5 A New History
If we look forward from Straparola toward the fairy tale future, we see a publishing phenomenon with printed texts carrying fairy tales from one place to another. The ubiquitous and mysterious folk and nursemaids remain, but as consumers of fairy tales rather than as producers.
The publishing history of fairy tales shows that these stories were associated first with the literate classes and secondarily with the less-lettered folk. Madame d'Aulnoy's Les contes des fees (The Tales of the Fairies, 1697) began as four-volume productions whose internal reference points were unidirectionally upper class, but within a single generation the bibliotheque bleue was providing cheap imprints of individual d'Aulnoy stories for a market of simpler and generally poorer readers. The same process was repeated in greater detail and with more textual changes in Britain. There Mme. d'Aulnoy's tales, translated into English, were twice printed for upper class readers, a readership unmistakeably addressed in their prefaces. A reworked translation directed at merchants' wives, with amendments appropriate for that less exalted readership, came out with a variety of publishers in the next twenty years, while a third bowdlerized and simplified translation, was meant for humble readers. (Only after fairy tales had proven their success in the chapbook trade did the enterprising London publisher Mary Cooper and the renowned publisher of books for children John Newbery take them up for young readers.)
What then of the role of the folk in the creation of fairy tales? Although there have been many assertions and assumptions about the unlettered populus producing fairy tales in the early modern period, documentary evidence shows the opposite, with listening rustics being the recipients of stories read aloud to them by the literate. Rudolf Schenda, demonstrating this repeatedly in his study of European narrative, Von Mund zu Ohr (From Mouth to Ear, 1993), cited countless instances in which the German Enlightenment educator of the masses, Rudolph Zacharias Becker, read aloud in towns and villages. Distinguishing among several kinds of non-literate acquisition of knowledge of printed stories, Schenda called the practice of reading to people who couldn't themselves read a semi-literate process and a teller's repeating previously read material to others a semi-oral process. In both processes books played a manifestly central role.
What then of the role of the folk in the creation of fairy tales?
In the early history of the Grimms' collecting, books for the middle and upper classes are once again implicated. The Grimms' most prolific fairy tale informants (just a reminder once again that I'm discussing fairy tales and not folk tales; see chapter 1 for the distinctions underlying this discussion) were middle and upper-middle class book readers. In the 1830s, after the Grimms had published their First, Second, and Third Large Editions, as well as their First, Second, and Third Small Editions of the Nursery and Household Tales, selected tales from their collection were introduced into German elementary school readers.
Ingrid Tomkowiak has shown how those tales influenced generations of German children, who often memorized them as standard classroom practice.4 By the twentieth century the Grimms' tales had become an unquestioned component of German childhood. Formal and wide-ranging studies of colonial schooling and of the textbooks used in colonial schools have not yet been carried out, but informal conversations suggest that schoolbooks used in schools set up by European colonial governments disseminated national fairy tale canons into Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean in much the same way chapbooks had earlier carried French fairy tales into French Canada and into pockets of French population along the Mississippi.
THE CONSEQUENCES OF A BOOK-BASED HISTORY OF FAIRY TALES
A history of fairy tales based on named authors and book transmission has thoroughgoing consequences. The first is political and was central to the rhetoric of the Grimm nineteenth century political agenda. It was an intellectual agenda with real-world consequences, since large parts of it were adopted by the very Prussian government that supported the Grimms from 1840 onwards. The Grirnms held that language determined nationality, a view that ratified the political incorporation of the then-Danish-governed Schleswig-Holstein into German speaking Prussia, because the inhabitants of Schleswig-Holstein spoke a language that Jacob Grimm judged to be far more German than Danish.
The second area on which revising a belief in folk origins of fairy tales has an impact is related, but slightly different. The Grimms believed an individual's knowledge of brief narratives (Märchen) proved the existence of a common national folk heritage that had generated those narratives. That is Jakob, Wilhelm assumed that a single person's knowledge of a tale stood for a shared knowledge of that tale by the entire population from which that person came. The Grimms didn't test this assumption, nor was it scrutinized by later scholars, but it was nonetheless embraced by folklorists internationally. It would have been easy for the Grimms to ascertain a relationship between a person's having read a story in a book and that person's remembering it and later recounting it to them; they would only have had to ask their informants a few questions about their current and earlier reading habits. But since both Grimms were unshakably convinced that the tale they heard resulted from a centuries long chain of unbroken oral transmission from the ancient past they never thought to ask their informants about where they they had learned the stories that they told the brothers.
