Marina Warner
4 Potato Soup
True Stories/Real Life
The meaning [of the tales] has long ago been lost, but it is still felt, giving the tale its substance, while at the same time satisfying our pleasure in the marvelous. They are never merely the shimmering colors of insubstantial fantasy.
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
In the 1950s, Italo Calvino embarked on doing for Italian literature what the Grimms had done a century before in Germany. Italian bundles fairy tale, folk tale, and fable into the word fiaba, and Calvino was an impassioned advocate of the whole range of stories and hunted for them in every source he could find. In the introduction to Fiabe ltaliane (1956; translated as Italian Folk Tales), he wrote, 'Now that the book is finished, I know that this was not a hallucination ... but the confirmation of something I already suspected-folktales (fiabe) are real.'
What did Calvino mean by this assertion?
What did Calvino mean by this assertion? He is the most inspired and fantastical of modern fabulists, author of masterly and complex works of contemporary fiction such as If on a Winter's Night, A Traveller, and Invisible Cities, but he had begun his career writing novels and short stories of sensitive Chekhovian observation. His encounter with la fiaba was a revelation to him and wrought a momentous change in his approach to fiction: as a member of the partisans who fought Fascism and a communist in Italy after the war, he saw fantastic fiction as the literature of the people whom he wanted to reach and represent. When he proclaims 'Folktales are real (le fiabe sono vere)' he means that they speak of poverty, scarcity, hunger, anxiety, lust, greed, envy, cruelty, and of all the grinding consequences in the domestic scene and the larger picture. The structures of wonder and magic open ways of recording experience while imagining a time when suffering will be over. Fate will be changed; perpetrators overcome. The wishful thinking and the happy ending are rooted in sheer misery. When he writes that he became obsessed with the fairy tale about a donkey that shits gold, he might have been invoking a symbol for the form itself, a humble, low thing that brings amazement and riches.
Pins, Lice, Mice, & Want
Princes and queens, palaces and castles dominate the foreground of a fairy tale, but through the gold and glitter, the depth of the scene is filled with vivid and familiar circumstances, as the fantastic faculties engage with the world of experience. Realism of content also embraces precise observation of detail, and contrasts between earthiness and preposterous fancy sharpen the entertaining effect. Perrault tells us, for example, that the cruel sisters have dressmakers' pins from England, the most fashionable and most coveted article at the time. In the Grimms' 'The Three Golden Hairs', the Devil himself is the adversary, and hell is a kitchen much like any ordinary kitchen where his granny sits by the stove. When the brave hero appears, a poor lad who's been set an impossible task by the proud princess to fetch her the trophy (the hairs in the title), Granny is kind to him, and turns the boy into an ant to keep him safe. She hides him in the folds of her apron until she has herself pulled out the three hairs, shushing the Devil as she does so. She then turns our hero back again into human form and sends him back to the world above to marry the princess.
She hides him in the folds of her apron until she has herself pulled out the three hairs, shushing the Devil as she does so.
It is emblematic that the Devil's kind old granny can pull out the required hairs because she is busy de-lousing him, something that's comforting even in Hell. Each of the three hairs then brings about a blessing that makes a joke of the story's roots in toil and hunger: with the first, the Devil reveals that a spring has dried up because an old toad is squatting on a stone that's blocking it; with the second that an apple tree no longer bears fruit because a mouse is nibbling through its roots; and with the third that the ferry man who's working day in and day out, poling passengers across the river need only put his pole in the hands of one of his passengers to be free.
Many fairy tales about golden-haired princesses with tiny feet still address the difficulty, in an era of arranged marriage and often meagre resources, of choosing a beloved and being allowed to live with him or her. Many explore other threats all too familiar to the stories' receivers: the loss of a mother in childbirth is a familiar, melancholy opening to many favorites.
Unlike myths, which are about gods and superheroes, fairy tale protagonists are recognizably ordinary working people, toiling at ordinary occupations over a long period of history, before industrialization and mass literacy.
