, written in italics, contain fragments of the fairy tale ‘Briar Rose’ as told by Gemma to her granddaughters at different times during their childhood. In Gemma’s version, the bad fairy, who wears black boots and silver eagles on her hat, represents the Nazis. Gemma is herself the princess and the curse stands for the implementation of the extermination plan but also for a legacy that has affected survivors and their descendants. The castle where the princess is trapped in Gemma’s tale is the Polish death camp of Chelmno, also known as the Schloss (German for castle) since there was a castle there that the Nazis converted into their base camp during the war. In this camp Gemma was interned, gassed, and given up for dead. As Becca establishes more and more links between her grandmother’s life and the tale she told, it becomes clear to both her and the reader that Gemma’s version of ‘Briar Rose’ was a vehicle for her traumatic memories, and for clinging to life through the bridge of storytelling. As in Yolen’s novel, in Peter Rushforth’s Kindergarten (1979) storytelling forges bonds between generations and becomes ‘a means to integrate personal memories, a family’s past, and traumatic historical events’ (Saxena 123). The transgenerational dimension of trauma is linked in this multi-​layered novel with its transhistorical and transnational dimensions. The story’s narrator is Corrie, a seventeen-​year-​old British boy who has recently lost his mother in a terrorist attack. Lillie, his German grandma, was the only member of her family that managed to escape to safety during the war. However, as Corrie says, ‘Lillie, like the girl bound to silence in “The Six Swans”, had never spoken a word about her past, her life in Germany, her family, her books and paintings had remained locked away, from herself and from everyone else’ (Rushforth 33). She was an artist, a painter and book illustrator, but there came a point when she could not paint anymore. Something that Corrie finds out at the end is that in Lillie’s beautiful illustrations of the Grimms’ tales the characters’ faces are those of the dead members of her family. Art articulates her memory of loss. Evoking the secret room in Bluebeard’s castle, Corrie discovers an inner room inside another room and there, in a chest, he finds lots of letters and

206 Martínez-Alfaro photographs from worried Jewish parents that wanted to send their children to Britain, away from an increasingly dangerous Germany. There are also letters from their addressee, an empathic boarding school director, the predecessor of Corrie’s father. The documents constitute traces from the past and the fragmentary stories that Corrie reconstructs from them strengthen his bond with his grandmother, who lived through the historical episodes the letters describe. Corrie understands that her past is also his past, and that his suffering at the loss of his mother is like the suffering of those other children he never met. Interspersed through the narrative are references to the media coverage of a terrorist attack against a school in Berlin, where children are taken hostage. Their parents’ anguish becomes one with that of those in the old letters. Moreover, the terrorists belong to the same group that killed Corrie’s mother in an attack on Rome airport. Thus, memories of the Holocaust are superimposed on two terrorist attacks, in the present and the recent past. In this palimpsestic story everything is connected, and rendered through intertextual links to children’s books of the pre-​war generation as well as to classic tales like ‘Hansel and Gretel’, ‘Fitcher’s Bird’, and ‘Wolf and the Seven Kids’. The image of the palimpsest has been used in the context of trauma theory and memory studies to suggest that we frequently comprehend one instance of historical trauma through another, understanding emerging from a dialogue between proximate stories of violence, as happens in Rushforth’s novel. Michael Rothberg’s Multidirectional Memory (2009) made a significant move towards a new account of transcultural remembrance and others have followed his lead, like Max Silverman in his 2013 Palimpsestic Memory, which also deals with this relational perspective on memory specifically built here on the palimpsest metaphor. Another relatively recent development in the literature of memory in general and in Holocaust literature in particular has to do with the so called ‘turn to the perpetrator’,3 which can be illustrated in the field of Holocaust anti-​tales by Louise Murphy’s The True Story of Hansel and Gretel (2003). The story takes place in the last months of the Nazi occupation of Poland and begins with the Nazis chasing a family (father, stepmother and two children) on the outskirts of a thick forest. The stepmother has the idea of abandoning the children, though here it is to ensure their survival by putting the Nazis off the scent. The kids’ real names will reveal their Jewishness, so she renames them ‘Hansel’ and ‘Gretel’ before they part company. As in the tale, they find a hut where a strange old woman lives, known as ‘Magda the Witch’. She is initially linked

3 See Jenni Adams and Sue Vice’s edited collection on perpetrators in Holocaust literature and film.

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with the frightening witch, that evil other in the original tale, and also with the Jew as other, since Nazi ideologues used the figure of the witch and the Jew interchangeably in their anti-​Semitic propaganda, transferring the terror and evil associated with witches onto the Jewish people (Szasz 97). These negative connotations are subverted in Murphy’s novel, which contests former representations of both the witch and the stepmother by rewriting them as helpers. The role of evil antagonist is played by a sinister SS officer, the unnamed Oberführer, who kidnaps Aryan-​looking children from the area to be Germanized and also revitalizes his own body through forced blood transfusions from Slavic women. Through this character Murphy provides a portrait of the Nazi other and gives the perpetrator a key role in the story. Perpetrator fiction is an exponent—​like Holocaust comedy, for example—​of the multiple perspectives from which the Holocaust is approached in contemporary literature. It has even been claimed that it is now ‘necessary to comprehend perpetratorhood in the light of the shift from the victim era […] to the perpetrator era’ (Morag 14). Murphy rewrites the fairy-​tale genre in a way that bears witness to this shift. The Oberführer manages to survive in Murphy’s novel, the narrative thus leaving a loose thread that subverts the eradication of evil in fairy tales. Although he is trapped by a group of Russian soldiers, the last we hear of him are his defiant words: ‘I will never die. You can’t kill me’ (Murphy 293). The evil that he represents is the same evil that Krista resists with the help of fairy tales and her own gift for storytelling in Eliza Granville’s Gretel and the Dark (2014). Krista is a lonely girl in Nazi Germany, spoiled, stubborn, and intensely curious about the strange infirmary where her Papa has taken a job. She actually lives on the outskirts of a camp where her father performs medical experiments on the inmates. In a way that reminds the reader of John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2006), she strikes up a friendship with a camp prisoner, a boy named Daniel, and this friendship will continue inside the camp. Krista’s mother committed suicide and the girl is considered to have mental and behavioural disorders as a consequence, later intensified by the death of her guilt-​stricken father. She is then interned in the camp under the supervision of one of his late father’s colleagues, who bribes her with small trifles until he finally rapes her. The deprivations of the camp and the harshness of sexual abuse are coped with by telling herself and others old stories, which she learned from a servant called Greet. The reader can recognize some of these tales, while others seem utterly invented. Greet also taught Krista that ‘[s]‌tories […] are fast travellers, always moving on’ (Granville 213), they can be changed, told and retold without limits. So Krista uses them when she needs a way to punish those that are cruel, making them burn in the witch’s oven or finding other alternative ways to make justice; they help her to create bonds with other inmates and restore

208 Martínez-Alfaro some of their lost humanity; stories are also a way to escape her hard reality, escape, as she puts it, ‘into that secret part of me where by magic or heroism I make things turn out differently’ (343). This is a book about the power of the imagination and storytelling as aids to survival. They also emerge as a vehicle for building bonds across generations, bonds of love but also of knowledge, as an old Krista reflects when telling her tale to her grandchild in an attempt to find ‘the point of balance between burdening [the youth] with the vile details and ensuring the truth is never forgotten’ (356). 3

Words to Break the Prison

Elie Wiesel explains that the memory, the impact of the Holocaust, can make you feel as if in a prison; words can build a prison, but we may equally use words to break the prison. That is why he wrote his first work, Night (Yiddish 1956; English 1960), and also the other books that came after:  ‘first of all to establish the prison, that there was a time when everything was a prison, time itself was a prison; afterwards, other words had to be found to break down the walls’ (Wiesel online). Holocaust anti-​tales convey a sense of what the prison was like, but also prove that other message, that words are powerful to break the prison. In the works discussed here stories are an aid to survival, a way to create bonds with others, and with members of younger generations that did not live through the Holocaust; stories help us to remember, to think also of those that made it happen, to ponder on perpetration and evil; stories link experiences of violence, pain and trauma, and foster understanding as a relational task. As to the distortion that the Holocaust imposes on the fairy-​tale genre, it can ultimately be approached as a manifestation of what Lang calls ‘the blurring effect in Holocaust writing’ (35): the fact that the Holocaust is a historical event whose highly problematic representation is made even more complex by the ethical demands at work accounts for a kind of writing that distorts clear-​cut generic and metageneric boundaries.4 Far from being betrayed by its treatment through fairy-​tale conventions, then, the blurring of (meta)genres in the Holocaust anti-​tale emerges as a representational strategy aimed at narrating a most dramatic episode in world history, one that changed our understanding of what it is to be human as well as our views of good and 4 My use of the term ‘metageneric’ should be understood in the light of Lang’s definition of metagenres as ‘the forms of discourse that distinguish historical and scientific discourse, for example, as these complement more standard literary genres like the novel or the short story, which themselves fall under the metagenre “imaginative writing” ’ (35).

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evil. No wonder it also changed literature, which has had to find ways to attend to the broken voice of the Holocaust past.5

Works Cited

Abraham, Nicolas and Maria Torok. The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis, Vol. i, Nicholas T. Rand. (ed. and trans.). Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994. Adams, Jenni and Sue Vice, eds. Representing Perpetrators in Holocaust Literature and Film. London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2013. Bloom, Sandra. ‘Bridging the Black Hole of Trauma: the Evolutionary Significance of the Arts’. Psychotherapy and Politics International 8.3 (2010): 198–​212. Figes, Eva. Tales of Innocence and Experience:  An Exploration. London:  Bloomsbury, 2003. Goldstein, Lisa. ‘Breadcrumbs and Stones’. Snow White, Blood Red, Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling (eds.). New York: eos (Harper Collins), 1993. 398–​406. Gomel, Elana. Bloodscripts. Writing the Violent Subject. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2003. Granville, Eliza. Gretel and the Dark. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2014. Horowitz, Sara R. Voicing the Void. Muteness and Memory in Holocaust Fiction. New York: suny Press, 1997. Joosen, Vanessa. Critical and Creative Perspectives on Fairy Tales. An Intertextual Dialogue between Fairy-​Tale Scholarship and Postmodern Retellings. Detroit:  Wayne State UP, 2011. Kelly, Judith. Primo Levi:  Recording and Reconstruction in the Testimonial Literature. Leicester: Troubador, 2000. Kertész, Imre. ‘Imre Kertész—​Nobel Lecture’. NobelPrize.org 2002, https://​www.nobelprize.org/​prizes/​literature/​2002/​kertesz/​25364-​imre-​kertesz-​nobel-​lecture-​2002-​2/​. Kidd, Kenneth B. ‘ “A” is for Auschwitz: Psychoanalysis, Trauma Theory, and the “Children’s Literature of Atrocity” ’. Children’s Literature 33 (2005): 120–​49. Kidd, Kenneth B. Freud in Oz: At the Intersections of Psychoanalysis and Children’s Literature. Minnesota: U of Minnesota P, 2011. Lang, Berel. Holocaust Representation. Art within the Limits of History and Ethics. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 2000. Luckhurst, Roger. The Trauma Question. New York and London: Routledge, 2008. 5 The research carried out for the writing of this essay was financed by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness (MINECO) in collaboration with the European Regional Development Fund (DGI/​ERDF) (code FFI2017-​84258-​P). The author is also thankful for the support of the Government of Aragón and the ERDF 2014-​2020 programme ‘Building Europe from Aragón’ (code H03_​17R).

210 Martínez-Alfaro Martínez-​Alfaro, María Jesús. ‘Rewriting the Fairy Tale in Lisa Goldstein’s and Louise Murphy’s Holocaust Narratives’. EJES-​The European Journal of English Studies 20.1 (2016): 64–​82. McAra, Catriona and David Calvin. ‘Introduction’. Anti-​Tales. The Uses of Disenchantment, Catriona McAra and David Calvin (eds.). Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011. 1–​15. Morag, Raya. ‘On the Definition of the Perpetrator: From the Twentieth to the Twenty-​ First Century’. Journal of Perpetrator Research 2.1 (2018): 13–​19. Murphy, Louise. The True Story of Hansel and Gretel: A Novel of War and Survival. London: Penguin, 2003. Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional Memory. Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009. Rushforth, Peter. Kindergarten. 1979. San Francisco: Lawson, 2006. Sanyal, Debarati. Memory and Complicity. Migrations of Holocaust Remembrance. New York: Fordham UP, 2015. Saxena, Vandana. ‘Mother Goose Tales:  Intergenerational Storytelling and the Holocaust in Jane Yolen’s Briar Rose and Peter Rushforth’s Kindergarten’. The Fantastic in Holocaust Literature and Film, Judith B. Kerman and John E. Browning (eds.). Jefferson: McFarland, 2015. 122–​36. Silverman, Max. Palimpsestic Memory. The Holocaust and Colonialism in French and Francophone Fiction and Film. New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2013. Szasz, Thomas S. The Manufacture of Madness. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1997. ‘ “We May Use Words to Break the Prison”: Elie Wiesel on Writing Night’. YouTube, uploaded by ‘Facing History and Ourselves’, 31 August 2011. https://​www.youtube.com/​ watch?v=cgAZQXcGxVE. Yolen, Jane. Briar Rose: A Novel of the Holocaust. New York: Tor Books, 1992. Yolen, Jane. ‘Granny Rumple’. Black Thorn, White Rose, Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling (eds.). Gaithersburg: Prime Books, 1994. 203–​16. Yolen, Jane. Mapping the Bones. New York: Philomel Books, 2018. Zipes, Jack. Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion. The Classical Genre for Children and the Process of Civilisation. New York: Routledge, 1983. Zipes, Jack. Spells of Enchantment:  The Wondrous Fairy Tales of Western Culture. New York: Penguin, 1991. Zipes, Jack. Why Fairy Tales Stick. The Evolution and Relevance of a Genre. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Zipes, Jack. Relentless Progress: The Reconfiguration of Children’s Literature, Fairy Tales, and Storytelling. New York: Routledge, 2009.

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Peter Pan Goes to War: the Reimaging and Exploration of J.M. Barrie’s Story as a Historically Realistic Graphic Novel Stephané Greffrath Abstract The adaptability of stories helps ensure their survival in the popular consciousness and fairy tales in particular exhibit this characteristic. The numerous retellings, reinterpretations and recreations of these beloved tales ensure that they endure to enchant a new generation. One such fairy tale which continues to lend itself to adaptation is J.M. Barrie’s elusive creation, Peter Pan. Kurtis J. Wiebe and Tyler Jenkins’s graphic novel, Peter Panzerfaust (2012–​2017), is one of the most recent retellings of this beloved tale, and forms the focus of this chapter. In this story, Peter is removed from the fantasy of make-​believe and transposed onto the realistic historical setting of wwii. I consider various instances throughout the graphic novel that have appropriated Barrie’s elements from the Peter Pan story and reinterpreted and recreated these elements to suit not only the historical wartime milieu, but also the graphic novel as new medium. Hutcheon’s adaptation theory and how adaptations are a form of palimpsest will form the basis for interpreting the interplay between the Peter Pan story and the graphic novel through the analysis of features such as dialogue and imagery (particularly that of Peter Pan) thereby showing that through this process of recreation and reinterpretation of the original text, this graphic novel can be seen as a successful adaptation.

Keywords Peter Pan –​ palimpsest –​ intertextuality –​ adaptation –​ Peter Panzerfaust –​ Hutcheon

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | DOI:10.1163/9789004418998_022

212 Greffrath 1

‘No one is going to catch me’1

Towards the end of the play Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Would not Grow Up, Wendy imploringly asks Peter whether he will return, to which he responds with boastful self-​assurance: ‘Yes … To hear stories about me!’ (Barrie, PP 90).2 This elusive protagonist has remained true to his word, having his story (re)told in many ways throughout its 110-​year existence in numerous formats and media including books, comics, films, video games, plays, presentations, and television programmes. In Kurtis J. Wiebe and Tyler Jenkins’s recent graphic novel adaptation, Peter Panzerfaust (2012–​2017),3 this treasured fairy tale has been adapted to the context of wwii, as well as to suit an illustrated medium. Within this graphic novel, Peter is no longer a flighty youth, but a 17-​year-​old American teenager who, together with a gang of French orphans (the Lost Boys), joins the French Resistance. They are involved in an on-​going battle with Kapitän Haken, a captain in the Nazi German Army and, in this, Peter and the Lost Boys are no longer innocently playing at war games, but find themselves in the midst of a very real war. This chapter analyzes this reimaging of the Peter Pan story by exploring some of the dialogue and imagery of the graphic novel by analysing the palimpsestic interplay between the original story of Peter Pan and the graphic novel, with particular focus on the character of Peter Pan. Even though some logophiles may be averse to Wiebe and Jenkins’s recreation of the original story (Stam 58), it is precisely the creators’ ‘intertextual engagement’ and their ‘interpretive and creative act of appropriation with the adapted work’ (Hutcheon 8–​9) that allow for this version of the Peter Pan story to be seen as a successful adaptation. As with most adaptations, especially of well-​known classic literary texts such as Peter Pan, the receiver is aware of the prior text and like Peter’s

1 Submitted in requirement for the degree Masters in English Literature at Potchefstroom University, the dissertation entitled ‘The Peter Pan story in the literary and cultural imagination: exploring the many re-​imaginings of J. M. Barrie’s story’ (le Roux, 2016) serves as a conceptual point of departure for this study. 2 As reference will be made to the many different versions of the Peter Pan story it can become confusing as to which Barrie text is which without specifically referring to the exact title. Therefore, the first citation of a Barrie text will contain the full title followed thereafter by its abbreviation. I use the following abbreviation for titles frequently cited: Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (1910 novel): PPKG; Peter and Wendy (1911 novel): PW; Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Would not Grow Up (1928 play script, 1933 published edition): PP. 3 The five published volumes of the graphic novel each have five chapters, but do not have page numbers. For the purposes of this chapter, and for the sake of clarification, I have given each chapter its own page numbers starting with the number 1.

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shadow, ‘we always feel its presence shadowing the one we are experiencing directly’ (Hutcheon 6). Most adaptations are ‘inherently “palimpsestuous” works, haunted at all times by their adapted texts’ (Hutcheon 6) and as with most palimpsestuous texts, the erasing of the previous text is not always successful and in some instances, the original text seeps to the surface and becomes mingled with the new written text (van der Westhuizen 10). Peter Panzerfaust continues to provide an ‘extended intertextual engagement with the adapted work’ (Hutcheon 8) by adapting and changing Barrie’s Neverland to adhere to the new context of wwii. For those readers who are familiar with Barrie’s original story, the memory of the original resonates strongly within the text and imagery of the graphic novel—​indeed, the palimpsestic nature of this adaptation adds to the pleasure of reading the graphic novel. 2

‘To die will be an awfully big adventure’

Even though Wiebe and Jenkins are presenting readers with an interesting new version of Peter Pan, they have not usurped the original. Together as co-​ creators, Wiebe and Jenkins have explored Barrie’s original story and reinterpreted and recreated it to suit the new medium of the graphic novel. Nevertheless, Wiebe commented in a 2012 interview that: People coming to this series will be getting a brand new story, totally fresh, but with small hints of a story they may be familiar with. I want to keep it subtle enough that readers are rewarded for their knowledge of Peter Pan, but I’m very committed to making sure they also enjoy this story on its own merit. gustafson, 2012

Wiebe remained true to his word and, while Peter Panzerfaust is an excellent stand-​alone series, it is the palimpsestic relationship between the original and the graphic novel that provides readers who are familiar with the story the most pleasure. For instance, the first volume of the series, The Great Escape, is reminiscent of the children playing games in Neverland and echoes the sentiment behind Barrie’s Peter adage of ‘[t]‌o die will be an awfully big adventure’ (PW 143).4 This title resonates with the famous 1963 film The Great

4 Peter Panzerfaust also utters these exact words before commencing on a dangerous rescue mission (Wiebe & Jenkins [16]; Ch. 12).

214 Greffrath Escape (based upon Paul Brickhill’s book). While the film follows the escape of soldiers from a pow camp during wwii, the title of the graphic novel implies the metaphorical escape of Peter and the Lost Boys from their old lives to the playing of ‘war games’. At this point in the series, neither Peter nor the Lost Boys have realized the enormity of the situation they find themselves in, namely the conflict of wwii. Sabotaging the German army’s plans is still only a game to them. It is only when they suffer a great tragedy that they realize the immensity of their situation and the ‘realness’ of war. Wiebe elaborates: By playing at war, by running from the reality of their situation, Peter and the Lost Boys suffered very real tragedy. It was not only a way of grounding our series in an honest picture of what happened to children caught in the conflict, but also as a means to propel them to greatness. To rise above their fear and embrace their fate […]. Melrose online

The story of Peter Panzerfaust is told in five volumes through a series of interviews, conducted many years after the war by a Mr John Parsons, with the different members of Peter’s gang. The interview questions lead to flashbacks, and thus the puzzle of who Peter was is slowly put together—​an elusive theme that features prominently in Barrie’s own versions of the Peter Pan story. The interviewees include the Lost Boys, Tiger Lily, and the Darlings. The Lost Boys—​Felix, Julien, Alain, Claude, Maurice, and Gilbert—​are a group of French teenage orphans who make Peter’s acquaintance in Calais after their orphanage is bombed by the Germans in the spring of 1940. Peter leads them to safety, and inadvertently they all become embroiled in the grim realities of wwii. What transpires through each narrator’s account is that Peter Panzerfaust,5 a name given to him by Tiger Lily, was a hero who helped them survive the atrocities of a devastating war. Above all, and something to which many of the narrators return, Peter gave them hope—​he made them believe that they could survive, and they placed all their hope for survival in Peter. Curly (Julien’s nickname) even tells Mr Parsons that, when they thought Peter had perished after being captured by Haken: ‘Without him, our faith died’ (Wiebe & Jenkins [16]; Ch. 9). 5 The nickname Peter Panzerfaust is a play on words:  it contains the name Peter Pan and Panzerfaust, meaning ‘tank fist’—​‘a single shot, dispensable anti-​tank weapon carried by German anti-​tank squads during World War Two’ that provided ‘infantry with the ability to knock out enemy tanks in close combat’ (‘Panzerfaust’). This is indeed what Peter does during a battle after procuring a few Panzerfäuste and annihilating several German tanks in this manner (Wiebe & Jenkins [14–​17], [23–​24]; Ch. 19).

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This expression references Disney’s adaptation of Barrie’s idea (Barrie, Peter and Wendy 54–​55), and is an example of the palimpsestic nature of Wiebe and Jenkins’s story. For in Disney’s Peter Pan (1953), Peter says explicitly, after the Darling children fail to fly for the first time, that ‘[a]‌ll it takes is faith and trust. […] Just a little bit of pixie dust’. The intertexual thread running through both these adaptations links back to the original, in which the children of Neverland must place their faith in Peter in order to learn how to fly. In the graphic novel, this faith takes on a more sinister tone, since without it the members of Peter’s gang see no hope of surviving the atrocities of a world war. 3

‘Peter breaks through’

In the first volume, the reader is presented with a few images of a young man. The reader does not yet know that this is Peter. It is only on page [5]‌, after the bombing of the orphanage in Calais, that readers are presented with a confirmed image of Peter (see ­figure 20.1). Gilbert (nicknamed Tootles), tells Mr Parsons: ‘And then he appeared from nowhere. Like he had been there all along, just … my eyes had failed to see him’ (Wiebe & Jenkins [4]; Ch. 1). It seems as though Wiebe and Jenkins try to establish a similarity between their Peter Pan and Barrie’s: both are magical boys who will lead those they meet into a series of fantastical adventures. Wiebe (online) states that this is an act of ‘homage to Peter appearing in the window at the outset of the novel, looking for his shadow’, indicating that Wiebe and Jenkins are familiar with the F.D. Bedford illustration from Barrie’s 1911 novel Peter and Wendy (­figure  20.2). Wiebe also mentions that Jenkins’s original drawing made Peter look like ‘an arrogant jerk’ and that he asked Jenkins to provide Peter with a more ‘whimsical and hopeful demeanor’, which he achieved. Peter is, like the Lost Boys, a teenager in the midst of a gruesome war. Unlike the Lost Boys, Peter seems to have some combat experience, evidenced through the mud stained mish-​mashed uniform and the weapons (rifle, grenade and knife) he carries. Jenkins’s image also lends itself to the explanation provided by Tootles that he had just suddenly ‘appeared’, as it suggests movement through the way Peter’s hair seems to be wind-​swept to the right and his coat to the left, allowing the viewer to imagine that he leapt suddenly into view. The small knife or dagger is an iconic piece of the imagery of Peter Pan (see ­figure  20.3).6 Thus in remembering the story first experienced (Barrie’s 6 In a few instances in the novel, Peter is described as having his dagger at the ready (see Barrie, PW; Ch. 13 & 14).

216 Greffrath

­f igure 20.1  Peter Panzerfaust courtesy of image comics/​s hadowline, from peter panzerfaust by kurtis j. wiebe & tyler jenkins.

original text) and comparing it to the new version presented, the reader of this adaptation is able to ‘experience difference as well as similarity’, which creates a sense of both pleasure and frustration, bred through repetition and memory (Hutcheon 21–​22). 4

‘[Q]‌uite the ordinary kind’ of Shadow

There are various other instances within Volume i Chapter 1 that hint at the original story of Peter Pan. Some of the illustrations especially create a ‘story

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­f igure 20.2  1911 Bedford illustration of Peter entering the nursery

world built by the creative interaction of words and images’ (Baetens & Frey 150). One such image hints at Peter’s losing his shadow (Wiebe & Jenkins [10]; Ch. 1). Peter is fired upon by a German tank and the shock sends him flying against a wall. The wall and Peter are covered in particles of dark debris and, when Peter falls from the wall, his silhouette remains as a clear outline on the

218 Greffrath

­f igure 20.3  Bedford’s Peter carries his dagger

wall (see ­figure 20.4). Not only does this silhouette remind one of a shadow, but the posturing of the outstretched arms and legs suggests flying. This is a cleverly adapted interpretation of Barrie’s Peter who lost his shadow (see Barrie, PW Ch. 2). Of course Wiebe and Jenkins’s story takes place in a more realistic setting, thus forcing them to reinterpret some of Barrie’s magical illusions into a more naturalistic reality. After all, when adapting a text, and accepting that ‘ “to adapt” is to “adjust, to alter, to make suitable” ’ (Hutcheon 7), the purpose for adaptation is not to provide the adapted literature’s equivalence, but to adjust it to make it more suitable for the new reality in which it finds itself. Another instance of such a reinterpretation by Wiebe and Jenkins is when they suggest Peter’s ability to fly. Peter and the Lost Boys are trapped on the roof between two buildings. In order to escape, Peter suggests that they jump across the rooftop towards the ‘second window to the right’ (Wiebe & Jenkins [11]; Ch. 1), which any reader of Peter Pan would know is in reference to Wendy’s asking Peter where he lives, to which he replies: ‘Second to the right, [ …] and then straight on till morning’ (Barrie, PW 37). When Tootles describes this

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­f igure 20.4  Peter’s shadow courtesy of image comics/​s hadowline, from peter panzerfaust by kurtis j. wiebe & tyler jenkins.

scene, he tells Mr Parsons, ‘Peter flew’ (Wiebe & Jenkins [13]; Ch. 1), indicating that he believes it to be true. The other Lost Boys are also able to make the jump because they first witness Peter doing it, indicating the faith they are beginning to place in Peter and which is a central concept from all the Peter Pan stories. At the end of this first chapter, Wiebe and Jenkins’s Peter once again displays a well-​known characteristic of Barrie’s Peter Pan, although it has once

220 Greffrath again been reinterpreted and recreated to suit the setting of the graphic novel: the act of crowing. Barrie’s Peter tells Wendy (after she has sewn his shadow back on and he attributes this feat to his own cleverness): ‘I can’t help crowing, Wendy, when I’m pleased with myself’ (Barrie, PW 40). Wiebe and Jenkins’s Peter however does not crow, instead he howls like a wolf. Wiebe states that there are two primary reasons for this change; one being phonetic—​as no matter how he tried to render the sound onomatopoeically, it always looked silly when he parsed it out (Wiebe online). His second reason was that ‘the wolf became an on-​going symbol for the series and one [that he thought] suited the idea of young soldiers much better’ (Wiebe online). Cry of the Wolf is the title of the third volume of the series and, in Volume i, Tootles describes the act, one which they adopted before going into battle, as the means by which Peter inspired confidence in them (Wiebe & Jenkins [1]‌; Ch. 2). 5

‘The grimmest part of him was his iron claw’

Chapter 3 from Volume i is significant because it introduces the reader to Kapitän Haken. After having once again obstructed the plans of a squad of German soldiers, Peter and the Lost Boys come into contact with their commander Kapitän Haken, an SS officer. If there was any doubt that this is Barrie’s Captain Hook reincarnate, then Kapitän Haken’s utterance of ‘Bad form’ (Wiebe & Jenkins [12]; Ch. 3) immediately dispels any uncertainty readers may have had (Barrie, PW 203, 206, 228–​29). Haken is surprised that his men were outwitted by a group of children. An altercation occurs between the two groups and Haken, like Barrie’s Hook (Barrie, PW 226), accuses Peter of being a ‘[p]‌roud and insolent youth!’ (Wiebe & Jenkins [17]; Ch. 3). Peter runs to attack Haken and the reader witnesses the incident that led to Haken losing his left hand, instead of only hearing about it after the event, as happens in Barrie’s original story. Wiebe and Jenkins adapt earlier versions of this incident—​they use this duel scene to depict the actual engagement that led to Haken losing his hand and how Peter’s ability to ‘fly’ was an advantage. It also portrays the way in which the illustration is not merely a drawing technique ‘used to shape a given story [but rather] a creative operation that produces the images and the very story [itself]’ (Baetens & Frey 164). The panels in Chapter  3 on page [15] are organized in a clear and well-​ arranged composition that allows readers’ eyes to move from the various actions within the frame and creates a sense of motion. There is no written text (expect for ‘Blam’, emulating the sound of the gun), allowing the pictures to convey the action (see Gluibizzi 28). This one page of illustration shows Peter apparently flying at his enemy, together with a natural reason for this appearance of flight,

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and sets him up to wound Haken’s hand badly (which is shown on page [16] to [17]). The imaginary camera follows three actions as a dead or wounded German soldier slumps down, allowing the reader to follow Peter’s movements and foregrounding the real possibility that, through this specific sequence of movements, Peter effectively flies (see ­figures 20.5 and 20.6). The movements include



­f igure 20.5  Series of movements courtesy of image comics/​s hadowline, from peter panzerfaust by kurtis j. wiebe & tyler jenkins.

222 Greffrath

­f igure 20.6  ‘Have at thee!’ courtesy of image comics/​s hadowline, from peter panzerfaust by kurtis j. wiebe & tyler jenkins.

the soldier slumping forward (1), Peter running towards him and placing his foot upon his back (2), and Peter unsheathing his dagger from his boot while still atop the soldier’s back (3). These actions must occur in this sequence to create the illusion of Peter flying at Haken. Wiebe and Jenkins’s Peter is drawn in the reality of wwii and thus abides by the normal laws of physics as in our own reality, thus removing it from fantasy and grounding this story of Peter Pan in reality. In order to create the impression of a flying Peter Pan, Wiebe and Jenkins have artfully reinterpreted and recreated a scene not far removed from our perceived reality and turned it into an illusion in which it seems as though this Peter can also fly. When this panel is viewed in full, the reader is able to draw the conclusion that

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the bottom image of this panel, in which Haken and Peter face one another as Peter descends on Haken through the air, is a realistic one. Peter’s ability to fly is after all what has always given him the advantage over Hook. Wiebe and Jenkins allow their Peter to attack Haken from above, allowing him to inflict a disabling wound on Haken’s left hand (unlike Barrie’s Hook, whose right hand was severed by Peter). This image introduces the origin of Peter and Hook’s on-​going rivalry and establishes, as in Barrie’s Peter Pan story, Haken’s hatred for Peter. In this image readers are presented with an illustration of the enmity between Peter and Haken, evoking the familiarity of Barrie’s story. Peter, nothing more than a young teenager, flies towards his enemy without fear and armed only with a small dagger. Haken, with his sword reminiscent of a pirate’s cutlass and long coat mimicking those worn by pirate captains, is poised for the attack. While Jenkins’s illustration depicts the incident which led to Haken losing his hand (and which is merely inferred from a retelling by Hook in the original story) the imagery is reminiscent of other versions in which Peter Pan and Hook battle it out, with the young boy armed with little more than a small sword or dagger against Hook’s cutlass and clawing hook (see ­figure  20.7). As shown in ­figure 20.8 this imagery, complete with Peter’s aerobatics, is again repeated in Chapter 24 [26–​27] in the final battle between Peter and Haken and corresponds with Barrie’s ‘Hook or me this time’ chapter (see Barrie, PW Ch. 15). These pivotal scenes have successfully reinterpreted and recreated an element from earlier versions of Peter Pan, which allows us to practically notice how ‘texts are involved and entangled’ (Dillon 4). Wiebe and Jenkins have added to the story of Peter Pan by engaging with the original through this reinterpretation of Hook’s mutilation. They have adapted it from the telling mode of Barrie’s novel into the showing mode of the graphic novel, and, in so doing, removed it from the realm of imagination and allowed readers to perceive the action directly. By studying this image alongside the reality of wwii, readers are able to ascertain that while they are confronted with a new, unfamiliar image, they are still able to recognize and draw parallels with Barrie’s version of the Peter Pan story, and in so doing they render the unfamiliar familiar. 6

Conclusion

Peter Panzerfaust is an excellent example of a successful adaptation of Barrie’s original story as it has reinterpreted and recreated elements from the original in order to create a new, visually engrossing story that allows readers to

224 Greffrath

­f igure 20.7  Bedford illustration of Hook and Peter’s duel

see Barrie’s characters in an innovative way. Wiebe and Jenkins have, through their use of imagery and dialogue, incorporated many elements from Barrie’s original story and changed and adapted them to suit the new context of wwii. For those readers who are familiar with Barrie’s original story, Peter

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­f igure 20.8  Final battle courtesy of image comics/​s hadowline, from peter panzerfaust by kurtis j. wiebe & tyler jenkins.

Panzerfaust continues to provide an ‘extended intertextual engagement with the adapted work’ (Hutcheon 8). The memory of the original story resonates strongly within the text and imagery of the graphic novel and the palimpsestic nature of this adaptation adds to the pleasure of reading the graphic novel. It is through the numerous retellings, reinterpretations and recreations that Peter will continue to live on in our collective imagination. The storytellers who have mastered the art of ‘repeating stories’ will not allow us to forget Peter, thereby ensuring his immortality and our continued faith in him—​from young and old alike.

Works Cited

Baetens, Jan, and Hugo Frey. The Graphic Novel: An Introduction. New York, NY: Cambridge UP, 2015. Barrie, J.M. Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. 1906. New  York:  Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1910. Barrie, J.M. Peter and Wendy. 7th ed. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1911.