A book-based history of fairy tales explains the remarkable phenomenon of similar or identical tellings of the same story by different storytellers. Similarities in wording and phrasing in a particular story has frequently been observed by European and American collectors of fairy tales in the field, even when the same story is told by two or three different individuals. This observation led past folklorists to think about the powers of folk memory, and most concluded that such similarities demonstrated that folk memory was unvarying and perfect. Indeed, the Grimms themselves concluded that it was the simplicity of simple people’s lives that made it possible for them to retain a story without changing it. Folk memory was invoked most famously when late nineteenth-century French tellings of “Red Riding Hood” agreed in every detail with Charles Perrault’s text from nearly two hundred years earlier. And yet book history, and the presence of specific texts in particular places at particular times (as, for example, in schools where children memorized it or in towns whose local newspapers published it or in homes where a popular book might exist at several addresses) offer an equally good, and in many respects, a better explanation for similar or identical tellings of a single story. Intranational narrative mutualities such as schools, newspapers, and books were far more likely to have been responsible for the extent to which a body of fairy tales was disseminated within a given society, whether that society was Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, or Russian, or any of those of southern and southeastern Europe. International plot similarities can be accounted for by book transmission far more logically than they can be by oral transmission. Many of the plots of French fairy tales were born south of the Alps in Venice and in the shadow of Vesuvius of Naples.
A book-based history of fairy tales explains the remarkable phenomenon of similar or identical tellings of the same story by different storytellers.
In a large sense the international spread of fairy tales can be explained within a history of a predominantly Italian creation, French editing, and German re-editing that took place in a context of commercial mechanisms within book distribution networks. Fairy tales can be shown to have arrived in a new location and to have been documented there in concert with the arrival of the books bearing those fairy tales. The most dramatic incidence is perhaps the highly likely arrival of Basilean fairy tales in France in the hands of their printer and publisher Antonio / Antoine Bulifon in the late 1680s or early 1690s, directly after which Charles Perrault, Mlle. Lheritier, and others began to (re)create many of the same tales.
A book-based history of fairy tales cracks the foundations on which many psychologists have created purpose-built interpretations of fairy tales. Without the broad and anonymous folk as the ultimate author of fairy tales, Bruno Bettelheim’s notion that fairy tales represent essential aspects of the human psyche must be revised. Perhaps fairy tales are better understood not as a direct and unmediated expression of human beings’ emotional need, but as people’s conscious or unconscious incorporation of tales that suit their needs which canny suppliers recognize and respond to. A close, even intimate, connection remains between fairy tales and the public, so that the result remains – the extraordinary popularity of certain fairy tales. But the mechanisms by which a widespread popularity is understood to have come about differ considerably in a book-based explication.
A book-based history of fairy tales cracks the foundations on which many psychologists have created purpose-built interpretations of fairy tales.
Fairy tales’ marketability is a key element in their history. Measurable by the extent to which the public consumed them, marketability is an indirect rather than a direct form of evidence for human longings and individual hopes as expressed in specific fairy tales. But printings and reprintings of fairy tales as a measure of public acceptance, and even more than that, of public consumption of fairy tales, is evidence in an area of study where evidence has for a long time been very scarce indeed.
We remain ignorant of many things about fairy tales in the history of book printing and publishing. For instance, we don't know the precise number of copies that each print run produced in past centuries, although for books for the general market, 1,000 copies per print run is generally taken as a norm. On the other hand, reprintings reveal a great deal about the public's preferences. People buy books that speak to their condition, that appeal to them in one way or another, that their friends, acquaintances, and relatives recommend to them, and, above all, people buy books that they like. Fairy tale books were bought in increasing numbers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As fairy tales were marketed to an increasingly broad public, rise fairy tales represented a growing proportion of tale content in books of fairy tales. The predominance of rise over restoration fairy tales gained steadily in the nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first centuries.
Each observarion about hard fairy tale data-the number of fairy tale books printed, the number of print runs a particular fairy tale book had, the number of translations a single story had, the number of books in a print run--opens a window onto the book-buying public's taste for fairy tales, and each one makes that taste measurable in countable numbers of book sales. Many more case studies are needed, but the direction is apparent and well documented in a study like "The Relationship between Oral and Literary Tradition as a Challenge in Finnish Fairy-Tale Research" by the Finnish scholar Satu Apo. Increasingly, the study of cheap print, such as pocketbooks and newspapers, shows written sources spreading a broad knowledge of what has long been considered traditional oral material. So far this has been documented in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Finland, Brittany, Ireland, and England, and additional research are likely to confirm these initial findings.
Folklorists' observations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were for the most part accurate accounts of tales that their informants knew and told them (although there is a large and growing body of scholarship devoted to the way in which past folklorists edited the materials they collected, sometimes changing them fundamentally). How today's folklorists understand the past record, however, depends on their theoretical stance.
Growing amounts of evidence indicate that known authors created fairy tales and that printing and publishing practices were central to their dissemination. The evidence requires an adjustment to continuing insistence that fairy tales originated among an unlettered folk and that fairy tales in books contaminated pure folk productions. Similarly, fairy tales' plot and language stability underlie an unquestioned assumption that tales' transmission has depended on oral means. This assumption suffuses the laws and theories of folk narrative and has created a major impediment to understanding fairy tales' history over long stretches of rime and even longer geographical distances.