Behind their gorgeous surfaces you can glimpse an entire history of childhood and the family: the oppression of land owners and rulers, foundlings, drowned or abandoned children, the ragamuffin orphan surviving by his wits, the maltreated child who wants a day off from unending toil, or the likely lad who has his eye on a girl who's from a better class than himself, the dependence of old people, the rivalries between competitors for love and other sustenance. Unlike myths, which are about gods and superheroes, fairy tale protagonists are recognizably ordinary working people, toiling at ordinary occupations over a long period of history, before industrialization and mass literacy. In the Arabian Nights the protagonists belong to more urban settings, and practice trades and commerce. Some are abducted and then sold into slavery, many are cruelly driven by their masters and mistresses. In the European material, the drudgery is more rural, the enslavement unofficial and more personal in its cruelty. It is fair to say that fairytale heroines are frequently skivvies who take on the housework uncomplainingly, and that this kind of story won favor in the Victorian era and later, at the cost of eclipsing lively rebel protagonists, tricksters like Finette (Finessa in English translation), who turns the tables on her sisters' seducers, or Marjana the slave girl who pours boiling oil on the Forty Thieves.
Direct and shared experiences of material circumstances of the measures that sociologists use to establish the well being of a given society-are taken up by fairy tales as a matter of course: when the mother dies giving birth, that child will have to survive without her love and protection, and that is a grim sentence. The pot of porridge that is never empty speaks volumes about a world where hunger and want and dreadful toil are the lot of the majority, whose expectations are rather modest by contemporary standards. 'A fairy tale', Angela Carter once remarked, 'is a story in which one king goes to another king to borrow a cup of sugar.'
D. H. Lawrence famously proclaimed, 'Trust the tale, not the teller.' To which Jeanette Winterson retorts, repeating again and again, 'I'm telling you stories. Trust me.' But in what ways can we trust the tale-and even trust the teller? How can such preposterous fantastic stories be true, as Calvino and others who value fairy tales have claimed?
One answer is that a story is an archive, packed with history: just as an empty field in winter can reveal, to the eyes of an ancient archaeologist, what once grew there, how long ago the forest was cleared to make way for pasture, and where the rocks that were picked out of the land eventually fetched up, so a fairy tale bears the marks of the people who told it over the years, of their lives and their struggles.
C. S. Lewis writes that in literature there is realism of presentation on the one hand, and realism of content on the other: 'The two realisms are quite independent. You can get that of presentation without that of content, as in medieval romance: or that of content without that of presentation, as in French (and some Greek) tragedy; or both together, as in War and Peace; or neither, as in the Furioso or Rasselas or Candide.'
According to these distinctions, it is possible to see how fairy tales, while being utterly fantastical in presentation, are forthright in their realism as to what happens and can happen.
Mothers died in childbirth, and large families of step relations arose as a result, competing for resources. In fairy tales, want stalks everyone, and the word's double meaning matters: both desire and lack. Measures taken to meet want are often extreme, but injustices are endemic in a society that's itself unfair, with hierarchies decreed chiefly by blood and accidents of birth. People steal and brawl and cheat and sometimes the story is on the side of the cheats. The word of fathers, husbands, and even of younger brothers is law.
Fairy tales from cultures in which polygamy was practiced reflect it: rivalry between co-wives over their children's future caused vicious conflicts, a situation reproduced in the Chinese 'Cinderella' (recorded in the ninth century, and the earliest variant extant): Yeh-Hsien suffers miseries at the hands of her father's co-wife, not under the regime of a new stepmother. Where dowries were crucial for a young woman to get married, dowries figure vividly in fairy tales: in Basile's sparkling 'Pinto Smalto' (Painted Bread), Betta tells her father that if he is so keen, she should marry, he must give her a fabulous combo (trousseau)-jewels, gold, silks, etc. But she also stipulates flour, sugar, and rosewater. She then bakes a cake in the shape of a gorgeous young man, who comes to life. The story continues through various misadventures but ends gloriously.