226 Greffrath Barrie, J.M. Peter Pan, Or, The Boy Who Would Not Grow Up. 1928. The Plays of J.M. Barrie—​In One Volume. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1933. 3–​90. Dillon, Sarah. The Palimpsest: Literature, Criticism, Theory. London: Continuum, 2007. Peter Pan. Dir. Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, Hamilton Luske & Jack Kinney. usa. 1953. Gluibizzi, Amanda. ‘The Aesthetics and Academics of Graphic Novels and Comics’. Art Documentations; Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America 26.1 (2007): 28–​30. Gustafson, Felicity. ‘Kurtis Wiebe: Kicking Nazi Ass with Peter Panzerfaust’. Comics Bulletin, 20 Jan. 2012, http://​comicsbulletin.com/​kurtis-​wiebe-​kicking-​nazi-​ass-​peter-​ panzerfaust/​. Hutcheon, Linda, and Siobhan O’Flynn. A Theory of Adaptation. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2013. le Roux, Stephané R. ‘The Peter Pan story in the literary and cultural imagination: exploring the many re-​imaginings of J. M. Barrie’s story’. MA. Diss. North-​West U, 2016. Melrose, Kevin. ‘Kurtis Wiebe and Tyler Jenkins Get Their Hook into Peter Panzerfaust’. Comic Book Resources 1 Jan. 2013, https://​www.cbr.com/​kurtis-​wiebe-​and-​tyler-​ jenkins-​get-​their-​hook-​into-​peter-​panzerfaust/​. ‘Panzerfaust’. World War II Aces (n.d.), https://​www.worldwar2aces.com/​panzerfaust. htm. Stam, Robert. ‘Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation’. Film Adaptation, James Naremore (ed.). London: Athlone P, 2000. p.54–​p.76. van der Westhuizen, T. ‘Palimpsestic writing and crossing textual boundaries in selected novels by A.S. Byatt’. MA Diss. North-​West U Potchefstroom, 2014. Wiebe, Kurtis J. ‘Essay on the Peter Pan Parallel:  Issue I’. Facebook. 18 Dec. 2013. https://​ w ww.facebook.com/​ PeterPanzerfaust/ ​ p hotos/ ​ p b.257473767606295.-​ 2207520000.1452322139./​677829948904006/​?type=3&theater. Wiebe, Kurtis J. and Tyler Jenkins. Peter Panzerfaust. 5 vols. Berkeley, CA: Image Comics, 2012–​2014.

pa rt 3 Other Contemporary Subversions of Genre through Fairy Tales

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­c hapter 21

Mary Poppins: the Subversive Magic Helper Renáta Marosi Abstract The purpose of this study is to analyze several fairy-​tale motifs in the fantasy stories of Mary Poppins, especially to examine several attributes of the magic helper, one of the essential figures of fairy and fantasy stories, in Mary Poppins’s character. Fantasy literature has adopted and altered the fairy-​tale formulae. Accordingly, for example, (supernatural) characters (crones, fairies, goblins, dragons), the presence of magic (flying, spell) and magic objects (invisibility cloak or ring, wand), which are considered essential in fantasy literary works, are all derived from the world of fairy tales. The Mary Poppins books, as examples of this mode, reflect the fairy-​tale pattern in many ways. In the same way, I argue that considering Mary Poppins’s role in the Banks family, she can be decoded as the (universal) magic helper. However, Mary Poppins is an unconventional, subversive helper regarding her outward appearance, personality, magic aid and attitude toward her protégés, the Banks children (particularly, Jane and Michael). The subversive magic helper acquaints Jane and Michael Banks with the fairy world: she introduces to them characters (crones), magic (act of flying, talking animals) and so forth. Jane and Michael’s physical (external) and psychological (internal) journeys fascinate, influence and teach them at the same time.

Keywords fairy tale –​magic helper –​Mary Poppins –​subversion –​magic aid

1

The Grimm Brothers’ Tales and P. L. Travers

In 1812 and 1815 the Brothers Grimm published their collected tales under the title of Kinder-​und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Tales). Several years later these volumes were translated into many languages, and they were published in English as German Popular Stories in 1823 and 1826. By the time Helen Lyndon Goff (later known as P.  L. Travers) was born, the Grimm brothers’ collected tales were widely known and eagerly read.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | DOI:10.1163/9789004418998_023

230 Marosi Significant adults who introduced little Helen into the realm of fairy tales were her parents and the family’s Irish washerwoman, who often told the young Helen fantastic tales, ‘grims’, a word she ‘took to be a generic term for narrative’ (Haggarty 20). Travers’s soul was deeply etched with the multi-​layered realities and the magic of the tales (Draper 12). She also insisted that German Popular Stories shows the truth by being realistic and didactic; furthermore, the Grimm’s (original) tales did not speak to her childishness and treated her with respect (Travers, “I Never Wrote” 183). Tales in general shaped her imagination since she ‘found she could conjure up from her own mind the most fearsome monsters as well as a host of fairy-​tale creatures’ (Lawson 37). Travers’s reading experiences largely contributed to writing her Mary Poppins books.1 Travers said that Mary Poppins has come out of myth (Burness-​ Griswold online), and so she has ‘come out of the same world as the fairy tales’ (Grilli 39). More specifically, Mary Poppins might have come from a tale which Travers told her sisters about a magic white horse that moves from house to house, flies without wings and dives into the sea. Indeed, the magic horse resembles Mary Poppins who moves to and from the Banks house, who also flies and visits the sea without possessing any wings or gills. 2

Who Is Mary Poppins?

Mary Poppins has already been identified with various fairy-​tale and mythological characters, or psychologically speaking, archetypes. Her personality, deeds, behaviour and roles could be analyzed from various perspectives: psychological, folkloristic, mythological, anthropological, sociological and so forth. This subchapter aims at presenting some possible definitions and descriptions of Mary Poppins based on the aforementioned analytical viewpoints. Neil Gaiman, one of the most popular and celebrated fantasy writers of our century, defines Mary Poppins as ‘a natural phenomenon, ancient as mountain ranges, on first-​name terms with the primal powers of the universe’ (xiii). She

1 P. L. Travers wrote eight books of the magic nanny from 1934 to 1988. In order of publication, these are the following: Mary Poppins (1934), Mary Poppins Comes Back (1935), Mary Poppins Opens the Door (1943), Mary Poppins in the Park (1952), Mary Poppins from A to Z (1962), Mary Poppins in the Kitchen (1975), Mary Poppins in Cherry Tree Lane (1982) and Mary Poppins and the House Next Door (1988). Mary Poppins from A to Z includes twenty-​six vignettes one for each letter of the alphabet whereas Mary Poppins in the Kitchen shares recipes. All the books are illustrated by Mary Shepard.

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indeed maintains a very intimate relationship with nature, as for example her first arrival and departure are highly influenced by the east and the west wind. The magic nanny is also claimed to take various aspects of the mother archetype: ‘[l]‌ike the Great Mother, Mary Poppins is universal, timeless, permeating the realms of past and present, fiction and reality’ (DeForest 149). As an example of this archetype, the Indian goddess Kali is portrayed ‘as wearing a snake around her waist’ (DeForest 144) just like Mary Poppins in a particular chapter when she is wearing the Hamadryad’s, her cousin’s (!)  birthday gift, namely, his casted skin that he has just given her. Moreover, she is also considered a threshold figure, a sort of Shaman for, among other things, her deed of entering ‘into contact with the whole of the natural world and the entire cosmos’ (Grilli 47). By the same token, Mary Poppins talks, dances and celebrates with cosmic, natural phenomena (the Sun) and representatives of the natural world (the Terrapin, the Hamadryad) in various chapters. Giorgia Grilli, the author of the first yet only full-​length study that covers all the Mary Poppins books, also identifies the mysterious governess with the figure of the trickster due to her presence that causes disorder (71), and with the character of Dandy, who was known for subverting norms, conventions and mentality, such as small-​mindedness (56), in the late Victorian society. Accordingly, the strict and (apparently) narrow-​minded Park Keeper is always very upset and annoyed by Mary Poppins’s appearance in the Park, as her presence always evokes chaos in ‘his’ organized Park: flying above the Park, talking lions, fairy-​tale princes and god(s) coming alive, etc. Mary Poppins is also both an ordinary and an extraordinary example of the typical governess of the Late-​Victorian, Early-​Edwardian England. Although she perfectly accomplishes her daily tasks (ironing, sewing, shopping, taking care of her charges) that are required from her as a governess, her teaching methods could not be considered traditional at all. She teaches Jane, Michael, John and Barbara Anabel Banks (but mostly the first two children), on the one hand, with a more liberated and experience-​centered methods, and, on the other hand, with her magical power; for instance, instead of making them read and memorize books on geography and biology, Mary Poppins takes Jane and Michael around the world with the help of a magic compass in order to see and meet various animals from each corner of the world. Thus, her subversive teaching methods are twofold: she challenges the traditional Victorian teaching methods that forbade any form of entertainment and free imagination (Manlove 1, 12), and she also opens and crosses the border between the natural and the supernatural.2 2 Read more on identifying Mary Poppins as a subversive governess in Renáta Marosi’s ‘Mary Poppins, a rendkívüli dada „felforgató” nevelési módszerei’.

232 Marosi Subversion is present in the Mary Poppins stories and in her character in many other ways. In more detail, if we study Mary Poppins’s role and aid in the Banks family, we can also identify her as one of the fairy-​tale archetypes, and that is the magic helper. Joseph Campbell, the American comparative mythologist, defined the magic helper as a protective wise person (63) whose functions, according to Vladimir Propp, the formalist folklorist, are, among other things, the rescue and the transfiguration of the hero (79). Therefore, regarding Campbell’s and Propp’s study on the function of this character, I suggest that Mary Poppins is a (universal) magic helper, however, a subversive one, since she is everything but a traditional old woman, a speaking animal or a dwarf in the woods or a cheerful, old fairy with a magic wand who guarantees the ‘happily ever after’. She is rather the cross ‘Great Exception’ (Travers, The Complete Mary Poppins 98)  who shows the children that nothing lasts forever. Moreover, as Alfred the elephant, Jane’s toy, claimed, Mary Poppins is a ‘fairy-​tale come true’ (Travers, The Complete Mary Poppins 471). Alfred’s words could be explained by quoting Grilli’s thoughts about Mary Poppins: The unexpected situations she creates are the result neither of tools, nor of enchanted formulae, nor of magical ingredients. […] Rather, she is an ungraspable presence […] for whom anything and everything is possible. (6) In other words, it is she who makes the fairy world out of the stories and characters around her: without Mary Poppins, Jane and Michael could hardly ever undergo supernatural adventures or meet extraordinary characters. 3

Mary Poppins, the Subversive Magic Helper

‘The helpful crone and fairy godmother is a familiar feature of European fairy lore’ (Campbell 65). The magic helper, as one of the main fairy-​tale characters, may be some little fellow of the woods, some wizard or shepherd, who appears to give the advice that the hero will require (Campbell 66). Therefore, Grimm’s helpers are not dummy, flying fairy godmothers with a wand—​which is so common in Disney tales—​rather old women or men in the woods, dwarfs, elves, dead mothers, enchanted royalty and shepherds. Just like fairy tales have undergone several changes throughout times, the figure of magic helpers has also been transformed. In the first recorded folk and fairy tales, heroes have been protected on their journeys with the help of

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talking animals or crones, but as time passed, they were followed or replaced by jolly Fairy Godmothers and peculiar magic helpers such as Mary Poppins: Mary Poppins was not so much a plain old nanny as a good mother from a fairy tale. Hiding behind the facade of a British nanny pushing a pram in Kensington, Poppins was more magical than Cinderella’s godmother, more mysterious than the good fairy of ‘The Sleeping Beauty’. lawson 1–​2

Magic helpers appear to aid their protégés on their journeys. Generally, what ‘such a figure represents is the benign, protecting power of destiny’ (Campbell 66) and so friendliness. Nevertheless, the ‘magical’ and ‘mysterious’ Mary Poppins is neither friendly nor benign; she is definitely a very serious and rigid helper; even ‘something sinister lay behind’ (Lawson 2) her blue eyes. This mysterious and fearsome aspect in her personality might recall the deeds of the evil fairy of Travers’s beloved Grimm’s tale, ‘Rose Bud’ (also known as ‘Little Briar Rose’ or ‘Sleeping Beauty’). Mary Poppins is very petulant and offensive especially when Jane and Michael attempt to unfold her magic power and try to talk about their adventures. Although Mary Poppins does not curse them or causes any harm to the children, her sharp look, ‘scornful laugh’ and ‘stern voice’ (Travers, The Complete Mary Poppins 83) are sufficient to stop their enthusiasm. Her evil fairy side is further depicted when the cruel and strict Ms Andrews (also known as Holy Terror), Mr Banks’s former governess, criticizes Mary Poppins’s teaching methods. Mary Poppins rescues Caruso, Ms Andrew’s lark, from his cage and she puts her enemy into the aviary instead. Eventually, the magic nanny releases Ms Andrews, who learns her lesson (for a while) and flees the house. Travers actually expresses her great sympathy for the evil fairy because as she wrote in her essay ‘About the Sleeping Beauty’, no Wise Woman or Fairy is in herself either good or bad; she takes on one aspect or the other according to the laws of the story and the necessity of events […] They change with the changing circumstances. Travers, “Unsleeping” 267

It might be therefore possible that sometimes Mary Poppins introduces herself as a caring helper who can be trusted, and then she suddenly and unexpectedly turns to an evil and vengeful character who does not tolerate any criticism or offence regarding her personality, behaviour and teaching methods. She is also considered a subversive magic helper with regards to her appearance. ‘Fairy tales rely on abstraction for their effect’ (Bernheimer 67). In other

234 Marosi words, we find not many particular, illustrative details about the landscape or the characters’ outward appearance. Thus, the only information that might be given about the magic helper is that (s)he is old, young, small or tall, perhaps that (s)he is nice or ugly: ‘[when] he [a soldier] was travelling through a wood, he met an old woman, who asked him where he was going’ (Grimm 45) –​states the narrator in the ‘Twelve Dancing Princesses’; similarly, Travers’s other favourite character, Rumplel-​Stilts-​Kin is described as follows: ‘the door opened, and a droll-​looking little man hobbled in’ (Grimm 213). By contrast, although we cannot decide whether Mary Poppins is small or tall, we do not even know how old she is exactly, her appearance seems to be perfect anytime: in the morning, at night, on her daily walks in the Park with the children, even while she is flying or diving in the water. Moreover, on shopping days, she always delights in looking at herself proudly in the shop windows: Mary Poppins put her hat straight at the Tobacconist’s Shop at the corner. It had one of those curious windows where there seem to be three of you instead of one […] Mary Poppins sighed with pleasure, however, when she saw three of herself, each wearing a blue coat with silver buttons and blue hat to match. She thought it was such a lovely sight that she wished there had been a dozen of her or even thirty. The more Mary Poppinses the better. Travers, The Complete Mary Poppins 30–​31

The pretty vain magic nanny wears her traditional governess attire (e.g. her ‘coat’ and ‘hat’) carefully and proudly, and she does not forget about it for a single moment. Moreover, complimenting on her appearance is probably the only way by which the children can manipulate her and get what they want. 4

Mary Poppins’s Magic Aid

Propp defined the universal magic helper as a dramatis persona (or character) who is able to fulfil ‘(in certain ways) all five functions of the helper’ (82): ‘the spatial transference of the hero; liquidation of misfortune or lack; rescue from pursuit; the solution of difficult tasks; transfiguration of the hero’ (Propp 79). While Grimm’s helpers are given the choice to accept the help or not, Mary Poppins takes the characters into the realm of the magic world without asking their permission. As these adventures often take place at night during the children’s dream state, Jane and Michael are unable to control these events.

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Mary Poppins here expands and provides the first function, namely ‘the spatial transference of the hero’ (Propp 79) accompanied by a unique aspect: the universal and subversive magic helper introduces to her charges a (fairy)world which actually belongs to their primary physical world during the day, but which shows its other deeper and magical side once Mary Poppins appears in their dream. For instance, while in the afternoon the Park is the scene of their daily walk, at night it is the place of celebration (with their own shadows on Halloween or with fairy-​tale characters on New Year’s Eve). Thus, even though a certain (rather mental) transference is realized, the setting remains the same and alters its qualities by Mary Poppins’s will. Mary Poppins, the ‘fairy tale come true’, takes her protégés into a fairy-​tale-​ like world to aid them in learning about themselves, about animals, nature and the universe. This setting might be considered an ideal place of learning, as fairy tales ‘are old trees, rooted in the folk, full of meaning and ritual […] asking something about us, telling us something about life’ (Travers, “Only Connect” 297). Accordingly, when children are dancing together with fairy-​tale characters in the Park in the Crack (a unique time between the Old and New Year) and with animals in the Zoo they receive answers to their questions like what is between the first and the last stroke of twelve and what a Zoo looks like at night. It is worth noting that the so-​called Crack has been supposedly coined and created by Travers’s reading experience connected to Rumpel-​Stilts-​Kin. The ‘droll-​looking’ man lives ‘among the trees of the forest where the fox and the hare bid each other good night’ (Grimm 216). This peace and harmony between animals and creatures prevail in the Crack as well. The Sleeping Beauty who has just woken up explains that ‘inside the Crack all things are at one. The eternal opposites meet and kiss’ (Travers, The Complete Mary Poppins 469). This is the reason why, just like Rumpelstiltskin’s hare and fox, Red Riding Hood and the Wolf are embracing each other, and the Lion and the Unicorn are dancing and talking instead of fighting for the crown (as they do it in the original English nursery rhyme). The same balance dominates among the animals in the Zoo when the children celebrate Mary Poppins’s birthday on Full Moon, ‘when the small are from the great, and the great protect the small’ (Travers, The Complete Mary Poppins 117). Travers claimed that the place ‘where the opposites are reconciled’ is ‘the only place and the only time when to be Happy Ever After is possible and true’ (Travers, “Myth” 189). Indeed, that could not be a mere coincidence that the title of the analyzed chapter is ‘Happy Ever After’. These (often dream-​like) journeys, just like the journeys of folk and fairy tales, are not only physical (external) but also psychological (internal) journeys

236 Marosi which serve to discover the unknown, the unconscious part of our selves, and where the children are provided with the opportunity of self-​discovery, revelation and recollection of some truths and maxims. Thereby, here Mary Poppins fulfils two functions of the magic helper at the same time: ‘liquidation of misfortune or lack’ and ‘transfiguration of the hero’. Jane and Michael lack self-​ knowledge that is hereby guaranteed by Mary Poppins who might lead them to their transfiguration. Nevertheless, while by transfiguration Propp mostly meant that ‘the hero is given a new appearance’ (Propp 62), Mary Poppins is focusing on an internal transfiguration: spiritual and psychological change and growth. Interestingly, Jane and Michael Banks are guided not solely by Mary Poppins but also by other (old) wise women: the crone of crones Clara Corry pays the children’s attention to the value of their shadows which, from a psychological perspective, refers to the ‘hidden, repressed, for the most part inferior and guilt-​laden [part of] the personality’, which also displays both bad (fears) and good (normal instincts) qualities and which can be realized in dreams’ (Jung 482; Marosi, “Meeting” 125). Furthermore, the wise Balloon Woman and Ms Calico help the Banks children enjoy their walk in the Park by selling to them flying balloons and flying peppermint horses. The crones’ instructions include maxims, a messages of positive attitude toward life: Enjoy your life! Never lose your childish self! Transcend yourself and the world and try to observe them from another point of view! Consequently, as Grilli writes, there is a correlation between the change of physical reality and the alteration of the characters’ mental perspective (61). Mary Poppins makes Jane and Michael show her caring and trusted self when she fulfils the remaining functions of the helper: ‘rescue from pursuit’ and ‘the solution of difficult tasks’ (Propp 79). The magic nanny has to rescue her charges (especially Jane and Michael) several times when they get into trouble. For instance, after Michael steals Mary Poppins’s whistle, he has a terrifying dream about cats who force him to live with them on the Cat Star; similarly, one day when Jane breaks the family’s beloved Royal Daulton Bowl, her nightmare takes place inside the broken bowl, where the dreadful patterns of the bowl want to keep her as the only and the youngest child in their family. All these scenes, in various ways, end in the pursuit of the hero (in this case, that of Jane and Michael). Finally, each time, Mary Poppins always arrives and rescues them. The magic helper’s aid here is tricky and shows sign of subversion. Mary Poppins punishes Jane and Michael for their bad behaviour by causing them nightmares. Accordingly, although it is Mary Poppins who rescues the children in the end (by waking them up), it is also the magic helper who performs villainy in order to teach ‘her heroes’ lessons.

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‘Anything I Write Is All Question’

Mary Poppins never lets the children completely discover her magic power and the truth about their adventures. The denial of these things might be in accord with the prohibition of fairy tales, which Tolkien has associated to the ‘taboo once practised long ago’ (online). In Grimm’s tales the prohibition manifests in the various magic helpers’ or donor’s advice: ‘take care not to drink any of the wine which one of the princesses will bring to you’ (Grimm 45) because you fall asleep; ‘do not try to take the bird out of the shabby cage’ (Grimm 20) otherwise you will regret it, and so forth. In fairy tales, these aids and adventures are not surprising, but parts of the every-​day routines or deeds that are to be accomplished. That is why in fairyland ‘nobody wonders at anything that may happen’ (Bunce online), moreover; there ‘is never an explanation of why’ (Bernheimer 68). The youngest prince, the simpleton brother or the poor soldier never asks his helper why (s)he helps them or who (s)he is. Heroes also take it for granted if they have to steal a giant’s hair, fight the dragon or rescue an enchanted princess. Nevertheless, Jane and Michael do ask questions; they need answers since for them these adventures are extraordinary. In Mary Poppins’s stories the prohibition might be the following: do not wait for answers, but instead let the adventures happen to you and answer your questions on your own. We all require different answers because we all differ in personality and in interest. Travers preferred questions to answers. She once declared, ‘Anything I write is all question. I don’t think I have the answers’ (Zaleski 173). Moreover, getting no answer is a grace because the child’s mind has the possibility to ‘turn in upon itself […] wondering, pondering, absorbing the world, re-​enacting […] all the myths there are’ (Travers, “Radical” 237)  Therefore, Mary Poppins explains neither herself nor her deeds to anyone (as no one knows where she has come from, where she goes to, what she feels or thinks), but instead she lets the children observe their adventures and the world as they like and lets them find their own answers and truths. Nevertheless, Mary Poppins occasionally ‘reveals some clue or object’ (Grilli 37) which show the children that their adventures were true. Mary Poppins makes the children notice her belt that she got that night in the Zoo from the Hamadryad; she leaves her scarf in the drawing of Royal Daulton Bowl after she has rescued Jane from it; she allows the children to see her grassy slippers in which she has been dancing with fairy-​tale characters in the Park, in the Crack. Showing these clues is necessary since the Mary Poppins books ‘do not establish a physical demarcation between reality and fantasy’ (Valverde 69). Thus, we are not able to decide where reality ends and where the dream begins. Therefore, these little clues (grassy slippers, a belt,

238 Marosi a scarf, etc.) prove that a real but blurred connection exists between the two worlds, and that thus (somehow) both worlds are true. Magic helpers appear when characters need them and they leave when their aid is no longer necessary. While Grimm’s heroes do not seem to be interested in how long their helpers stay with them, since there is no close relationship between each other, the whole Banks family is always very happy when Mary Poppins appears or returns, and so they are desperate, lost and sad because of her eventual departures. Therefore, Mary Poppins subversively brings a happy ending at the beginning of the stories with her arrivals but does not offer a real, joyful end since she goes away (three times!). Travers said that fairy tales ending happily tell only half the story. They leave the other half to the reader. It is the reader who must complete it (Travers, “Unsleeping” 191). The same is true for Mary Poppins, who leaves the Banks family forever in the end, but it is the reader and the Banks who must complete her story.

Works Cited

Bernheimer, Kate. ‘Fairy Tale Is Form, Form Is Fairy tale’. The Writer’s Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House. Oregon–​New York: Tin House Books, 2009. 61–​75. http://​www. katebernheimer.com/​images/​Fairy%20Tale%20is%20Form.pdf. Bunce, John T. Fairy Tales, Their Origin and Meaning: With Some Account of Dwellers in Fairyland. Internet Archive, 2007. https://​archive.org/​stream/​fairytalestheiro00buncuoft#page/​n3/​mode/​2up. Burness, Edwina and Jerry Griswold. ‘P. L. Travers: The Art of Fiction No. 63’. The Paris Review 86 (1982):  210–​ 229. https://​www.theparisreview.org/​interviews/​3099/​p-​l-​ travers-​the-​art-​of-​fiction-​no-​63-​p-​l-​travers. Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Commemorative 2nd edition. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton UP, 2004. DeForest, Mary. ‘Mary Poppins and the Great Mother’. Classical and Modern Literature 11 (1991): 139–​154. Draper, Ellen D. and Jenny Koralek. Introduction to A Lively Oracle: A Centennial Celebration of P. L. Travers Creator of Mary Poppins, Ellen D. Draper (ed.). New York: Larson Publication, 1999. 9–​15. Gaiman, Neil. Foreword to Myth, Symbol and Meaning in Mary Poppins:  The Governess as Provocateur, Giorgia Grilli (ed.), Jennifer Varney (trans.). London and New York: Routledge, 2014. xiii–​xiv. Grilli, Giorgia. Myth, Symbol and Meaning in Mary Poppins: The Governess as Provocateur, Jennifer Varney (trans.). London and New York: Routledge, 2014.

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Grimm, M. M. German Popular Stories Translated from the Kinder-​und Hausmärchen, Edgar Taylor (trans.). London: C. Baldwyn Newgate Street, 1823. Haggarty, Ben. ‘Refining nectar’. A Lively Oracle: A Centennial Celebration of P. L. Travers Creator of Mary Poppins, Ellen D. Draper and Jenny Koralek (eds.). New York: Larson Publication, 1999. 20–​24. Jung, Carl-​Franz. Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Aniela Jaffé (ed.), Richard and Clara Winston (trans.). Vintage Books, 1989. Revised. Lawson, Valerie. Mary Poppins She Wrote:  The Life of P. L. Travers. New  York:  Pocket Books, 2013. Manlove, Colin. From Alice to Harry Potter:  Children’s Fantasy in England. New Zealand: Cybereditions Corporation, 2003. Marosi, Renáta. ‘Mary Poppins, a rendkívüli dada „felforgató” nevelési módszerei’. Pannontükör 1 (January-​February 2017): 84–​87. Marosi, Renáta. ‘Meeting Mary—​Meeting Your Self: The Functions of Dreams in the Mary Poppins Books’. Eger Journal of English Studies xvi (2016): 109–​135. Propp, Vladimir. Morphology of the Folk Tale. Laurence Scott (trans.) Austin: U of Texas P, 1968.Tolkien, John R. R. ‘On Fairy Stories’. Speech delivered at University of St Andrews, Scotland, 1939. http://​www.unife.it/​stum/​lingue/​insegnamenti/​letteratura-​ inglese-​ii/​materiale-​didattico-​2017–​2018/​J.%20R.%20R.%20Tolkien-​%20On%20 Fairy-​Stories-​%201939.pdf/​view. Travers, P. L. ‘A Radical Innocence’. What the Bee Knows: Reflections on Myth, Symbol and Story. Wellingborough: The Aquarian Press, 1989. 235–​241. Travers, P. L. ‘Only Connect’. What the Bee Knows: Reflections on Myth, Symbol and Story. Wellingborough: The Aquarian Press, 1989. 285–​303. Travers, P. L. ‘The Unsleeping Eye:  A Fairy Tale’. What the Bee Knows:  Reflections on Myth, Symbol and Story. Wellingborough: The Aquarian Press, 1989. 189–​194. Travers, P. L. ‘Myth, Symbol and Tradition’, A Lively Oracle: A Centennial Celebration of P. L. Travers Creator of Mary Poppins, Ellen D. Draper and Jenny Koralek (eds.). New York: Larson Publication, 1999. 186–​199. Travers, P. L. ‘I Never Wrote for Children’. A Lively Oracle:  A Centennial Celebration of P. L. Travers Creator of Mary Poppins, Ellen D. Draper and Jenny Koralek (eds.). New York: Larson Publication, 1999. 177–​185. Travers, P. L. Mary Poppins: The Complete Mary Poppins. London: HarperCollins Children’s Books, 2010. Valverde, Cristina P. ‘Dreams and Liminality in the Mary Poppins Books’. Dream, Imagination and Reality in Literature (2007): 69–​72. Zaleski, Philip. ‘At Home with Pamela Travers’. A Lively Oracle: A Centennial Celebration of P. L. Travers Creator of Mary Poppins, Ellen D. Draper and Jenny Koralek (eds.). New York: Larson Publication, 1999. 168–​174.

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Rodents in Children’s Literature and Audiovisual Fairy Tales: a Book-​to-​Film Adaptation Approach Rebeca Cristina López González Abstract Scurrying in and out of sight, mice and rats have been part of fairy tales for quite a long time. From Aesop to Mickey Mouse as well as Tom and Jerry, whether living in a town or country house, running up or down the clock, these small, almost insignificant creatures have been protagonists and helpers (Propp 105–​106) in many of the stories we have read and seen in books through illustrations and on screen. These rodents have helped human protagonists in their struggle to overcome evil and find long-​lasting bliss. Among our selection as child readers, we have chosen (and still choose) books about dragons, treasures, trolls, gnomes, princes and princesses, but mice do not seem to be, in general, our first choice. And yet, mice and rats abound in Children’s Literature being quite often relegated to the role of secondary characters. This paper will review some of these old, loved fairy tales to analyze how the role of rodents has varied across time and format, jumping and climbing from the printed page onto the audiovisual media, to answer the question: are mice still among our apparently invisible, tiny fairy tale characters that are less likely to be cast in main heroic roles after all?

Keywords children’s literature –​fairy tales –​animation –​rodents –​helpers and donors –​new roles

1

A Book-​to-​Film Adaptation Approach to Children’s Literature

This paper must begin by establishing the boundaries of what can be considered Children’s Literature (ChL). Briefly, Riitta Oittinen’s approach has been applied to the analysis presented below, which examines books and their film adaptations, due to this author’s inclusive definition of ChL by which it includes genres that go beyond the printed page. Oittinen quoted the Swedish

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | DOI:10.1163/9789004418998_024

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writer Lennart Hellsing, whose sociological and psychological perspective defines ChL as anything the child reads or hears, anything from newspapers, series, TV shows, and radio presentations to what we call books. If we take the child’s view into consideration, we could also include not just literature produced for children, but also literature produced by children themselves, as well as the oral tradition. Seen from a very wide perspective, children’s literature could be anything that a child finds interesting. oittinen 62

Within the audiovisual content that attracts the attention of the child, animation has been, for most of the twentieth century, a tool to access fairy tales and tradition. Animation was wisely used by Walt Disney to rewrite fairy tales and build an institution based on popular shared knowledge, orally transmitted from one generation to the next. Mortimer, the mouse, aka Mickey Mouse, was one of the first and most popular rodents to migrate from comic-​strip-​to-​ cartoon in the late 20s (Omar & Ishak 4). The nature of animation, as Halas & Manvell (13) noted, ‘being similar to those of other television and film content, is that they carry themes and styles which are mostly originated from fantasy and folklore […]’. Four major stages explain the development of animation in which the first is the closest to fairy tales: The initial period of trick-​word and magic. The period of the establishment of the cartoon as a sideline to commercial entertainment (1920s). The period of technical experiment and of the development of animation in the form of full length feature entertainment (1930s and 1940s). The contemporary period during which people see considerable expansion to the animated film into every kind of use from the television commercial to the highly specialised instructional film. halas & manvel 13

The analysis developed in this paper will encompass the printed and animated magic displayed by fairy tales together with the full-​length animated feature entertainment, which is broadcast in the mid-​twentieth and early twenty-​first century. This chapter discusses the transition of mice characters from fairy tales to full-​length animated films. Four literary examples—​Robert C. O’Brien’s 1971 Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh, Perrault’s 1697 ‘Cinderella’, the 1609 nursery

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rhyme ‘Three Blind Mice’ and Aesop’s fable ‘The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse’ first known to be compiled in Greek in the 4th century bce by Demetrius of Phalerum—​and their film adaptations reveal how the rodent character has seen its main character function develop through time and space. Helpers and donors are now the main roles that these characters play in new stories which still keep the magic of older fairy tales. The following pages will show how mice, despite not being our first choice when we think of fairy-​tale characters, are still cast as supporting and main characters. 2

The Very Beginnings of Mice in Fairy Tales and the Purpose of Anthropomorphism

Once upon a time there were mice, mice everywhere, first in oral tales and then in paintings, in picture books and other literary works aimed at children but also adults. In fact, adults were the first to make use of the folk tradition in an orally expressed form in order to entertain themselves at times when magical and supernatural elements could be a way to escape from daily chores. Fairy tales are a subgenre of folklore along with myths and legends that have crystallised into a body of literature which after centuries of use and, also abusively, have become a canon (López 188; Tatar 353; Zipes 48). The first Contes de Fées were told in French salons towards the end of the seventeenth century and the first decade of the eighteenth century. These stories were then preserved thanks to the women who attended these salons as well as other authors, such as Madame Leprince de Beaumont, Charles Perrault, the Grimm brothers, Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Engebretsen Moe, among many others who wisely saw the importance of keeping these tales in written form. As Bettelheim (35) expressed it, fairy tales and popular stories appertaining to folklore ‘evolved out of myths; others were incorporated into them. Both forms embodied the cumulative experience of a society as men wished to recall past wisdom for themselves and transmit it to future generations’. As this author also emphasised, fairy tales offer deep knowledge which has been essential to sustain humanity throughout the unending vicissitudes of its existence. This knowledge is part of the inheritance received by children in what seems to be a simple, direct and accessible story. Needless to say, the printing press had much of an influence in preserving orality and tradition in the communication of this knowledge. The description of this tradition was structurally analyzed by Propp (35), who encapsulated the essence of fairy tales by establishing the functions of fairy tale characters. His Morphology of the Folk Tale (1928) was aimed at

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discovering to what extent certain phenomena were repeated in tales. As a consequence, the repetition of fundamental constitutive parts of fairy tales allows for a classification and profound analysis. Propp’s starting point is the figure of the hero, the protagonist who initiates the adventure, who suffers the attack of the villain, who has to be the character in charge of solving the problem thanks to magic. Here, precisely, is where rodents come into play. They often become the magical animal who grants the hero the power to fulfil their destiny once they have passed the test. An animal can therefore be the gift provided by a helper or even the helper the hero needs to continue the quest. Animals, and mice in particular, are part of the reward, or heroes might even be transformed into a rodent in the plot (transmogrification). This is so because animals are magical donors. They are the aid that the hero needs, and they even carry out difficult tasks on their behalf. Mice are, therefore, one of the magical companions of the protagonist in a fairy tale. They are characters with humanised, anthropomorphic traits and have been included in fairy tales for a long time due to the fact that Mice are small, secret, numerous and usually hidden. They are beautiful and neat and, one must feel courageous to live with us so closely. Their fur-​coated bodies make them endearing and strokeable. […] Perhaps it is easier to imagine them members of their own hidden social system and to think that when out of sight they might be part of a miniature mirror world. Blount 152

This miniature world attracts the child because mice are small, overlooked and even ignored despite possessing very lively personalities. Children cannot but see themselves reflected in these characters (Anderson 85; Hunt 116). Besides, in Burke & Copenhaver’s (206) opinion children’s predilection for animals has much to do with their familiarity with them in real life: Most children are curious about and fond of animals. Many of us share our homes and our hearts with our pets. Certainly our local environments, whether we live in a city, a suburb, or the country, are filled with a vast variety of animals both large and small. So, it would seem rather intuitive that these same creatures would find a place in the stories that we tell. And they do. But when these animals begin to talk and scheme and learn to read, we have gone past their intuitive inclusion in a replication of reality.

