Introduction
Attached, almost as an afterthought, to the end of Mircea Eliade's book Myth and Reality I is a highly stimulating essay entitled "Myths and Fairy Tales." First published as a review of a book that dealt with the relationship of the fairy tale to the heroic legend and myth, Eliade's essay was concerned not only with demonstrating the differences between myth and fairy tale but also with elaborating their extraordinary symbiotic connection.
It is well known that Eliade, one of the great scholars of religion and myth, believed that "myth narrates a sacred history; it relates an event that took place in primordial Time, the fabled time of the 'beginnings.' In other words, myth tells us how, through the deeds of Supernatural Beings, a reality came into existence, be it the whole of reality, the Cosmos, or only a fragment of reality-an island, a species of plant, a particular kind of human behavior, an institution.'' Since myth narrates the deeds of supernatural beings, it sets examples for human beings that enable them to codify and order their lives. By enacting and incorporating myths in their daily lives, humans can have a genuine religious experience. Indeed, it is through recalling and bringing back the gods of the past into the present that one becomes their contemporary and at the same time is transported into primordial or sacred time. This transportation is also a connection, for a mortal can gain a sense of his or her origins and feel the process of history in the present and time as divine.
However, this does not mean that oral folk tales and literary fairy tales are desacralized narratives.
In contrast to the myth - and here Eliade often conflates the genre of the oral folk tale with the literary fairy tale - he argues that "we never find in folk tales an accurate memory of a particular stage of culture; cultural styles and historical cycles are telescoped in them. All that remains is the structure of an exemplary behavior.” However, this does not mean that oral folk tales and literary fairy tales are desacralized narratives. On the contrary - and this is Eliade's important point - they continue to convey mythic notions and motifs that are camouflaged. In one key passage of his essay, Eliade states that, "though in the West the tale has long since become a literature of diversion (for children and peasants) or of escape (for city dwellers), it still presents the structure of an infinitely serious and responsible adventure, for in the last analysis it is reducible to an initiatory scenario: again and again we find initiatory ordeals (battles with the monster, apparently insurmountable obstacles, riddles to be solved, impossible tasks, etc.), the descent to Hades or the ascent to Heaven (or - what amounts to the same thing - death and resurrection), marrying the princess." All of this becomes camouflaged, according to Eliade, when the tale abandons its clear religious "initiatory" responsibility, but appropriates the scenario and certain motifs, and one of the intriguing questions for folklorists and those scholars interested in myths and fairy tales is to determine why and when all this took place.
The fairy tale or, to be more specific, the folk tale, as an "easy doublet for the initiation myth."
Eliade believes it may have occurred when the traditional rites and secrets of cults were no longer practiced and when it was no longer taboo to reveal and tell the "mysteries" of the religious practices. Whatever the case may be, it is clear to Eliade that the myth preceded the folk and fairy tale and that it had a more sacred function in communities and societies than the secular narratives.
Of course, there have been great debates among scholars about whether the myth preceded the oral folk tale and whether it is a higher form of art because it encompasses the religious experience of people. But this debate is not what interests me about Eliade's essay, rather it is the way he almost equates the religious myth with the secular fairy tale. That is, he tends to regard the folk tale as the profane conveyor of the religious experience. "The tale takes up and continues 'initiation' on the level of the imaginary," he says. ''All unwittingly, and indeed believing that he is merely amusing himself or escaping, the man of modern societies still benefits from the imaginary initiation supplied by tales. That being so, one may wonder if the fairy tale did not very early become an 'easy doublet' for the initiation myth and rites if it did not have the role of recreating the 'initiatory ordeals' on the plane of imagination and dream."