Family Secrets
When the eldest son, according to the law of primogeniture, inherited everything, the younger brother would set out on his adventures penniless, to return fabulously endowed, as in the Grimms' 'The Boy Who Wanted to Learn How to Shudder'. The genre's themes are real-life themes and the passions real-life passions: getting by and getting what you want, knowing the odds are stacked and that all might be lost ... Luck is powerful, but resourcefulness, often amoral, is praiseworthy. The situations in fairy tales also capture deep terrors of occurrences common and, mercifully, uncommon. Unspeakable-unbelievable-acts are also always taking place. Terrible family violence: a father cuts off his daughter's hands, because the Devil wants to carry her off; another daughter disguises herself in a coat of animal hides after her father wants to marry her. Small children are damaged: Hansel and Gretel are abandoned by their mother and father to die in the woods and then narrowly escape a cannibal witch. And so on. These are acts which contradict all ideas of natural feeling. But these situations, however horribly they beat belief, have been spoken of in the stories, and they are echoed, week by week, in the news. When a child dies at the hands of parents who have starved and tortured him, as in the case of Daniel Petka, and nobody moves to help him; when young girls are kidnapped and held prisoner by an apparently ordinary man in an ordinary American suburb; and when Josef Fritz imprisons his daughter in a cellar and keeps her there for twenty-four years, fathering seven children on her until he was discovered in 2008, then fairy tales can be recognized as witnesses to every aspect of human nature. They also act to alert us - or hope to.
Starvation and infanticide are recurrent dangers, and their victims devise ways of opposing them, avenging themselves on the perpetrators, and of turning the status quo upside down. The plots convey messages of resistance-a hope of escape.
The siren function of the form, saying the unsayable and tolling a warning in the night, has been lessened in recent years, when child abuse has come to be recognized, and appalling cases of cruelty, involving incest, enslavement, and rape, are made known by other means. Fairy tales used to be a rare witness to such crimes and encode them cryptically for the younger generation to absorb, but they can now watch them unfold in the media. However, recognition and familiarity with the possibility does not seem to have sharpened sensitivity or produced change, only increased a general fear for children's safety. Fairy tales used to transmute the horrors by setting them once upon a time and far away, and in this way did not directly raise the specter of a killer next door but smuggled in their warnings under cover of magical storytelling.
Social historians have drawn on the tales for evidence about conditions of life in the past. Eugen Weber wrote 'Fairies and Hard Facts: The Reality of Folktales' (1981), an article which proved very influential. Robert Darnton, in a chapter of his sparkling book The Great Cat Massacre (1984), also emphasizes the true witness of Mother Goose. Weber's title is echoed, for example, by Marla Tatar in her study The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales (1987). Jack Zipes, the most industrious scholar in the field, has developed a politically committed, cultural materialist perspective that explores the multiple ricochets between historical facts and mentalities (including class and gender values) with fairytale scenarios. His extensive criticism, from Don't Bet on the Prince (1986) to the recent The Irresistible Rise of the Fairy Tale (2012) has simultaneously helped give fairy tales greater stature as literature and led to sharp controversy about their pernicious or liberating influence on audiences and readers, especially the young. This opens one of the most charged questions about fairy tales: not, do they carry the evidence and reflect what happens? But do they interact with reality and shape it? Are they addressing the future as well as the past?
The French novelist Michel Tournier (who is steeped in fairy tale), has distinguished between the French terms conte, fable, and nouvelle (this last meaning a short story as well as a news item) regarding their relation to reality. Fables, as in Aesop and La Fontaine's animal parables, are 'transparent' in their explicit moral lessons, while Nouvelles report on the facts. Both destroy all interest in the stories they tell by what he calls their 'brutal opacity'-their obviousness. By contrast, contes, Tournier declares, have 'crystalline translucency', which allows glimpses of truths but does not state them-this is the seduction and power of fairy tale. Tournier has frequently revisited monsters and ogres in his fiction, including Bluebeard, who offers a fruitful test case for his concept of fairy tale as a vehicle of translucent insights.
Extreme Crimes: Bluebeard, Serial Killer
Bluebeard has become a familiar character, whatever the medium, whatever the date: in opera, cartoon, X-rated film, or graphic novel, he is an archetypal serial murderer, terrifying and yet alluring. Men and women have responded equally, showing strong identification from different vantage points.
'When he was gone, she walked about the house from top to bottom, inspecting everything. At last, she came to the forbidden door. She looked at the key, she put it in the lock. But what did she see as she went in? A huge blood-stained basin was standing in the middle of the room, and in it there lay human beings, dead and chopped in pieces.'
But is Perrault's La Barbe bleue a tale of thrilling terror, born of fantasy, or could it have roots in fact? Could such extreme tales really have a basis in history, in the lived experience of men and women?