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As Burke & Copenhaver add, these animals often also serve a didactic purpose: The talking, thinking, acting animals could provide for children what they were already providing for their adult mentors—​a buffered engagement with a message of cultural significance. The lively animals would soften the didactic tone and ease the tensions raised by dealing with issues not yet fully resolved or socially controversial. (210) 3

Rodents in Children’s Books and Films

As mentioned above, mice have been part of several ChL works. Dorothy Kilner’s 1783 Life and Perambulations of a Mouse, which portrays a mouse as a first-​ person narrator, flees the didactic intention of its contemporary works, and Mary Belson Elliot 1810’s The Mice and Their Pic-​Nic, a cheerful and religious story, are just a couple of examples. Both works have transcended the representation of mice in fairy tales since for the first time in ChL these animals became the protagonists capable of creating entertainment and produce joy to readers of all ages. In recent times, these little animals have gained importance in printed children’s fiction, with rankings which demonstrate that rodents are among the readers’ preferences. As an example The Guardian (2016) compiled the top ten list of rodents in children’s fiction, among which Scabbers the rat in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books is probably one of the most notorious characters due to how he becomes Lord Voldemort’s spy and betrays Harry’s dad. Armitage, the rat in Ratburger—​a wink at Roald Dahl’s irreverent sense of humour—​has been included in this ranking together with Beatrix Potter’s elegantly dressed rodents. This list also includes Stuart Little by E.B. White, the Dormouse in Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and the mouse in The Gruffalo by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler. This ranking, of course, is just the tip of the iceberg. Other animated mice received excellent reviews despite not being included in the ranking mentioned above. The films Ratatouille (2007) and The Tale of Desperaux (2008), based on Kate DiCamillo’s 2003 book, are popular due to their rodent main characters. Rats were for long, and due to historical health reasons, considered humanity’s ruthless enemy. J.K. Rowling, aware of this stereotype, made use of transmogrification to transform a human into a rat: Harry’s father’s human friend Peter Pettigrew is magically turned into a rat (Scabbers). However, not all rats are malignant. Perrault’s Cinderella’s rats are transformed into footmen by the Fairy Godmother and take the future princess to the ball. They are helpers as

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Propp would have categorised them. Another example can be spotted in Robert C. O’Brien’s Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh (1971), which won the Newbery Medal in 1972. Rats were granted human traits with human problems, such as a widowed mother’s worry to take care of her offspring. This ChL favourite also addresses other themes, such as the development of a literate and technological rat society and its destruction by humans, a topic which, three decades later, is a present-​day reflection of humanity’s problems and struggles. The reader will sympathise with Mrs. Frisby’s difficulties and surely will forget about the animalesque nature of the main characters. The transference from page to screen was carried out in 1982 under a different title, The Secret of Nimh, due to trademark matters. Classified as an animated dark fantasy film directed by Don Bluth, who left the Disney factory to create an independent company (Costa 127), this version shared some visual elements with Disney but also respected its young audience by not toning down its plot. This audiovisual version received critical acclaim, but the younger viewer might not easily relate to the characters’ emotional journey since there are too many characters and several problems to be dealt with throughout the film. Therefore, some of the magical purposes of ChL listed in Burke & Copenhaver’s work, such as ‘the need to make sense of our lives and of the world; generate questions and new life alternatives; the preservation of our understandings, knowledge and social beliefs and provide momentary escape from the current situation’ (206–​207), have been blurred by the technical effort of creating an animated film centered on artistic production. The 46 different versions of Mrs. Brisby in the film exemplify the director’s main focus throughout the production (Costa 128). Perrault’s version of ‘Cendrillon ou la petite pantoufle de verre’ included in Histoires ou contes du temps passé, avec moralités (1697) has been reinvented in every culture and rewritten in cinematographic, literary and musical works. The tale explores the worries related to courtship and marriage and grants Cinderella happiness thanks to her work and beauty. Her success as well as every Cinderella’s ever since is owing to her magic helpers or donors. For example, in the Grimm’s version ‘Aschenputtel’ a tree spills presents over Cinderella, in Perrault’s ‘Cendrillon’ the Fairy Godmother uses magic to transform rats and lizards into beautiful servants, and in the Scottish version ‘Rashin Coatie’ a red calf makes a dress for the lady in distress. Precisely, Perrault’s version chooses rodents as Cinderella’s helpers. The Fairy Godmother opens a mousetrap and lets six mice out and turns them into beautiful, furry-​mouse-​grey horses. Cinderella, according to this version of the fairy tale, suggests that there might be rats in the mousetrap and that one of them could be the coachman. Six lizards picked by Cinderella are transformed

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into servants, and her tattered dress becomes a luxurious jewellery-​sprinkled gown. Arthur Rackman, the illustrator, was one of the few who in 1919 placed mice in the visual representation of the future-​to-​be princess. Other illustrations emphasize Cinderella’s stepsister’s vanity, such as Harry Clarke’s (1922), Rie Cramer’s (early twentieth century) and Wanda Gág’s (1936), or Cinderella’s time at the ball (Edmund Dulac (1929)). Rackman’s work reminds the visual reader about the importance of helpers, without whom Cinderella would not have enchanted the prince. Disney’s awarded animated classic version dates back to 1950 and meant a relaunching of the nearly bankrupt company as a consequence of the disconnected European market due to World War ii. According to the American Film Institute, Cinderella is one of the best animated feature films created in the US. Disney and Perraults’ versions of this ancient fairy tale share a similar plot, but Disney’s version grants rodents, and more specifically mice, a major role as Cinderella’s helpers. Magic transforms these animals at the key moment of the tale, but mice in Disney’s animated tale are Cinderella’s pet friends, and they even have proper names: Jaq and Gus. Mice alter a dress that belonged to Cinderella’s mother by using Cinderella’s stepsister’s extra bits and pieces of other dresses. This non-​magical token gives her a first chance to attend the ball although her opportunity is truncated by her stepsisters’ envy. As a result, mice play a more important role in the audiovisual versions of this fairy tale Another contemporary fairy-​tale film adaptation that features mice is the Shrek saga. Shrek was created by William Steig, an American cartoonist, illustrator and writer. His passion for rodent main characters was expressed in picture books such as Abel’s Island (1976) and Doctor De Soto (1982). Steig’s work was given credit by being the US nominee for the international Hans Christian Andersen Award (Glistrup) as children’s book illustrator in 1982 and writer in 1988. In Steig’s printed Shrek there is not much space for rodents. DreamWorks’ animated version, however, played with the fairy tale genre to create a metafairy tale, or several tales within a tale which also include rodent characters. Shrek is an ogre who lives in Far Far Away; a kingdom where all fairy tale characters live together. Cinderella, Snow White, Rumpelstiltskin, the Fairy Godmother, Prince Charming, Pinocchio, etc. live in complete harmony until Lord Farquaad decides to create a perfect kingdom free from hideous creatures such as ogres. DreamWorks wisely and originally mixed all these characters into a single fairy tale by subverting the viewers’ expectations on the frequently-​known roles played by each character. An example of this literary metafairy-​tale game is found in the representation of Thomas Ravenscroft’s Three Blind Mice published in Deuteromelia or The Seconde part of Musicks Melodie (1609). It is said that this musical round was inspired by Queen Mary i of England, who ordered the blinding and

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executing of three Protestant bishops. Despite this speculated cruel origin, this rhyme entered children’s literature in 1842 when it became part of the James Orchard Halliwell collection. The presence of Ravenscroft’s blind mice in Shrek is another wink at the fairy tale compilation created by DreamWorks. Every fairy tale character is sent to Shrek’s swamp to fulfil Lord Farquaad’s eviction orders. The scene where the three disabled mice are protagonists underlines the stereotyped role of mice in ChL. The three are shown at Shrek’s table trying to nibble and snatch some food by squeaking and mumbling a few words of complaint after banging themselves against some of Shrek’s objects on the table. This alerts Shrek who suddenly finds all sorts of fairy tale characters in his domains. The representation of the three mice is what might make the audience smile: round dark glasses and tiny sticks that resemble toothpicks carried by little white furry mice. They are homely mice but far from Propp’s structural fairy tale roles. These rodents dance Ricky Martin’s songs and interact with other fairy tale characters triggering humorous anachronic scenes. Another contemporary example of the presence of mice in audiovisual ChL owing to the contribution of traditional fairy tales and popular literature can also be found in another DreamWorks’ production; Flushed Away (2006). This stop-​motion tale begins with an absolute wink at Aesop’s fable ‘The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse’. Rodderick St. James is an upper class pet who lives in a Kensington flat and accidentally meets a sewer rat named Sid. The contrast between the rich and the poor mouse is made evident in these first scenes and recalls Aesop’s characters. Roddy tries to fool Sid into the ‘toilet Jacuzzi’ but ends up falling into his own trap. Then, he becomes the main character of the film, the hero, who helps Rita Malone, a scavenger rat, and fights The Toad, Prince Charles’s former pet, in Ratropolis. Modern and frantic, Flushed Away has not kept much from the traditional fable which tells the story of a town mouse who invites the country mouse to boast about all the food he has access to. Once both mice begin to enjoy the food, they are startled by a group of cats, leaving the mice no other option but to run out of the town mouse’s home. The country mouse returns home and learns his lesson well: he would rather live a peaceful and humble life than a luxurious life full of worries and danger. A parallel ending awaits Sid, as the post-​credits scene reveals. 4

Concluding Remarks

This book-​to-​film adaptation approach has elapsed from traditional to current times to show four examples of how Children’s Literature has included rodents

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as helpers, donors and eventually heroes of the tales that young and adult readers/​viewers enjoy. The first of the examples deals with the cinematographic adaptation of anthropomorphic rodents in The Secret of Nimh. Disney’s version of Cinderella, on the other hand, gives more prominence to mice by even naming these small characters who help Cinderella without the use of magic. Steig’s subversive fairy tale narrative was picked up by DreamWork’s Shrek, where the three blind mice of the old nursery rhyme were incorporated as secondary characters. Finally, a more modern perspective of Aesop’s fable places adventurous mice at the core of the plot. The four adaptation cases discussed do exemplify, despite their different settings, how rodent characters are still cast as helpers and donors (and even protagonists) in modern adaptations of fairy tales. These successful printed and visual narrations include mice characters who play new roles by actively leading the action to tackle human problems (as Nimh’s rats do) subverting, on occasions, unwritten traditional rules (Shrek and Flushed away). This paper opens the door to develop a deeper analysis on the role of rodents in ChL through the compilation and study of a broader corpus of printed and audiovisual literary works.

Works Cited

Anderson, Susan M. ‘ “Regard[ing] a Mouse” in Dickinson’s Poems and Letters’. The Emily Dickinson Journal 2.1 (1993): 84–​102. Project Muse: http://​muse.jhu.edu/​article/​ 245247. Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment. The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. New York: Random House, 2010. Blount, Margaret. Animal Land: The Creatures of Children’s Fiction. New York: William Morrow, 1975. Burke, Carolyn L. & Joby G. Copenhaver, ‘Animals as People in Children’s Literature’. Language Arts Vol. 81 No. 3 (January 2004): 205–​213. Cinderella. Dir. Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson and Hamilton Luske. usa, 1950. Costa, Jordi. Películas clave del cine de animación. Barcelona:  Ediciones Robinbook, 2010. Glistrup, Eva. Candidates for the Hans Christian Andersen Awards 1956–​2002. Switzerland: International Board on Books for Young People, 2002. Halas, John & Roger Manvell. The Technique of Film Animation. London:  Focal Press, 1959. Hunt, Caroline C. ‘Dwarf, Small World, Shrinking Child: Three Versions of Miniature’. Children’s Literature 23 (1995): 115–​136.

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López González, Rebeca Cristina. ‘La guionización como traducción “disfuncional” en The Brothers Grimm (El secreto de los hermanos Grimm)’. Los cuentos de los hermanos Grimm en el mundo. Recepción y Traducción, Isabel Hernández & Paloma Sánchez (eds.). Madrid: Editoral Síntesis, 2014. 185–​194. Oittinen, Riitta. Translating for Children. New  York and London:  Garland Publishing, 2000. Omar, Mohd Amir Mat & Md Sidin Ahmad Ishak, ‘Understanding Culture Through Animation: From the World to Malaysia’. Malaysian Journal of Media Studies Vol. 13 No. 2 (2011): 1–​9. Perrault, Charles. ‘Cendrillon ou la Petite Pantoufle de Verre’. Histoires ou contes du temps passé avec moralités. Paris: Barbin, 1697. Propp, Vladimir. Morfología del cuento. Madrid: Akal, 2011. Shrek. Dir. Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson. usa, 2001. Tatar, María. Los cuentos de hadas clásicos anotados. Barcelona: Crítica, 2004. Zipes, Jack. Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion. New York: Heinemann Educational Books Ltd, 1983.

­c hapter 23

Bear Tales: Ways of Seeing Polar Bears in Mythology, Traditional Folktales and Modern-Day Children’s Literature Lizanne Henderson Abstract The Polar Bear has been an important character in the mythology and traditional folktales of numerous Arctic and sub-​Arctic peoples. It is among the most recognizable charismatic megafauna in the world and arguably the most iconic symbol of the far north. Increasingly, the polar bear has also come to represent the effects of anthropogenic climate change and global warming. The focus of this study is upon the various intercultural ‘ways of seeing’ the polar bear, from northern folklore to modern-​ day children’s literature, in order to assess the main themes, archetypes and character functions that have emerged over time. A sample of 71 fiction and non-​fiction books about polar bears, published between 1982 and 2019, and aimed at early learner children of about 7 or 8 years of age, have been examined.

Keywords polar bear  –​Inuit mythology  –​folktale  –​children’s literature  –​environmental ­communication –​ human-​animal studies

1

Introduction

Animals represent a proportionately large portion of the characters found in traditional folktales, as well as within more recent adaptations and retellings, and assume most of the 21 character functions identified by Vladimir Propp. The polar bear features in a number of folktales across the northern regions from the American and Canadian Arctic, to Greenland, Scandinavia and Russia. Across a wide range of cultures and time periods, numerous themes and motifs emerge from these bear tales, such as origin stories and creation tales; family ties and community bonds; success or failure at hunting; interspecies

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | DOI:10.1163/9789004418998_025

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communication and talking animals; shapeshifting, shamanism and connections with the supernatural world. Modern day children’s literature similarly utilizes the bear in a variety of ways, such as Hans de Beer’s Little Polar Bear (1987), which stresses family relationships, or Lara Bergen’s explicit environmental message in The Polar Bears’ Home: A Story about Global Warming (2008). This paper examines the various intercultural ‘ways of seeing’ polar bears, as expressed in mythology, traditional folktales and adaptations of such tales, with a specific focus on the role and symbolisms of the bear in children’s literature. The sample of 64 fiction and 7 non-​fiction children’s books examined date from 1982 to 2019, they are all in the English language or have been translated into English, and they have all been originally published in the UK and/​or North America with the exception of Tupera Tupera’s Polar Bear’s Underwear (2012), which was published first in Japan. Furthermore, the sample consists entirely of picture books aimed at pre-​school children of about 7 or 8 years of age. My analysis is based on the major themes emerging from the text and basic storyline and not upon the illustrations and images (as this forms the basis of a separate forthcoming study). The intention of this chapter is to investigate the main archetypes and character functions of the polar bear that have emerged over time, ranging from some of the oldest tale types, such as that of ‘The Woman who Married a Bear’ and ‘The Bear Son’, to more recent literary manifestations of the bear as a tool for environmental communication and an ambassador of global warming. Ultimately, it seeks to question what these mythologies, traditional folktales and modern-​day children’s stories can reveal about our relationship with non-​human animals over time. Influential to this study has been John Berger’s seminal work Ways of Seeing (1972) and his anthology of essays About Looking (1980), specifically ‘Why Look at Animals?’, which explores the evolution of the human relationship with animals and the imbalance of power those relationships reflect: […] animals are always the observed. The fact that they can observe us has lost all significance. They are the objects of our ever-​extending knowledge. What we know about them is an index of our power, and thus an index of what separates us from them. The more we know, the further away they are. (14) In order to better comprehend how the polar bear motif functions within children’s literature, we must first delve into the mythological and folkloric origins of bear tales.

252 Henderson 2

Polar Bears and Mythology

The terms ‘myth’ or ‘mythology’ can hold different cultural meanings across temporal and geographical space, though the designations ascribed by William Bascom in the 1960s are still useful (Bascom 3–​20). In the language of modernity, myth is often used in the sense of something that is untrue or anti-​ scientific; in literary contexts it can relate to archetypal themes or to aspects of the creative imagination. It can also have a religious or spiritual connotation, ‘a sacred narrative explaining how the world and man came to be in their present form’ (Dundes 1). Polar bears are biologically, mythologically and folklorically liminal beasts; they cross worlds. They are cross-​elemental, associated with earth, ocean, and sky and as such have been considered the optimal spirit guides and intermediaries to the otherworld. Though bears can be fierce adversaries or competitors for food resources, in mythological terms they are more likely to be interpreted as allies, friends or distant members of the family (D’Anglure). While the ancient Greeks saw the Great Bear, Ursa Major, in the night sky believing it to be a punishment inflicted upon Callisto for her love affair with Zeus, the Inuit told a story about a woman who lived with a polar bear family, but when she betrayed the bears to her human kinfolks she was killed. Her human husband, seeking revenge, hunted down the murderous bear, set dogs on him, and the bear, with dogs in close pursuit, was chased up into the sky, forming the constellation (D’Anglure 182). Many northern cultures have perceived a similarity between polar bears and humans, in terms of their appearance, behaviour, intelligence and emotions. According to the Inuit of Clyde River, the bear understands when it is being ridiculed or belittled, while in east Baffin to make jokes about bears would bring hunting misfortune (Wenzel 94). The similarities and kinships shared between humans and bears are tightly woven into several mythological stories and legends. The Inupiat of Alaska tell that the first bears were twins born of a woman; one had brown fur, the other white. So strange were they that she abandoned them and the brown bear-​child ran into the mountains and the white ran across the frozen sea (Engelhard 176, 202). This story reflects the emergence of a divide between the species and possibly a rejection or fear of the animal ‘other’. Further separation between ‘us’ and ‘them’ is found in Inuit mythology which recalls that at the beginning of time all animals and humans lived together as one, without boundaries, but the polar bear was the closest to humans of all. As the world became overpopulated, an old woman, using magical words, summoned Death. Henceforth, Woman became responsible for procreation and

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the animals were reduced to a food source. There was no more inter-​marriage and the polar bear, once a comrade and potential marriage partner, became a competitor and adversary. An Inuk, dismayed at what had happened, invented shamanism as a means of communicating supernaturally with the spirit and animal world (D’Anglure 180). The polar bear was a particularly potent ally to the angaqok (shaman). In Greenland and Labrador, a helpful polar bear spirit called Tornarssuk was associated with shamanic initiation rituals (Nansen 240), though only the most powerful angaqok could form a relationship with this mighty spirit. Among the Ammasilik people of southeast Greenland the apprentice angaqok ‘spends long hours in his snow hut, meditating; at a certain moment, he “falls dead”, and … an enormous polar bear devours his flesh and reduces him to a skeleton … from which he will be born again’ (Sheppard 104). To be spiritually consumed by the bear opened the angaqok to a mystical connection with the natural and supernatural worlds. In Nordic tradition, according to the Icelandic Sagas, the bear acted as a guiding spirit, or fylgia. In Njal’s Saga the hero Gunnar’s fylgia is a massive bear. In most instances this would have been the European Brown Bear, but the Norse were also familiar with the Ice bear, or Isbjørn (Norwegian) or hvítabjörninn (Icelandic). There were particular rites that had to be observed in the killing of a bear, brown or white; it was taboo to ignore these rituals and not show proper respect to the slain bear. An account from Greenland, circa 950 ad, records how a great white bear ravaged a village near the home of Eric the Red, founder of the Norse community of Brattahlid. The bear was killed by Eric’s guest, Thorgils, and the meat was divided among the villagers. Only Eric the Red remained silent and expressed remorse, not for slaying the bear or apportioning of the meat, but because the bear was killed without the old ceremonies (Bieder 77). Anthropologist Irving Hallowell noted striking parallels between bear hunting rituals in several North American tribes and in Scandinavia, Siberia and among the Ainu of Japan, leading him to conclude there was an ancient circumpolar bear hunting tradition among subarctic peoples; ‘the bear was believed to represent, or was under the control of some supernatural power which governed the potential supply of certain game animals’ (Hallowell 145). Prior to the time when scientific explanations became the norm, Arctic peoples made sense of the decline or disappearance of wildlife—​caused by what might now be explained as natural population shifts, migratory patterns, or the effects of overhunting—​within their own conceptual constructions. The Inuit relationship with animals revolved around a hunting culture, and the belief that the hunted animals were composed ‘entirely of souls’, who would be

254 Henderson offended if they were not treated with the proper respect during and after a kill (Rasmussen 56). Furthermore, if angered, the sea spirit, known by many names including Sedna or Nuliajuk, trapped the marine animals, including the bear, in her hair and would only release them, with a comb, when appeased by the angaqok. 3

Polar Bears and the Folktale

What patterns, motifs or moral messages can be decoded from folktales that feature the polar bear? In folktales, as with modern day children’s literature, animals constitute a ‘proportionately large segment’ of the characters. Animals inhabit most of the roles identified by Propp as donors, helpers, dispatchers, villains, objects, givers, senders, receivers or opponents. Few of the European märchen, or wonder tales, have no animal character whatsoever (Thomas 103). Why a non-​human animal should be considered the best way of manifesting the fantastic, the magical, the supernatural qualities within a folktale is a more difficult question to address and will not be attempted here. Animals function in polyvocalic ways within folk narratives, making it challenging to produce a clear-​cut classificatory system of animal roles and character types. Stith Thompson’s Motif-​Index lists 6 animal categories: mythological animals, magic animals, animals with human traits, friendly animals, the marriage of a person to an animal, and fanciful traits of animals. However, it has been argued that the animal character type matters less than the role the animal plays within the tale. Joyce Thomas has suggested 4 categories of animal characters based on their overall function within the tale:  Fabular animals, Helpful animals, Supernatural animals, and Animal-​Human. There is the potential for overlap between these categories but it does offer a ‘broad, comprehensible nomenclature, one which fuses the animal’s role and essential nature’ (Thomas 104–​5). Particularly popular in Europe and across the Arctic regions are tales about Animal-​Humans, i.e. humans trapped inside animal form through a spell or enchantment, or as shapeshifters with no control, or with a modicum of control, over their therianthropic abilities. From Siberia to Canada, traditional folktales of humans who transformed into bears abound. The Inuit told stories about polar bears who walked upright, lived in igloos, were capable of human speech, and could shed their fur or skins. Two of the oldest and most universally widespread of bear tales are ‘The Woman who Married a Bear’ and ‘The Bear Son’. The pattern of the animal husband or groom tale has been traced to the mythological 2nd century ad story of Cupid and Psyche recorded by Apuleius, in which Psyche marries Cupid but

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is subsequently convinced by her sisters that she has in fact married a serpent. Among the most well-​known folktale retellings of this story are ‘Beauty and the Beast’, which emerged in sixteenth-​century Europe (Zipes 45–​9), and the Norwegian tale ‘East o’ the Sun, West o’ the Moon’. In the latter, a young woman agrees to marry a white bear to save her family from poverty. Her mother informs her she has, in fact, married a man under a troll’s curse. She subsequently discovers his true identity by breaking her promise not to look at him at night or he will be forced to leave and go east of the sun, west of the moon, to the troll woman who has cursed him. Another Norwegian variant, ‘White Bear King Valemon’, a man is similarly under a troll woman’s spell and assumes the form of a white bear by day and a man by night. In both of these stories the human female who weds the bear is able to release him from the curse. While human-​to-​animal transformations are relatively common in European and Northern folktales, the reverse scenario—​animal-​to-​human—​is comparatively rare, though bear tales are a curious exception. In some tellings of ‘The Bear Son’, for instance, he may begin life as a bear but is physically transformed into hominid form, or acquires human traits, while living among them. The basic European formulae begin with a woman abducted by a bear, who then gives birth to a bear-​human hybrid, and the rest of the tale is about the exploits of the bear-​son overcoming a series of challenges. Tales of Old Norse heroes Hygelac, Grettir and Bodvar Bjarki are all variants of the ‘Bear-​ Son’ (Rockwell 188). This particular tale-​type has also functioned as a legend attached to the Danish kings. In 1555, Olaus Magnus recorded the story of a woman abducted by a bear in order to eat her, but instead he fell in love with her. The bear was killed by local farmers but the woman was now pregnant. Her son, though he looked human, had the strength of his ursine father, and when he reached adulthood slaughtered those who had killed his father. From this boy descended King Sven of Denmark and a long lineage of Danish kings (Bieder 60–​1). ‘The Bear Son’ tale-​type is also prevalent in Inuit folktales. A Greenlandic story relates how an old couple wish for a son. One day the man killed a polar bear and sang a song to it, pleading with it to come back to life and be his son. Out of the blood flowing from the dead bear emerged a bear cub. The couple were happy and raised the cub as their own. When the bear-​son grew older, he hunted for the old couple, bringing them seals. Then one day the old man asked his bear-​son to bring back the meat of the ice bear. Although the bear-​ son refused, the old man insisted. The bear-​son returned with the body of a large polar bear, but when the old couple sat down to eat the bear meat, the son walked out, never to return. The old couple were left without a son to hunt for them and they soon died. This is essentially a story about the dangers of

256 Henderson breaking taboos. The strong kinship between bear and human is also demonstrated and there is a moralistic message that abusing kinship can result in disaster (Feazel 95; Bieder 64–​5). This Greenlandic tale does not sanitize or shy away from tragedy and brutality; it speaks to its intended audience about ‘real life’ through a thin veil of the magical. Polar bears have a diversity of roles and characteristics in folktales, many exploring the importance of family and community. Quite often the central human character is an orphan or an outsider. From Baffin Island there is a tale about an orphan who has been abandoned by hunters and is adopted by polar bears who teach him how to hunt. When he becomes a man, the bears return him to the village where, because he can now prove himself as an able hunter, he is accepted by the community. Max Lüthi understood that ‘fairy tales are unreal but they are not untrue; they reflect essential developments and conditions of man’s existence’ (Lüthi 70). Polar bear folktales embody archetypes and sometimes provide a didactic message on how to survive in the real world. The usage of the bear in folktales as a personification of symbolic ideas or cultural mores is therefore rarely about the mammal itself but rather a projection or statement of belief regarding human identity or ethical principles. The bear is comprehended dually as the archetypal ‘other’ but also as a reflection of ourselves, like us and unlike us. 4

Polar Bears and Children’s Literature

It should be clear by now that bear tales have functioned in different ways for different peoples at different times, and continue to evolve for new audiences. This raises certain questions, such as, in what ways have these metaphoric imaginings affected human relationships and understandings of the real, as opposed to the symbolic, bear? Can stories alter behaviours or attitudes toward the bear in the present and future? In other words, can these stories act as an educative tool in the fight to save polar bears and halt global warming? Some of the children’s literature under review consciously advocates such a goal. For example, Frann Preston-​Gannon’s The Journey Home (2012) has a hard-​hitting conservation message about destructive human activity as the cause behind habitat loss, and it is the animals—​a Polar Bear, a Panda, an Orang-​Utan, and an Elephant—​who must help one another as humanity destroys and drives them out of their homes. On their journey they ultimately meet a Dodo, an extinct creature, who rather somberly tells them they can go home ‘when the trees grow back and when the ice returns and when the cities stop getting bigger and when the hunting stops’. ‘When will that be?’ asks the

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Polar Bear. ‘I don’t know’ said Dodo, ‘let’s see what tomorrow brings’ (n.p.). Along the same lines, Jackie Morris’s The Ice Bear (2010) is essentially about being in harmony with nature, but it is the human who learns wisdom from the bear. It is described as a ‘beautiful story that reminds us that we are caretakers of its wild creatures and our actions directly affect their future’ (n.p.); a strong advocation of the power of story, though personally I am uncomfortable with the paternalistic concept of human as caretaker. Moving backwards in time, Nicola Davies’s Ice Bear (2005), a work of non-​ fiction that employs storytelling techniques, self-​consciously promotes an educational, environmental message in which the humans learn how to co-​exist with the natural world from the bear. Similarly, Liliana Stafford’s The Snow Bear (2000) deploys the theme of friendship between an Inuit boy and a female bear who saves him during a blizzard and teaches him how to survive. The wider context of the story hints at the problems of human-​bear conflict in the wake of global warming, using Churchill, Manitoba’s ‘Bear Jail’ as the backdrop. At least 7 key themes have been detected in the sample of 64 fiction and 7 non-​fiction works of children’s literature reviewed between 1982 and 2019. In general terms the most consistent themes were stories that dealt with ‘Family and Friendship’, closely followed by retellings and variations of the ‘Bear Son’. Stories about ‘Cooperation between Humans and Animals’ were prevalent up until the turn of the twenty-​first century while stories that focused on ‘Wild versus Civilized’, with the bear always occupying ‘wild’ and humans ‘civilized’ dominated in the 1990s. Some are purely ‘Educational’, framed specifically at learning about polar bear biology and habitat; in this sample the theme is strong in the 2000s. In some stories, especially from the late 90s and into the 2000s, the polar bear is merely ‘Incidental’, its species unimportant to the main storyline. A key theme, especially post-​2000 with a notable increase from 2009, is around ‘Environmental Concerns and Climate Change’. Of the works surveyed 14 (22%) had an environmental message of some description and all date from 2000 onwards. For example, within the work of one author, Jean Craighead George’s Snow Bear (1999) is centrally concerned with the importance of family and does not incorporate an environmental aspect, as such, but in her book The Last Polar Bear (2009) the climate change message takes center stage. This ‘process of iconization’ of the bear as a symbol for climate change has been discovered in other contexts as well, such as in the scientific magazine National Geographic where the bear appears to have undergone a transformation from anthropomorphized and relatable images from the 1990s to 2004, to fully fledged ambassadors of climate change from 2005 onwards (Born).

258 Henderson There appears to be a noticeable upsurge in children’s literature that features the polar bear post-​2000. All of the 7 non-​fiction works consulted here date from 2001 to 2016. Of the 64 fictional works, 3 were first published in the 1980s, 14 in the 1990s, 29 between 2000–​2009, and 18 between 2010–​2019. Other things worth noting throughout the fiction sample are the appearance of the Inuit in 14 (22%) of the storybooks; 8 (12%) are conscious adaptations of a traditional folktale; most are set within a natural or Arctic setting though 7 (11%) are either set in a zoo or the bear is threatened with capture by a zoo; 28 (44%) feature a human protagonist, while 35 (55%) have a bear protagonist and humans are either incidental to the story or do not appear at all. Some distinctive gender patterns emerge from the sample with 14 (22%) human females occupying the protagonist role as opposed to only 5 (8%) of human males. The figures are reversed when considering stories with a polar bear protagonist with 27 (42%) male bears assuming this role and only 4 (6%) female bears. The most common protagonist in this sample is therefore either a male polar bear or a human female. Numerous studies indicate the lasting effect stories can have upon children’s understanding of the natural world and the formation of attitudes and beliefs they will carry into adulthood (More 1979; More 1984; Burke and Copenhaver; Ganea et al.; Celis-​Diez et al.). Inuit and Arctic latitude children excepted, who may have ‘direct natural experiences’ with polar bears, most youngsters learn about bears through ‘direct artificial experiences’, such as in a zoo or museum where the bear has been removed from its normal habitat, or even more commonly through ‘vicarious experiences’, in which the child has no real contact with the animal itself but only via another medium, such as television, film or children’s literature. These latter experiences can also be the ‘greatest source of misinformation’ regarding wildlife (More 1984, 19–​20). In many picture books for children, including some that are intended to teach children about wildlife, the animals are anthropomorphized or the natural world is incorrectly depicted or described. For instance, in Piers Harper’s Snow Bear (2002) the bear cub befriends and plays with a seal. That said, the use of picture books to acquaint young children with information about the natural world has been shown to be a successful model in which children are able to transfer their learning about ‘depicted’ animals on to their understanding of ‘real’ animals (Ganea et al.). Moreover, the use of an anthropomorphic framework to communicate species specific and ecological knowledge may have the additional benefit of being more relatable to children who are, arguably, already predisposed to anthropomorphized interpretations of the animal world. Animal stories generally fall into three main categories: anthropomorphized animals that talk and act like people; animals that can talk but otherwise

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behave like an animal; and, objectively described animals that are not anthropomorphized (Arbuthnot 398–​425). In the 7 non-​fiction works from our sample, the polar bear is represented as ‘animal’ and objectively referred to in the third-​person, without describing the bear’s thoughts, feelings, or attitudes, while in the fictional works the bear is either fully anthropomorphized or, in the majority of examples, is treated as an animal except that it can talk like a human. First-​person (or first-​bear) point of view narration within the sample is rare but Lindsay Moore’s Sea Bear (2019) is an exception. 5

Conclusion

Why do polar bears with human speech populate so many children’s stories? Aside from creating a space for the blossoming of imagination, a basic function of much children’s literature is to make sense of the world, to impart knowledge and social mores, to open up a conversation with and about ourselves, to reflect upon our experiences, and to assist in the formulation of ideas and alternatives to the challenges and issues that we may face. A polar bear character that can speak, or has other human-​like traits, can provide ‘emotional distance’ for the reader, particularly when the underlying message is ‘very powerful, personal, and painful’ (Burke and Copenhaver 206–​7, 213). Furthermore, for children, the separation between animals and humans is potentially less sharply drawn than it is for adults and it can seem entirely logical that a bear might talk, that a lost cub might befriend other animals to help find the way home, or that a bear might adopt a lost human and teach it to hunt. The affinity that most children have with animals has possibly always been recognized but at least since the nineteenth century it has been understood that animal stories can be used to educate children with valuable social skills, such as empathy and compassion, or to inculcate particular morals and ethical codes. In this respect, polar bear stories, with or without a strong environmental theme, may well have an important part to play in shaping young minds towards a respect for the bear and its threatened habitat. Polar Bear mythology, traditional folktales and legends are full of stories about transmogriphication—​from bear to human or human to bear—​or cosmically-​aligned Ursines with access to the supernatural realms; they are rarely about bears, as such, but externalize human emotions and morality. Given the extreme living conditions present in the Arctic it might be expected that spiritual protection would be sought from the region’s apex predator, the strong and mighty bear. In modern day retellings and reinventions, and within children’s literature, the polar bear still often functions as a supporter to

260 Henderson human vulnerability yet, curiously, in many of the children’s stories from the last two decades, it is the bear who has grown weaker and more vulnerable, at the mercy of anthropogenic climate change, or by human ‘custodians’ who have assumed responsibility for saving the bear from extinction in what has become a fragile and degraded natural world. Perhaps the world needs more stories.