The fairy tale or, to be more specific, the folk tale, as an "easy doublet for the initiation myth." That is an astonishing idea. It could mean that, from the beginning, individual imaginations were countering the codified myths of a tribe or society that celebrated the power of gods with other "non-authoritative" tales of their own that called upon and transformed the supernatural into magical and mysterious forces which could change their lives. Certainly, myths and folk tales blended very early in the oral tradition, and in many modern oral and literary narratives it is very difficult to tell them apart. They seem to be invested with an extraordinary mystical power so that we collapse the distinctions and feel compelled to return to them time and again for counsel and guidance, for hope that there is some divine order and sense to a chaotic world.
Myths and fairy tales seem to know something that we do not know.
Myths and fairy tales seem to know something that we do not know. They also appear to hold our attention, to keep us in their sway, to enchant our lives. We keep returning to them for answers. We use them in diverse ways as private sacred myths or as public commercial advertisements to sell something. We refer to myths and fairy tales as lies by saying, "oh, that's just a fairy tale," or "that's just myth." But these lies are often the lies that govern our lives. Over the centuries we have transformed the ancient myths and folk tales and made them into the fabric of our lives. Consciously and unconsciously, we weave the narratives of myth and folk tale into our daily existence. During one period in our history, the Enlightenment, it seemed that we people of reason were about to disenchant the world and get rid of all the old myths and religions that enfeebled our minds so that we could see clearly and act rationally to create a world of equality and liberty. But, as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer noted in their most significant contribution to critical theory, Dialectic of Enlightenment, we simply replaced archaic myths with a new myth of our own based on the conviction that our own civilized reason had the true power to improve the living and working conditions of all human beings; it was not the power of the gods that would help humankind. It was the rising bourgeoisie that spoke out in the name of all human beings while really speaking in its own interests, and these interests are the myths that pervade our lives today.
But these myths are not new, nor are they just myths, for they are also fairy tales.
These myths and fairy tales are historically and culturally coded, and their ideological impact is great. Somehow, they have become codified, authoritative, and canonical. We talk of classical myths and classical fairy tales. They seem to have been with us for centuries, for eternity, but we neglect the way we created gods and magic to hold our experiences and lives intact.
Perhaps that is "natural." I mean we need standards, order, models. As Freud pointed out in Civilization and Its Discontents, culture cannot exist without repression and sublimation, and it is within the civilizing process that we establish the rules by which we live. We seek to make these rules stick and become eternal. We classify and categorize to establish types and values. We weed out, modify, and purify, seeking the classical statement or form. We want to make our lives classic, and we construe roles for ourselves through classical models and narratives. They are all around us in Barbie dolls and fairy tales.
When we think of the fairy tale today, we primarily think of the classical fairy tale. We think of those fairy tales that are the most popular in the western world: Cinderella, Snow White, Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel, Beauty and the Beast, Rumpelstiltskin, The Ugly Duckling, The Princess and the Pea, Puss in Boots, The Frog King, Jack and the Beanstalk, Tom Thumb, The Little Mermaid. It is natural to think mainly of these fairy tales as if they had always been with us, as if they were part of our nature. Newly written fairy tales, especially those that are innovative and radical, are unusual, exceptional, strange, and artificial because they do not conform to the patterns set by the classical fairy tale. And, if they do conform and become familiar, we tend to forget them after a while, because the classical fairy tale suffices. We are safe with the familiar. We shun the new, the real innovations. The classical fairy tale makes it appear that we are all part of a universal community with shared values and norms, that we are all striving for the same happiness, that there are certain dreams and wishes which are irrefutable, that a particular type of behavior will produce guaranteed results, like living happily ever after with lots of gold in a marvelous castle, our castle and fortress that will forever protect us from inimical and unpredictable forces of the outside world. We need only have faith and believe in the classical fairy tale, just as we are expected to have faith and believe in the American flag as we swear the pledge of allegiance.
The fairy tale is myth. That is, the classical fairy tale has undergone a process of mythicization.