The Bluebeard figure who appears in Grimm is a less ambiguous villain. The emphasis falls squarely on the dangers of marriage, and the tales feature a plucky trickster heroine who gets the better of her would-be murderous groom. He figures in two of their most mysterious and powerful stories, 'Fitcher's Bird', and 'The Robber Bride groom', one of the earliest stories the Grimms collected.
A rich man turns up and asks to marry a miller's beautiful daughter. She doesn't take to him, and when she's making her way to his house, deep in the heart of a dark forest, her forebodings grow very heavy. A friendly bird sounds the alarm:
'Turn back, turn back, my pretty young bride, in a house of murderers you've arrived.'
But she goes in all the same, and finds every room entirely empty, except for a doddery old woman in the cellar, who cries out, 'The only wedding you'll celebrate is a wedding with death.'
When her fiancé returns with his gang, they're dragging another young woman with them, and our heroine watches from her hiding place as they make their victim drink 'three glasses full, one white, one red, one yellow, and before long her heart burst in two. The robbers tore off her fine clothes, put her on the table, chopped her beautiful body into pieces, and sprinkled them with salt.'
They also chop off one of her fingers wearing a gold ring, but it flies through the air and lands in our heroine's lap. She makes her escape, and in the perfect denouement, she tells the guests at her own wedding feast how she has suffered from a terrible nightmare and describes the horrors she witnessed. When she reaches the end, she presents her groom with the severed finger He realizes he's been unmasked and tries to run. The guests seize him and turn him over to the law; he and his robber band are executed for their dreadful deeds. This grisly tale communicates, beneath the Gothic scenes, several different layers of historical truth. It reveals many aspects of marriage in Europe in the past, and expresses resistance to the usual customs, conveying the apprehension of the girl who leaves her home to live far away in her husband's house; it takes for granted the power and attraction of money, and it confronts her lack of choice in the matter. The picture of a cannibal gang goes much further than the serial murders in Perrault's La Barbe bleue, but by stacking the evidence against the bridegroom, this version makes a very strong case for giving power to decide to the bride.
In the other Grimm Bluebeard tale, called 'Fitcher's Bird', the murderer is a wizard, or, in some translations, a warlock; a very close variation, 'Silver Nose', is also included by Cal vino, and both feature spirited heroines who are possessed of mother wit-and a ferocious instinct for survival. Their defiance of the tyrant should be read in school assemblies to help young people to resist older men-and sometimes women-who get them in their clutches.
Historians have looked for connections beyond ordinary conditions, to identify actual events and known individuals at the root of a certain fairy tale. Two of the best known of all-'Bluebeard' and 'Snow White'-have been linked to individuals whose lives reveal deep causes for tensions in private and public arenas.
Most prominently, Bluebeard has been identified with Gilles de Rais, the Breton commander who fought alongside Joan of Arc in the Hundred Years' War and was condemned to be hanged for sorcery and satanic abuse-the ritual murder of scores, perhaps hundreds, of children at his castle (he was spared burning because he was a nobleman). George Bernard Shaw even included him under that name in his play, Joan of Arc.
At the fin de siecle, J. K. Huysmans wrote a notorious, decadent novel, Lil-Bas, inspired by the excesses of Gilles de Rais; later, Georges Bataille, who was engaged all his life with defining the sacred and the profane, and used pornography to expose social conventions, argued in his edition of the Breton nobleman's trial that his excesses epitomize the power of the aristocracy and the profligacy of chivalry their extravagant clothes, their butchery out hunting, and their pitiless violence towards the poor whose lands they raided.
Both these writers' imaginings flow into the novel about La Barbe bleue and Joan of Arc that Michel Tournier published in 1983, in which he returns to the lurid stories of pedophiliac, satanist carnage committed by Gi11es de Rais. He conveys no skepticism over their historical status; for him, the fictional form of the conte offers that crystalline translucency through which a more profound truth appears. Charges of witchcraft were not infrequent in the fifteenth century and posterity usually treats them with utter skepticism, as in the case of Joan of Arc. Historians prefer to examine the context that led to such serious fears, arguing from observation of evidence and the social, political, and perhaps personal tensions it reveals. Yet, running against the grain of ordinary and reasonable skepticism, the guilt of Gilles de Rais has been taken at face value based on the evidence at the trial. It has always seemed to me improbable that so many children-between 80 and 200-could have gone missing without explanation over a period of years without leaving some traces, or causing an outcry from the victims' families, before Gilles was accused and tried. One of the worst riots in Paris, for example, broke out in 1750, when children were regularly going missing. The king Louis XV-or one of his daughters-was suspected of kidnapping them to drink their blood, a remedy that had been prescribed, it was rumored, by the royal physicians to restore the royal health. No similar riots are recorded in Brittany at the time that Gillesde Rais was accused of the deaths of so many children, and because of this as well as other reasons (his chief prosecutor inherited all his offices and possessions), historians have expressed doubts about his crimes.