Works Cited

Arbuthnot, May Hill. Children and Books. 3rd ed. Chicago: Scott Foresman, 1964. Bascom, William. ‘The Forms of Folklore: Prose Narratives’. Journal of American Folklore 78 (1965): 3–​20. Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: BBC/​Penguin, 1972. Berger, John. About Looking. London: Writers and Readers, 1980. Bieder, Robert E. Bear. London: Reaktion, 2005. Born, Dorothea. “Bearing Witness? Polar Bears as Icons for Climate Change Communication in National Geographic”. Environmental Communication 10 (2018): 1–​15. Burke, Carolyn L. and Joby G. Copenhaver. ‘Animals as People in Children’s Literature’. Language Arts 81/​3 (2004): 205–​13. Celis-​Diez, Juan L., Javiera Diaz-​Forestier, Marcela Marquez-​Garcia, Silvia Lazzarino, Ricardo Rozzi and Juan J. Armesto. “Biodiversity Knowledge Loss in Children’s Books and Textbooks. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment vol. 14, no. 8 (October 2016): 408–​10. D’Anglure, Bernard Saladin. ‘Nanook, Super-​Male:  The Polar Bear in the Imaginary Space and Social Time of the Inuit of the Canadian Arctic’. Signifying Animals: Human Meaning in the Natural World, R. Willis (ed.). 1994. 178–​95. Dundes, Alan (ed.) Sacred Narrative:  Readings in the Theory of Myth. Berkeley:  U of California P, 1984. Engelhard, Michael. Ice Bear: The Cultural History of an Arctic Icon. Seattle: U of Washington P, 2017. Feazel, Charles T. White Bear: Encounters with the Master of the Arctic Ice. New York: Henry Holt and co., 1990. Ganea, Patricia A., Lili Ma and Judy S. De Loache. ‘Young Children’s Learning and Transfer of Biological Information from Picture Books to Real Animals’. Child Development 82/​5 (2011): 1421–​1433. Hallowell, A. Irving, ‘Bear Ceremonialism in the Northern Hemisphere’, American Anthropologist 28/​1 (1926): 1–​175. Lüthi, Max. Once Upon a Time:  On the Nature of Fairy Tales. Bloomington:  Indiana UP, 1976.

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More, Thomas A. “Wildlife Preferences and Children’s Books”. Wildlife Society Bulletin (1973-​2006) vol. 7, no. 4 (Winter 1979): 274–​8. More, Thomas A. ‘An Analysis of Wildlife in Children’s Stories’. Children’s Environments Quarterly 1/​3 (1984): 19–​22. Morris, Jackie. The Ice Bear. London: Frances Lincoln Children’s Books, 2010. Preston-​Gannon, Frann. The Journey Home. London: Pavilion, 2012. Propp, Vladimir. Morphology of the Folktale. Laurence Scott (trans.) Austin: U of Texas P, 1968. Rasmussen, Knud. Intellectual Culture of the Hudson Bay Eskimos. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1929. Rockwell, David. Giving Voice to Bear: North American Indian Myths, Rituals and Images of the Bear. Niwot: Roberts Rinehart, 2003. Sheppard, Paul and Barry Sanders. The Sacred Paw: The Bear in Nature, Myth and Literature. 1985; New York: Arkana, 1992. Thomas, Joyce. Inside the Wolf’s Belly: Aspects of the Fairy Tale. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1989. Thompson, Stith. Motif-​Index of Folk Literature. 6 vols. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1955–​8. Wenzel, George W. “Canadian Inuit Subsistence and Ecological Instability –​if the climate changes, must the Inuit?” Polar Research 28:1 (2009): 89–​99. Zipes, Jack (ed.) The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000.

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Cultural Writings of the Fairy Tale: a Spatial Reading of Three Studio Ghibli Productions Eduardo Barros-​Grela Abstract In this chapter I  delve into the many postmodern manifestations of Studio Ghibli’s productions in order to uncover the ‘shades of magic’ that engulf the fairy-​tale genre and are re-​told as parodical discursive manifestations of the anti-​fairy tale. In particular, I look at three different productions of the Japanese franchise, all of them directed and written by Hayao Miyazaki: Spirited Away (Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi, 2001), Howl’s Moving Castle (Hauru no Ugoku Shiro, 2004), and Ponyo (Gake no Ue no Ponyo, 2008). These three films expose a refractive correlation with space, as they provide a contradictory resignification of magical places that have a rhetorical impact on their protagonists’ mindsets. As divergent forms of heterotopias, both the natural and the artificial worlds portrayed in these films appear as magical environments in which the objects acquire a sense of place and are conceptualized as autonomous and performative entities. Magic is therefore interconnected with nature, allowing an ecocritical reading of the films based on their productions of space. The discourses of such spatiality will be the analytical focus of this essay, in which I interrogate the cultural projection of the fairy tale in terms of transnational folklore.

Keywords Studio Ghibli –​fairy tales –​space –​Japan –​folklore

1

Introduction

There is an everlasting belief that Japanese folk visual narratives are distant and eccentric tales that do not relate to Western epistemologies (Willis 16). However, the connection between the two worlds has been widely discussed, and it is not unusual to find in the lists of contemporary fairy tales titles that derive from the Japanese cultural tradition (Cavallaro).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | DOI:10.1163/9789004418998_026

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The problematic origins of fairy tales (Bottigheimer 17) present, however, an invitation to question the connection between folk and fairy tales, in which orality and popular transmission are interrogated as the only—​and unique—​ source of transmission for these types of narratives. In her introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Fairy Tales, Maria Tatar reflects about this issue in terms of the moral values transmitted by fairy tales (3), and alludes to the mutability of their nature. Cristina Bacchilega, nonetheless, claims that ‘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’ (3). In this sense, the influence of Japanese folk stories and fairy tales is not different in the quality of their reception through Miyazaki’s films. Such is the argument of Thomas Lamarre in The Anime Ecology (2018), where he discusses the history of Japanese television and contextualizes its connections with Western productions. He argues that the development of animated narratives in Japan ran parallel to the construction of a national cinema (238), and not only did their ontogeny encompass attributes of folk discourses and fairy tales, but it also built bridges in their intercultural tête-​à-​tête with Western epistemologies. This argument is underpinned by Napier, when she refers to the global/​local duality that is inherent to contemporary Japanese animation: ‘Tezuka1 himself was a strong admirer of Disney animation, as were many of Japan’s pioneer animators. Even today, Japanese animators are strongly aware of American animation’ (16). As it happens, Napier connects these influences of Western aesthetics distinctly via the extension of fairy-​tale narratives, which she argues are present in many contemporary productions of Japanese animation (139). As I discussed elsewhere in an analysis of Evangelion Neo Genesis,2 the spatial cityscapes described there function as a transgression of Western postmodern placelessness, inasmuch as they are incorporated to—​and therefore reterritorialized3—​in Japanese cultural values. The fairy tale imaginary follows a similar process of incorporation into the aesthetics of Japanese animated

1 Osama Tezuka was the creator in 1963 of the first Japanese animated television series ever, legendary Astro Boy. 2 See Barros-​Grela, especially 32–​34. 3 Reterritorialization is a term coined by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari to refer to processes of displacement (or decontextualization) that entail the use of power. For example, the proliferation of Hollywood aesthetics in the films produced in other countries, in this case, Japan, not only implies the suppression of traditional cultural identifiers. They also convey the imposition of new signifiers in the receiving cultural space.

264 Barros-Grela films and television series, in which the tales find a terrain of expansion for their narrative possibilities. From an ontological standpoint, fairy tales have a tendency to present characters that foster personal independence through personal growth, and their struggle with the fantastic pursues the objective of facilitating said development. As Marie-​Louise von Franz has argued, ‘Fairy tales are a play of nature. They are as meaningful or as meaningless as nature is when we look at it or when we don’t. They are like the products of the unconscious of someone who is not analyzed’ (19). This interconnection between the identity production of fairy-​tale characters and the natural spaces they inhabit results in the stimulation of place as a site of magical subjectivity. Following Robert Tally’s ideas in Spatiality, one can easily identify a straightforward applicability of his ideas to the sphere of the fairy tale. The motivating force toward personal self-​determination should be articulated with the natural and social environment that supports the construction of the tale, one that usually draws on the production of space. Nature has had a relevant position in the writing of the most notorious fairy tales.4 The origin of the fairy derives from divinities belonging to different cultures and their corresponding historiographies, ranging from nymphs to sylphs, sirens, or mermaids, as Jack Zipes pointed out (30). These character categories are connected with the natural worlds in their respective cultural imaginaries: water, the forest, mountains, or caves are easily identified with the moving forces that determine those characters’ identities. The inherent reciprocity of natural space and subjectivity has therefore been topical in the development of Western fairy-​tale characters. Even in postmodern adaptations of classical tales, such as 1986 Jim Henson’s film Labyrinth or Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), nature plays a distorted role in the magnification of the protagonists’ subjectivities, who turn to landscape and natural sceneries to enhance their magical attributes. Although Japanese reinterpretations of this connection between the natural world and human subjectivity might be built as an antithetical writing of how fairy tales normally unfold, their allegations towards the parallelism between nature and the spiritual is clearly dominant, as can be clearly noticed in Miyazaki’s productions. Lucy Wright argues that the director of Howl’s recovers ancient Japanese traditions that emphasize a continuity with the natural world, but that subverts, at the same time, the traditional idealization of humans living in harmony with the natural world. 4 See Laurence Talairach-​Vielmas’ book, Fairy Tales, Natural History and Victorian Culture.

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In this sense, keeping in mind these attributes of Studio Ghibli’s productions, as well as the critical peculiarities of space, place and spatiality, the three Anime films that represent the basis of this analysis offer a series of motifs that introduce relevant topics in the discussion of fairy tales. In the following sections, therefore, these three films will be studied from a perspective that connects space to emptiness (Spirited Away), heterotopias (Howl’s), and dystopias (Ponyo). 2

Emptiness and the Reterritorialization of Space in Spirited Away

Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi (千と千尋の神隠し), released in 2001, is a milestone in the production and the reception of animated films. According to García and López, this film represents the definitive entrance of Japanese Anime into the aesthetics of both Asian and Western epistemologies, given its relevance at international festivals and global theatres (34). As a narrative that might be integrated into the fairy tale spectrum, Spirited Away tells the story of Chihiro, a ten-​year-​old girl who, by mistake, enters a tunnel that leads to an abandoned amusement park that gives shelter to a myriad of demons, spirits, witches, and fairies. After Chihiro’s parents eat some food from an empty restaurant, they turn into pigs to the girl’s dismay, who feels trapped in the unoccupied place and will try henceforth to disentangle the complexities of the magical world of the bathhouse. Many references to classical fairy tales can be extracted from this synopsis. To all intents and purposes, Spirited Away functions as a homage to kami figures (magical beings or spirits) belonging to the Shintō folklore tradition in Japan, much as Hollywood blockbuster Shrek paid tribute, the same year (2001), to all previous Disney adaptations of the fairy world. Both productions deliver a re-​reading—​or reterritorialization—​of classical characters,5 and explore how those folk impersonations of cultural beliefs respond to particular contemporary characters who have developed a different—​even an inharmonious—​ axiology. Both Shrek and Chihiro are marginal characters within the fairy tale department, and provide a distorted view of its ethical message although assimilating, at the same time, its conventions. We cannot forget that fairy tales have traditionally been conceptualized as devices that help children to

5 Because of this, sometimes they have been referred to as examples of the anti-​fairy tale (Spencer, O’Neill, Bugeja).

266 Barros-Grela confront detrimental affections, such as envy, vanity, greed, or any other morally and socially unaccepted inclination (Cashdan 55). Many sequences from Spirited Away refer to recurrent themes that are normally identified with fairy tales. The entrance though a tunnel into a magical world (reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland), the transformation of humans into animals (also to be found in ‘Cinderella’), the anthropomorphic development of characters (as in ‘Beauty and the Beast’), the presence of magical characters and witches (‘Hansel and Gretel’, among many others) are all motifs that Hayao Miyazaki retrieves from classical narratives and are subsequently rewritten within the parameters of Japanese folklore. As mentioned above, nature and space play an extraordinarily important role in Spirited Away. Although there is not much critical literature about the impact of the amusement park on the development of the story, there is an element of the park that is inherent to the magical scenography of the fairy tale, which is also shared with many Western patterns of folkloric discursivity: emptiness. The abundance of diverse characters in the film might suggest that Spirited Away is not a story about absences, but the amusement park is presented as abandoned or deserted, and the characters start the story after they leave behind a space that they used to inhabit, which therefore remains empty. This apparently insignificant detail turns out to be conclusive to establish the protagonist’s psychological struggle in her attempt to build a subjectivity—​ and by extension, a spatiality—​in the new environment. This factor is distinctive of fairy tales in general (Cantrell 202), as—​generally—​innocent characters are placed in a position in which they are expected to resignify the new space to which they are exposed. They find out they need to negotiate their spaces in order to construct their identities, a practice that is in Spirited Away normally circumscribed to the production of a multiplicity. In this sense, the initial image of the amusement park is profoundly coherent, because as an abandoned space, it confers to the audience the necessity to assign to it any sort of meaning. Unquestionably, Spirited Away invites the audience to participate in the semantic territorialization that Chihiro proposes for the theme park. For example, the first image beyond the tunnel is one of an abandoned house in ruins, a space that produces both nostalgia and fear. This is a trope that is systematically repeated in classical fairy tales: uninhabited edifications, places that insinuate the existence of residents, although none are present, or places of recreation that have been deserted and remain specters. These are what Ignasi de Solà-​Morales conceptualized as ‘terrain vague’: abandoned areas, spaces, and buildings that gain conscience of themselves as places of value, and consequently resist their logical incorporation into the cityscape (12). Chihiro’s perception of the park through its alleys and its food

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stalls is precisely one of abandonment. She can feel the specters of former inhabitants, but as if in a dystopian scenario, all places are presented as deserted, forcing Chihiro to initiate a process of resignification through her cultural and folkloric background. Furthermore, her rewriting of space becomes the basis of her process of learning and developing towards maturity, a routine that is unmistakably usual in classical fairy tales. 3

Howl’s Moving Castle as a Heterotopian Fairy Tale

If Spirited Away introduced space as a recurrent trope, Hauru no Ugoku Shiro (ハウルの動く城, 2004)6 goes a step further in the integration of European fairy tales, and invokes through the narrative device of a moving castle the troubling scenery of parallel spatialities and temporalities. Howl’s Moving Castle presents a young character, Sophie, who is magically turned into a ninety-​ year-​old woman and is doomed to wander about in a fictional kingdom, looking for a remedy against her spell. It is in this search where she meets Howl, a wizard that is embarked in the struggle against external oppressors. Together, they start a love story that will lead them to Karishifâ, a fire demon who promises Sophie to return her to her original age in exchange for her help in breaking his contract with Howl. These events will lead to a series of adventures that offer a sharp perception of love, magic, and above all, the battle between good and evil. The static set of sceneries delivered by Spirited Away is replaced by fluid and dynamic spaces. The first sequences of the film show a serene Sophie, working as a milliner, and looking impassible at how different high-​tech flying devices meander around her place of work. This transition from a paralyzing domestic space to a hyperactive exterior is epitomized by the moving castle, a type of building that subverts all preconceived ideas of housing to offer a transitional, fluid, and destabilizing idea of home identification. Parallel to this image, Howl’s presents the transitionary identity of Sophie as a young woman but also as an elderly woman. Both personalities conform to the character’s evolutionary behavior, which is enacted as a cluster of vanishing identities (Napier 192). Such a continuous fluctuation of identities is habitual in classical fairy tales. Magical spells, curses, and other narrative devices belonging to the fantasy world are normally used to produce a separation from one’s given individuality. Hayao Miyazaki’s contribution to this resource in Howl’s can be interpreted on 6 Howl’s Moving Castle is based on Diana Wynne Jones’s homonymous novel (1986).

268 Barros-Grela the basis of an approach to multiplicity (Deleuze and Guattari 236), in which several spaces, places, identities, or subjectivities coexist within one single organism. This multiplicity is materialized in a heterotopia, in which one can find contingent spaces and undefined subjectivities. Michel Foucault’s classical example of a heterotopia, a mirror, presents space as a reflection, which exists and does not exist at the same time. In the moving castle, all these elements—​ multiplicity, heterotopia, and transitionary spaces—​coalesce to bring to the reader the same image of magical amalgamation that is conventional in the fairy-​tale genre, and which coincides with a common preoccupation to either separate reality from fantasy, or to be carried along by accepting the duality of the fairy-​tale narrative. In the two films discussed above, there is a common element that can be relevant in the discussion of the fairy tale: the witch. It plays a pivotal role in both narratives, as she represents the turning point in which the protagonists feel compelled to inquire into their own identities, yet at the same time they are not the straightforward malevolent characters that do appear in some other classical tales. On the contrary, these witches—​Yubaba and The Witch of the Waste—​combine evil attitudes with generous actions, and their moral position fluctuates depending on Chihiro’s and Sophia’s interpretations of their subjectivities. The witches’ bodies assemble a vision of the world in which reality is contingent while space and subjectivity become relative. In these films, Miyazaki invites the audience to re-​read legitimized narratives—​including fairy tales—​in order to question the values that have traditionally been passed on from generation to generation and have molded our current epistemologies. 4

Dystopian Spaces in Ponyo

The quintessential expression of the suspension of space and identity would come in 2008, when Hayao Miyazaki directs Ponyo (2008), an animated work of art that comprises ethical, social, philosophical, and critical principles. It is a fairy tale that stimulates on the reader similar effects to those from canonical Western narratives of the magical world. Gake no Ue no Ponyo (崖の上のポニョ) revisits the abutting worlds of the real and the fantastic, and taking this premise as its starting point, delves into the contradictions of creating liminalities between those two narratives. Ponyo could be basically considered a free adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Little Mermaid’ (1837). It presents the involvement of Sōsuke and Brunhilde—​a boy and a fish/​human figure—​in a friendship that transgresses the traditional borders of relational forms. While living underwater, inside her

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father Fujimoto’s submarine, fish Brunhilde loses her way in the ocean and gets to the surface where she meets Sōsuke. After the boy is injured by a piece of glass, Brunhilde licks his wound and the boy gets immediately cured. Brunhilde, now renamed ‘Ponyo’ by Sōsuke, has tasted human blood, and is therefore affected by a spell that will gradually transform her into a human being. Boy and girl will begin together a difficult story of sacrifice, love, and acceptance. The summary of the story could very well refer to any fairy tale of Western origins. It meets all of the features normally associated with the morphology of the fairy tale, including what Vladimir Propp identified as the seven spheres of action: the villain, the hero, the donor, the helper, the princess, the father, the dispatcher, and the false hero.7 Although Miyazaki is aware of the limitations of Propp’s taxonomy, he appropriates his system to create a series of complex characters who live within the frontier of those categories, making of his 2008 fairy tale a compendium of guidelines and transgressions of the characteristic fairy-​tale elements. In agreement with his formal infringements, Miyazaki also subverts the singularity of his characters. If Spirited Away and Howl’s presented problematic spaces that affected the production of identities in their protagonists, Ponyo goes a step further and provides subjectivity to those spaces, which acquire thus a performative role in the course of the events. In particular, the ocean’s agency surrounds all the important episodes in the plot, to the extent that, at times, viewers perceive the world and the characters’ experiences as belonging to a dystopian scenario. The ocean is portrayed in several different ways: first as the clean and pure home of Fujimoto and his family, and therefore as a pleasant place in which everything runs smoothly for its inhabitants. But also as a toxic space containing plastics and garbage, polluting oils, and other elements that justify Fujimoto’s distrust of the human species. Probably as a consequence of this discredit, the ocean also adopts a threatening attitude towards the different characters in the film. When Sōsuke meets Brunhilde/​Ponyo, Fujimoto gives the order to rescue his daughter from the human oppressors, causing that several anthropomorphic waves intimidate the young boy in his way home. Also, the constant presence of the tsunami keeps all the characters in a permanent state of alert, and the very home where Sōsuke, his mother and Ponyo live functions sporadically as a lighthouse that communicates with people at sea, thus functioning as another reminder of the perils at sea.

7 The functionality of these spheres should be interpreted within the methodological procedure introduced by folklorist Axel Olrik in 1909 (epic laws of folk narrative).

270 Barros-Grela Although the story is an attempt to reinforce Miyazaki’s trust in humanity—​ as the end of the film evidences, the scenes produced by the director are particularly pessimistic. The several verbal references to the decaying state of the waters contrast with Sōsuke’s naïve attitude toward the sea, as several times he is seen inside the water and does not seem to be intimidated by its inauspicious connotations. The reason for this conflicting spatiality would be again the representation of the intense conflicts between human being and nature—​clearly represented in Lisa’s (Sōsuke’s mother) reckless driving, even when Sōsuke and Ponyo, the utmost representation of pure and innocent nature, are inside the car. The mechanical forces created by human beings represent an even more threatening danger for sea creatures than the tsunami does for them, and practices such as industrial fishing, pollution or a lack of respect for non-​human beings are presented in Ponyo as constituents of a dystopian future. Needless to say, these features are already present in classical fairy tales, although in a more subtle degree. The relationship between human beings and nature has been an essential part in the construction of fairy tales, as happens with the sea in ‘The Little Mermaid’, but also with forests, caves, mountains, or gardens in many different tales. In both cases—​traditional fairy tales and Japanese anime—​nature functions as an allegory of human psychology, and as Sheldon Cashdan argues, fairy tales want to entertain and delight, but they also offer the means to channel psychological conflicts (ix). 5

Conclusions

Miyazaki is able to offer a series of films that reterritorialize the classical fairy tale: he keeps the essence of the stories but adapts them to the Japanese folkloric imaginary in order to question the legitimate values that accompany the original tales. At the same time, he takes the psychological value of the stories and enhances them in order to achieve a comprehensive immersion in human subjectivity. It is not coincidental that many of Mayazaki’s protagonists are female, as they represent the arduous path into subjective independence. He parts from traditional images of women as charming but inactive characters, and prefers to create bound and determined female protagonists who are ready to control their subjectivities—​something that, traditionally, and particularly in Japan, had been present only in male characters. The use of abandoned amusement parks, alternate realities and uchronias, the duality of balanced worlds, the exploration of courage and confidence that are hidden in one’s interior, the ecocritical value of space, the emptiness of

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characters and spaces, the multiplicity of heterotopic spaces, or the refraction from traditional fairy tales are all evident characteristics of the three films discussed here, which confers a clear sense of continuity to Miyazaki’s productions. This continuum can be summarized in the director’s preoccupation with marginality. His films provide a profound criticism against hegemonic discourses that overshadow powerless identities, like female characters, infants, elderly people, or nature. In this sense, the films that have been discussed in this chapter may be considered as fairy tales in many ways, but they also open up new projections in the development of the genre, based particularly on the psychological development of those characters whose identities had been limited to being uncritical participants in the celebration of the heroes’ deeds. Miyazaki’s proposal looks at spaces of fantasy to produce contemporary versions of classical fairy tales and to continue their task as producers of real and imagined worlds.

Works Cited

Bacchilega, Cristina. Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1997. Barros-​Grela, Eduardo. ‘Past Future Cityscapes. Narratives of the Post-​Human in Post-​ Urban Environments’. Cityscapes of the Future: Urban Spaces in Science Fiction, Yael Maurer and Meyrav Koren-​Kuik (eds.). Leiden: Brill, 2018. 28–​48. Bottigheimer, Ruth B. Fairy Tales. A  New History. Albany, NY:  State U of New  York P, 2009. Bugeja, Nick. ‘Spirited Away: the Anti-​Fairy Tale’. Australian Center for the Moving Image. https://​www.acmi.net.au/​ideas/​read/​spirited-​away-​anti-​fairy-​tale/​. Cantrell, Sarah K. ‘‘I solemnly swear I am up to no good’: Foucault’s Heterotopias and Deleuze’s Any-​Spaces-​Whatever in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter Series’. Children’s Literature 39 (2011): 195–​212. Cashdan, Sheldon. The Witch Must Die. New York: Basic Books, 2014. Cavallaro, Dani. The Fairy Tale and Anime. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011. Deleuze, Gilles and Féliz Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987. Howl’s Moving Castle. Dir. Hayao Miyazaki. Japan. 2004. Lamarre, Thomas. The Anime Ecology. A Genealogy of Television, Animation, and Game Media. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2018. López Martín, Álvaro and Marta García Villar. Mi vecino Miyazaki. Madrid: Diábolo, 2014. Napier, Susan. Anime. From Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle. Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation. London: Palgrave, 2005.

272 Barros-Grela O’Neill, B. ‘Shrek:  The Anti-​Fairytale’. Spiked 4 july 2001, https://​www.spiked-​online. com/​2001/​07/​04/​shrek-​the-​anti-​fairytale/​. Olrik, Axel. ‘Epic Laws of Folk Narrative’. Jeanne P. Steager (trans.) The Study of Folklore, Alan Dundes (ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-​Hall, 1965. 129–​141. Ponyo. Dir. Hayao Miyazaki. Japan. 2008. Propp, Vladimir. Morfología del cuento de hadas. Madrid: Akal, 1985. Solà-​Morales Rubió, Ignasi de. Presente y futuros. La arquitectura en las ciudades. Barcelona: Col·legi Oficial d’Arquitectes de Catalunya, 1996. Spencer A., Renner J., Kruck A. ‘Happiness Is Just a Teardrop Away: A Neo-​Marxist Interpretation of Shrek’. Investigating Shrek, A. Lacassagne and T. Nieguth (eds.). London: Palgrave, 2011. Spirited Away. Dir. Hayao Miyazaki. Japan. 2001. Talairach-​Vielmas, Laurence. Fairy Tales, Natural History and Victorian Culture. New York: Springer, 2014. Tally, Robert. Spatiality. London and New York: Routledge, 2013. Tatar, María. The Cambridge Companion to Fairy Tales. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015. von Franz, Marie-​Louise. Archetypal Patterns in Fairy Tales, Toronto:  Inner City Books, 1997. Willis, David Blake and Jeremy Rappleye. Reimagining Japanese Education:  Borders, Transfers, Circulations, and the Comparative. Oxford: Symposium Books Ltd, 2011. Wright, Lucy. ‘Forest Spirits, Giant Insects and World Trees: The Nature Vision of Hayao Miyazaki’. The Journal of Religion and Popular Culture 10.1 (Summer 2005): 3–​23. Zipes, Jack. The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2012.

­c hapter 25

Contemporary Japanese Folktales Represented in Anime: the Paradigmatic Case of InuYasha Alba Quintairos-​Soliño Abstract Definitions of fairy and folk tales are heterogeneous, westernized, and may even contradict each other. Therefore, Japanese folktales may present certain features that differ from the literary canon. On another note, the worldwide influence of Japanese culture cannot be denied, so it is no surprise that the current Japanese soft power strategy is based on the international exhibition of a modern Japan where anime (animation) and manga (comic) play a key role. According to Amber Slaven, anime stories are highly influenced by Japanese folklore. Hence, anime spectators are in permanent touch with Japanese folklore even if they are not aware of it. In this chapter, the InuYasha animation (2000–​2004)—​a story that combines common narratives of anime and settings of Japanese folklore—​will be analyzed by considering both conventional descriptions of folktales and specific traits of Japanese stories. The aim is to provide an insight into Japanese folktales from a contemporary perspective that helps anime viewers to identify these stories as an evolution of Japanese traditions. Ultimately, a comprehensive definition of folktales that tries to avoid Orientalist dynamics will be suggested.

Keywords Japanese contemporary folktales  –​Orientalism  –​InuYasha  –​ Japanese folklore  –​ fairy tale

1

Introduction

In 2017, the Japanese animation market exceeded the 2 trillion yen and the manga (comic) industry amounted to 448.3 billion yen, largely due to overseas consumption (Hawkes online). The influence of Japanese culture around the world is strong and partly due to the implementation of a soft power strategy known as ‘Cool Japan’ by the Japanese government (Sugimoto 321–​334).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | DOI:10.1163/9789004418998_027

274 Quintairos-Soliño This strategy consists principally in internationally spreading a modern vision of the country that attracts young people and, therefore, it is no surprise that anime and manga play a key role in it. Subsequently, the Japanese government supports the distribution of certain artworks that contain cultural references that would attract international audiences to Japanese culture. Thus, this audience assimilates these stories as culturemes representative of Japanese society. Amber Slaven’s research proves that anime (and, by extension, manga) is created by using some features of traditional folktales, which implies that anime viewers are unconsciously assimilating Japan’s folklore on a regular basis. However, common definitions of fairy and folk tales are usually made from a Western perspective, and features considered as ‘defining’ of these stories cannot be applied to non-​Western fairy tales. Thus, the need of a comprehensive definition of the folk and fairy-​tale duality that tries to avoid biased dynamics arises. The aim of this work is to provide an insight into Japanese folktales from a contemporary perspective that helps anime viewers to identify these stories as an evolution of Japanese traditions, as well as to suggest a more inclusive description of fairy tales. Moreover, it must be considered that, due to Japan’s fairy tales being disregarded as such because of the abovementioned reasons, in this work the terms ‘fairy tale’ and ‘folk tale’ are used as synonyms. After having studied different definitions of the notion of ‘fairy tale’, specific features of Japanese folktales, as well as the correlation between anime and Japanese folklore, are examined. To verify the accuracy of the studied characteristics and achieve a comprehensive definition of folktales, the InuYasha animation (2000–​2004) is analyzed. Finally, a new definition that tries to comprise all types of folktales is suggested. 2

Definitions and the Evolution of Fairy Tales

2.1 Fairy Tales, Folk Tales and Cultural Bias According to the Oxford dictionary, a fairy tale is ‘a children’s story about magical and imaginary beings and lands; a fairy story’ (‘Fairy tale’). The Cambridge dictionary also refers to the traditional and imaginary nature of these stories, and targets children as their main addressees: ‘a traditional story written for children that usually involves imaginary creatures and magic’ (‘Fairy tale’). However, dictionary definitions fall short of accuracy for researchers. Zipes claims that the ‘literary fairy tale is a relatively young and modern genre’ and argues that ‘it was not until the 1690s in France that the fairy tale could establish itself as a ‘legitimate’ genre for educated classes’ under the

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name of contes de fées (xxi-​xxiii). According to Zipes, the main features of these contes de fées were 1) its length, which used to vary from 10 to 60 pages, and 2) its target readers, since these stories ‘were not at all addressed to children’ (xxiii). Nevertheless, due to the wide production of chapbooks during the eighteenth century, fairy tales reached other audiences and hence these tales ‘were often read aloud and made their way into or back into the oral tradition’, turning into children’s literature at some point (xxiv). Moreover, Nikolajeva (140–​153) outlines some main features that must be considered when defining a fairy tale: (1) the fairy-​tale system of characters includes a hero, a princess, a helper, a giver and an antagonist; in addition, these characters may be ‘wizards, witches, genies, dragons, talking animals, […] swords, magic food and drink’; (2) the hero is never scared—​and never fails—​; (3) the story usually ends in marriage and enthronement; (4) the combat between good and evil is usually one of the key conflicts in the story; (5) magic must be present; (6) heroes and readers do not ‘experience wonder when confronted with magical events or beings’; (7) fairy tales ‘take place in one magical world, detached from our own both in space and in time’; this can be achieved by using rhetoric formulas such as ‘once upon a time’, etc.; (8) readers ‘are not supposed to believe in the story’. However, Schwabe offers a slightly different definition of German fairy tales. According to her, ‘literary fairy tales transfigure or mimic traditional folktales but aspire to the ‘higher’ artistic goals of stylistic elegance and philosophical purpose’ (12). Thus, it can be deduced that fairy tales are a cultural construction and, therefore, their definition must vary depending on time (i.e., when the story has been written) and space (i.e., where the story has been written). Most contemporary definitions of fairy tales—​often provided by Western researchers—​try to be generic and they are only based on Western stories. In consequence, the fact that folk and fairy tales ‘reflect religious beliefs, history, social norms, customs and/​or gender roles’ (Sawai 6) means that non-​Western fairy tales may not fit this category. Disregarding non-​Western fairy tales because they do not fit the Western features of fairy tales is a cultural-​biased approach. When applied to Asia, this bias is known as Orientalism, that is, ‘a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient’ (Said 3). Schwabe also elaborates on Said’s definition of Orientalism and its relation to Romantic fairy tales and concludes that Orientalism is regarded

276 Quintairos-Soliño ‘as a form of ‘intellectual authority’ over the Orient within Western culture, which is directly linked to the exercise of power’ (127). There is no doubt that the definition of ‘fairy tale’ must be non-​culturally biased. Thus, it should be comprehensive and applicable to different cultures. In this regard, Kelley’s research on ideology in Japanese fairy tales helps to identify some characteristics that are intrinsic to this type of story (online). The author enumerates some key aspects of the Japanese fairy tales that differ from Western tales, as it can be seen in table 25.1. Kelley raises a key issue about Japanese fairy tales: settings are usually unambiguous, specific and extremely detailed; therefore, readers may immediately identify where the story takes place.1 By comparison, in Western fairy tales, time and place are never stated, and stories usually begin with the formula ‘Once upon a time in a kingdom far, far away …’ (online). Other researchers have found features that seem intrinsic of Japanese folk tales. For instance, one important trait is that ‘the hero gains supernatural knowledge and/​or magical objects either through a deity or through his contacts with animalistic spirits’ (Yen 12). This is explained by the presence of Shintō and folk religions in Japanese culture, where ‘every object has a spirit inside and every part of the Nature has a god in it’ (Bak 2). Folk religions are table 25.1 Differences between Western and Japanese fairy tales (Kelley online; adaptation)

Western fairy tales

Japanese fairy tales

Rejection of the hero by some characters Emphasis on physical beauty Ambiguous setting (‘Once upon a time …’) Independence of the hero Pride (the hero aims for a personal goal) The hero is self-​made

Acceptance of the hero by other characters Emphasis on spirituality Specific setting (explicitly stated) Dependence of the hero on the group Modesty (the hero must forget their ‘individual desires and success’) The hero serves their country because they want ‘the best for the group’

1 By contrast, in Japanese folk tales, as in Western tales, time references are less specific and stories start with a formula that varies according to region, being 昔々 (‘mukashi mukashi’, which translates to ‘a long time ago’) the most common (Kunio 320, Miyashita 2).