Any fairy tale in our society, if it seeks to become natural and eternal, must become myth. Only innovative fairy tales are antimythical resist the tide of mythicization, comment on the fairy tale as myth. Even the classical myths are no longer valid as Myths with a capital M. That is, the classical myths have also become ideologically mythicized, dehistoricized, depoliticized to represent and maintain the hegemonic interests of the bourgeoisie. Classical myths and fairy tales are contemporary myths that pervade our daily lives in the manner described by Roland Barthes in Mythologies and in ImageMusic-Text. For Barthes, myth is a collective representation that is socially determined and then inverted so as not to appear as a cultural artifact. "Myth consists in overturning culture into nature or, at least, the social, the cultural, the ideological, the historical into the 'natural'. What is nothing but a product of class division and its moral, cultural, and aesthetic consequences is presented (stated) as being a 'matter of course'; under the effect of mythical inversion, the quite contingent foundations of the utterance become Common Sense, Right Reason, the Norm, General Opinion, in short the doxa (which is the secular figure of the Origin)."
As a message and type of verbal or visual speech, contemporary myth is derived from a semiological system that has undergone and continues to undergo a historical-political development. Paradoxically the myth acts to deny its historical and systematic development. It takes material that already has a signification and reworks it parasitically to make it suitable for communication in an ideological mode that appears nonideological. Barthes argues that "myth is a double system; there occurs in it a sort of ubiquity: its point of departure is constituted by the arrival of a meaning." Essentially, it is the concept behind the formation of the myth that endows it with a value or signification so that the form of the myth is totally at the service of the concept. Myth is manipulated speech. Or, as Barthes defines it, "myth is a type of speech defined by its intention … much more than by its literal sense ... and despite this, its intention is somehow frozen, purified, eternalized, made absent by this literal sense."
As frozen speech, "myth suspends itself, turns away and assumes the look of a generality: it stiffens, it makes itself look neutral and innocent.... On the surface of language something has stopped moving: the use of the signification is here, hiding behind the fact, and conferring on it a notifying look; but at the same time, the fact paralyses the intention, gives it something like a malaise producing immobility: to make it innocent, it freezes it. This is because myth is speech stolen and restored. Only, speech which is restored is no longer quite that which was stolen: when it was brought back, it was not put exactly in its place. It is this brief act of larceny, this moment taken for a surreptitious faking, which gives mythical speech its benumbed look."
The fairy tale, which has become the mythified classical fairy tale, is indeed petrified in its restored constellation: it is a stolen and frozen cultural good, or Kulturgut as the Germans might say. What belonged to archaic societies, what belonged to pagan tribes and communities was passed down by word of mouth as a good only to be hardened into script, Christian and patriarchal. It has undergone and undergoes a motivated process of revision, reordering, and refinement. All the tools of modern industrial society (the printing press, the radio, the camera, the film, the record, the videocassette) have made their mark on the fairy tale to make it classical ultimately in the name of the bourgeoisie which refuses to be named, denies involvement; for the fairy tale must appear harmless, natural, eternal, ahistorical, therapeutic. We are to live and breathe the classical fairy tale as fresh, free air. We are led to believe that this air has not been contaminated and polluted by a social class that will not name itself, wants us to continue believing that all air is fresh and free, all fairy tales spring from thin air.
Obviously, we cannot trace the "real" origins of fairy tales to their roots. But we can gain a sense of their historical transformation as genre and how they become mythified or are associated with myths in different historical periods.
What interests me most in this book is the way the fairy tale as genre sets parameters for a discourse of the mores, values, gender, and power in the civilizing process and how the parameters and individual tales are frozen or become standardized, only to be subverted in a process of duplication and revision. Here it is important to define what I mean by duplication and revision.