The case of Gilles de Rais is particularly interesting because, like the uprising of 1750, it reveals the continual interplay of existing fantasies with historical events. Another obvious problem with identifying Gilles de Rais as La Barbe bleue is that Gilles, if he was a mass murderer, chose his victims among little boys: his legend does not depict him as a serial wife-killer, but rather closer to a classic fairy tale ogre, snacking in the night on an infant or two until a clever young hero dupes him.
The case of Snow White has also inspired a quest for a historical original. For example, in the exhibition Treasures of Heaven at the British Museum (2012), one of the many relics, set in a scintillated jewelled reliquary, remembered the death of St Ludmila, the grandmother of King Wenceslas of the Christmas carol. She's the patron saint of Bohemia and much revered to this day. She was murdered by her mother-in-law, the label went on, who grew jealous of her goodness and beauty and strangled her with her veil.
There have been several bids to identify the authentic model for the Grimms' heroine: in 1994, a German scholar, Eckhard Sander, proposed Margarete von Waldeck (b.1553), who was possibly poisoned in dynastic scheming of the time. Margarete also grew up in a town (Wildungen) where children went down the copper mines and, Sander continues, were consequently stunted, and taunted as 'poor dwarfs'.
Claims by historians that they have identified Bluebeard or unearthed the first, authentic Snow White reveal a thirst for stable genealogies-something that can never be appeased. Snow White's situation is historical and generic: it encapsulates fundamental dynamics of family life over a longue duree, unfortunately. It is reflected in the fury of Venus against Psyche after her son Cupid has fallen in love with her in The Golden Ass, for example. Shakespeare dramatizes the conflict in Cymbeline, when the Queen stepmother to the heroine Imogen-schemes against her. In her very first speech, she alludes to 'the slander of most stepmothers' (I.i.85) and hastens to reassure Imogen that she will not act stereotypically. But she attempts to poison her, of course. In Pericles, another evil queen orders Marina killed, because she's gifted with more qualities than her own daughter. Shakespeare knows such plots from his historical sources, because the tensions were commonplace, especially in early medieval history when women could occupy positions of power but were always poised precariously, easily unseated by a rival. Like 'Bluebeard', the fairy tale of 'Snow White' does not record a single, appalling crime, but testifies to a structural and endemic conflict in society that was political and social as well as personal, producing many, many instances of similar violence.
The elements are stirred into the pot of story. Occasionally, a fait divers, news item or true-life story, does make its way directly into the soup. The Tales of the Thousand and One Nights gathers in several incidents reported from history and transmutes them into fairytale romance. 'The Tale of al Mutawakkil' (the 10th Caliph, d. 861) and Mahbuba, his beloved concubine, relates how, after a long estrangement, he dreams of her and of their reconciliation; soon after he wakes up, a slave slips him a note; al-Mutawakkil steals into the women's quarters and finds Mahbuba singing; the poem-of her own composition-describes how she saw him come to her in a dream to make peace with her.
Mutual dreaming is one of the distinctive enchantments of the Nights, and after this, the lovers are reconciled-until the Cal1ph's murder. In this story, Mahbuba then pines away and dies, to live forever as a symbol of faithful love. (In historical reality she was handed over to the next ruler, but refused to oblige him, was thrown into prison, and lost to view.)
Andre Miquel, translator, and editor of the Nights has commented that this story discloses rather clearly the warp and weft of history and fantasy in such literature, but it remains unusual in featuring by name individuals who once existed: epics such as La Chanson de Roland, or fantastic biographies, such as the Alexander romance, do so as a matter of course, but fairy tales usually bring ordinary mortals center stage. In the same way as the runaway girl wears a pelican skin in the Spanish version of 'Donkeyskin', so local incidents and memories add color and point to an existing tale, long after the historical memory of them has faded.