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also based on the belief that ‘human beings and gods [are] under the Nature […] and there is a tendency that the gods and the Nature are almost identified […]. The Nature and human beings give mutual influences to each other’ (1). In Western fairy tales, divinities are usually replaced by witches, genies and other magical creatures because, in Western religions, ‘the god dominates the Nature through human beings’ (1) and therefore the divinity is not represented as such in the story. In this regard, whereas Kelley uses the term ‘fairy tales’ to refer to these stories, other authors prefer to talk about ‘folk tales’ because fairies, among other magic creatures, only belong to the folklore of specific cultures. In her research, Nikolajeva includes a list of characters that are considered ‘typical’ of fairy tales (e.g.: fairies, witches, princesses, dragons, etc.), which is clearly based on European traditions (140). In Japanese folklore, the most common supernatural creatures are the yōkai, which can be a ‘monster, spirit, goblin, ghost, demon, phantom, spectre, fantastic being [or] lower-​order deity’ (Foster 2) and present a good or bad nature towards humans depending on their features. Moreover, dragons are traditionally a symbol of wisdom and, in some cases, they may represent one of the four sacred beasts that protect the four cardinal points in Japanese mythology; therefore, they do not convey the same meaning as Western dragons, and its presence in folktales is not usually as relevant as in European stories. In addition, it is important to consider that main characters are not necessarily princes and princesses: given that Japan’s emperors had a ‘godlike’ status (Tennō), they were not usually depicted in folk tales as main characters. Thus, aristocracy is represented in these stories by ministers and other nobles. The fact that many tales feature plebeians as main characters is also interesting, because commoners are adopting the role of the ‘hero’. Nikolajeva also suggests that fairy tales have as main theme a conflict between good and evil and that the stories end ‘in marriage and enthronement’ (140–​153). Some Japanese tales may represent a struggle between good and evil, but, even though there is a ‘happy ending’, these stories do not usually end with marriage (since the story is focused on the aim of the hero, which is a collective benefit) or enthronement (given that Japan has traditionally been an Empire). Concerning the story addressees, Kunio explains that Japanese folk tales may suffer variations because the narrator adapts the story to the listener; thus, ‘when hearers of a folk tale were children, it became pure and simple, but in the mountains or aboard a craft where only adult men were associated, the tale became correspondingly vulgar’ (xxiv). This is one of the main differences between Japanese and Western fairy tales: in Japan, several versions of the tale coexist from the beginning because the plot is immediately adapted to

278 Quintairos-Soliño the addressee, which is another reason why there was no need to differentiate between ‘folk tales’ and ‘fairy tales’ a priori. However, in Western cultures, folk tales existed first, and they were not adapted to a child audience until the eighteenth century, as Zipes suggests (xxiv). In brief, it can be stated that Japanese fairy tales do not fit Western definitions because of sociocultural differences that are not usually considered by researchers. 2.2 Contemporary Fairy Tales beyond Tradition According to Miyashita, manga and anime stories are ‘affected by Japanese old tales’, and therefore it seems plausible to assume that ‘some aspects of folk tales have been passed down to modern manga and anime, displaying a quiet yet pervasive impact on the medium’ (1). The author argues that, if this is true, then ‘themes and motifs in folktales have been passed down to the culture of today even in modern manga and anime’ (3). The renowned sociologist Joy Hendry also highlights that Japanese TV programs for children (usually anime) emphasize recurring topics whose roots are old supernatural beliefs (82). In the previous section, it has been suggested that Shintō and folk religions have influenced Japan’s folk tales. When explaining the correlation between anime and fairy tales, Slaven also mentions Shintō as a source of inspiration for anime creators because this religion contains numerous ‘stories about gods and goddesses, heroes and scoundrels, noble souls and tricksters’ (46). This point is used by Slaven to highlight the probability of folk tales underlying many anime productions. She claims that anime is another way of representing folklore due to the fact that ‘the dynamic nature of folklore allows for the change and adaptation of folklore materials, which ensures the continued and lively use of traditional knowledge and materials’ (12). However, anime and Japanese folk tales differ on one point. Slaven’s research shows that some creators of anime ‘borrow heavily […] from other geographic regions such as Europe and China’ (12). However, in the case of Japanese folk tales, Kunio states that folk tales from regions ‘where the influence from the new trade was not felt’ were autochthonous and, even if they share similarities with other tales, they ‘cannot be called importations offhand’ (xxiii). Another distinction can be found: in Western and Japanese fairy tales, heroes and readers are not surprised when they encounter enchanted elements because magic is expected to be in the story (Nikolajeva 153). However, in anime, human characters (and sometimes also viewers) are often surprised, and even frightened, when they are confronted with magic elements. Based on Lüthi’s depiction of fairy-​tale heroes, Slaven examines the characteristics of anime’s main characters and concludes that they ‘normally exist as something special. There is normally something particular about them that

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leads them down the path of a hero. In many cases they are born with a certain magical characteristic that marks them as special’ (73). This ‘isolation’ of the hero, however, is not equally represented in Western and Japanese stories. In Western tales, heroes act in isolation (Lüthi, qtd. in Slaven 70). However, anime and Japanese folk tales usually emphasize the cooperation issue; thus, isolated heroes cannot defeat their enemies unless they are helped by other characters (Hendry 82). As can be seen, anime works as a new means of producing folk tales that are inspired in tradition, but also adapted to a contemporary context. Thus, it could be suggested that anime fantasy stories are, in fact, contemporary Japanese folk tales. 3

InuYasha: a Feudal Fairy Tale

To verify the accuracy of the studied characteristics, in this chapter, the InuYasha animation (2000–​2004), by Rumiko Takahashi, is analyzed. The relevance of this anime lies in the fact that it combines common narratives of anime and settings of Japanese folklore. The plot is seemingly simple: a contemporary Japanese girl named Kagome, who is a descendant of a priestess from the Sengoku period (1467–​1568), is able to travel back in time to that era (where humans and demons coexist) due to the power of a dangerous sacred jewel. When she is attacked by a yōkai, the sacred jewel breaks, spreading its fragments around the country, which forces her to team up with a half-​demon named InuYasha to recover all the magic pieces. InuYasha can be considered a paradigmatic anime due to many reasons. For instance, it is also known as「戦国御伽草子 犬夜叉」(‘Sengoku Otogizōshi InuYasha’), which was translated as InuYasha: A Feudal Fairy Tale.2 This title states that the story is, indeed, a fairy tale set in the Sengoku era, even though its features may not be those of fairy tales according to leading researchers. The plot should also be taken into account, since it includes several elements that allow to classify the story as a contemporary fairy tale; concepts such as ‘priestess’, ‘yōkai, ‘sacred jewel’, ‘Sengoku period’ or ‘magic’ may indicate that this story is a fairy or folk tale prior to its analysis. In table 25.2, the features of contemporary Japanese fairy tales obtained in the previous section are enumerated and applied to the InuYasha story. 2 「戦国御伽草子犬夜叉」(‘Sengoku Otogizōshi InuYasha’) literally means ‘InuYasha: a fairy tale from the Sengoku era’. However, due to stylistic and cultural reasons, it was translated into English as InuYasha: A Feudal Fairy Tale.

280 Quintairos-Soliño table 25.2 Features of contemporary Japanese fairy tales in InuYasha

Features of contemporary Japanese fairy tales

Features of InuYasha

Acceptance of the hero by other The main character (Kagome) is beloved characters by her family and friends. The other protagonist (InuYasha) is accepted in the Sengoku era once he changes his attitude towards humans; in the Heisei era, he has always been appreciated by other characters. Emphasis on spirituality Explicit emphasis on good behaviour (e.g.: helping others, being nice to people, etc.) Specific setting (explicitly The story happens in Musashi (武蔵), stated) a Japanese historical region, during the Sengoku era, as well as in Tokyo during the Heisei era. Dependence of the hero on the InuYasha cannot defeat the villain until group he understands that he needs his friends’ help. Kagome is aware from the beginning that they need friends to achieve their goal. Modesty (the hero must forget InuYasha’s real aim is to steal the sacred their ‘individual desires and jewel to become a complete demon, success’) as well as to defeat his enemy, Naraku; however, he only progresses in the story when he understands that he is being selfish and abandons the idea of becoming a demon. The hero serves their country Kagome decides to recover all the pieces because they want ‘the best for of the sacred jewel because she knows the group’ it is the best for the villagers, given that evil demons are searching for them too in order to become more powerful. Eventually, InuYasha also understands that he must help others to reach the common good, and he therefore becomes a hero.

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table 25.2 Features of contemporary Japanese fairy tales in InuYasha (cont.)

Features of contemporary Japanese fairy tales Isolation of the hero

Features of InuYasha

At the beginning of the story, InuYasha is an isolated character that likes to act alone and that is discriminated by humans and demons because he is a half-​demon; his appearance also differs from the rest of beings (e.g.: long silver hair, dog ears, yellow eyes, fangs, claws, etc.). The hero gains supernatural InuYasha’s father was an inugami (‘dog knowledge and/​or magical god’) who gives him a magic sword made objects either through a deity from a fang. or through his contacts with Also, Kagome obtains the sacred jewel animalistic spirits from her ancestor, a priestess with magic powers named Kikyō. Human characters are surprised Kagome is surprised and slightly when confronted with magic frightened when she travels back in time elements to the Sengoku era for the first time. InuYasha is also surprised by contemporary items, which he considers ‘magical’, and he is often scared of them. The main theme is the struggle Even though the search for the fragments between good and evil of the sacred jewel underlies the story, the struggle between good and evil is an explicit topic in every episode due to evil demons’ bad actions. Tales are strongly influenced by Most demons depicted in InuYasha are folkloric, religious elements Takahashi’s self-​interpreting of yōkai creatures (e.g.: Shippo’s character is based on the kitsune, a ‘demon fox’, while Kirara is a nekomata or ‘demon cat’). Other elements are the Buddhist and Shintō rituals, which are constantly represented through funerals and exorcisms. Also, the Buddhist belief in rebirth is shown when Kikyō is reincarnated in Kagome.

282 Quintairos-Soliño table 25.2 Features of contemporary Japanese fairy tales in InuYasha (cont.)

Features of contemporary Japanese fairy tales

Features of InuYasha

Influences from other geographic regions

InuYasha uses a cloth known as the ‘Robe of the Fire-​rat’, which has its origins in Chinese culture. In episode 6, the sword named ‘Tessaiga’ appears for the first time; it can only be held by a worthy person, which draws parallels with Excalibur (in English literature) and Mjölnir (in Norse mythology). Episode 57 is about the Peaches of Immortality, which are part of a Chinese myth. At the end, the main characters defeat the villain with the help of their friends and Kagome travels back in time to the Heisei era. Years later, she is able to return to Musashi and stay with InuYasha.

There is a happy ending

All these features seem to be present in the story, which confirms InuYasha as a contemporary fairy tale. Intertextuality is also an important trait that can be inferred from table 25.2, where influences from other geographic regions and the presence of folkloric elements may suggest the possibility of finding references to other contemporary and traditional fairy tales. Thus, in InuYasha the Movie: The Castle Beyond the Looking Glass (Shinohara 2002), the villain is Kaguya, a goddess based on the protagonist of the Japanese folk tale ‘The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter’. Likewise, there are intertextual elements associated to all kinds of contemporary artworks: in episodes 90 and 128, for example, several references to the manga and anime Detective Conan, by G.  Aoyama, can be found, even if they are not related. Hence, another characteristic must be added to the definition of contemporary folk tales: the presence of intertextual references to other contemporary Japanese cultural products.

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Conclusions

Researchers do not seem to agree on which features define fairy tales. As has been shown, most of them based their studies only on Western corpora, which implies that non-​Western fairy tales cannot be considered as such. However, being exclusive of a particular culture is never included as a main trait in the cited research. Thus, if this ‘exclusiveness’ is not stated, fairy stories can be understood as part of world literature and therefore their definition must be comprehensive and include a general conception that can be applied by other cultures to avoid a cultural bias. In this case, another solution is to explain that Japanese fairy tales cannot be classified as such because current academic definitions cannot be applied to certain cultures, which would suggest an Orientalist approach and, again, a cultural bias. Furthermore, other scholars have analyzed different aspects of Japanese fairy and folk tales from a non-​Western perspective. However, the characteristics they provide are not usually shared by all the existing studies. In this chapter, main features of Japanese fairy tales, as well as the presence of folk tales in anime, have been studied. Moreover, after having opposed Western and Japanese definitions, there are some Western characteristics that can also be applied to Japanese fairy tales. The combination of these three elements (i.e.: the definition of Japanese fairy-​tale features; the analysis of folk tales in anime; and some traits from Western descriptions that are also valid for Japanese fairy tales) gives rise to a new perspective of fairy tales. Japanese tales are strongly influenced by folkloric, religious elements, due to the animist correlation between Nature and divinity. This implies that deities and humans are at the same level, contrary to Western beliefs, where the divinity is placed above the human world. Therefore, it is logical to assume that Japanese folkloric elements (i.e., divinities, demons, sacred objects, etc.) and social structures prevail over the integration of Western beliefs, especially if we consider that Japan was under the isolationist policy known as Sakoku (鎖国) for several centuries (1633–​1854) and the introduction of many Western cultural references is relatively recent (Hane 84–​86). Considering the above, a comprehensive definition of fairy tales is proposed. Thus, fairy tales are stories where: (1) there is a hero who is helped or accompanied by one or more people; (2) the hero must literally or metaphorically begin a journey to achieve a goal; (3) the hero must possess different appreciated virtues (which depend on the social values of the culture where the tale exists);

284 Quintairos-Soliño (4) the hero is encountered with magic elements during the journey; (5) the hero is confronted with difficulties during the journey; (6) the hero must have distinctive features (which make them feel different from the rest of characters); (7) the struggle between evil and good is a recurrent topic; (8) the story is influenced by folkloric elements (that vary according to the culture); (9) there is a happy ending; And, when defining contemporary fairy tales, the following characteristics must be added: (1) the story is also influenced by folkloric elements from other regions; (2) there is a high presence of intertextual pop-​culture elements; (3) characters are surprised when encountered with elements that are considered ‘outside elements’ (e.g.: magic). Even though the analysis of the InuYasha animation suggests that the selected features are valid, their accuracy must be verified by applying this definition to other Western and Japanese tales. Therefore, more studies in this field are needed to broaden this research and cover other non-​Western cultures to determine the comprehensiveness of the proposed description.

Works Cited

Bak, Mikyung. ‘Animism inside Japanese animations: Focused on animations by Hayao Miyazaki’. International Design Conference CUMULUS Kyoto 2008, 2008, https://​ www.kyoto-​seika.ac.jp/​cumulus/​e_​programs/​posterpdf/​s2_​4.pdf. ‘Fairy tale’. Cambridge Dictionary, Cambridge. https://​dictionary.cambridge.org/​es/​diccionario/​ingles/​fairy-​tale. ‘Fairy tale’. Oxford Dictionary, Oxford living Dictionaries. https://​en.oxforddictionaries. com/​definition/​fairy_​tale. Foster, Michael D. Pandemonium and Parade:  Japanese Monsters and the Culture of Yōkai. Berkeley: U of California P, 2009. Hane, Mikiso. Breve historia de Japón. Madrid: Alianza, 2003. Hawkes, Rebecca. ‘Streaming Giants Feed Growth as Japanese Anime Market Hits US$19BN’. Rapid TV News, 10 Dec. 2018, www.rapidtvnews.com/​2018121054435/​ streaming-​giants-​feed-​growth-​as-​japanese-​anime-​market-​hits-​us-​19bn.html#axzz5nwRDxU3j. Hendry, Joy. Para entender la sociedad japonesa. Barcelona: Bellaterra, 2018. InuYasha. Dir. Masashi Ikeda, Yasunao Aoki. Japan. 2000–​2004.

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InuYasha the Movie: The Castle Beyond the Looking Glass. Dir. Toshiya Shinohara. Japan. 2002. Kelley, Jane. ‘Analysing Ideology in a Japanese Fairy Tale’. The Looking Glass: New Perspectives on Children’s Literature, 10.2, 2006, https://​www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/​ojs/​index.php/​tlg/​article/​view/​101/​97. Kunio, Yanagita. The Yanagita Kunio Guide to the Japanese Folk Tale. Tokyo:  Indiana UP, 1948. Miyashita, Hiroko. Common Motifs and Storylines between Japanese Folktales and Modern Manga and Anime [Master’s essay]. 2017. Nikolajeva, Maria. ‘Fairy Tale and Fantasy:  From Archaic to Postmodern’. Marvels & Tales, 17.1 (2003): 138–​156. Said, Edward. Orientalism. London: Routledge, 1978. Sawai, Mari. Perception of Japanese folktales by readers from different cultural backgrounds [Master’s thesis]. The University of Toledo, 2013. Schwabe, Claudia M. K. Romanticism, Orientalism, and National Identity: German Literary Fairy Tales, 1795–​1848 [PhD Thesis]. University of Florida, 2012. Slaven, Amber. The Japanimated Folktale: Analysis Concerning the Use and Adaptation of Folktale Characteristics in Anime. [Master’s thesis]. Western Kentucky University, 2012. Sugimoto, Yoshio. Una introducción a la sociedad japonesa. Barcelona: Bellaterra, 2016. Yen, Alsace. ‘Thematic-​Patterns in Japanese Folktales: A Search for Meanings’. Asian Folklore Studies, 33.2 (1974): 1–​36. Zipes, Jack. ‘Introduction: Towards a Definition of the Literary Fairy Tale’. The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales, Jack Zipes (ed.). Oxford: Oxford UP, 2015. Xv–​xxxv.

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Oral Storytelling, Slavic Mythology, Philological Research and Fairy Tales: the Case of Croatian Tales of Long Ago Estela Banov Abstract The classic book Croatian Tales of Long Ago written by Ivana Brlić-​Mažuranić in 1916 that contains eight fairy tales is one of the most popular examples of fantasy in Croatian literature. From the very first edition, the stories have attracted the attention of young readers and sophisticated literary critics. The clearest signs that Ivana Brlić-​Mažuranić was recognised as a distinguished author were her nominations for the Nobel Prize in Literature and translations of her works to numerous foreign languages. Contemporary literary critics have noticed the influence of traditional oral storytelling, which was broadly present in Croatian rural families at the beginning of the twentieth century. Literary analysis of the mythical creatures and fantasy motives represented in the Tales has identified several elements from the contemporary academic tradition and Slavic studies. This chapter examines the transtextual aspects of Croatian Tales of Long Ago including the published Slavic studies. The author of the Tales was highly educated and used her large family library, where she had the opportunity to find numerous classic titles from this field. Thus, I argue that those scientific works are intertextually present in her tales more than traditional oral storytelling.

Keywords Ivana Brlić-​Mažuranić  –​fairy tales  –​Croatian literature  –​Proto-​Slavic mythology  –​ Slavic studies –​oral storytelling –​intertextuality

1

Ivana Brlić-​Mažuranić’s Masterpiece Croatian Tales of Long Ago

A collection of fairy tales by Ivana Brlić-​Mažuranić (1874–​1938), published in 1916, quickly attracted the attention of both readers and literary critics. She was already an acclaimed author due to her children’s novel The Strange Adventures

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | DOI:10.1163/9789004418998_028

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of Hlapić the Apprentice, and lived to see two more editions of this collection and its translations into numerous languages. Her Tales have transcended the great majority of literary works from that period thanks to their artistic and stylistic qualities. The author’s stylistic expression in Croatian Tales of Long Ago was influenced by the poetics of fin de siècle, i.e., changes that occur at the turn of a century. As the late 1800s gave way to the early 1900s, art became seen as a sublimation of reality (Zima, Ivana Brlić 104–​111). Crucial elements in literary discourse were either neo-​romantic tendencies and a highly aesthetic decadent style or the hermetic language of symbols that derive from the sacral artistic, religious-​ritualistic or mythological tradition.1 Just as Oscar Wilde paid special attention to the language and the style of his fairy tales, this Croatian author also tried to refine the formal and stylistic aspects of her texts. Due to their high artistic level and originality, the Tales were soon recognised as an exceptional literary work of art and their author became the first female member of the Yugoslav Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1937. She was also nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature several times during her lifetime (Zima, ‘Ivana Brlić-​Mažuranić’). Interest for the Tales has not diminished, and the collection has recently inspired an international electronic publishing project presented on a cd-​r om and the Internet by the Bulaja publisher (Banov). 2

Slavic Mythology and the Architext of the Croatian Tales of Long Ago

Discussions about the relation between the Tales and authentic oral folk tales, on the one hand, and the system of Slavic mythology as described and presented by Slavic philologists from the nineteenth century, on the other, began soon after the publication of the first edition. The fact that the book was translated into foreign languages also increased the level of interest in the analysis of the relation between this collection and the oral tradition. Attention to literary fairy tales was closely related to the interest in traditional oral tales, folklore and mythology during the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries (Zima, Ivana Brlić). This connection can be seen in the works of all the major authors of classic literary fairy tales (Charles Perrault, the Grimm Brothers, Alexandr Nikolayevich Afanasjev, Hans Christian Andersen, Oscar Wilde, and others).

1 See: Ljiljana Ina Gjurgjan, Mit, nacija i književnost ‘kraja stoljeća’ –​Vladimir Nazor i William Butler Yeats (Zagreb: Nakladni zavod Matice hrvatske, 1995), 22.

288 Banov The terms and characters from Slavic mythology played an important role in the understanding of the semantics of the text. The author herself was aware that a wider reading audience needs an explanation in order to gain basic insight into the Slavic pantheon, and so decided to include explanations of terms while she was writing the Tales (Brlić-​Mažuranić, Croatian Tales 255–​259). When preparing the first edition of her collection, Ivana Brlić-​ Mažuranić added an appendix in which the names used were explained. For example, the character of Muggish from the fairy tale ‘Bridesman Sun and Bride Bridekins’ is a figure from the Proto-​Slavic Pantheon; the name of the title character of ‘Stribor’s Forest’ is associated with another Slavic deity; and one of the songs incorporated in the text calls forth the little Svarog, a Proto-​ Slavic god of fire. In several stories ‘vilas’ take part in narration –​those fairy-​ like spirits are typical of Slavic folklore and oral traditions and of the genre. In the English translation, the author offered the original Croatian terms in addition to their translations and explanations (Brlić-​Mažuranić, Croatian Tales 255–​259). According to Gérard Genette, endnotes are a form of paratext. They include a series of elements that enable a link between the text and the reader or an audience to be established. They also help to determine the boundaries between the literary text and those elements that do not belong to it directly (Genette, Palimpsests 3). Another kind of explanation of a book or a text can consist of different forms of the author’s explanations or other statements that are not integral parts of the text. The elements that belong to the first group are here referred to as peritext (i.e. internal paratext), and those that belong to the second as epitext (i.e. external paratext) (Genette, Paratexts 3). Considering that the author herself added these endnotes, they are a form of author’s paratext. The author gave general guidelines to the readers in the form of paratextual elements like the title of the collection in addition to the endnotes. Additional guidelines in the form of epitextual elements can be found in her autobiographic texts. Although the author has linked some of the names of her fantastic creatures to the Slavic mythology, their descriptions have been changed and harmonised with the poetics of fairy tales. In the story ‘Bridesman Sun and Bride Bridekins’, Muggish, a character from Proto-​Slavic mythology, makes her appearance. In accordance with nineteenth-​century beliefs, the author portrays her as the Sun’s nanny during the winter solstice: But this wasn’t just an old wife like other old wives; it was Mother Muggish. Now Muggish could turn herself into any mortal thing, a bird or a snake, or an old woman or a young girl. And besides that she could do

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anything, both good and bad. But woe to him who got into her bad books, for she was very spiteful. Muggish lived in the morass on the fringe of the bog where the autumn sun dwelt. And with her the sun put up over the long winter night; for Muggish knew potent herbs and powerful spells; she would nurse and cherish the feeble old sun till he grew young again at Yuletide and started on his way once more. brlić-​m ažuranić, Croatian Tales 140

But in the context of the fairy tale she is a protective figure in a family in which relations between generations have been disrupted. This is just one of the examples of artistic transformation of mythological motifs in this book. The title of her collection is not only a paratextual, but also an architextual category (Genette, Palimpsests 4) –​it refers to the genre and the relation between the discourses and the modes of representation. The original title connects two notions –​those of tales and ancient times.2 The term ‘tales’ clearly indicates the genre, and the ‘ancient times’ are related to the genre constant of fairy tales, which is also present in the standard formula ‘Once upon a time very long ago …’ (Brlić-​Mažuranić, Croatian Tales 11) that opens the first tale in the collection –​‘How Quest Sought the Truth’. This formula also serves as the opening for the entire collection and establishes a link between the world of artistic literary fairy tale and the atmosphere of oral storytelling and the way in which imaginary worlds are created in folk tales. The artistic specificity of the time in which these Tales take place is the result of the link between the abstract ‘long ago’ and the mythical time of the pre-​Christian era, both of which are linked to the primeval homeland of all Slavic nations. Literary critics have linked it to the transition period between the pre-​Christian era in which the Slavs’ ancient religion dominated and the time immediately after the Slavs adopted Christianity (Zima, Ivana Brlić 112). Ethnographic sources that deal with Slavic mythology and the Christianisation of Slavs also speak of dual faith (from Russian:  dvoeverie) as a specific phenomenon related to the medieval period, after Christianity was officially accepted.3 According to Zipes’s interpretation of the position of Russian fairy tales in the history of genre, the facts that some Slavic nations accepted Christianity 2 The translation of the title into English by Fanny Copeland is Croatian Tales of Long Ago. It signals a paratextual addition by the translator and the wish to specify where the text belongs. 3 See Radoslav Katičić, Zeleni lug. Tragovima svetih pjesama naše pretkršćasnke starine (Zagreb/​ Mošćenička Draga: Ibis grafika, Matica hrvatska: 2010), 17.

290 Banov rather late compared to the western European nations, and that the oral storytelling played a noticeable role in Slavic culture, are important. Despite the theoretical contribution of Vladimir Propp, the collections of oral or artistic fairy tales of Slavic origin are not as well known as those of Romance and Germanic origins (Zipes 60–​61). It seems reasonable to consider that if researchers pay more attention to them that could help in better understanding the genre. 3

The Genesis of Croatian Tales of Long Ago in the Autobiographic Discourse

Literary critics have frequently referred to Ivana Brlić-​Mažuranić’s writings dating from the period after the completion of the collection when interpreting her fairy tales (Skok 21). The most important epitextual elements can be found in her Autobiography, private letters, and recently discovered handwritten notes. The fact that the Tales were written by a woman could also be interpreted as a paratextual element. Gender issues in her Autobiography are related to the possibility of reconciling the wish to write with the sense of family obligations and responsibilities and the place that a woman and a mother should occupy when it comes to raising her children. In a note written when the Tales were completed the author places the beginning of her literary work in a period when her children were already old enough to express the wish to read: My children want to read –​what joy it is for me to be their guide in this domain too, to open the doors for them into that fabulous colourful world, into which every child steps by reading his first book –​to direct their bright and inquisitive gaze towards those aspects of life that I want them to see first and never lose sight of. brlić-​m ažuranić, Izabrana djela 299

Such argumentation reconciles the wish to write with motherly duties. Fairy tales are also a literary form that has, ever since the Grimm Brothers’ romantic Nursery and Household Tales, aimed at areas that would be important to a mother like encouraging the cognitive and moral development of children. Although the Autobiography only briefly mentions the creation of the Tales, the description of her childhood, youth and married life gives insight into the author’s cultural circle and intellectual world. This insight enables us to see that the choice of the Proto-​Slavic period also links the Croatian Tales of

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Long Ago to the Pan-​Slavic ideas that permeated the development of Slavic studies as a scientific discipline in the nineteenth century. The same ideas also marked the ideology of the Illyrian movement and the Croatian National Revival during the nineteenth century, and in the public life of Croatia, they were linked to the political views of the National Party.4 The presence of mythical and fairy tale discourse in Brlić-​Mažuranić’s collection gave rise to questions about the relationship with the recorded texts from the Croatian oral tradition. The questions regarding the genesis of the Tales are primarily linked to the letter the author had sent to her son Ivan Brlić, an author and a journalist, in 1929. Wishing to acquaint the public with the author’s attitude towards the relation of the Tales to Slavic mythology and oral storytelling, he published the letter the following year and commented that the author had sent a similar letter to her acquaintance Zinaida Nikolayevna Gippius, the wife of the Russian author Dmitry Sergeyevich Merezhkovski. The epistolary and autobiographical writings about the inspiration for the Tales are similar in their style to the artistic description. One winter evening our home, contrary to custom, was completely quiet. No one was around –​the rooms big, semi-​darkness everywhere, atmosphere secretive, fire in the fireplaces. From the farthest room  –​a big dining room –​a sound ‘Knock! Knock!’ –​‘Who is it’ I ask. –​Nothing! Again: ‘Knock! Knock!’ –​and then nothing again. With a certain mysterious fear I step into the big dining room and suddenly: a joyous crack, a thump, a small explosion! A pine log cracks in the big fireplace –​sparks come flying out to greet me as if they are a swarm of little stars, and when I spread my arms to catch this living gold gift, they rise up to the tall ceiling and … they are gone.  –​At the time I  was reading Afanasjev’s The Poetic Outlook on Nature by the Slavs  –​and at that moment the ‘Brownies’ came to my mind. And so the swarm of sparks-​stars was captured  –​in ‘Stribor’s Forest’  –​which was created because of them. From this tale seven others were born, without any special genesis, so

4 The author’s grandfather Ivan Mazuranch was one of the most prominent authors belonging to the Illyrian movement, and he was the Ban of Croatia from 1873 to 1880. Her father Vladimir was also an intellectual and an author of a dictionary. For a number of years he was the head of yaas. Her husband, Vatroslav Brlić, a lawyer and a politician, was a supporter of the National Party, just like his father and grandfather. The Brlić family had a very large library that contained several thousands of books in various languages collected over a period of almost a hundred years in their home in Brod na Savi. It was a very stimulating environment for the writer and she spent almost all her life there after she married at the age of 18.

292 Banov they too, just like ‘Stribor’s Forest’, flew out like sparks from the hearth of an ancient Slavic home. brlić-​m ažuranić, Izabrana djela 276

Commenting on her creative process, Ivana Brlić-​Mažuranić mentioned the work of the Russian folklorist Alexandr Nikolajevich Afanasjev as an inspiration for one of the tales. The context of this epitext has changed over the years. From a private letter to a close family member the text grew into a newspaper article and after analyses in literary-​historic treatises (Bošković-​Stulli 163–​180) it became a part of Brlić-​Mažuranić’s anthology (Brlić-​Mažuranić, Izabrana djela 275–​277). 4

The Art of Oral Storytelling and the Literary Fairy Tale

The popularity of literary fairy tales can be attributed in part to the similarity to the way content is presented in folklore and oral storytelling. Literary fairy tales are similar to the oral ones in which the story is stylised, action dominates and attracts the attention of the listeners, and the rhythmic prose evokes the feeling of pleasure (Ong 31–​34). Their motifs and thematic characteristics are also similar: home and hearth are some of the most important motifs in both oral and literary fairy tales. Those motifs are closely connected to the idealisation of family values. Motifs related to home and household are frequent in the Tales, and include those of spirits of the hearth and figures of wise old men and grandfathers. In the Tales the collective characters of Slavic ghosts ‘Brownies’ (originally ‘Domaći’, home sprites from Croatian dom meaning home) are especially plastic. These good spirits, which are linked to the hearth, appear in ‘Stribor’s Forest.’ However, in ‘How Quest Sought the Truth’, ‘goblins’ or little naughty creatures that trouble the main characters, make their appearance. Their ruler Rampogusto tries to harm the grandchildren of the wise old man Witting because he hates him ‘as a mean scoundrel hates an upright man’ (Brlić-​ Mažuranić, Croatian Tales 16). Although some characters, such as Wee Tintilinkie, stand out among them, the author portrays them as groups that resemble playful children. Their collective activities and play are the most dynamic segments of the Tales and are reminiscent of the rhythm and the intonation of oral storytelling. And how they danced! Round the hearth, in the ashes, under the cupboard, on the table, in the jug, on the chair! Round and round! Faster and

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faster! They chirped and they chattered, chased and romped all over the place. They scattered the salt; they spilt the barm; they upset the flour –​ all for sheer fun. The fire on the hearth blazed and shone, crackled and glowed; and the old woman gazed and gazed. She never regretted the salt nor the barm, but was glad of the jolly little folk whom God had sent to comfort her. brlić-​m ažuranić, Croatian Tales 170–​172

The figures of wise old men, which are sometimes related to the transfer of knowledge and values characteristic of prolonging tradition, also stand out. Traditional societies in which folk tales were created built their identity on patriarchal values. Therefore the relationship of respect for the oldest and wisest members of the community and the family is implicit in such cultures. The Romantic authors who idealised the folk spirit also stressed these traditional aspects in their works. Furthermore, the patriarchal idealisation of the function of grandparents is also a genre topos of the literary fairy tale. The old man Witting stands out as an example of such an idealisation. He embodies wisdom and family knowledge, and his ability to resist evil is tied to the sacralisation of the hearth: ‘The old man had brought the sacred fire to the glade so that it might never go out, and the smoke of that fire made Rampogusto cough most horribly’ (Brlić-​Mažuranić, Croatian Tales 16). The old man and woman who are the only advocates of harmony between the two feuding villages in ‘Reygoch’ are not only portrayed as experienced and wise  –​their life experience is also tied to the difficulties which can be discerned from just looking at their wrinkled old faces. So the hero of the story, the giant Reygoch, exclaims: ‘Oh dear! Oh dear! What a lot of trouble these old people must have been through in these parts to have come to look like that!’ (Brlić-​Mažuranić, Croatian Tales 134). The physical and psychological portraits of characters in the Tales are significantly more complex than those of the characters in oral storytelling, and their descriptions are influenced more by Secession neo-​romanticism than by the oral tradition. However, the moral of the Croatian Tales of Long Ago is almost always about the importance of being considerate towards one’s elders, regardless of their means. In these stories, all forms of rudeness and lack of respect towards the elders are punished, while kindness and willingness to help are rewarded. The intertwining of the imaginary world of Slavic mythological creatures with the Christian ethical system integrated into the morals of these stories is an artistic convention because of which the author also refers to the heritage of Russian folk tales and the scientific research of Slavic mythology that began with the works of Slavic philologists in the nineteenth century.

294 Banov 5

Slavic Mythology in Philological Studies

Engler and Kos-​Lajtman have recently discovered Brlić-​Mažuranić’s notes on Slavic mythology based on Afanasjev’s The Poetic Outlook on Nature by the Slavs and Tkany’s historiographic lexicon Mythologie der alten Teutschen und Slaven. (Engler & Kos-​Lajtman). Those notes, dated 1934, would also be a form of epitext relevant for the establishment of a relation between the discourse of the Tales and the discourse of Slavic mythology.5 Although literary historians have searched for the possible sources of mythological components in the Tales from early on, only more recent research of the archives has revealed information on the works the author had read and whose elements might have been incorporated in her writings. Numerous motifs indicate that the author was familiar with Nodilo’s The Ancient Faith of the Serbs and the Croats (1885–​1890). However, the fact that the notes on reading Afanasjev and Tkany were sorted out almost twenty years after the Tales were written, indicates that the author wished to learn more details about the mythological works she had read during her most intense creative period. Ivana Brlić-​Mažuranić thus reminds us of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, whose collections of fairy tales were published in 1812 and 1815, and whose Deutsche Mythologie appeared more than twenty years later in 1835, and of Afanasjev, who wrote his work on Slavic mythology after he published his collection of Russian fairy tales.

Acknowledgement

Proofreading and translation by Anita Memišević.