The world duplication has three major meanings: it is (1) the act of doubling something; (2) the repetition of an action or thing; (3) the folding of something in two. Implicit in these meanings is that the part which is made from the other is exactly the same, or, at least, corresponds to it almost exactly. In other words, one part should be able to pass for the other so that the unsuspecting viewer might not be able to distinguish which part is the original. However, as we all know, most copies are generally discernible because it is practically impossible to duplicate anything exactly as it is. This fact is not disturbing because most people do not demand exact copies to possess the original; rather they want copies for proof, evidence, remembrance or because they are fond of something they cannot possess. A duplicate is not an original; it is a representation that attests to the fact that there is an original. The duplicate mimics the original; it is not unique, creative, or stimulating. It is there to dupe us, deceive us, dope us so that we do not have to recreate the original ourselves. It saves our mind energy by providing a near facsimile of what we have seen, read, or heard. It recalls patterns and repeats them in a familiar way so that we are deluded and believe that the copy is almost as good as the original. It enables us to fall back on the comfortable familiar object that does not challenge our customary routines or habits. The duplicate reinforces the deeply entrenched modes of thinking, conceiving, believing that provide our lives with structure. Since the conditions of life change so rapidly, we need to hold on to what we know and like quickly before it vanishes. So, we copy. We duplicate.
We live in an age of mechanical reproduction where there are more copies of original art works than there are originals. We copy others in the way we dress, buy, and desire. We desire through the constant repetition of commercials that we copy whenever we shape ourselves and consume. To copy somebody else or something is to become a look-alike and make a coded statement.
To copy a fairy tale is to duplicate its message and images, to produce a look-alike. To duplicate a classical fairy tale is to reproduce a set pattern of ideas and images that reinforce a traditional way of seeing, believing, and behaving. It does not take much imagination or skill to duplicate a classical fairy tale. Nor is it expensive for publishers to print duplicates. The text is not copyrighted, and the illustrations correspond to a fixed pattern that has rarely been altered in their history of reproduction. The purpose for the publisher is to make money by reproducing staple products that will sell. The consumers/viewers want comfort and pleasure: they are not threatened, challenged, excited, or shocked by the duplications. A traditional and socially conservative world view is confirmed.
Revisions of classical fairy tales are different. According to the Oxford Universal Dictionary, revise means "To look or read carefully over, with a view to improving or correcting 1611," "To go over again, re-examine, in order to improve or amend." The purpose of producing a revised fairy tale is to create something new that incorporates the critical and creative thinking of the producer and corresponds to changed demands and tastes of audiences. As a result of transformed values, the revised classical fairy tale seeks to alter the reader's views of traditional patterns, images, and codes. This does not mean that all revised classical fairy tales are improvements and progressive. Revision for the sake of revision is not necessarily a change for the better or stimulating. However, the premise of a revision is that there is something wrong with an original work and that it needs to be changed for the better. Qualitative transformation is of essence in a revision, whereas duplication is more concerned with maintaining whatever value was contained in the original. In fact, quality does not play much of a role in duplication because it does not demand a critical reexamination of the original work.
It is impossible to grasp the history of the fairy tale and the relationship of the fairy tale to myth without taking into consideration the way tales have been revised and duplicated.
To be more precise, the evolution of the fairy tale as a literary genre is marked by a process of dialectical appropriation involving duplication and revision that set the cultural conditions for its mythicization, institutionalization, and expansion as a mass-mediated form through radio, film, and television. Fairy tales were first told by gifted tellers and were based on rituals intended to endow meaning to the daily lives of members of a tribe. As oral folk tales, they were intended to explain natural occurrences such as the change of the seasons and shifts in the weather or to celebrate the rites of harvesting, hunting, marriage, and conquest. The emphasis in most folk tales was on communal harmony. A narrator or narrators told tales to bring members of a group or tribe closer together and to provide them with a sense of mission, a telos. The tales themselves assumed a generic quality based on the function that they were to fulfill for the community or the incidents that they were to report, describe, and explain. Consequently, there were tales of initiation, worship, warning, and indoctrination. Whatever the type may have been, the voice of the narrator was known. The tale came directly from common experiences and beliefs. Told in person, directly, face to face, they were altered as the beliefs and behaviors of the members of a particular group changed.