It is an observable fact that over time some tales have changed in their style, content, and structure, an observation at odds with the assumption that fairy tales have remained stable and invariant over the long term. These two competing observations have produced a central paradox in the theory and history of folk narrative, one that has never been logically accounted for. That is, how can the folk be producers and perfect rememberers while at the same time they are variers and alterers?
The Grimms were the initial providers of reasons to account for the perfection they claimed for folk memory, although their reasons made little sense, were offensively condescending, and remain experimentally unsupported. Theories have been developed in abundance to explain the paradox of evident stability in content along with content and stylistic change. One is that oral micro-conduits provide competing and alternative modes of narrative transport. But this kind of theory is unnecessary when content is maintained in a translated book or when style is changed to sell books to a new market. Bookselling practices explain content continuity and stylistic change far more effectively than does a theory of oral micro-conduits. Micro-conduits themselves, as Linda Degh and A. Vazsonyi conceptualized them, accurately account for the circulation of differing print versions of a single story in each culture. In fact, in most cases, existing folk narrative "laws" remain tenable if book routes are substituted for the oral ones that they posit.
The true scandal of the oralist-privileging history of traditional fairy tale studies has been the suppression of evidence about the status of individual storytellers. Imagine a blind storyteller who was presented as a perfect example of a completely oral transmitter of story tradition, who--because of his blindness-remained utterly uncontaminated by book-based story sources. Such is the "history" of one "oral" source, and consensual belief among folklorists produced more than one completely uncontaminated storyteller. The outrageous instance outlined above involved a blind storyteller in Finland who was known as "Blind Stromberg." Blind Stromberg's blindness made him a poster boy for the theory that fairy tales had been transmitted orally: his blindness both denoted and connoted an inability to have read the tales he told as an adult. But the facts of Blind Stromberg's life were inconveniently different. Young Stromberg had been a sighted child and an avid reader who became blind at the age of ten. The shocking part of the history of Blind Stromberg is that those who first chronicled his storytelling knew of his earlier reading and of his later blindness and conscientiously included those facts in their accounts. But researchers eager to demonstrate the existence of oral transmission erased all mention of Blind Stromberg's childhood reading. This remarkable history was laid out by the Finnish researcher Gun Herranen in a cautionary 1989 article, "A Big Ugly Man with a Quest for Narratives," which deserves close reading.
As far as definitions are concerned, a rigorous separation of tales about fairies and fairy tales from folk tales has perhaps a greater consequence, because it requires an active recognition of differences in their plots, characters, construction, performance, and above all, in the history of the three genres.
THEORIES OF FAIRY TALE ORIGINS
The most influential theory of the origins and spread of folk and fairy tales was developed in the later nineteenth century. Called the geographic-historical method, it was enunciated and developed by Julius Krohn (1835-1888) and further elaborated by his son Kaarle Krohn (1863-1933). Demanding in detail and scholarly in outlook, the geographic-historical method resulted in a host of enormously useful reference works. But the geographichistorical method depended on the concept of oral transmission, and it gave birth to an oralist-privileging vocabulary which declares to this day that printed tales represent a "contamination" of "pure" orality.
Believing that oral transmission preceded and underlay all tales that had been told, including fairy tales, it follows naturally that an illiterate, non-literate, preliterate, or aliterate population was necessarily responsible for fairy tales' composition. That logical necessity produced the idea chat folk-authoring and the tales authored by the folk grew from, and therefore incorporated, folk experience. Arnold van Gennep (1873-1957) described tales as verbal representations of cultural rites of passage: Rapunzel in her tower, for example, was for him an instance of sequestration at menarche. ls there a problem with van Gennep's reasoning? Sequestering a girl when her menstrual period begins was a practice observed by twentieth-century anthropologists in some exotic cultures, but "Rapunzel" is a European tale. Neither the towered girls in Ovid's Metamorphoses nor ones in the Neapolitan society within which Rapunzel tales first appeared practiced tower sequestration at menarche. Nonetheless, since van Gennc12. came up with his theory, anything red has frequently been interpreted as a narrative ritually associated with female sexual maturation. Red Riding Hood's cloak figures large in these discussions, but so do red apples and red checks.
Most of the conclusions reached by nineteenth- and twentieth century oralist folklorists were based on phenomena they had observed in the field. They found people telling the same or similar tales in locations far distant from one another. That is a fact, and it is clear enough. But because they viewed their evidence through a lens skewed by nationalistic and folkloristic agendas, they came to distorted conclusions. There was no room in their theories for fairy tales' historical origins among urban authors, with reproduction via printing presses and dissemination along bookselling routes.