Works Cited

Banov, Estela. ‘Reception of Fairy Tales in Printed and Digital Media’. Shiel, Gerry, Ivanka Stričević, and Dijana Sabolović-​Krajina. Literacy without Boundaries Proceedings of the 14th European Conference on Reading Zagreb, Croatia 2005. Osijek: Croatian

5 Since the author was raised in a multicultural environment, she was fluent in German, Russian and French from an early age and she could also speak Italian and English. As a result, she could read literary and academic works in all of these languages and she incorporated the results of her Slavic mythology studies into her literary work.

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Reading Association, 2007. 210–​215, http://​hcd.hr/​wp-​content/​uploads/​sites/​356/​ 2014/​11/​zagreb_​conference_​proceedings.pdf. Brlić-​Mažuranić, Ivana. Croatian Tales of Long Ago. London: George Allen, 1924. Brlić-​Mažuranić, Ivana. Izabrana djela. Zvonimir Diklić (ed.). Zagreb: Matica hrvatska, 1997. Engler, Tihomir and Kos-​Lajtman, Andrijana. ‘Bajkopisna diseminacija mitoloških motiva u Pričama iz davnine Ivane Brlić-​Mažuranić na primjeru intertekstualnih poveznica s leksikonom A. Tkanyja’. Studia Mythologica Slavica 16 (2011): 307–​326. Genette, Gérard. Palimpsests:  literature in the second degree. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky (trans.) Lincoln NE and London: U of Nebraska P, 1997a. Genette, Gérard. Paratexts:  thresholds of interpretation. Jane E. Lewin (trans.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997b. Gjurgjan, Ljiljana Ina. Mit, nacija i književnost ‘kraja stoljeća’ –​Vladimir Nazor i William Butler Yeats. Zagreb: Nakladni zavod Matice hrvatske, 1995. Katičić, Radoslav. Zeleni lug. Tragovima svetih pjesama naše pretkršćanske starine. Zagreb/​Mošćenička Draga: Ibis grafika, Matica hrvatska, 2010. Nodilo, Natko. Stara vjera Srba i Hrvata (The Ancient Faith of the Serbs and the Croats). Split: Logos, 1981. Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy. The Technologizing of the Word. London and New York: Routledge. Taylor & Francis Group, 2007. Skok, Joža & Crnković, Milan: Čudnovate zgode šegrta Hlapića i Priče iz davnine Ivane Brlić-​Mažuranić & Robinson Crusoe Daniela Defoa. Zagreb: Školska knjiga, 1995. Zima, Dubravka. ‘Ivana Brlić-​Mažuranić, članstvo u Akademiji i Nobelova nagrada.’ Libri & Liberi Croatian Association of Researchers in Children’s Literature vol. 3, no. 2, (2014): 239–​261. Zima, Dubravka. Ivana Brlić Mažuranić: monografija. Zagreb: Zavod za znanost o književnosti Filozofskog fakulteta Sveučilišta u Zagrebu, 2001. Zipes, Jack. The Irresistible Fairy Tale. The Cultural and Social History of a Genre. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton UP, 2012.

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The Mark of Fairy Tales on Galician Literature for Children and Young Adults Carmen Ferreira Boo Abstract This chapter conducts a historical overview of Galician literature for children and young adults, analysing the most representative works from each of the different established periods of Galician literature in different ways. The concepts of ‘rewriting’, ‘versions’, and ‘adaptations’ will be taken into account, as well as Genette’s distinction between types of transtextuality and their uses as defined by Valriu. This paper looks at how the roles of the characters change, how the stereotypes of witches, fairies, princesses, and others are modified, and how contexts are modernized for different purposes such as provoking a parodic effect, subverting and/​or humanising the characters, or instilling certain values or ideologies in young readers. In this way, this paper offers a general overview of the mark that fairy tales have left on Galician literature for children and young adults, and the influence and vitality that they have as a source of recreation, subversion, and deconstruction for writers of children’s and young adult literature.

Keywords adaptation –​fairy tale –​Galician literature for children and young adults –​rewrite –​ version

1

Introduction

The fairy tale1 adapts to the child and young adult reader through versions, adaptations (Hutcheon 7–​8, Haase 2), and rewrites, depending on the degree 1 According to Jolles, a broad understanding of the term includes the primitive folkloric tale faithfully compiled in a primitive way; those that have been collected with greater or lesser degrees of intervention from the authors, such as those by G Basile, Charles Perrault, and

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | DOI:10.1163/9789004418998_029

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of conservation of the hypotext that the writer uses as a source of inspiration. Hence, at a glance, throughout the history of Galician literature for children and young adults,2 generally the first manifestations were versions, followed by adaptations with a greater degree of freedom. In the third phase, once this literary system was consolidated, these were followed by rewrites3 which subvert and deconstruct the original version in a completely freeing creative act. These rewrites transgress the hypotext and establish interesting and novel intertextual and hypertextual relationships (Genette) by employing creative strategies such as imitation, satirical transformation, and parody through the use of devices such as irony, ambiguity, or antanaclasis. These are used in order to create a literary work that is like an ingenious game between the issuer and the receiver, which breaks traditional narrative moulds and tends towards transgression, humour, irony, modern fantasy, and the manipulation of classic characters from the collective imagination. In the case of the picture book, which has a double narrative (textual and visual), they introduce versions, adaptations, and translations of the narrative text, which itself is simplified, and ludic rewrites in the visual narrative by the illustrator who updates, humanizes, and caricatures (Ferreira, “Reescritas” 202) through referencing/​allusion or parody and by using different artistic techniques and graphic styles (Ramos 18). We must not forget that literary trends, including the rewriting of fairy tales,4 are influenced by the socio-​historical context and agents such as the education system, publishing houses, prizes, and academic and informative criticism. Thus, from the 1970s onwards, the so-​called ‘New fantasy’ or ‘Modern fairy tale’ emerged. They followed the ideas of Gianni Rodari by reformulating fantasy and modifying literary folklore models, exploiting their potential for intertextual play and meaning. As Colomer (185–​186) stated, popular stories the Brothers Grimm; and the stories created from Romanticism onwards that were made for children, such as those by H.C. Andersen. 2 For the Iberian and Ibero-​American scene, refer to Roig, Neira and Soto, which gives an account of the manipulation of oral narrative material by writers of literature for children and young adults in the Spanish, Catalan, Galician, Portuguese, Basque, and Ibero-​American contexts. 3 Professor Díaz-​Plaja (166–​169) distinguishes between simple rewrites with small modifications such as modernising the context; expansions, by way of extending the beginning or the ending; modifications that can affect the personality of the characters, variations to the structure, or a change of register; and collage, or a mixing of one or several stories with various intentions. 4 Zipes states that current fairy tales are duplicates, or rather, replicas, that repeat a pattern, or recreations of one of two types: stories of fusion with a traditional narrative and contemporary references, and transfigured fairy tales that legitimise current values by criticising or parodying the hypotext (178–​179).

298 Ferreira Boo have been subverted or converted into a framework for the production of variants which are more complex or closer to current literary trends; they serve to both reinforce flourishing values, such as feminism, for example, and to provide traditional elements to the game of demystification that children’s literature has undertaken. 2

Galician Literature for Children and Young Adults and the Rewriting of Fairy Tales

In order to analyze the Galician narrative for children and young adults and how writers deal with and manipulate oral literature, which is the thematic foundation of the children’s and young adult literature system5 (Roig, Literatura Galega Infantil 96), a periodization of three historical eras has been followed: from 1920 to 1980, from 1980 to 2000, and from 2000 to 2010. Due to the large amount of rewrites, this paper does not comment on referential rewrites,6 translations, versions, or adaptations of stories by Perrault or the Brothers Grimm, focusing instead on a selection of ideological, ludic, and humanising rewrites (Valriu 20–​21).7 These were chosen for their literary quality, for being pioneers and/​or innovative, for being awarded literary prizes, and for having been well-​received critically. Attention has been paid to significant changes to the characters’ roles, narrative voice and context, among others, each with a different purpose, such as creating a parodic effect, subverting and/​or humanising the characters, or instilling a certain type of ideology or set of values in readers. 5 In fact, ‘Oral literature for children and young adults’ is included in Literature for Children and Young adults as a trend consisting of all the oral folkloric manifestations as well as those that are newer and based on constructive guidelines of the previous manifestations and that create modern versions (Roig, Consideracións 134). 6 Also referred to as instrumentales by Roig and Ferreira (88), they are characterised by the use of elements with folkloric origins, which are similar to those used in the traditional version without distorting them or adding new content (Valriu, 20). Therefore, these include collections of fairy tales with peritexts as well as those not directed at the child or young adult reader, picture books with adaptations, versions and translations of stories with different geographical locations, and works by authors that are new fairy tales through imitation or that include traditional stories in the plot (Ferreira, Reescrituras contos marabillosos 121–​122). 7 Ideological use is a feature of works that reuse elements and motifs, adding ideological content with an essentially instructive and indoctrinating intention. The ludic consists of inverting, decontextualizing, and reinventing the elements of stories in a disinhibited way with celebratory or iconoclastic intentions; and humanization draws on archetypal characters but humanises them, giving them feelings and attitudes that are completely human.

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2.1 From 1920 to 1980: Foundations During this period, which is characterized by the emergence of Galician literature for children and young adults, six rewrites were published (three of which were referential and three of which were ideological), by authors that came from the world of literature for adults. One of the pioneering works is the ideological rewrite Margarida a do sorriso d’Aurora (1927) by Evaristo Correa Calderón, which was included in the educational project by Escolas do Insiño de las Irmandades da Fala of La Coruña. It was the beginning of young adult fiction being published in book form, and it incorporates elements of stories with ideological intentions, with an active female character that must choose a husband from various suitors with the help of a fairy godmother who is an old biddy. This was followed by the more anecdotal children’s story O bosque de Ouriol (1973) by Arcadio López Casanova, and ‘Cascabel, o cabaliño do circo’ by Dora Vázquez, published in the anthology Contos pra nenos (1979). These stories both won first prize at the Concurso Nacional de Contos Infantís O Facho in 1972 and 1976 respectively. 2.2 From 1980 to 2000: Establishment During this period, the number of rewrites increased considerably to 103, 12 of which were referential, 91 of which were other types. Of these 91, 78 were for children and 13 were for young adults. The first notable work is the ideological young adult narrative O segredo da pedra figueira (1985), by María Xosé Queizán, which highlights elements of identity and eschews patriarchal society with a marked feminist character. The narrative uses a coming-​of-​age journey, the overcoming of trials by the active heroine, and the presence of a helper and a magic object. That same year, the young adult work Arnoia, Arnoia (1985) was published, written by Xosé Luís Méndez Ferrín and featured in the ibby Honour List in 1988. In this rewrite, Celtic and Arthurian mythology converge, as well as the fairy tale, the exoticism of oriental cultures, and references to the Tolkienian universe. In 1986, the ludic and humanising rewrite Aventuras de Sol (1986) by Alberto Avendaño won the Barco de Vapor prize. The protagonists of this story are Coxi and his dog Sol, and it broke ground with its dual narrative voice, the way in which it directly addresses the reader, and above all the subversion of the two antagonists, Bolo the wolf and Cuxa the witch, through demystification and humour. It also enforces ideas of solidarity, the importance of the environment and Galician cultural identity. Xesús Pisón wrote the children’s story O demo presumido (1987), which won the Concurso de Contos O Facho in 1984. It was the first ludic and humanising rewrite to have an aggressor as the main character, a demon who is ridiculed, subverted, and modernized through the use of humour. It highlights the importance of

300 Ferreira Boo co-​habitation, mutual respect, and humility. In 1988, A princesa Lúa e o enigma de Kián was published and was awarded the Premio Merlín de Literatura Infantil in 1987. This was an ideological rewrite in which Palmira G. Boullosa mixed elements of the fairy tale and Arthurian legend using imitation and expansion, highlighting questions of identity and feminism by inverting masculine and feminine roles, as the princess Lúa must figure out how to free Brandon, who has been kidnapped by the fairies of the Antela lagoon, from a spell. The decade ended with Pepe Carballude’s Andainas de Pedro Chosco (1989), which was a finalist for the first Premio Merlín in 1986. With its ideological intentions, this story combines motifs, characters and places from oral and written literature with interesting intertextual plays and Arthurian literature in order to criticize power, reviving an imaginary Galician character, Pedro Chosco, who is in charge of making children fall asleep. A cidade dos desexos (1989), Agustín Fernández Paz’s ideological rewrite related to environmental advocacy, modernizes the fairy archetype with the character of Ana, a woman who uses her magical powers to grant the wishes of a group of boys at a Centre for the Promotion of Fantastic Initiatives. Xosé Antonio Neira Cruz’s ludic and ideological rewrite Ó outro lado do sumidoiro (1989), winner of the 1988 Premio Merlín, is a creative re-​reading of the fairy tale and is an ode to friendship and solidarity with interesting intertextual and parodic plays. The 1990s began with As Aventuras de Breogán Folgueira (1990), by Darío Xohán Cabana, who mixed Arthurian literature, mythology and a coming-​ of-​age novel in a ludic and ideological rewrite that uses humour and parody. There was also Servando I, rei do mundo enteiro (1990), by Paco Martín, who subverted the archetype of the prince using humour and criticism. Fernández Paz published the humanising rewrite for children O tesouro do dragón Smaug (1992), which features a Tolkienian character, and uses themes, structures, and narrative formulas of the fairy tale, as well as an active, rebellious, and bold princess protagonist, combined with modernized elements. In A fraga misteriosa (1992), which won second place at the Premio Barco de Vapor 1985, Carballude again uses mythological references to show the value of the oral tradition. Combining the coming-​of-​age novel with the fairy tale. In the same year, Xabier P. Docampo published his ideological and humanising rewrite for young adults called O pais durminte (1992), highlighting collective identity and historical memory, as well as freedom, love, and friendship through the heroine Aurora’s fight against King Ambulasac to restore life to Glearim. In 1993, Boullosa continued the story she began in A princesa Lúa e o enigma de Kián with the humanising rewrite Brandón, fillo de Ferreol, which serves as a complete journey through Celtic and Galician legends, with Arthurian characters as well as subverted and humanized mythology. In As viaxes do príncipe azul

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(1993), Cabana offers the young adult reader a ludic and humanising rewrite that parodies prince stories by introducing elements of modernity and humanising the prince archetype, as the prince becomes a librarian in this story. In Os Mornias (1993), a novel about a friendship group and the winner of the 1992 Premio Merlín, Dolores González Lorenzo tells the story of the adventures of a group of adolescents that meet Merlín, the wizard’s apprentice and the archetype of the inept wizard, who has been modernized and subverted using humour. In 1994, Marilar Aleixandre published Nogard, a ludic and ideological rewrite for pre-​adolescents in which the dragon protagonist is played with and deconstructed for the first time. In the same year, Cabana published O castrón de ouro (1994), winner of the Premio Barco de Vapor 1993, which once again mixes elements of, and references to, Greek and Latin mythology with elements of humorous stories and parodies. Xan López Dominguez wrote and illustrated the children’s story Gago por Merenda (1995), a ludic and humanising rewrite which was chosen by clij magazine as one of the best books of the decade between 1988 and 1999. It tells the love story between the wizard Gago and the witch Merenda with humour. In 1997, Eva Moreda won the tenth Premio Rúa Nova de Narracións Xuvenís with the Arthurian young adult novel Breogán de Guisamonde, o cabaleiro da gaivota, which, with humanising intentions, tells the story of the adventures of the knight Breogán de Guisamonde in Camelot at the court of King Arthur. In the humanising rewrite Tanis I o Mocos (1998), which was included in the clij Lista de Honor, Manuel Lourenzo González breaks with the archetypes of the individualized prince and princess with the characters of Tanis and Sildym, two adolescents that are fighting to be able to choose their destiny, promoting democratic values and social justice with an ironic and humorous approach. This era ends with the ideological rewrite O chápiro verde (1999), which made the clij Lista de Honor in 2000 and in which Marilar Aleixandre combines tradition, modernity, a fast-​paced narrative, humour, a ludic use of language, and multiple intratextual and intertextual references to create a fantastical country using popular stories, creatures from Galician mythology, and highbrow literature, in particular the stories of Lewis Carroll. The end of the decade also included Dragón Rock (1999), a story for adolescents in which the illustrator Xaquín Marín humanizes and subverts the dragon archetype using humour. 2.3 From 2000 to 2010: Consolidation This period stands out for the variety of themes and forms, as well as the strengthening of the literary trajectories of classic contemporary authors

302 Ferreira Boo (Roig, Historia 307–​308). In addition, there was the eruption and expansion of the picture book and the various versions, adaptations, and translations of fairy tales published in this format that stand out for their originality and innovation of the visual narrative, such as the collections ‘Os contos do trasno Comodín’ from Kalandraka and ‘O’ from oqo Editora. The production of rewrites was maintained, increasing slightly to 129, of which 36 were instrumental and 92 were of other types (72 for children and 21 for young adults). The decade begins with the publication of the ludic rewrite Matapitos.com (2000), by Gloria Sánchez, who subverted the archetype of the witch with parody and humour by creating a pastiche of motives to tell this story. The context is modernized and new technology is introduced in fun incidents that are the result of the inefficiency of the witch Marta Matapitos, who pretends to be the principal of a school in order to capture the life energy of her students. It offers a parodic version of the story, full of humorous and sarcastic situations, which shrewdly criticize pedagogy and education. In 2001, Fernández Paz made another contribution to ideological rewrites with his children’s story No corazón do bosque, which was a finalist for the Premio Nacional de Literatura in 2002 in Spain. This story sees the symbolic and urban worlds meet, represented by the friendship between a goblin and a little girl, and it reinforces the need to care for the environment. Xosé Miranda contributed to humanising rewrites with his story for adolescents Feitizo (2001), which details the maturing process of Marta, a teenaged witch who is fighting for her right to have a normal life and who comes up against her mother, Xoana. Antonio Reigosa, on the other hand, used the figure of the demon once again, making him a protagonist and humanising him in the young adult story Resalgario (2001), winner of the Premio Raíña Lupa 2000. It is an adventure story full of humour about Resalgario’s pilgrimage to Compostela, a punishment for his disobedience, and it stands out for the integration of oral stories into its plot, while denouncing xenophobic behaviour, defending the Galician language, and demystifying the demon archetype. In 2002, Manuel Lourenzo González published Estanislao, príncipe de Sofrovia, a novel for adolescents that tells the story of the early years of a rebellious prince from when he is born until he is sent to boarding school in England. It is a humanising rewrite of the prince archetype, who is presented as very progressive and who uses punk slang. Xerardo Quintiá began with the humanising rewrite for pre-​adolescents A verdadeira historia do burro Feldespato, which uses magic and symbolism and which transgresses topics using humour, decontextualization, and caricature to narrate the life of Feldespato the donkey and Marica Pendella the witch, who has been sleeping for 100 years due to a botched spell.

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In O Botín de inmortalidade (2003), which tied for first at the second Certame Literario de Relatos de Aventuras Avilés de Taramancos in 2003, Francisco Antonio Vidal did a humanising rewrite of the mermaid, a character that has not been subverted very often, by giving her human characteristics. In the tale, she becomes a mortal when she marries her love Pepe o Lombudo. Xesús Manuel Marcos won the Premio Merlín in 2004 and The White Raven award in 2005 with the young adult epic fantasy novel O brindo de ouro I: A chamada do Brindo (2004), which tells the story of how different tribes fight to liberate themselves from the power of Seara, the Witch dos Broncedos. This is an ideological rewrite that revives toponymy from the Galician Sierra do Caurel and that creates an epic mythical world in the style of J.R.R. Tolkien by combining real and fantastical geography. The story is continued in O Brindo de ouro ii: A táboa da hospitalidade (2009), a finalist for the prizes of the Asociación de Escritoras e Escritores en Lingua Galega in 2010, which details the epic tale of the stonemasons, consolidating their mythical literary space and widening and deepening the cast of characters. In 2005, Xavier Queipo began with the children’s story O espello e o dragón, featured in the clij Lista de Honor in 2005. It is the story of three princes who embody the values of courage, strength, knowledge, art, and wisdom in an oriental setting, offering an update of a classic story. Agustín Agra won the Premio Merlín in 2006 with his ideological rewrite for adolescents O tesouro da lagoa de Reid’Is (2006), in which various narrative voices go on a journey through fantastical Galician legends and with characters such as urcos, mouros and tardos,8 as well as using symbolic toponymy and multiple references to Celtic neopaganism and Arthurian tradition. Antonio Yáñez Casal was a finalist for the fifth Premio Raíña Lupa with his humanising rewrite for adolescents Crisóstomo o alifáfaro (2006), in which the first person narrator discovers the enigmatic alifáfaros9 while talking to an Angolan boy. In 2007, Anxo Fariña began his successful collection for young adults about the Megatoxos with Os megatoxos e o aprendiz de druída, a ludic and humanising rewrite that mixes fairy-​tale elements with technological advancements and time travel in the style of science fiction, as well as identity elements like

8 The urco is a Galician mythological animal in the shape of a large black dog with huge horns and ears. The mouro is a mythical race of giants that live underground. They are guardians of treasures and builders of castros, petroglyphs and caves. Finally, the tardo is a kind of Galician goblin that causes nightmares to sleeping people by sitting on top of them. To avoid having nightmares, you have to leave a bowl of wheat or small grain on the table, and the tardo gets distracted by counting to one hundred. 9 An alifáfaro is a small mythological being similar to an elf that makes jokes to children.

304 Ferreira Boo the gorse plant, which has magical powers. This series continued with Os Megatoxos e a espada esmeralda (2008) and Os Megatoxos e os templarios da luz (2009).10 Carlos Mosteiro published Unha bruxa ben rara in 2007, which won the Premio O Barco de Vapor in 2006. This is a ludic rewrite for adolescents which was innovative in the way it alternated between an omniscient voice and that of the creator/​author, as well as the epistolary discourse of the witch’s mother Raruxa, who lost her powers after falling into a love potion as a child. It humanizes three archetypes (the witch, the dragon, and the troll) and changes their roles from that of aggressors to victim and helpers. Xerardo Quintiá offered the child reader a humanising and ideological rewrite in the picture book Titiritesa (2007), which was pioneering in its treatment of sexual diversity, specifically lesbianism, and which made the clij Lista de Honor in 2008. It retains the structure of a fairy tale, the linear progression, the timelessness, the opening and closing formulas, and the roles of the characters, but it is innovative with its themes, as it is the love story between the princesses Titiritesa and Wendolina, and underlines the equality of the sexes by giving the female character an active role. In 2009, Charo Pita published the children’s picture book Velliñas (2009), an ideological rewrite which deals with social themes such as hunger and highlights loyalty. It simplifies the structure and functions of the fairy tale and is innovative insomuch as it chooses two elderly women as protagonists. With clear references to the story of ‘Jack and the beanstalk’, it uses other motifs from folklore (such as the magic bean and the reconstruction of the protagonist) and carnival (the country of Jauja, dismemberment), which it reinterprets in a modern way using intertextual irony. The writer Elena Gallego Abad began her successful epic-​legendary tetralogy11 for young adults with Dragal. A herdanza do dragón (2010), a finalist for the Premio Fundación Caixa Galicia in 2009 and the Premio Frei Martín Sarmiento in 2012 (in the first and second years of high school category). It tells the story of the rebirth of the last Galician dragon which fuses with a boy called Hadrián in the catacombs of the San Pedro church. The fantastical events, along with the appearance of magic and alchemy, which are based on Galician, Celtic,

10 11

Three more instalments have since been published: Os Megatoxos e a cara oculta de Lúa (2011) Os Megatoxos e o dragón de xade (2014) and Os Megatoxos e a batalla de Rande (2018). The story continued with A metamorfose do dragón (2011), A fraternidade do dragón (2012), and A estirpe do dragón (2015). Aside from being translated into other languages, it also has its own website with updated information about marketing, critical reception in the press, and a description of its genesis.

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and universal mythological legends, are interwoven with daily anecdotes and current issues such as bullying at school and young love. The saga recreates mythological and legendary worlds with strong elements of identity, which are combined with characteristics of adventure, crime, and coming-​of-​age novels, as well as multiple intertextual references to highbrow and popular culture. Finally, the duo of graphic artist humourists, Pinto&Chinto, comprised of David Pintor and Carlos López, published their anthology Contos para nenos que dormen deseguida (2010), consisting of 28 micro-​stories that stand out for their linguistic economy and condensation and the way that characters and motifs have been subverted. They are ludic and humanising rewrites of characters (e.g. princes, princesses, witches, mermaids, fairies, giants, and dwarves) that have been modified using humour in both the narrative text and caricature-​style illustrations. 3

Conclusions

In the evolution of Galician literature for children and young adults, referential and ideological rewrites have given way to others which are ludic, humanising, novel, and unconventional. In terms of narrative elements of the fairy tale, narrative voices have become more diverse and plots have been extended, with a preference for episodic structure in the young adult narrative. Settings have been maintained, but they have undergone a process of modernization, and values of friendship, solidarity, liberty, caring for the environment and cultural identity are still conveyed. In addition, authors use the individual hero with a supporting cast of characters that does not conform to traditional gender roles. They have also introduced the collectively minded hero that acts in the name of solidarity and not for their own benefit. Finally, fairy-​tale characters have been subverted and demystified through the use of parody, caricature and irony. They generally maintain their physical characteristics, but their roles are modified, and they adopt new psychological traits. Female characters have been more enriched and diversifiedthan others, particularly princesses, fairies and witches, and to a lesser extent, male characters such as princes, wizards, goblins, and elves, have also been modified.

Works Cited

Colomer, Teresa. La formación del lector literario. Narrativa infantil y juvenil actual. Madrid: Fundación Germán Sánchez Ruipérez, 1998.

306 Ferreira Boo Díaz-​Plaja, Ana. ‘Les reescriptures a la literatura infantil i juvenil dels últims anys’. La literatura infantil i juvenil catalana: un segle de canvis, Teresa Colomer (ed.). Barcelona: Institut de Ciències de l’Educació de la U. Autònoma de Barcelona, 2002. 161–​170. Ferreira, Mª del Carmen. ‘Reescritas dos contos populares dos irmáns Grimm en formato álbum. Propostas de lectura para traballar na aula’. Literatura para a Infância e a Juventude e Educação Literária. Coords. Maria Madalena Teixeira and Isabel Mociño. Porto: Deriva Editores, 2013. 196–​215. Ferreira, Mª del Carmen. As reescrituras dos contos marabillosos na Literatura Infantil e Xuvenil galega. Diss. U. de Santiago de Compostela, 2016. Genette, Gerard. Palimpsestos. La literatura en segundo grado. Madrid: Taurus, 1989. Haase, Donald (ed.). The Greenwood encyclopedia of folktales and fairy tales. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2008. Hutcheon, Linda. A theory of adaptation. New York: Taylor&Francis Group, 2006. Jolles, André. Formes simples. París: Éditions du Seuil, 1972. Ramos, Ana Margarida. Literatura para a infância e ilustração. Leituras em diálogo. Porto: Tropelias&Companhia, 2010. Roig, Blanca-​Ana. ‘A literatura infantil e xuvenil: consideracións xerais’. Boletín galego de Literatura, 14 (1995): 119–​135. Roig, Blanca-​Ana. A Literatura Galega Infantil:  Perspectiva diacrónica, descrición e análise da actualidade. Diss. U. de Santiago de Compostela, 1996. Roig, Blanca-​Ana. (coord.). Historia da Literatura Infantil e Xuvenil Galega. Vigo: Edicións Xerais de Galicia, 2015. Roig, Blanca-​Ana and Carmen Ferreira. ‘O conto de transmisión oral na LIX galega’. Reescrituras do conto popular (2000–​2009). Blanca Ana Roig, Marta Neira, and Isabel Soto (coords.). Vigo: Edicións Xerais de Galicia, 2010. 83–​105. Valriu, Caterina. ‘Reescriptures de les rondalles en el s. XXI (2000–​2009)’. Reescrituras do conto popular (2000–​2009). Blanca Ana Roig, Marta Neira, and Isabel Soto (coords.). Vigo: Edicións Xerais de Galicia, 2010. 13–​30. Zipes, Jack. Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion. New York: Routledge, 2006.

­c hapter 28

Where Else but Reading? Blending Genres in Jasper Fforde’s Nursery Crime Series Miriam Fernández-​Santiago Abstract Like many works of children’s literature, fairy tales involve a large dose of the fantastic to show exemplary cases of real life-​lessons for children. This fantastic quality allows final morals to have a universal dimension that is articulated by a basic metaphorical relation between the real and the fantastic by force of literary convention. In Jasper Fforde’s Nursery Crime series (NCS)—​including the novels The Big Over Easy (2005), The Fourth Bear (2006) and the short story ‘The Locked Room Mystery mystery’ (2007)—​the city of Reading is both a real and an imaginary place inhabited by real and imaginary characters. As the title of the series suggests, the series blends the genres of nursery rhymes and detective fiction. While it is true that elements of fairy tales have blended with other genres before, what makes Fforde’s fiction a special case for Fairy-​ Tale Studies is that the object of detective investigation is the fairy-​tale literary tradition itself. The result is a hilariously self-​reflective fiction constructed on the basis of literalized metaphor that presses on hard-​core critical issues while retaining a popular, highly marketable profile that is common to both blended genres.

Keywords fairy tales –​detective fiction –​genre blending –​Jasper Fforde –​Nursery Crime series

1

Introduction

Jack Zipes has noted an increased literary and critical interest in fairy tales and fairy-​tale motifs since the early 1980s following a general tendency towards bringing together the spheres of high and low art. He regards this as part of the culture industry’s processes of instrumentalization and commercialization of literary products that have been detached from the socio-​cultural context in which they developed . While in the past, fairy tales made ‘direct reference to

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | DOI:10.1163/9789004418998_030

308 Fernández-Santiago a particular community of historical tradition’; nowadays, ‘[t]‌heir own specific ideology and aesthetics are rarely seen in the light of a diachronic historical development which has a great bearing in our cultural self-​understanding’ . The time-​gap existing between the flourishing of fairy tales as a literary genre and their reception by a contemporary readership is heavily mediated by the difference in the sociohistorical context of reception, which involves the physical media of transmission (oral/​written/​audiovisual) and the diverse industries involved in their production and marketing. But maybe most significantly, the reading of fairy tales in the present is mediated by the development that literary practices have undergone with the apparition of new popular and high-​ brow genres, literary tastes and critical approaches. The act of reading fairy tales nowadays is already laden with the new read-​ erly expectations that have adapted to new literary practices, which include different literary themes, devices, and conventions that have developed from earlier forms of literary production. In order to encounter a text such as the original ‘Sleeping Beauty’ nowadays, the present reader not only needs to suspend disbelief in the fantastic logic of its causative structure, but also make the willing effort to imagine herself in a past communicative context when class, gender, or political consciousness did not exist yet. While failing to respond to current readerly interests can be considered an undeniable drawback for the current popularity of fairy tales, the added awareness of a multiplicity of literary, historical and cultural relations between fairy tales and the present reading experience adds a contrastive self-​reflective dimension to such experience. Jasper Fforde’s Nursery Crime series began with The Big Over Easy (2005),1 which was written in 1994 and, like some of Fforde’s other early works, took a few years and too many rejections to publish. It was then quickly followed by The Fourth Bear (2006)2 and ended with the short story ‘The Locked Room Mystery mystery’ (2007). As its title indicates by authenticating the incongruous relation between nursery rhymes and detective fiction on the basis of the rhyming Crime/​Rhyme pair , the Nursery Crime Division ‘should oversee all enquiries involving “any nursery characters or plots from poems and/​or stories” ’ (Fforde, BOE 77). Its protagonist, Detective Inspector Jack Spratt is a cross-​genre blend of the homonymous nursery rhyme character, the protagonist of ‘Jack and the Magic Beans’, the classical detective that originated the genre (Dupin/​Holmes) and the hard-​boiled detective type, who is nonetheless, a dedicated family man. Similarly, his ambitious assistant Sergeant Mary Mary

1 Henceforward BOE. 2 Henceforward FB.

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is also a blend of the character from the popular nursery rhyme ‘Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary’ and its development into German experimental rock band Can’s femme fatal from their song of the same title, who is therefore quite contrary and has men waiting in a row. Since she is newly arrived at the Nursery Crime Division (NCD) that Spratt leads, her initial unacquaintance with the particularities of nursery crime deductive reasoning justifies that Spratt introduces her (and readers) to the method through explanatory passages in the fashion of classical detective fiction. The action takes place in the fictional city of Reading, which is in all ways described as the homonymous actual English city, except for the fact that the ruling logic of Reading as a frame is determined by the literalized meaning of its name. Reading is therefore an allegorical setting of the act of reading, implying that all action happens because someone is reading it, and developing a metadiegetic literalized critical frame of Reader-​ Response Criticism that unfolds along the diegesis of the novel. My claim in this chapter is that the real function (Genette 232)  of genre blending in Fforde’s NCS is describing the synchronic experience of reading in the present as necessarily intertextual (understood in a most general interdiscursive sense, including the intergeneric and metadiegetic). This is so because although the reception of written texts demands a suspension of disbelief in its inescapable diachrony, it cannot help incorporating the cognitive associative layers that are activated in the always already historically-​embodied act of reading. 2

Metadiegetic Allegory in ‘Reading’

Given their long-​lasting presence as a popular literary genre, reading fairy tales today involves superimposing3 the scripts and schema of traditional fairy tales to the many literary interpretations, critical analysis, symbolic use and literary development they have been subject to over centuries, as well as to the extratextual discursive frame in which readers have developed their own historically situated social scripts and schema at the moment of reading. Thus, while at the moment of their original composition, characters such as water nymphs, elves, fairies, giants, dwarfs, ghosts were real in the minds of primitive and 3 McHale’s description of the technique of superimposition in postmodernist fiction involves ‘two familiar spaces [that] are placed one on top of the other, as in a photographic double-​ exposure, creating through their tense and paradoxical coexistence a third space identifiable with neither of the original two—​a zone’ . ‘The effect’, McHale claims, ‘is that of a disorienting double-​vision’ , which in the NCS is self-​reflective.