With the rise of literacy and the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century, the oral tradition of storytelling underwent an immense revolution. The oral tales were taken over by a different social class, and the form, themes, production, and reception of the tales were transformed. This change did not happen overnight, but it did foster discrimination among writers and their audiences almost immediately so that distinct genres were recognized and approved for certain occasions and functions within polite society or cultivated circles of readers. In the case of folk tales, they were gradually categorized as legends, myths, fables, comical anecdotes, and, of course, fairy tales.
What we today consider fairy tales were just one type of the folk-tale tradition, namely the Zaubermarchen or the magic tale, which has many subgenres. The French writers of the late seventeenth century called these tales contes de fees (fairy tales) to distinguish them from other kinds of contes populaires (popular tales), and what really distinguished a conte de fee, based on the oral Zaubermarchen, was its transformation into a literary tale that addressed the concerns, tastes, and functions of court society. The fairy tale had to fit into the French salons, parlors, and courts of the aristocracy and bourgeoisie if it was to establish itself as a genre. The writers, Madame D'Aulnoy, Charles Perrault, Mademoiselle L'Heritier, Mademoiselle de La Force, and many others knew and expanded upon oral and literary tales. They were not, however, the initiators of the literary fairy-tale tradition in Europe. Two Italian writers, Giovanni Francesco Straparola and Giambattista Basile, had already set an example for what the French were accomplishing. But the French writers created an institution; that is, the genre of the literary fairy tale was institutionalized as an aesthetic and social means through which questions and issues of civilite, proper behavior and demeanor in all types of situations, were mapped out as narrative strategies for literary socialization, and in many cases, as symbolical gestures of subversion to question the ruling standards of taste and behavior.
While the literary fairy tale was being institutionalized at the end of the seventeenth century and beginning of the eighteenth century in France, the oral tradition did not disappear, nor was it subsumed by the new literary genre. Rather, the oral tradition continued to feed the writers with material and was now also influenced by the literary tradition itself. The early chapbooks or (cheap books) that were carried by peddlers or colporteurs to the villages throughout France known as the Bibliotheque Bleue contained numerous abbreviated and truncated versions of the literary tales, and these were in turn told once again in these communities. In some cases, the literary tales presented new material that was transformed through the oral tradition and returned later to literature by a writer who remembered hearing a particular story.
By the beginning of the nineteenth century when the Brothers Grimm set about to celebrate German culture through their country's folk tales, the literary fairy tale had long since been institutionalized,
and they, along with Hans Christian Andersen, Collodi, Ludwig Bechstein, and a host of Victorian writers from George MacDonald to Oscar Wilde, assumed different ideological and aesthetic positions within this institutionalization. These writers put the finishing touches on the fairy-tale genre at a time when nation states were assuming their modern form and cultivating particular forms of literature as commensurate expressions of national cultures.
What were the major prescriptions, expectations, and standards of the literary fairy tale by the end of the nineteenth century?
Here it is important first to make some general remarks about the "violent" shift from the oral to the literary tradition and not just talk about the appropriation of the magic folk tale as a dialectical process. Appropriation does not occur without violence to the rhetorical text created in the oral tales. Such violation of oral storytelling was crucial and necessary for the establishment of the bourgeoisie because it concerned the control of desire and imagination within the symbolical order of western culture.
Unlike the oral tradition, the literary tale was written down to be read in private, although, in some cases, the fairy tales were read aloud in parlors. However, the book form enabled the reader to withdraw from his or her society and to be alone with a tale. This privatization violated the communal aspects of the folk tale, but the very printing of a fairy tale was already a violation since it was based on separation of social classes. Extremely few people could read, and the fairy tale in form and content furthered notions of elitism and separation. In fact, the French fairy tales heightened the aspect of the chosen aristocratic elite who were always placed at the center of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century narratives. They were part and parcel of the class struggles in the discourses of that period. To a certain extent, the fairy tales were the outcome of violent "civilized" struggles, material representations of struggles for hegemony. As Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse have suggested, "a class of people cannot produce themselves as a ruling class without setting themselves off against certain Others. Their hegemony entails possession of the key cultural terms determining what are the right and wrong ways to be a human being." No matter where the literary tale took root and established itself - France, Germany, England - it was written in a standard "high" language that the folk could not read, and it was written as a form of entertainment and education for members of the ruling classes. Indeed, only the well-to-do could purchase the books and read them. In short, by institutionalizing the literary fairy tale, writers and publishers violated the forms and concerns of nonliterate, essentially peasant communities and set new standards of taste, production, and reception through the discourse of the fairy tale.