The scholar Catherine Velay-Vallantin has shown how the story of the Bete de Gevaudan, a French variation on the Beast of Dartmoor and other legends, became interwoven with the retellings of 'Red Riding Hood' in provincial France. The Bete was a monstrous creature, reputedly a huge wolf, which took the lives of many before it was finally hunted down. The local bishop fulminated against the morals of the community, identifying the Beast as a sure sign from God of their sinfulness, both to bring former Huguenots into line, and to terrorize rural shepherd girls into Christian modesty and decorum: 'This idolatrous and criminal flesh,' he ranted, 'which serves only as a demonic instrument for seducing and condemning souls, should it not be given unto the murderous teeth of the ferocious Beast to tear it to pieces?'
Occasionally, the necessary transformation into fiction does not convince, and the nouvelle remains one, failing to crystallize as a conte. The Grimms, for example, collected a savage episode in a tale called 'Playing Butchers': 'There once was a father who slaughtered a pig, and his children saw that. In the afternoon, when they began playing, one child said to the other, "you be the little pig, and I'll be the butcher." He then took a shiny knife and slit his little brother's throat.'
The Grimms had found the story in a Berlin newspaper edited by the Romantic writer Heinrich von Kleist, so it hardly had authentic Volk credentials, except as an urban myth; it does have analogues in folklore elsewhere, but its pitilessness aroused shock and horror in the first readers of Children's and Household Tales, and the Grimms came under pressure to drop it. They did so in later editions of their collection. But Wilhelm protested that it taught children the all-important distinction between playing make-believe and real life. He saw the wisdom in the tales as cautionary as well as consolatory.
Common Bonds
Overall, though, the historical reality that can be excavated from fairy tales does not carry the memory of extreme horrors, specific tragedies, or individuals, but rather dramatizes ordinary circumstances, daily sufferings, needs, desires-and dangers, especially of dying young. Rather than seek for a particular vicious individual behind a fairy tale figure, or for a specific event, thinking of the stories as responses to generic human experience yields far greater results. The story of Bluebeard touches upon areas of acute anxiety-about male sexuality in general and in extremis; about the rights of husbands-and the rights of wives; about money (Bluebeard is always vastly wealthy); about foreigners and Orientals; about the delinquency of curiosity and women's special propensity to be curious. The deaths of his wives one after another may offer a historical memory of the toll of childbirth.
Also, it is important to realize that the traffic does not only go one way, the fairy tale taking color from real life. Real life is understood in the light of the stories, too. That pre Revolutionary Parisian violence was suffused with a fairytale dread of child-guzzling ogres who came straight from the pages of 'Jack and the Beanstalk' or 'Hop o' My Thumb' or, one could say, the collective imaginary.
And fantasy often exercises a stronger pull than reality: Gilles de Rais is far more compelling cast as a fairytale monster bridegroom than he is as a victim of feudal and ecclesiastical ambition in medieval France.
In one sense the nightmare of Bluebeard overlaps with the terrors of penny dreadfuls and tabloid journalism about Jack the Ripper and other extreme, specific horrors. In another sense, however, the murderer bridegroom and his persistent presence in the tales symbolize more general grounds of acute anxiety. The voyeuristic violence has a moral dimension, too; what is the pleasure for the reader (and the writer) of the bloody chamber?
'Bluebeard', 'Beauty and the Beast', and many other fairy tales about monster bridegrooms appear to focus on the villain, the male protagonist. But they are as entangled with the bride and with questions of female desire as they are with male drives. Bluebeard's afterlife in literature and other media divides sharply along gender lines: male writers see themselves in the role, with varying degrees of selfscrutiny and complacency, whereas for women, the Blue beard figure often embodies contradictory feelings about male sexuality, and consequently presents a challenge, a challenge they meet in a variety of ways. The fascination and the repulsion that beast bridegrooms provoke in women turns such stories into explorations of female sexuality, and this strand has become one of the powerful attractions of the whole genre. Bluebeard typifies the principal male antagonist in the sex wars, an enemy, a sadist, and a rapist-who can also be irresistibly alluring.