310 Fernández-Santiago civilized peoples (Diane Purkis in Zipes 8) or the typical passivity of the hero is to be seen in relation to the objectively hopeless situation of the folk-​tale audiences (Zipes 9), the development of positivism and relativism along the nineteenth and twentieth centuries demands that nowadays, the magical elements in fairy tales be read metaphorically or symbolically, while passivity in characters may be attributed to psychological reasons. A change in critical and popular tastes that adapts to a different sociocultural context and to its continuously developing means of composition, distribution and consumption of literary texts, might alter the effect fairy tales have on contemporary readers, who may regard them as incongruous with more contemporary scripts and schema or adjust their interpretation to imply a symbolic meaning of present-​ day extratextual reality. In Fforde’s Reading, this network of interdiscursive relations is rhetorically exploited by literalizing the metadiegetic operations at work in the act of reading. In his thorough study of Swift’s use of literalization, Maurice Quinlan explains that this rhetorical device operates by ‘contrasting the metaphorical and literal significance of a term in order to reveal an ironic disparity between the two meanings’ . The literalized term or expression is usually a dead metaphor or naturalized pun that has lost much of its effect with the passing of time. Foregrounding the literal meaning of these terms creates a (possibly metafictional) effect of self-​reflective estrangement that nonetheless sustains the rhetorical relation between the literal and the metaphorical by means of irony. Quinlan identifies several means through which literalization may operate, including extended metaphor, descriptive action, or reversed allegory . A humorous effect might reside ‘in the failure of [one character] to perceive the duality implicit in his own [literalized] statements’, which would be an example of metaleptic dramatic irony. The name of the English city of Reading is a clear case of dead metaphor that Fforde literalizes in his series in the fictional city of Reading. The Reading of the NCS is inhabited by characters from well-​known literary works of all genres, although those involved in the main plot are mainly from children’s literature. While the leading plot is structured according to the literary conventions of detection (investigating the mysterious circumstances of a possible murder), the characters involved are intertextually borrowed from nursery rhymes and fairy tales. This borrowing is totally metafictional, since the very existence of the Nursery Crime Division is meant to investigate crimes related to acknowledged fictional plots from nursery rhymes. However, most of the characters are uneasily unaware of their fictional ontological status, which has a dramatically ironic and humorous metaleptic effect, since not only readers, but also other characters, are often aware of

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the fact that they are fictional (the ‘real’ status of the diegetic level is presented as fictional). The behavior of these characters is ruled by the fantastic scripts and framings of children’s literature, which are developed as scripts and framings typical of detective fiction when literalized. Thus, Humpty Dumpty’s fall from the wall (a dead metaphor in nursery rhyme) is a possible criminal act when considered literally, since (by virtue of extended metaphor) the Humpty Dumpty of Reading has an exceptional sense of balance and is used to sitting on walls. Similarly, the dead convention of animal personification in ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’, becomes the concern of the NCD when porridge consumption by bears is literalized as a crime against public health. The Reading in the NCS thus becomes a literalization of the actual city of Reading that operates as an allegory4 of the experience of reading traditional fairy tales nowadays, when their originally intended reception context has to be recreated by readers willing to suspend disbelief to such extent, or else be distorted by the intertextual and interdiscursive interference of different literary traditions foregrounding disbelief (breaking the illusion) at the moment of reading. 3

Blending Genres in Reading

The presence of the fantastic, broadly defined by Sonja Klimek as ‘differing from “realist aesthetics” ’ is possibly the most salient feature in fairy tales. According to Zipes, it is related to the wish-​fulfillment and the utopian projections of the people and the symbolic depiction of social realities . Their origin in the oral tradition, together with length and intended audience explain the absence of subplots and presence of schematic, flat characters in fairy tales. The later joint development of the printing industry and the novel, with its more heterogeneous intended audience, made it possible for more complex characters and subplots to appear in a post-​Enlightenment political and scientific discursive frame that was led by reason rather than magic. In reading fairy-​ tales nowadays, the literary conventions of the genre are already superimposed

4 In the last case of the series, ‘The Locked Room Mystery mystery’, the critical assertion that the locked-​room plot is a dead device in detective fiction is literalized by personifying the device, who is deduced to have committed suicide rather than get killed in a library which ‘had been locked … from the inside’ precisely because it was impossible that anyone would have broken into the libray. The story by Fforde becomes an allegory of the exhaustion of overused devices in detective fiction, which shifts focus on nursery rhymes in BOE and FB to detective fiction in the last story of the series.

312 Fernández-Santiago by the length and heteroglosic nature of the novel, as well as by the realistic reasoning and deductive logic that detective fiction relies on, which significantly alters their contemporary reception. In Fforde’s NCS, this superimposition is literalized by the perileptic5 intersection of both literary conventions. The diegetic level of Reading is constructed as a parallelquel6 of well-​known plots and characters that are only schematically developed in children’s literature. The detective story of this parallelquel unfolds in the many blank spaces resulting from the simpler fairy-​tale literary conventions, which causes the perileptic superimposition of both literary traditions. Thus, like its nursery rhyme and folktake counterpart, the Jack Spratt in the series can eat no fat, exchanges cows for beans and has a compulsion to kill giants. But when he is not doing that, he is a family man in a second marriage and a hard-​boiled detective managing the NCD, investigating Humpty Dumpty’s fall or the explosive potential of giant cucumbers. Similarly, the simple plots of children’s literature (in the case of nursery rhymes, sometimes just situational snapshots) complicate with interrelated subplots that may function as background texture for the parallelquel, descriptive material in character development, or like in the chase of the Gingerbreadman in FB, speed the reading pace by adding action scenes to deductive detection. Rubik has identified replotting as a metaleptic device used by Fforde to create suspense within a narrative that incorporates a well-​known plot in the intradiegetic7 level (351–​352). The suspense created, she argues, is thereby ‘anomalous’ because readers know what will happen, yet they watch enthralled how the end is brought about against all the odds introduced through the interference of incongruous scripts (Rubik 352). While replotting is ‘a typical psychological response to a fictional text in which readers consider the alternatives to the real events’ (Rubik 251), its paraleptic use between two fictional plots has a metafictional effect that breaks their respective illusions when considered individually, but sustains a new illusion by creating a new means to produce suspense. In the paraleptic blending of fairy tales and detective fiction in the NCS, while the stereotyped scripts of both literary traditions are exposed as exhausted literary constructs, the new blended genre of nursery rhymes ironically demands from readers that they sustain the illusion in the replotted story that produces a new source of suspense. ‘Typically’, Rubik claims when describing 5 Perilepsis has been described as paradoxical transgressions involving worlds at the same diegetic level . 6 Fforde’s use of parallelquel in The Eyre Affair has been discussed by Berninger and Thomas in 2007 as ‘juggling with the concept of the prequel and the midquel’ . 7 In Genette’s terms, the metadiegetic level .

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his style in Fforde’s novel The Eyre Affair,8 ‘Fforde will call up specific literary frames, but farcically meddle with their scripts’ (Rubik 352). According to her, while replotting defamiliarizes the schema of canonical texts, such schema are also reinforced (353). Yet while in TEA, the ‘patchwork of quotations, images, motifs, mannerisms or even whole fictional episodes […] may be used to stress the ironic awareness that language, literary forms, themes and motifs regularly come to the writer, so to speak, second hand form’ (Burden in Rubik 353), in the NCS , the focus is on the allegorical dimension that such ironic awareness involves when reading fairy tales nowadays. As fairy tales and detective fiction blend in the NCS, their perileptic superimposition reveals paradoxes and coincidences that very much weigh on the performative character of Reading as a literalized allegory. As mentioned above, one of the most salient divergences between fairy tales and detective fiction is their alignment with either fantastic or realistic aesthetics. Applying deductive investigation to solve crimes occurring within a fantastic framing should result in paradoxical situations with an expected metafictional effect by which either the fantastic or the deductive framing would be exposed as a literary construct. The resulting parallelotopia would then be ascribed within the fantastic or the deductive. Yet in Fforde’s NCS, the paradoxical clash between the fantastic and the deductive is solved by replacing the illusion of reason with the literary conventions ruling fairy tales. Jack Spratt himself explains the nursery crime investigative method in what is an obvious parody of the classical deductive method: Because we cover well-​ established situations, patterns do begin to emerge. You can never quite tell how something is going to turn out but you can sometimes second-​guess the investigation […] there’s usually a rule-​of-​three somewhere. Either quantitative as in bear, billy goats, blind mice, little pigs, fiddlers, bags of wool or what have you, or qualitative such as small, medium, large, stupid, stupider, stupidest. If you come across any stepmothers they’re usually evil, woodcutters always come into fame and fortune, orphans are ten a penny and pigs, cats, bears and wolves frequently anthropomorphise. Fforde, BOE 62–​63

In this fashion, despite the metafictional effect caused by literalized paralepsis, the illusion in the new blended script is still sustained. In his analysis of 8 Henceforward, TEA.

314 Fernández-Santiago metalepsis in detective fiction, Liviu Lutas argues that although metalepsis has the effect of breaking the illusion of realist aesthetics in detective fiction, this effect can be alleviated by its possible allegorical meaning, ‘which in the case of the detective novel could be the reproduction of the reading process’.9 Also, in his analysis of metalepsis in comics and graphic novels, Karin Kukkonen has argued that when metalepsis is one of the superhero’s superpowers, the illusionist effect of the metalepsis as weapon remains intact’ (228). Despite its realistic framing, the supernatural is related to the deductive faculties of the detective in Poe’s Dupin series, whose intellectual and poetic skills connect with the gothic tradition in matching the apparently irrational and supernatural quality of the mysteries he unravels (Fernández-​Santiago 653–​664). In the NCS, the apparently supernatural nature of the mystery in the detective literary tradition is replaced by the literalized fantastic nature of the fairy tale tradition. Subsequently, this mystery can only be unraveled by the literalized fantastic deductive faculties of detective Jack Spratt, a nursery rhyme character who can deduce its solution by operating the logics of literalized literary conventions and wordplay. The paradoxical effect of this paralepsis is solved by the metaleptic self-​reflective irony that articulates detective fiction since its very origins.10 Anastasaki has identified wordplay as the narrative motor that operates by blending the genres of crime fiction and fairy tale/​nursery rhyme in Fforde’s BOE . She contends that in Fforde’s novel, figurative language (including rhyme and literalized wordplay and literary conventions) causes metafictional paraleptic decontextualization that may break suspension of disbelief, but also creates new fictional spaces where semantic connections are self-​reflexively governed by linguistic approximation and literary precedence’ . This implies that in the NCS, the verisimilitude that is lost by the presence of the fantastic is balanced by the self-​reflective inevitability of literalized wordplay, which sustains narrative illusion in its metafictional frame: ‘[t]‌hrough this connection, the detection narrative loses its anchoring in verisimilitude, but gains in [allegorical] self-​referentiality’ (Anastasaki 10). A most illustrative example is the case of 9

10

Lutas supports his argument on Linda Hutcheon’s connection between detective fiction’s self-​consciousness and the hermeneutic act of reading, and Joel Black’s argument that the detective is a romantic projection of the literary critic . I have extensively argued that this self-​reflective connection is already present in E.A. Poe’s Dupin series, which is critically regarded as the very origin of the detective literary tradition (see Fernández-​Santiago). In a letter to Philip Pendleton Cooke, Poe himself self-​refectively comments on the paradox sustaining detective illusion: ‘where is the ingenuity of unravelling a web which you yourself have woven for the purpose of unravelling? The reader is made to confound the ingenuity of the suppositious Dupin with that of the writer of the story’ .

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rhyme, which according to Anastasaki, ‘has two very powerful attributes: the capacity of making things happen (magic incantations) and the capacity to uncover truth’ . She contends that ‘as a connecting agent between words or meanings [rhyme] is often conceived as a widely different—​albeit equally valid—​support for the veracity of a statement’ . This operates for instance, at the level of character by making it a necessity that Jack Spratt would not eat fat or that Mary should be contrary, by virtue of rhyming imposition. To put it simply, the conventions ruling verisimilitude in the realistic aesthetics of conventional detective fiction are replaced in the NCS by the self-​reflexive binding force of rhyme, literalized dead metaphors and exhausted literary genres.11

Works Cited

Anastasaki, Elena. ‘Nursery Crimes: A Tough Egg to Crack. Wordplay, Genre and Meta-​ Fiction’. Wordplay and Metalinguistic Reflection –​New Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Tübingen: Research Project Linguistics and Literary Studies: Wordplay in Speaker-​ Hearer-​Interaction, 2013. 1–​20. 27 March 2019, http://​www.wortspiel.uni-​tuebingen. de/​index-​Dateien/​Page2093.htm. Berninger, Mark and Katrin Thomas. ‘A Parallelquel of a Classic Text and Reification of the Fictional-​The Playful Parody of Jane Eyre in Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair’. A Breath of Fresh Eyre: Intertextual and Intermedial Reworkings of Jane Eyre, Margarete Rubik and Elke Mettinger-​Shartmann (eds.). Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. 181–​196. Fernández-​Santiago, Miriam. ‘Divination and Comparison. The Dialogical Tension between Self-​Reflective Aesthetics and Sensational Motifs in Edgar Allan Poe’s Dupin Series’. Poetics Today 37.4 (2016): 641–​674. Fforde, Jasper. The Big Over Easy. London: Hodder, 2005. Fforde, Jasper. The Fourth Bear. London: Hodder and Stoughton, Ltd., 2006. Fforde, Jasper. ‘The Locked Room Mystery mystery’. The Guardian 12 March 2019, https://​www.theguardian.com/​books/​2007/​dec/​24/​extract.originalwriting. Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse. Trad. Jane E. Lewin. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1972. 11

The use of puns as a self-​referential device in detective fiction has been traced back to the very origin of the genre in Poe’s Dupin series in relation with the real function of detection, which would ultimately be the self-​evident poetic truth of hermeneutic self-​ referentiality: “pun[s]‌reveal [nothing about case or character mysteries but everything about that, like the mathematical axiom, is self-​evident. Those who seek such poetic truth in these tales should avoid the endless play of subtly caricatured reflections […] The poetic is obscurely self-​reflective, which is not the same as saying it is abyssal, because while the parodic excess of paradox is self-​contradictory, in logical (narrative) terms, irony is resolvent at the poetic (rhetorical) level. (Fernández-​Santiago 667)”.

316 Fernández-Santiago Klimek, Sonja. ‘Metalepsis in Fantasy Fiction’. Metalepsis in Popular Cuture, Karin Kukkonen and Sonja Klimek (eds.). Berlin and New York: DeGruyter, 2011. 22–​40. Kukkonen, Karin. ‘Metalepsis in Comics and Graphic Novels’. Metalepsis in Popular Culture, Karin Kukkonen and Sonja Klimek (eds.). Berlin and New York: DeGruyter, 2011. 213–​231. Lutas, Liviu. ‘Narrative Metalepsis in Detective Fiction’. Metalepsis in Popular Culture, Karin Kukkonen and Sonja Klimek (eds.). Berlin and New York: DeGruyter, 2011. 41–​64. McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. London and New York: Routledge, 1987. Poe, Edgar Allan. The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, John Ward Ostom, R.B. Pollin and J.A. Savoye (eds.). New York: Gordian Press, 1966. Prince, Gerald. ‘Disturbing Frames’. Poetics Today 27 (2006): 625–​630. Quinlan, Maurice. ‘Swift’s Use of Literalization as a Rhetorical Device’. PMLA 82.7 (1967): 516–​521. 24 June 2015. Rubik, Margarete. ‘Frames and Framings in Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair’. Framing Borders in Literature and Other Media, Wolf Werne and Walter Bernhart (eds.). Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006. 341–​358. Zipes, Jack. Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales. Revised and Expanded Edition. The UP of Kentucky, (1979) 2002.

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Following the Lead of Fairy Tales: Storytelling in Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion María José Coperías-​Aguilar Abstract Even though Jeanette Winterson has insisted on the idea that in her writing she is not particularly interested in folk tales or fairy tales, many of her narratives are influenced by and intertwined with elements from fairy tales. It is true that Winterson does not generally rewrite fairy tales, but their presence is pervasive in many of her novels. In the case of The Passion (1987), the novel includes an Emperor, a Queen of Spades and a princess ‘whose tears turned to jewels as she walked’, as well as goblins, elves, and fairies. Besides, an important part of the story takes place in Venice, a city which is a maze in itself with all the mythical connotations that this has, and there are characters who accomplish extraordinary feats like walking on water or seeing things happening at a huge distance. In this paper, though, the main focus will be on the technique of storytelling in Winterson’s The Passion. Storytelling is an inherent part of fairy tales, which belong to an oral tradition and are created to be told rather than read. Throughout The Passion, characters are always telling stories to one another and, as readers, we are continuously reminded that we are ‘listening’ to stories. Therefore, the paper will explore the similarities that might exist between telling a fairy tale and a novel such as this.

Keywords Jeanette Winterson –​ The Passion –​storytelling –​fairy tales –​postmodernism

1

‘Stories was all we had’

There is little disagreement among critics about the postmodernist character of Jeanette Winterson’s novels and herself as a writer within a tradition of British women writers who widely introduce experimental ways of writing and make profuse use of fantasy and the fabulous in their works (Grice and Woods 6). For some authors, it is the metanarration, self-​reflection, blurring between

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | DOI:10.1163/9789004418998_031

318 Coperías-Aguilar fact-​fiction, reality-​fantasy, masculinity-​femininity, and intertextuality in her texts that make her a postmodern novelist (Makinen 31); others also add the use of the fantastic and her interest in the relationship between history and storytelling (Onega, Jeanette 2). In Art Objects (1995), Winterson’s collection of reflections on literature and art in general, as well as on her own work and that of others, she claims that she does not write novels and that the ‘novel form is finished’ (191). What she actually means by this is that the realist traditional novel is no longer of any use and that a new kind of narrative addressing twenty-​first-​century needs should be aimed at (190). A prominent feature in Winterson’s work is the extensive use of other texts as references in her own writing by reworking both popular stories and canonical books, thus supporting ‘the postmodern thesis that no text is completely original, but always develops out of earlier, culturally known narratives’ (Makinen 31). What is interesting in Winterson’s case is that she expands this tenet and uses her own novels as references for one another. In an interview published in 1993, to the question why she quoted herself in her books she answered that All the books speak to each other. They are only separate books because that’s how they had to be written. I see them really as one long continuous piece of work. I’ve said that the seven books make a cycle or a series, and I believe that they do from Oranges to The PowerBook. And they interact and themes do occur and return, disappear, come back amplified or modified, changed in some way. reynolds and noakes 25

The Passion (1987) is her third published novel and tells the parallel stories of two marginal members of society who witness the rise and fall of Napoleon Bonaparte: Henri, a young French peasant who has a passion for Napoleon and his dreams of glory but ends up disappointed and deserting the army; and Villanelle, a Venetian bisexual girl working at the casino who is sold to the French army as a vivandière. Henri and Villanelle flee Moscow together crossing half the continent to reach Venice. They have their own stories to tell each other and other people, and there are also other characters telling stories. Henri tells his stories about the army to the neighbours in his village when he goes on a special leave, and about his family to Villanelle’s parents. In turn, Villanelle’s mother also has some stories to tell; Villanelle has dozens of hard-​to-​believe stories to tell Henri and his army fellow, Patrick, during their flight across Europe, as well as the people they meet on their way, who in turn will tell Henri and Villanelle their own stories. Also, Patrick tells, first Henri, and then Henri

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and Villanelle, innumerable fantastic stories; and even Domino, the midget who takes care of Napoleon’s horses has stories to tell. As Henri says, ‘Stories were all [they] had’ (107). 2

‘Tears turned to jewels’

Jack Zipes argues that feminist fairy tales, which generally imply a questioning of gender roles, marked a second revolution in fairy-​tale production in the twentieth century—​the first one being that brought about by the Disney factory—​and adds that ‘experimentation linked to magic realism and a postmodern sensibility have become the key words in the fairy-​tale genre from 1980 to the present’ (xxxi). It is true that, unlike writers such as Angela Carter in her well-​known collection The Bloody Chamber (1979), Jeanette Winterson does not generally rewrite fairy tales, and in Art Objects she has claimed that she is ‘not particularly interested in folk tales or fairy tales’. However, she admits that she does ‘have them about [her] person’ and likens herself to a pedlar who knows ‘how to get a crowd around’ when she opens her bag of wares (189). According to Zipes (xvi), fairy tales would derive from the storytelling tradition related to the oral wonder tale, and with the passing of time, they started to be written down and established themselves as the genre of the literary fairy tale. Although addressed to the aristocracy, clergy and middle classes, the voices and beliefs of the peasants were incorporated into the literary fairy-​tale genre. Initially, these tales were part of chivalric romances, heroic sagas, chronicles and also primers and they often contained miraculous encounters and changes (xxi) and magic settings and objects that conferred the protagonists with some kind of power (xviii). This relates to the notion of magic realism in literature as denoting a combination of fantastic and real elements which are dealt with on equal terms in the narrative; that is, ordinary events are treated as if they were fantastic whereas extraordinary events are considered completely ordinary (Stoddart 35). As stated in an interview, it is within ‘a tradition which uses fantasy and invention and leaps of time, of space’ (Reynols and Noakes 19) developed by authors such as Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino that she feels more comfortable with. The Passion is full of this kind of fantastic stories mostly associated with Patrick and Villanelle, both of whom possess an extraordinary physical characteristic which allows them to accomplish remarkable feats. Patrick is a ‘de-​ frocked priest with the eagle eye, imported from Ireland’ (21) whose left eye is as good as a telescope and allows him to see things happening fifteen miles away from the place where he might happen to be (22). He tells Henri stories

320 Coperías-Aguilar about Ireland and the goblins, elves and fairies there and how they hide a treasure (38–​39); when Napoleon’s men get drowned in their attempt to cross the English channel to invade Britain, he interprets it as the doing of the mermaids, who want to marry them so as not to be lonely (24); and when Henri starts crying as his passion for Bonaparte turns into hatred as a consequence of the emperor’s out-​of-​control attitude and indifference to others’ suffering, Patrick tells his friend a story about a ‘[p]‌rincess whose tears turned to jewels as she walked’ (84) and how she married a prince and had her tears made into a necklace, a story that Henri, in turn, will tell Villanelle some time later (128). And when Patrick dies on their escape journey from Moscow, Henri and Villanelle miss his stories (107). Like all Venetian boatmen, though not women (51), Villanelle has webbed feet as a consequence of a mistake made by her pregnant mother during a propitiatory magic rite, and she can walk on water (129). She can also live without a heart and, when it is recovered from her lover’s house in an indigo jar, she places it back in her body and makes it beat again just by swallowing it (120–​1). Extraordinary as most of these events may appear, in our reading throughout the novel we may end up considering them ordinary, like Villanelle’s stepfather: ‘He’s never thought it odd that his daughter cross-​dresses for a living and sells second-​hand purses on the side. But then, he’s never thought it odd that his daughter was born with webbed feet’ (61). Besides princesses and princes, there is also an Emperor and a Queen of Spades, objects of the passion Henri and Villanelle feel for them, respectively. And the city of Venice, which features prominently throughout the novel, is qualified as a city of ‘mazes’ (49, 52, 108), of ‘disguises’ (56, 92, 99, 150), ‘littered with ghosts’ (61), and also a city of ‘madmen’ (11, 121, 158) and of ‘Satan’ (103). The pervasive presence of fantasy in this novel, and throughout Winterson’s writing production from the start (Fernández Sánchez 96), is undeniable. 3

‘I’m telling you stories. Trust me’

The Passion is structured in four chapters. In the first one, ‘The Emperor’, Henri tells us his life in retrospect from the moment he enrols in Bonaparte’s army to go to Boulogne in preparation to invade England and closes it on New Year’s Day, 1805, when he is twenty, but he includes some flashbacks about his childhood and his parents’ life. In the second chapter, ‘The Queen of Spades’, Villanelle tells us episodes from her young life, including her birth and her father’s disappearance, her work at the casino and her love story with an older woman, as well as the capture of Venice by Napoleon. It also ends on New Year’s Day, 1805. In chapter three, ‘The Zero Winter’, we hear about Bonaparte’s advance

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on and later disastrous retreat from Moscow, as well as Henri’s desertion from the army with Patrick and Villanelle accompanying them. It ends with Villanelle’s husband’s murder. It is Henri who starts narrating the chapter to pass the word over to Villanelle at some point and recover it later. The last chapter, ‘The Rock’, presents Henri’s confinement in the madhouse on the island of San Servelo to which he is sentenced for murder and finishes on New Year’s Day twenty years after the end of chapter one. Both Henri’s and Villanelle’s voices are heard in this part. The novel combines historical events with not only fictional but also fantastic stories into what Linda Hutcheon has called historiographic metafiction. This is a kind of narrative that refutes the natural or common-​sense methods of distinguishing between historical fact and fiction. It refuses the view that only history has a truth claim, both by questioning the ground of that claim in historiography and by asserting that both history and fiction are discourses, human constructs, signifying systems, and both derive their major claim to truth from that identity. (93) Or it is also the kind of novel, as Onega puts it, that is ‘characterised by intense self-​reflexivity and a relish in storytelling’ (Jeannette 56). For Kılıç (127–​8), the traditional separation between the historical and the fictional started to be questioned with Hayden White’s theory of historiography in the 1970s, as historians are also concerned with the act of storytelling and finding a way to narrate and order events. Coincidentally, Eşberk (268) places the origin of historiographic metafiction in the changing consideration of the concepts of history and fiction writing since, as Hutcheon puts it, both are discourses and constitute systems of signification that help us to make sense of the past, that is, ‘the meaning and shape are not in the events, but in the systems which make those past “events” into present historical “facts” ’ (89, italics in the original). Asensio Aróstegui also adds the notion of postmodernist historical novels, a concept coined by Elizabeth Wesseling, to that of historiographic metafiction since both terms refer to ‘the merging of historical material with the fantastic as a means to point out the contradictory nature of postmodernism’ (“History” 7). This kind of novel also allows for alternative versions of history and gives voice to characters that had been silenced, thus Henri’s telling of Napoleon’s military feats differs from many other official accounts (“History” 8, Kılıç 132). Interestingly enough, two years before Hutcheon published her seminal book on postmodernism, Winterson had already expressed very similar ideas in her novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985). In a short chapter called

322 Coperías-Aguilar ‘Deuteronomy’, we are told that ‘[p]‌eople like to separate storytelling which is not fact from history which is fact. They do this so that they know what to believe and what not to believe’, but actually stories are ‘a way of explaining the universe … [and] Everyone who tells a story tells it differently’ (91). She has also expressed the same ideas in interviews in which she has declared that ‘people have an enormous need … to separate history, which is fact, from storytelling, which is not fact … and the whole push of my work has been to say, you cannot know which is which’ (Harthill). As Fernández Sánchez (98–​9) says in reference to The Passion, by introducing fantasy in a fiction which is connected with historical events, Winterson plays with history and transforms it into story. And Onega actually highlights ‘Winterson’s conviction that literature, and specifically fantasy literature can be more truth-​revealing than history’ (“I’m telling” 142). As briefly mentioned at the beginning of this section, there are two main narrators in charge of storytelling in the novel: Henri and Villanelle. We know Henri starts writing a diary after the disaster at sea in Boulogne (28), and in chapter three, he already hints at what we learn in the last one: that he is locked up somewhere and that he is ‘writing this story, trying to convey to you what really happened. Trying not to make up too much’ (103). Later, we will learn through Henri himself that in San Servelo he has his notebooks (142, 152), as well as his story, which he goes ‘on writing so that [he] will always have something to read’ (159), and through Villanelle that ‘[h]‌e asked for writing materials and seemed intent on re-​creating his years since he had left home and his time with me’ (146), thus he not only tells his story but also writes it. Unlike Henri, there is no evidence throughout the text that Villanelle writes what she tells us, that is the reason why Asensio Aróstegui calls her an ‘oral narrator’ (“Written Narration” 462), and, in fact, Villanelle emphasizes this feature: ‘I’m surprised at myself talking in this way’ (68). Her role as an oral narrator is also enhanced by some of the expressions she uses in her narrative, for instance, to introduce Venice, ‘There is a city surrounded by water with watery alleys […]’ (49), or to talk about his father, ‘There was once a weak and foolish man […]’ (50). And, when, in chapter three, she takes over her role as narrator for the second time, she does so as part of Henri’s narrative, when he introduces her by saying ‘This was her story’ (89). Villanelle will not only tell us her own story but will also intersperse it with those of many others, like the one about the two gamblers who wager their own lives (90–​94) or that of Salvadore, a young Jewish man (97). These are only some of the many stories told throughout the novel, as described in the first section. Jeanette Winterson explains in Art Objects that writers have to set traps to catch the reader’s attention and what she does is

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to offer ‘the lure of a good story’, actually of many, as she uses ‘stories within stories within stories within stories’ (189). In The Passion she elaborates on this idea and applies it to other elements. Thus, Venice is presented as being ‘a city within the city’ (53), and later is described as a city that ‘enfolds upon itself. Canals hide other canals, alley-​ways cross and criss-​cross’ (113); in the same way as she has ‘seen dolls from the east that fold in one upon the other, the one concealing the other’ (94). This enfolding effect is enhanced by the repetition of motifs throughout the text. Some of them create what could be called a circularity effect: chapters one, two and four all end on New Year’s Day, the first two in 1805, the last one, twenty years later; shortly after the beginning of his narration, Henri warns us ‘I’m telling you stories. Trust me’ (5), and these are also his last words (160). This kind of refrain, as well as many other countless expressions and ideas which appear repetitively scattered throughout the text weave a sort of net which enfolds the narration. The repetition of these motifs, this recursive symmetry (Calvo 27), has been associated with musical and poetic forms (Seaboyer 492) and more specifically to that of the villanelle (Onega Jeanette 54), also the protagonist’s name, a verse form consisting of five tercets and a quatrain, all on two rhymes, with lines one and three of the first tercet systematically repeated in the following stanzas. This connection of the text with music and poetry highlights its sense of orality related to storytelling. The textual mirrorings and repetitions have also been related to a textual labyrinth, which in turn mirrors the city of Venice, that ‘city of mazes’, as we are so often told (Seaboyer 489). The repetition of the sentence ‘I’m telling you stories. Trust me’ (5, 13, 40, 69, 160) throughout the text is not only a metafictive motif that reminds readers that they are reading a piece of fiction (Burns 292, Makinen 72, Malhotra 480) but also a way to address the narratee. In the rest of the novel there are many other instances in which the two main narrators address an unknown narratee: Henri asks questions such as ‘What would you do if you were an Emperor?’ (12), ‘Do you ever think of your childhood?’ (25); he squarely declares ‘You can tell I  liked this man’ (28) or ‘He’s an Englishman. What do you expect?’ (157); he challenges the other with ‘You don’t believe me? Go and see for yourself’ (159) and shares his surprise, ‘I tell you her heart was beating’ (121). Villanelle also confesses ‘You see, I am no stranger to love’ (59) and retakes and old ‘conversation’ with the narratee about Henri’s situation in San Servelo, ‘As I told you’ (146). However, they often have an actual audience to listen to their stories: when Henri gathers his neighbours to tell his stories about the army he ‘wanted to know in advance that [his] audience was seated’ (31); Villanelle has Henri and Patrick as her audience for her stories; and Henri and Villanelle have their parents who listen to them. Villanelle, ‘who loved to tell stories’ (104),

324 Coperías-Aguilar could be likened to a Venetian Scheherazade, and Patrick, who was always seeing things that he turned into stories (107), would be her male counterpart. Finally, the third chapter, in which we are told story after story, each more fantastic than the one before, could be considered a new version of The Arabian Nights. This representation of storytelling is certainly connected to Boccaccio’s The Decameron and Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales that helped prepare the way for the establishment of the fairy tale as an independent genre (Zipes xvi). And it is decidedly linked to the most traditional way of storytelling in which an alluring storyteller captivates an attentive audience.

Works Cited

Asensio Aróstegui, María del Mar. ‘Written Narration Versus Oral Story-​telling in Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion’. Actas del XVIII Congreso de AEDEAN, R.J. Sola, L.A. Lázaro and J.A. Gurpegui (eds.). Alcalá de Henares: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Alcalá, 1994. 459–​464. Asensio Aróstegui, María del Mar. ‘History as a discourse in Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion: The Politics of Alterity’. Journal of English Studies 2 (2000): 7–​18. Burns, Christy L. ‘Fantastic language: Jeanette Winterson’s recovery of the postmodern world’. Contemporary Literature 37.2 (Summer 1996): 278–​306. Calvo, Mónica. ‘A Feminine Subject in Postmodernist Chaos: Jeanette Winterson’s Political Manifesto in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit’. Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses 13 (2000): 21–​34. Eşberk, Hatice. ‘History Rewritten in a Postmodern Novel: Opposed Views on History in Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion’. International Journal of Applied Linguistics & English Literature 4.4 (2015): 268–​272. Fernández Sánchez, José Francisco. 1996. ‘Play and (Hi)story in Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion’. Atlantis 18.1–​2 (1996): 95–​104. Grice, Helena and Woods, Tim. ‘Reading Jeanette Winterson Writing’. ‘I’m telling you stories’: Jeanette Winterson and the Politics of Reading (Postmodern Studies 25), Helena Grice and Tim Woods (eds). Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1998. 1–​11. Harthill, Rosemary. ‘Jeanette Winterson in Conversation with Rosemary Harthill’ (Writers Revealed). Radio 4 (Autumn 1990). Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York and London: Routledge, 1988. Kılıç, Mine Özyurt. ‘Demythologizing history:  Jeanette Winterson’s fictions and his/​ tories’. Feminismo/​s 4 (2004): 127–​134. Makinen, Merja. The Novels of Jeanette Winterson. Basingstoke:  Palgrave Macmilan, 2005.

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Malhotra, Isha. ‘Jeanette Winterson’s Fiction:  A Postmodernist Fabulation’. International Journal of English and Education 2.2 (2013): 478–​489. Onega, Susana. ‘ “I’m telling you stories. Trust me”, History/​story-​telling in Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges are not the only fruit’. Telling Histories. Narrativizing History, Historicizing Literature, Susana Onega (ed.). Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1995. 135–​147. Onega, Susana. Jeanette Winterson. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2006. Reynolds, Margaret and Noakes, Jonathan. Jeanette Winterson:  The Essential Guide. London: Vintage, 2003. Seaboyer, Judith. ‘Second death in Venice: Romanticism and the compulsion to repeat in Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion’. Contemporary Literature 38.3 (Fall 1997): 483–​ 509. Stoddart, Helen. Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus. London: Routledge, 2007. Wesseling, Elizabeth. Writing History as a Prophet. Postmodernist Innovations of the Historical Novel. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1991. Winterson, Jeanette. Oranges Are not the Only Fruit. London: Vintage, (1985) 1991. Winterson, Jeanette. The Passion. London: Penguin, (1987) 1988. Winterson, Jeanette. Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery. London: Jonathan Cape, 1995. Zipes, Jack (ed.). The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000.

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Experimentalism and Self-​Reflexivity in Donald Barthelme’s Postmodern Fairy Tales Luisa María González Rodríguez Abstract Donald Barthelme is drawn to the fertile irrationality of the fairy tale as it allows him to scrutinize unconventional narrative paths and challenge mimetic modes of representation. This chapter explores the techniques employed by Barthelme in his fairy-​ tale rewritings to break the mirror posed to society into multiple pieces so as to offer polyhedral visions of postmodernity and expose the mechanics of fiction-​writing. A further aim is to analyze how avant-​garde designs are constructed out of verbal and cultural debris to create worlds of fantasy that interrogate stale literary conventions and force the reader to transit entangled literary forests and construct meaning out of irresolution and multiplicity.