Folklore began as the study of the lore of the folk, hence the name the discipline took for itself. Folklore studies today encompass very different subjects, such as foodways, the use of space, and media relationships. As a result, the study of fairy and folk tales occupies a relatively small corner of folklore studies, and the tangled issue of fairy tales' origins and dissemination an even smaller space. Because fairy tales no longer lie at the center of folklore studies, views about fairy tales' origins and dissemination have not been systematically reexamined. Consequently, two-century old concepts about fairy tales live on in folklore as well as in related fields such as literature, history, and psychology.
For the time being, globalization has made nationalistic agendas irrelevant for fairy tale scholars and their institutional supporters. This may offer hope that evidence for fairy tale origins among urban folk and fairy tales' original production by and for urban folk will be taken sufficiently seriously so that people will begin to question the old myths.
Library shelves, however, continue to be dominated by the conclusions reached by six generations of oralist-privileging fairy and folk tale scholars. Those conclusions do not gather dust.
They remain front and center, because they provide literary scholars, historians, and the public with "facts" on which to base their own thinking about fairy tales. The result is that in books about fairy tales, readers, are typically informed that young women "told" Straparola the stories of Pleasant Nights, that Basile "wrote down" the Pentamerone stories recounted by a passel of common women, that nursemaids provided late seventeenth-century French fairy tale authors with the stories they similarly "wrote down," and that the Grimms "recorded” tales from the German folk. The result is a country otherness about fairy tales that contradicts their sixteenth- and seventeenth-century urban creation and their twentieth-century urban consumption.
The basic argument of this book replaces an anonymous folk with literate authors who are city-oriented people like ourselves. For human mouths and ears it substitutes printed books as the route of dissemination. This argument has an ancestry. In 1867 a young doctoral candidate at the University of Göttingen, F. J. W. Brakelman, argued that Straparola's stories underlay many of the Grimms' tales. A generation later, as national folklore societies were being founded in the late 1880s, a vigorous debate between oralists and non-oralists took place in Germany, France, England, and the United States. Without exception oralists won the day. After yet another generation, in the 1920s and early 1930s an Austrian-born Czech Albert Wesselski argued for a top-down history of the dissemination of fairy tales. He replaced the idea of folk oral creation and transmission with a concept of literate creation and textual transmission. But Nazi Germany with its taste for volkisch-ness was no place to advance a nonfolk-based and hence dangerously heretical idea. Wesselski's position was ridiculed for the next seventy years, with "Wesselski redovovis” still considered a mortal critical thrust.
Many contemporaries are exploring alternative ways to understand the oral qualities that form part and parcel of authored fairy tales. Rudolf Schenda brought his years of study of oral narrative together in Von Mund zu Ohr (From Mouth to Ear, 1993). Few of his writings are available in English, but a key section of his lengthy disquisition on the nature of orality was finally published in 2007. Taking a different tack, an English literature critic, Susan Stewart adopted the prevailing view of fairy tales’ orality in her 1991 Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation and categorized them as a "distressed" genre. She was using the furniture finishing term "distressed," the practice of beating a newly manufactured piece with clubs or chains until it develops an aged appearance. Even though her adherence to oral origins is, I believe, invalid, her term "distressed" captures well the process to which fairy tales have been subjected by modern commentators, either because they genuinely thought that fairy tales were an ancient literary artifact from the childhood of humanity or because they meant to give the impression that that was so. Elizabeth Harries shares Susan Stewart's vision of fairy tales as a genre whose producers have built agedness into their creations, but for Harries the "imitations of what various literary cultures have posited as the traditional, the authentic., or the nonliterary" provide a starting point for analyzing how authors have aged the tales they composed. Diane Dugaw examined ballads in the context of cheap print and concluded that "(t]he longstanding insistence upon the orality of folk tradition is a pol1ttcal idea whose oversimplifications have been in most cases misleading at best." Her findings and her conclusions about ballads parallel those I've come to about fairy tales and suggest that the time has come for a wholesale reconsideration of orality as the inevitable means by which European fairy tales spread throughout the world. The slowly emerging evidence from printing and publishing history provides an explanation that is substantial, verifiable, and superior to two centuries of largely conjectural theories about oral transmission.
Above all, a book-based history of fairy tales shows that fairy tales emerged when cities, literate city people, and city possibilities intersected and became a reality in urban people's lives. Venice was the first place where large-scale commerce, manufacturing, wide-spread literacy, and cheap print existed in the same place at the same time. Each of these conditions was a necessary element in the mix needed to produce fairy tales as we know them in the modern world. And so it can be no surprise that it was in Venice where, for the first tune, the beloved plot of modem rags-to-riches-through-magic-and-marriage fairy tales sprang into existence and joined the old restoration plots that had long entertained Europe's tale lovers. Rise fairy tales were new stories for a new age. They were stories about people like us.