His house, his castle, his forbidden chamber become syn onymous with forbidden knowledge: when the heroine of Angela Carter's variation on the fairy tale first sees the place where she is being taken:
And, ah! his castle. The faery solitude of the place; with its turrets of misty blue, its courtyard, its spiked gate, his castle that lay on the very bosom of the sea with seabirds mewing about its attics, the casements opening on to the green and purple, evanescent departures of the ocean, cut off by the tide from land for half a day... that castle, at home neither on the land nor on the water, a mysterious, amphibious place, contravening the materiality of both earth and the waves, with the melancholy of a mermaiden who perches on her rock and waits, endlessly, for a lover who had drowned far away, long ago. That lovely, sad, sea-siren of a place!
This enchanted fortress conceals a torture chamber.
The bride is initiated into erotic pleasure by this Bluebeard, but rescued, in a rightly celebrated, exuberant twist at the end of the story, by the arrival of her sharp-shooting mother: 'You never saw such a wild thing as my mother, her hat seized by the winds and blown out to sea so that her hair was her white mane, her black lisle legs exposed to the thigh, her skirts tucked round her waist, one hand on the reins of the rearing horse while the other clasped my father's service revolver and .. .'.
This vision owes something to the bewitched Highland crew, Cutty Sark and her ilk, whom Carter knew from her Highlander granny.
The heroine of Genevieve Breillat's low-budget, art house Movie Barbebleue (2009) also gets the better of her rich, obese, doting husband; this perverse rendering by a woman director, who has been censured for earlier pornographic work, deliberately evokes children's pop-up story books in design and narration, and ends with a tableau of the bride contemplating Bluebeard's head on a platter, a victorious Salome with the head of John the Baptist. This revenge eludes the protagonist of E. L. James's sadomasochist sensation, Fifty Shades of Grey; in this case, the female author chooses to let Bluebeard have his way.
In the twenty-first century, the politics of the bedchamber communicate a different perspective on the dangers that sex presents to a young woman.
Heroic Optimism
The nesting places of the storyteller, Walter Benjamin pointed out, are in the loom shed and at the spinning wheel, in the fulling barn and the kitchen when doing tedious, repetitive tasks-shelling peas in readiness for storing, sorting pulses for bagging, bottling, and preserving. Stories were told to alleviate harsh labor and endless drudgery-and they were passed between generations-by the voice of experience, filled with the laughter of defiance, the hope of just deserts.
For this reason, many readers have found in fairy tales a powerful 'consolatory fable' for the sufferings that ordinary people went through, and the proof of the emancipatory spirit of the oppressed in action. Idealists, reformers, self-styled prophets, and utopians are especially attracted to the form, and it is significant how many writers borrowed the conventions of fairy tales to campaign for social reforms: some, such as Charles Kingsley, Christina Rossetti, and C. S. Lewis, were devout Christians; others, from John Ruskin to Frank L. Baum, Antonio Gramsci to Philip Pullman, envision alternative societies, often organized along socialist lines. J. K. Rowling's political commitment to the cause of single mothers, for example, and her strong egalitarian feelings, are entirely of a piece with forerunners in the world of the expanded fairytale form.
The happy ending, that defining dynamic of fairy tales, follows from their relation to reality. Ordinary misery and its causes are the stories' chief concern. But writers-and storytellers-address their topics with craft, and it is often more compelling to translate experience through metaphor and fantasy than to put it plainly. As C.S. Lewis wrote in the title of one of his essays, 'Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What's To Be Said'.
Even a writer as dreamy (and privileged) as the German Romantic Novalis defined the form as a way of thinking up a way out: 'A true fairytale must also be a prophetic account of things-an ideal account-an absolutely necessary account. A true writer of fairy tales sees into the future.'
The stories face up to the inadmissible facts of reality and promise deliverance. This honest harshness combined with the wishful hoping has helped them to last. If literature is a place we go to, in Seamus Heaney's words, 'to be forwarded within ourselves' then fairy tales form an important part of it. If literature gives 'an experience that is like foreknow ledge of certain things which we already seem to be remembering', fairy tales offer enigmatic, terrifying images of what the prospects are, of the darkest horrors life may bring. Yet the stories usually imagine ways of opposing this situation, or at worst, of having revenge on those who inflict suffering, of turning the status quo upside down, as well as defeating the natural course of events; they dream of reprisals, and they sketch alternative plot lines. They are messages of hope arising from desperate yet ordinary situations.