Keywords postmodern fairy tale –​metafiction –​intertextuality –​metalepsis –​Donald Barthelme

1

Introduction

The fairy tale is a protean, hybrid genre whose simple structure and well-​ established generic conventions have attracted the attention of both twentieth-​ century writers and scholars interested in exploring the limits of human imagination and fictional creativity. Postmodern writers, such as Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover or Angela Carter, are drawn to the stimulating irrationality and formal constraints of a genre that can be evoked as a narrative framework for metafictional and deconstructive purposes. The fairy-​tale combination of fabulation, extravagance, irrealism, and barroquism proves to be a very fertile field for postmodern aesthetics inasmuch as it allows writers to demystify the mimetic representation of reality and self-​consciously explore the mechanics of fiction construction. By playing with the structure and archetypes of the

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | DOI:10.1163/9789004418998_032

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genre, these writers indulge in formal experimentation while they undertake the task of deconstructing the symbolic production of cultural artifacts in the postmodern age. Donald Barthelme is an innovator who has resorted to the fairy-​tale genre in an attempt to exhaust narrative possibilities to a limit that borders upon its own parody. He rewrites tales such as Snow White (1965) or ‘Bluebeard’, from his 1987 short story collection Forty Stories, to create fictional worlds that distort reality in imaginative ways that bring to the foreground the craft of the composition and lay bare the conventions of the genre. This chapter explores the sophisticated techniques that Barthelme uses to distort the spherical construction of the traditional tales and create kaleidoscopic, multi-​layered structures that reflect a shifting reality. The genre is used as a framing device that provides the author with the opportunity not only to comment on the nature of narrative, but also to activate a process of stuffing and accretion that pushes its structure to the limit. In sum, it is my contention to prove that Barthelme’s fairy tales become textual labyrinthine forests of fragmentariness and digression where the reader is compelled to fulfil the hero’s function by going through the ordeal of constructing meaning out of meaninglessness. 2

Intertextual Framing Practices

Barthelme resorts to intertextuality to highlight the constructed character of his narrative, conceived as a meeting place for new and old discourses as well as a collage inviting the confluence/​divergence of literary conventions. His fairy tales are not mirrors representing reality directly, but kaleidoscopic glasses that filter reality through their textual representations. Rather than directly questioning socio-​cultural structures, Barthelme interrogates the conventions underlying the hegemonic discourses that support those structures. Intertextual references are used in his fictions as subversive tools that highlight the notion that ‘all human mappings of the real are ideologically and hierarchically imposed coverings rather than discoveries, “lies” that overlay truth’ (Rice 353). He, therefore, evokes the fairy-​tale framework so as to raise the reader’s horizon of expectations and subvert generic conventions from within as well as to unveil the artificiality of fiction by exploring tensions and limits between reality and fiction. Barthelme’s ‘Bluebeard’ is an intertextual dialogue with previous versions of the theme narrated by the female character, who constructs a narrative framework that is put to serve transgressive purposes. Bluebeard’s wife subtly evokes other intertexts when she states: ‘I admit I found him very attractive

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despite his age and his nose, the latter a black rocklike object threaded with veins of silver’ (82). Although this remark seems to be one of the multiple digressions of the text, it positively invites intertextual connections with ‘Silver Nose’, an Italian folktale compiled by Italo Calvino, where a man with a silver nose, representing the devil, puts an impoverished widow’s daughters into his service. In Barthelme’s rewriting, the protagonist’s silver veins are mentioned recurrently as an ominous sign of impending events in order to play with the readers’ expectations and build a pastiche-​like parody that counteracts the myths of the intertext. Indeed, this postmodern revision is ‘two-​fold, seeking to expose, make visible, the fairy tale’s complicity with “exhausted” narrative and gender ideologies’ (Bacchilega 50). Perrault’s version is also evoked when Bluebeard’s wife admits having met her prospective lover Pancho Villa at her ‘aunt Thérèse Perrault’s house’ (85). This allusion, in which the male gaze is radically challenged, anticipates that this story aims at rewriting the narratives of patriarchy so as to give voice to female desires. Bluebeard’s wife has decided to tell her own story, where she is portrayed as a modern woman who, apart from having different lovers, is passionate about cars, supports political causes, and is economically independent. When confronted with the traditional prohibition, the heroine remarks that she ‘was not at all curious by nature’ (83). Her narrative reformulates Perrault’s female stereotypes since, by describing Bluebeard’s insistence on her opening the forbidden door, it alludes to the expectations both of the male gaze and the audience of a certain female’s behaviour that justifies man’s reaction. In this way, the narrator is rejecting patriarchal values as well as literary conventions while forcing both her husband and the reader to tolerate narrative uncertainty. Bluebeard’s wife, after noticing her husband’s anger, self-​ consciously acknowledges: ‘I could not for the life of me understand precisely how I had erred. Did he want me to open the door? To discover, in the room behind the door, hanging on hooks, the beautifully dressed carcasses of my six predecessors?’ (84). When she talks about her predecessors, she is playfully referring to the preceding versions of this tale, and Barthelme brilliantly shows those ‘carcasses’ by intertextually evoking them and bringing to the foreground the transparency of the layering process. Other textual allusions are subtler, such as Anatole France’s ‘Seven Wives of Bluebeard’, a text that rehabilitates the myth of Bluebeard by presenting him as a victim of his wives’ infidelities. In a similar fashion, Barthelme’s character is depicted by his unfaithful wife as a cultivated individual with a passionate interest in art and architecture. Therefore, ‘Bluebeard, once an iniquitous brute who had excited the popular imagination with his bloody deeds, developed an intellectual side that aligned him with reason and cunning rather than with

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passion and wrath’ (Tatar 133) and is more engaged with the architectural project of restoring the south wing of his castle than with fulfilling his role as a villain in the story. Barthelme’s counternarrative clearly alludes to France’s intertext when, at the end of the story, Bluebeard’s wife opens the forbidden door only to find ‘hanging on hooks, gleaming in decay and wearing Coco Chanel gowns, seven zebras’ (87). Barthelme reworks France’s version, in which the pictures of mythological scenes that decorate the cabinet of unfortunate princesses are taken for real dismembered women, and presents Bluebeard as a modern artist whose interest is to shock the audience with his exhibition of avant-​garde pieces of art. This reminds the reader of the artificiality of the text and focuses attention on the creative process. This artificiality is also highlighted by the three duplicates of the key Bluebeard’s wife had made by a blacksmith, and the eleven duplicate keys she has hidden in the chapel, which clearly allude to the different replicas or intertexts of this tale. As Hermansson aptly remarks, ‘these referential texts play cat-​and-​mouse games with the reader, foregrounding the reader’s own complicity and processes in reading intertextually […] the act of reading is thereby allied with his wife’s simultaneous acts of investigating and transgressing’ (160). These tales illustrate the concept of palimpsestic intertextuality since, by drawing attention to the idea that most of the motifs of the genre are the result of the accretion of debris from previous retellings, they lay bare the traces of the writing process. Barthelme’s Snow White, a transgressive novel drenched in socio-​cultural satire, is a parodic recycling of previous versions that skilfully encapsulates the intertextual and appropriative practices characteristic of the postmodern age. From the very beginning, the fairy-​tale framework is evoked only to activate, and later challenge, familiar genre expectations in the audience. This allows Barthelme to initiate a fertile dialogue with their predecessors and address some of the shortcomings of conventional representation of reality in previous fictions. In this disjointed version Snow White is living with the seven dwarfs with whom she has a sexual relationship. The dwarfs are described as hardworking middle-​class individuals who epitomize a consumption-​oriented society and have become rich by producing Chinese baby food that is packaged under the brand name Heigh-​ho. The traditional archetypes from the Brothers Grimm’s version or the Disney’s film are reworked to address contemporary problems and anxieties. However, in a commodity culture, the desired images and connotations associated to the traditional tale are triggered by the cumulative effect characteristic of the rhetoric of advertising. Thus, in a section devoted to ‘The Psychology of Snow White’, we are told that ‘IN THE AREA OF FEARS, SHE FEARS:/​MIRRORS/​APPLES/​POISONED COMBS’ (17). Another fragmented allusion is: ‘WHAT SNOW WHITE

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REMEMBERS:/​THE HUNTSMAN/​THE FOREST/​THE STEAMING KNIFE’ (39). For Barthelme, there is no need to retell the whole story since the fragments can vividly evoke the desired images and formulaic messages by means of collage-​like patterns in which shattered borrowings can be endlessly assembled and disassembled. Bartheme’s impulse for extravagance and barroquism prompts him to construct a surrealist world in which different fairy tales seem to coexist thus creating ontological confusion in the characters. He, therefore, plays with archetypical characters of the genre to convey the idea of the complexity of interpreting postmodern reality upon traditional standards. An example of this is the passage that intersperses allusions to some of the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tales: Irruption of the magical in the life of Snow White:  Snow White knows a singing bone. The singing bone has told her various stories which have left her troubled and confused. Of a bear transformed into a king’s son, of an immense treasure at the bottom of a brook, of a crystal casket in which there is a cap that makes the wearer invisible. (70) Unlike the characters of conventional fairy tales, for modern heroes encountering with the magical world may prove a traumatic experience. Thus, it is stated that the ‘behavior of the bone is unacceptable. The bone must be persuaded to confine itself to events and effects susceptible of confirmation by the instrumentarium of the physical sciences. Someone must reason with the bone’ (70). By pointing out the incongruities of the fairy-​tale magical world, Barthelme is also questioning twentieth-​century logical positivism as a paradigm for apprehending contemporary experience. The characters suffer the same confusion as the reader for Barthelme challenges the possibility of using stories to mediate postmodern complexity. Therefore, Snow White, like Rapunzel, recurrently lets down her hair through the window while she patiently waits for the prince to rescue her. In this dystopian world, this motif is interpreted as a sign of sexual promiscuity by the dwarfs, who think she is ‘a goddamn degenerate’ that ‘seeks a new lover’ (92). Apart from ignoring her own role in the narrative, Snow White does not know which prince, whether real or imaginary, she is waiting for: ‘Will it be Prince Andrey, Prince Igor? […] Prince Akihito? Prince Rainier? […] Prince Valiant? Prince Fortinbras?’ (77). This not only highlights the Borgesian notion that all fiction is self-​referential, but also that fiction and reality are intermingled and that ontological barriers may be easily crossed so as to include readers into the fictional universe.

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The prince is also confused about his role and wonders: ‘what shall I do next? What is the next thing demanded of me by history?’ (55). In this chaotic world of magic, where all the fairy-​tale myths and motifs are intermingled and deconstructed, the prince ‘is frog through and through’ (169) and Snow White feels disappointed once she admits that he is not going to ‘cast off his mottled wettish green-​and-​brown integument to reappear washed in the hundred glistering hues of princeliness’ (169). Jane, the stepmother, laughs in the dwarfs’ dream because they are burning Snow White and not her; however, one of the dwarfs tells her that for her they ‘have the red-​hot iron shoes’ (110) in allusion to the punishment the stepmother receives in the Grimm Brothers’ version. For the prince, role confusion proves to be fatal as he dies poisoned with ‘a vodka Gibson on the rocks’ (174) the stepmother had prepared for Snow White. The text becomes an ironic pastiche of cultural clichés randomly arranged to dismantle narrative structures as well as to criticize the values and stereotypes that these structures perpetuate. Intertextual dialogism is used not only to disrupt master narratives by questioning notions of stable meaning and unquestionable values, but also to vindicate the status of the text as artificial construct. 3

Metafictional Self-​Consciousness

Metafictional self-​reflexivity, or fiction about fiction, allows postmodern writers to submit to scrutiny the inadequacies inherent in traditional literary forms to articulate the meaninglessness and fragmentation of contemporary experience. Thus, the ‘revision of fairy tales can be used to make a metafictional point about how we understand our lives through stories and the nature of representation in hyper-​real societies’ (Smith 168). In Barthelme’s Snow White the characters are self-​conscious narrators that seem to be narcissistically looking at themselves in a mirror that reflects their own anxieties as well as those of modern society. As Bacchilega claims, ‘self-​conscious speculations replace the traditional hero’s feats, the familiar tale of action becomes a tale of words’ (40). Barthelme’s characters become linguistic centers or rhetorical constructs echoing postmodern discourses that are trapped in a narrative loop characterized by constant self-​questioning. The dwarfs’ contemplations vividly reflect postmodern discontent: ‘Snow White has added a dimension of confusion and misery to our lives. Whereas once we were simple bourgeois who knew what to do, now we are complex bourgeois who are at a loss’ (87–​88). In Beckettian-​like monologues the dwarfs cogitate upon the reasons of Snow White’s dissatisfaction and sexual abulia. In order to arouse her sexual

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desire, they decide to buy a new shower curtain for the shower room where she has sexual intercourse with them. This ridiculous act triggers self-​reflection around the characteristics of the curtain, whose merits were appraised by an aesthetician ‘who said that it was the best-​looking shower curtain in town’ (123). The aesthetician’s remark generates further speculation on the necessity of conducting a census of shower-​curtains to prove the certainty of his proposition. Eventually, they indulge in endless contemplation on how they can ‘ensure destruction of his detritus, his remark’ (125). This metafictional game traps the reader in an ontological labyrinth that confronts him/​her with complex theoretical dilemmas that defer the meaning-​making process ad infinitum. Snow White is caught while pointlessly waiting for her Godot and, while she regards her hair hanging out of the window, she wonders whether there is a prince or has she ‘only projected him in the shape of my longing, boredom, ennui and pain? Had I been trained in the finest graces and arts all my life for nothing but this?’ (102). Her anxieties reflect contemporary narcissism as well as the claustrophobic sense of being trapped within old-​fashioned representations of the female. She also launches into absurd monologues that disquiet the reader as the character crosses the ontological threshold to reflect on her own behaviour from a different narrative level. This is illustrated when Snow White analyzes a literary motif used in her narrative: ‘This motif, the long hair streaming from the high window, is a very ancient one I believe, found in many cultures, in various forms. Now I recapitulate it, for the astonishment of the vulgar refreshment of my venereal life’ (80). She also adopts the role of the author who has decided to repurpose an old motif for exploring new narrative paths. This constant self-​questioning shatters the linear plot of the story and turns the narrative into an endless, intricate web of verbal and mental speculations. The characters become prey of their dreams and fantasies that create new ontological levels of reality by multiplying the narrative layers. This is clearly illustrated by the dwarfs’ dream, where they are burning Snow White like ‘in Dreyer’s The Burning of Joan of Art’ (109). In this surrealist scene, conceived as a space for extravagant fabulation, reality and fiction are intermingled so as to allow characters to cross the boundaries separating the different diegetic levels of narration. The dwarfs are fictional characters who construct fictional worlds in which real artists, such as Antonine Artaud, participate holding out ‘a crucifix at the end of a long pole’ (109) and coexist with Snow White’s stepmother, who is conscious that she is not being punished as in the Brothers Grimm’s version. Metaleptic transgression allows the reader to have a glimpse into the fiction-​making process and functions as a metaphor of the act of

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reading. This is connected with Barthelme’s firm conviction that fiction is rooted in the realm of fantasy and imagination. This dream also presents the text as a dynamic constellation of meanings that can evolve through association in multiple directions. Indeed, Snow White is constructed as a web of randomly assembled speculations produced by protean narrators that construct verbal worlds and identities inviting the reader to participate in the meaning-​making process. In ‘Bluebeard’ the narrator-​ protagonist exhibits a narrative self-​ consciousness that relies on the conventions of her predecessors to evoke the fairy-​tale prescriptive framework that is going to be cunningly reworked. She anticipates and challenges the readers’ expectations when, after her husband’s prohibition, she states: ‘In truth I had a very good idea of what lay on the other side of the door and no interest at all in opening it’ (82). This metafictional capacity allows her to thoroughly explore the conventions controlling the fictional universe she abides. Therefore, by adopting the author’s role, she decides to free herself from the plots constructed by others: ‘I had trusted my husband to harbour behind the door nothing more than rotting flesh, but now that the worm of doubt had inched its way into my consciousness I became a different person’ (84). This marks a point of inflection in the narrative, as she has become fully aware that imagination can help her break with the fairy-​tale conventions and indulge in the pleasures of storytelling. Bluebeard’s wife adopts a feminist perspective that interrogates authority discourses as well as opposes the commodification of women. She constructs a counternarrative that not only frees women from victimized stereotypes, but also advocates the idea that worlds and identities can be constructed by language during the creative process. The heroine refuses to fulfil her passive role in the narrative and, in an attempt to forge an independent self, she weaves a hilarious, disjointed fiction in which she reinvents herself as the author of her own fantasies. Thus, she describes her involvement with the castle’s chaplain, a ‘handsome young priest, with his auburn locks and long, straight, white nose’ (86), with whom she meets ‘during the midnight Sabbats’ (86), dressed in a nun’s habit. Moreover, the narrator subtly rebels against the plot of the traditional tale by constructing alternative fictional worlds, where she can coexist with historical figures such as Pancho Villa or Perrault, who is recast as a woman. Indeed, she becomes the writer’s surrogate that constructs her own counternarrative within the fictional world thus challenging not only the stifling conventions of the genre, but also bringing to the fore issues related to representation and authority in fiction.

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Formal Experiments and Shattered Plots

Barthelme reworks the form of the fairy tale so as to vindicate a narrative metabolism that strongly favours digression and redundancy at the expense of plot and narrative linearity. His fairy tales are resolutely anti-​narrative for plot construction is deemed peripheral and, as the dwarfs state, he prefers ‘books that have a lot of dreck in them, matter which presents itself as not wholly relevant’ but ‘can supply a kind of sense of what is going on’ (106). As a postmodern innovator, he considers that plot is no longer the agglutinator of the story and sets about the task of creating collage-​like patterns out of postmodern cultural debris. Therefore, he sinks into endless digression with the final purpose of diluting the interest of the plot and dismantling the fairy-​tale structure in order to provide new patterns to reinvigorate the genre. In ‘Bluebeard’ the fairy-​tale motifs are intertangled with the discourses of modernity about art, architecture, the Mexican revolution or machines produced by ‘Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler’ (83). The narrator manipulates the linearity of the plot by stuffing her narrative with trivial divagations that offer a glimpse of twentieth-​century politics, aesthetics and society. She criticizes Baroque architecture as understood by Vanbrugh and Hawksmoor and establishes connections between Palladio and Le Corbusier when digressing about her husband’s project to restore his castle. She also interrupts the plot to provide details about Doroteo Arango, ‘known to the world as Pancho Villa’ (85), the Mexican revolution and how Villa was ‘pledged to rid Mexico of Díaz’s vile and corrupt administration’ (85). Yet, this process of debris accretion not only disrupts the narrative pattern, but also teases the reader by delaying the production of meaning. This is illustrated in the final section when she is on the point of opening the forbidden door and is intercepted by a house servant who gives her a telegram from the Finance Minister. Her speculations about the content of the coded telegram, and the consequences this may have for her fortune, again serve to defer the expected closure. Eventually, the reader’s expectations of finding a coherent meaning are frustrated when she opens the door only to find Bluebeard’s artistic exhibition, which is changed ‘from time to time’ (86). The reader is, therefore, confronted with an open-​ended piece of art that turns him into a co-​creator of the text. Barthelme finds the fairy-​tale structure claustrophobic and activates a process of digression that disrupts the classical form by pushing it beyond its own limits while improvising rhizomatic patterns. Thus, cultural clichés about education, feminism, psychoanalysis, and aesthetics are ironically filtered through the characters’ consciousness and arbitrarily piled up to provide

Experimentalism and Self-Reflexivity

335

ironic glimpses into the contemporary psyche. As Carpi remarks, ‘[b]‌y examining even marginal elements in a text, deconstruction analyzes what is repressed, what is not said, as well as its incongruities’ (10). Snow White is trapped in a senseless routine as she obsessively cleans the dwarfs’ house: ‘She sprayed the books with a five-​percent solution of D.D.T. […] Then she hung a bag containing paradichlorobenzene in the book case, to inhibit mildew’ (37). This illustrates how the process of stuffing is triggered around banal situations to distract the reader from the plot and explore contemporary issues such as society’s neurosis about hygiene and efficiency, the use of chemicals or the disintegration of culture. Similar examples of trash accretion around women’s education, ‘abstract expressionism’ (48), the judicial system, religion or Russian literature show how cultural conventions have colonized contemporary experience. This contributes to creating kaleidoscopic patterns that, through a process of stuffing and accretion of randomly assembled clichés and discourses, pull meaning in different directions. Digression turns the text into ‘a reversible space responding to the polyphonic principle of collage’ (González 255) where the reader is enticed to suture the gaps and contradictions of the postmodern text. 5

Conclusion

Barthelme’s fairy-​tale rewritings are adventures of the mind that rework avant-​ garde’s formal devices to portray the incongruity and fragmentation of postmodernity. Unlike their traditional counterparts, these texts are collage-​like compilations of socio-​cultural discourses weaving contemporary problems, sensibilities and anxieties while exhibiting dynamic patterns conceived to revitalize the fairy-​tale genre. Rather than invalidate the boundaries between the recycled fairy tale and its intertext, postmodern transgressions highlight contrasts by illuminating the conventions existing on either side and filtering traditional motifs through postmodern aesthetics. Furthermore, Barthelme resorts to sophisticated devices, such as intertextuality or metafictional self-​ reflection, and weaves radical formal patterns to disarticulate coherence in favour of expansiveness, irresolution and multiplicity. Postmodern fairy tales are conceived as shattered mirrors reflecting a dystopian reality through the refracted sub-​texts constructed by unreliable narrators. The verbal junk produced by the characters interrogates both the text and the world and forces the reader to rearrange the fragmented narratives and unravel the mysteries of the magical worlds woven from language and cultural debris.

336 

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Works Cited

Bacchilega, Cristina. Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and narrative Strategies. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1997. Barthelme, Donald. Snow White. London: Jonathan Cape, 1967. Barthelme, Donald. Forty Stories. New York: Penguin Books, 1987. Carpi, Daniela. Fairy Tales in The postmodern World:  No Tales for Children. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2016. González Rodríguez, Luisa María. ‘Intertextuality and Collage in Barthelme’s Short Fiction’. Short Story Theories: A Twenty-​First-​Century Perspective, Viorica Patea (ed.). Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2012. 249–​269. Hermansson, Casie. Bluebeard: A Reader’s Guide to the English Tradition. Jackson: The UP of Mississippi, 2009. Rice, Thomas. ‘Mapping complexity in the Fiction of Umberto Ecco’. Critique 44.4 (Summer 2003): 349–​368. Smith, Kevin P. The Postmodern Fairy Tale. Hampshire: Palgrave Mcmillan, 2007. Tatar, María. Secrets Beyond The Door: The History of Bluebeard and His Wives. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2004.

Index A Monster Calls 129, 132 Adele 67–​68, 72–​73 Aesop 242, 247–​248 Aleixandre, Marilar 301 Alice in Wonderland 266 Amaia Salazar 171–​177 Andersen, Hans Christian 2, 22, 22n2, 135, 176, 246, 268, 287, 296n1 Anholt, Laurence 2, 78–​81, 84–​86 Apuleius 254 Art Objects 318, 319, 322 Artaud, Antonine 332 Bacchilega, Cristina 1, 35, 38–​39, 65, 67, 71, 73–​74, 160, 165, 170, 263, 328, 331 Barrie, J.M. 3, 212, 212n1, 212–​220, 215n6, 222–​225 Barthelme, Donald 4, 326–​330, 333–​335 Basile, Giambattista 18n3, 109–​110n1, 112, 296n1 Baztan trilogy 3, 171, 171n1, 172–​177 Beauty and the Beast (1946 film) 142 Beauty and the Beast (2017 film) 108 ‘Beauty and the Beast’ 22n2, 25, 255, 266 Bedford, F.D. 215, 217–​218, 224 Bergen, Lara 251 Bessie 67–​68, 70, 72–​73 Bettelheim, Bruno 95, 110, 112, 149, 154, 203, 242 Bluebeard 136, 143–​144, 144n2, 197, 205, 327–​329, 333–​334 Boccaccio, Giovanni 324 Borges, Jorge Luis 319, 330 Boy, Snow, Bird 2, 34–​41 Brave 111 ‘Breadcrumbs and Stones’ 204 Brennan, Maeve 64, 67–​71, 73–​74 Briar Rose (novel) 205 ‘Briar Rose’ (Sexton’s poem) 9n1, 10–​12, 17–​18, 18n3 ‘Briar Rose’ (tale) 19, 109, 150, 205, 233 Briggs, Katharine Mary 195 Brlić-​Mažuranić, Ivana 5, 286–​294 Brothers Grimm 2, 9–​10, 10n2, 22, 22n2, 39, 47, 48, 97, 99–​102, 109–​110, 129, 140, 143, 150, 154, 155, 160, 172, 194, 205, 229–​230,

232–​235, 237–​238, 242, 245, 287, 290, 294, 297n1 298, 329–​332 Butler, Judith 2, 50–​51, 90–​94, 97 Cabana, Darío Xohán 300–​301 Calvino, Italo 319, 328 Campbell, Joseph 232–​233 Carabosse 109–​110 Carballude, Pepe 300 Carroll, Lewis 244, 301 Carter, Angela 3, 22n1, 156, 159–​167, 319, 324 Chaucer, Geoffrey 324 Cinderboy 78–​79, 81, 83–​86 Cinderella (2015 film) 108 Cinderella (character) 3, 12, 18, 64, 66–​74, 79, 84, 89, 95, 97, 105, 150, 152, 233, 244–​246, 248 Cinderella (Disney film) 151, 246, 248 ‘Cinderella’ (Sexton’s poem) 9–​13, 65 ‘Cinderella’ (tales) 19, 22n2, 64, 65n1, 68, 70, 71, 79, 84, 90, 97, 124, 151, 241, 245, 266 Clarke, Harry 63–​66, 75, 246 Connolly, John 3, 180n1, 183–​185, 186n3 Coover, Robert 326 Copeland, Marion 159–​161, 166 Correa Calderón, Evaristo 299 Craighead George, Jean 257 Craven, Wes 3, 151–​155 Crimson Peak 143–​144 Croatian Tales of Long Ago 4, 286–​290, 292–​293 Cupid 254 Daisy Burns 67, 73–​74 Dam, Thomas 2, 116, 118–​119, 121 Davies, Nicola 257 de Beauvoir, Simone 55, 58, 91 de Beer, Hans 251 del Toro, Guillermo 3, 130–​132, 134, 136, 139–​145, 264 Dickens, Charles 195 Disney, Walt 3, 11n2, 39, 48, 50, 92–​93, 100, 101–​102, 105, 107–​111, 113–​114, 117, 117n2, 118–​119, 122, 124, 134–​135, 151, 172–​173, 177, 215, 232, 241, 245–​246, 248, 263, 265, 319, 329

338 Index Donoghue, Emma 2, 21–​22, 22n1, 22n2, 23, 23n3, 24–​28, 28n7, 29 Dragal series 304 DreamWorks 3, 103–​104, 116, 117 117n2, 119, 246–​247 Dworkin, Andrea 149 El guardián invisible 171–​172, 174–​176 Fernández Paz, Agustín 300302 Fforde, Jasper 5, 308–​313, 311n4 312n6, 314 Flushed Away 247–​248 Forget-​Me-​Not 67 Forty Stories 327 France, Anatole 328 Freddy Krueger 152 Freud, Sigmund 4, 44–​45, 52, 149, 179–​181, 185–​186, 203 Frozen 111, 122–​123, 135–​136 Gaiman, Neil 2, 45–​51, 54–​56, 58–​61, 230 Gallego, Elena 304 Genette, Gérard 288–​289, 297, 309, 312n7 Goldstein, Lisa 203–​204 González, Manuel Lourenzo 301–​302 Good Behavior 67–​70, 72, 74 Granville, Eliza 203, 207 Graves, Robert 199 Gretel and the Dark 207 Gumball 118 Hansel and Gretel (characters) 173 ‘Hansel and Gretel’ (tale) 9n1, 22n2, 46, 100, 140, 171, 194, 203n2, 204, 206, 266 Happy-​Go-​Lucky 117 Harper, Piers 258 Harry Potter 135–​136, 151, 244 Hill, Susan 4, 189–​199 Howl’s Moving Castle 267267n6 I Spit on Your Grave 152 In and Out of Never-​Never Land 67, 69 Into the Woods 108 InuYasha 5, 273274, 279, 279n2284 Jack Spratt 308, 312, 314–​315 Jung, Carl Gustav 149, 181–​182, 186, 190, 196, 197, 198, 199, 236

Kavanagh, Julia 64, 67–​74, 72n7 Keane, Molly 64, 6772, 74 Kellman, Craig 121 Kendrick, Anna 117 Kertész, Imre 203 Kindergarten 205 Kissing the Witch 22–​23, 23n3, 24–​25, 26n5, 27, 27n7, 29–​30 Lacan, Jacques 39, 149, 186, 197 Legado en los huesos 171, 171n1, 175 Lévi-​Strauss, Claude 4, 190, 194, 196, 199 Little Red Riding Hood (character) 3, 129, 152, 154, 185 ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ (tale) 3, 151–​155, 158, 161–​162, 166, 170, 172, 177, 184 ‘Little Snow-​White’ 47; Loving and Giving 67, 69–​70, 72, 74 Madame Leprince de Beaumont 22, 22n2, 242 Maleficent (character) 107–​114 Maleficent (film) 3, 107–​108, 110–​114 Marcos, Xesús Manuel 303 Mary Poppins 4, 230, 231–​238, 230n1, 231n2 McGuire, Gregory 108 Mickey Mouse 241 Miranda, Xosé 302 Miyazaki, Hayao 263–​264, 266–​271 Moore, Lindsay 259 Morris, Jackie 257 Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh 241, 245 Mulvey, Laura 92, 98, 163 Murphy, Louise 203, 203n2, 206–​207 Njal’s Saga 253 Nodelman, Perry 45–​46 Nursery Crime series 5, 308–​310, 313 O Brindo de Ouro series 303 Ofrenda a la tormenta 171–​172, 174 Oittinen, Riitta 240–​241 ‘On Fairy-​Stories’ 110 Once Upon a Time (TV show) 108, 113 Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit 321 Oyeyemi, Helen 2, 33–​41 Pan’s Labyrinth 131, 139, 144, 264 Parker, Cornelia 93–​95, 93n1

Index Pasolini, Anna 161 Perceforest 110 Perrault, Charles 2, 22, 22n2, 64–​66, 107, 109–​110, 110n1 140, 144, 154–​155, 155, 160, 197, 241–​242, 244–​246, 287, 296n1, 298, 328, 333 Peter and Wendy 212n2, 213, 215, 215n6 218, 220, 223 Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Would not Grow Up 212, 212n2 Peter Panzerfaust 4, 212–​214, 214n5, 215–​225 Pinto&Chinto 305 Ponyo 265, 268–​270 Preston-​Gannon, Fran 256 Prince Charming 10, 58, 69–​70, 72, 104, 105, 246 Princess Fiona 100, 103–​105, 136 Propp, Vladimir 4, 151, 172, 190–​192, 195, 199, 232, 234–​236, 242, 245, 247, 250, 254, 269, 290 Psyche (character) 44, 254 Queizán, María Xosé 299 Quintiá, Xerardo 302, 304 Rancinan, Gérard 97, 97n4 Rapunzel (character) 330 ‘Rapunzel’ (Sexton’s poem) 9–​10, 9n1 12, 15–​16, 17 ‘Rapunzel’ (tale) 11, 11n2, 19, 22n2 Redondo, Dolores 3, 171n1, 171–​175, 177 Reigosa, Antonio 302 Riddell, Chris 50, 55 Robins, Arthur 78 Rowling, J. K. 6, 244 Rumpelstiltskin (character) 150, 183, 183n2, 235, 246 ‘Rumpelstiltskin’ (Sexton’s poem) 9n1 ‘Rumpelstiltskin’ (tale) 183 Rushforth, Peter 203, 205 Sánchez, Gloria 302 Scheherazade 324 Scream 152 Sexton, Anne 2, 9n1, 9–​18, 18n3, 22n1 Shelley, Mary 135 Shrek (character) 103–​104, 135, 136, 246, 265

339 Shrek films 100, 103–​104, 105, 135, 136, 246–​248, 265 ‘Silver Nose’ 328 ‘Sleeping Beauty’ (ballet) 109 Sleeping Beauty (character) 3, 17, 58, 89, 95, 104, 105, 108, 110, 110n1, 114, 235 Sleeping Beauty (film) 109–​110, 113 ‘Sleeping Beauty in the Woods’ 109 ‘Sleeping Beauty’ (tale) 2–​3, 18n3, 22n2, 46–​47, 51, 54–​56, 58–​59, 89–​90, 93, 107–​111, 110n1, 113–​114, 130, 205, 233, 308 Snow White (character) 3, 46–​51, 55, 59, 93, 97, 99, 101–​105, 130, 139, 150, 175, 246 Snow White (novel) 329–​331 ‘Snow White’ (tale) 2, 11, 19, 22n2, 25, 34, 38, 46–​47, 51, 54–​55, 84, 90, 93, 95, 97, 100–​103, 151, 327 Snow White and the Huntsman 99, 102, 105 Snow White and the Seven Aliens 78, 82–​84, 86 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Disney film) 50, 102, 151, 172–​173 ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarves’ (Sexton’s poem) 9–​12, 14–​15 Spirited Away 265–​267, 269 Spivak, Gayatri 44–​45, 52 Stafford, Liliana 257 Steig, William 103, 246, 248 Stepmother 11, 13–​15, 40, 47, 100, 102, 109, 130, 132, 150, 174, 180, 185, 204, 206–​207, 313, 331–​332 Studio Ghibli 5, 265 ‘Sun, Moon and Talia’ 18n3, 109–​110 Takahashi, Rumiko 279, 281 Tatar, Maria 1, 39, 109, 150, 170, 242, 263, 329 Tchaikovsky, Piotr Ilych 109 The Arabian Nights 324 The Big Over Easy 308, 308n1, 311n4, 313–​314 The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories 3, 158, 319 The Book of Lost Things 4, 179, 180n1, 182, 184–​185 The Canterbury Tales 324 ‘The Company of Wolves’ 158, 160–​161, 163–​165 The Decameron 324 The Fourth Bear 308, 308n2, 311n4, 312

340 Index The Hobbit 135–​136 The Last House on the Left 3, 151–​155 The Maybe 93–​95 The Morphology of the Folk Tale 190, 192, 242 The Passion 5, 318–​320, 322–​32 The Shape of Water 130–​131, 139, 141, 142, 144 The Sleeper and the Spindle 2, 45–​51, 54–​61 The True Story of Hansel and Gretel 206 The Woman in Black 4, 189–​199 ‘The Werewolf’ 158, 160–​164 Thompson, Stith 192, 194, 254 Thriller: A Cruel Picture 153 Titiritesa 304 Tolkien, J. R. R. 56, 110, 179, 237, 299–​300, 303 Transformations 9, 9n1, 10, 11, 11n2, 17, 18 Travers, P. L. 4, 229–​230, 230n1, 232–​235, 237–​238 Trolls (film) 3, 116–​124, 135–​136

Warner, Marina 1, 9, 22n1, 71, 74, 103, 197–​198 Weems, Carrie Mae 95–​97, 95n2 Wiebe, Kurtis J. and Tyler Jenkins 4, 212–​225, 213n4, 214n5 Wiesel, Elie 208 Wilde, Oscar 287 Winterson, Jeanette 5, 22n1, 317–​322 ‘Wolf-​Alice’ 158, 160, 162, 164, 166 Wreck-​it Ralph 122 Yolen, Jane 203, 205 Zipes, Jack 1, 10, 22, 27, 34–​35, 100–​102, 111, 117, 132, 139–​140, 160, 170, 201, 203, 242, 255, 264, 274–​275, 278, 289–​290, 297n4, 307, 310, 311, 319, 324 Zootopia 118