The literary fairy tales tended to exclude the majority of people who could not read while the folk tales were open to everyone.
Indeed, the literary narratives were individualistic and unique in form and exalted the power of those chosen to rule. In contrast, the oral tales had themes and characters that were readily recognizable and reflected common wish fulfillments. Of course, one had to know the dialect in which they were told. From a philological standpoint, the literary fairy tale elevated the oral tale through the standard practice of printing and setting grammatical rules in "high French" or "high German." The process of violation is not one of total negation and should not be studied as one dimensional, for the print culture enabled the tales to be preserved and cultivated, and the texts created a new realm of pleasurable reading that allowed for greater reflection on the part of the reader than an oral performance of a tale could do. At the beginning, the literary fairy tales were written and published for adults, and though they were intended to reinforce the mores and values of French civilite, they were so symbolical and could be read on so many different levels that they were considered somewhat dangerous: social behavior could not be totally dictated, prescribed, and con trolled through the fairy tale, and there were subversive features in language and theme. This is one of the reasons that fairy tales were not particularly approved for children. In most European countries it was not until the end of the eighteenth and early part of the nineteenth centuries that fairy tales were published for children, and even then begrudgingly, because their "vulgar" origins in the lower classes were suspect.
Of course, the fairy tales for children were sanitized and expurgated versions of the fairy tales for adults, or they were new moralistic tales that were aimed at the domestication of the imagination, as Rudiger Steinlein has demonstrated in his significant study. The form and structure of the fairy tale for children were carefully regulated in the nineteenth century so that improper thoughts and ideas would not be stimulated in the minds of the young. If one looks carefully at the major writers of fairy tales for children who became classical and popular in the nineteenth century, it is clear that they themselves exercised self censorship and restraint in conceiving and writing down tales for children.
This is not to argue that the literary fairy tale as institution became one in which the imagination was totally domesticated. On the contrary, by the end of the nineteenth century the genre served different functions. As a whole, it formed a multi-vocal network of discourses through which writers used familiar motifs, topoi, protagonists, and plots symbolically to comment on the civilizing process and socialization in their respective countries. These tales did not represent communal values but rather the values of a particular writer. Therefore, if the writer subscribed to the hegemonic value system of his or her society and respected the canonical ideology of Perrault, the Grimms, and Andersen, he/she would write a conventional tale with conservative values, whether for adults or children. On the other hand, many writers would parody, mock, question, and undermine the classical literary tradition and produce original and subversive tales that were part and parcel of the institution itself.
The so-called original and subversive tales kept and keep the dynamic quality of the dialectical appropriation alive, for there was and is always a danger that the written word, in contrast to the spoken word, will fix a structure, image, metaphor, plot, and value as sacrosanct, thereby lending it mythic proportions. For instance, for some people the Grimms' fairy tales are holy, or fairy tales are considered holy and not to be touched. How did this notion emanate?
To a certain extent it was engendered by the Grimms and other folklorists who believed that the fairy tales arose from the spirit of the folk and were related to myth. Yet, worship of the fairy tale as holy scripture is more of a petrification of the fairy tale that is connected to the establishment of correct speech, values, and power more than anything else.
This establishment through the violation of the oral practices was the great revolution and transformation of the fairy tale, and led to mythicization of key classical fairy tales. It is the fairy tale as myth that has extraordinary power in our daily lives, and its guises are manifold, its transformations astonishing. We often forget or are unaware of how "mythic" and "changeable" fairy tales are.