Fairy Tales and Society: Illusion, Allusion, and Paradigm 9780812201505

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FAIRY TALES and SOCIETY

\_1 FAIRY TALES and SOCIETY: ILLUSION, ALLUSION,

and PARADIGM Edited by RUTH B. BOTTIGHEIMER Univer,fl'ty of Penn,lylvania Pre.:M • Philadelphia

Copyright © 1986 by the Univer.Jlty of PenrMy!vanUl Preel,! All right" ruervec) Firdt paperback printin,q 1989 Library of Con,qrecJd Catawging-in-Publication Data [1fain entry under title: fairy taled and docicty. Included bibliographic referenced and indo:. 1. Fairy tale,; -Hiltory and criticilm -Addre,I,led, Nday", lecture,l. 2. Fairy tale.J - SOCUl! adpect,lAddreMN, e,May,}, lectured. 1. Bottigheimer, Ruth B. GR550.F25 1986 398.2' 09 85-29629 ISBN 0-8122-8021-0 ISBN 0-8122-1294-0 (pbk.)

DNigned by AdrUlnne Onderdonk DuJden

Nicht die Kinder bloft dpeut man mit Marchen abo Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Nathan oer Weue

La qualiti d'ambaddadeur Peut-eLle d'abauder a ded conted ru/gaired? Vow puu1'e o/frir med rerd et /eurd graCed figered? Quoi? de conted d~enfanlcf don peup/e dembarradde! Si Peau d'ane metod conti, Jy prendrou un plauir extreme. Jean de la Fontaine, Fable.1

Contenld

Preface

Xl

1 LUTZ ROHRICH

Introduction

PART ONE:

Fairy Talcd

1M

OraL Phenomena

1. Oral Narration in Contemporary North America

15

KAY F. STONE

PART TWO:

Fairy Talcd in Society 2. Madnedd and Cure in the Thousand and One

Nights 55 JEROME W. CLINTON 5. To Spliz a Yarn: The Female VOice in Folklore and Fairy Tale 5J

KAREN E. ROWE 4. TelLin.9 Tale" ~Spreadlizg Tale,,: Chan.ge ill the Communicative Forllld of a Popular Genre 75

RUDOLFSCHENDA

Vlll

Contentd 5. Born Yedterday: Heroed in the Grimmi' Fairy Taled

95

MARIA M. TATAR 6. Silenced Women in the Griml1ld' Tale.J: The "Fit" Between Fairy Taled and Society in Their Hidtorical Context 115

RUTH B. BOTTIGHEIMER 7. Folkwridtd ad Agentd of Nationalidm: Adturian Legendd and the Problem of Identity 153

JAMES W. FERNANDEZ

PART THREE:

Fairy Tale Re.1earch Today 8. Gender-Related Biaded in the Type and Motif Indexed of Aarne and Thompdon 149

TORBORG LUNDELL 9. The Structure of "Snow White"

165

STEVEN SWANN JONES 10. The Encycwpedia of the Folktale

187

HANS-JORG UTHER 11. Fairy Taled from a Semiotic Perdpective

195

ANNA TAVIS 12. Fairy Taled and Pdychotherapy 203

SIMON A. GROLNICK 15. The Criminowgical Significance of the Griml1ld' Fairy Taled 217

GERHARD O. W. MUELLER 14. Feminidt Approached to the Interpretation of Fairy Taled 229

KAY F. STONE 15. Mam:idtd and the Illumination of Folk and Fairy Taled 237

JACK ZIPES

Contentd

IX

16. P{L:It and Predent Follcloridtic Narrator Redearch 245 RAINER WEHSE 17. Fairy Tated from a Folkloridtic Perdpective 259 ALAN DUNDES 18. The Grimnld and the German Obdeddlon with Fairy Tated 271

JACK ZIPES 19. The "UtterLy Heddian" Fairy Tated by "OIJ Marie": The End of a Myth 287 HEINZ ROLLEKE

ContrilJUtord 301 Index 305

Preface

This book explores the many and various functions of fairy tales in society and the way they are used by or appear to their tellers, their listeners or readers, or society at large. As a Germanist concentrating in early nineteenth-century literature, I have a special interest in the Miirchen as a genre and in Grimms' Fairy Tale" in particular. Recognizing how this little volume of more than two hundred tales was utilized in German society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a prop and proof for widely divergent child-rearing, political, and psycho-social aims led me to wonder how fairy tales functioned within other societies and how they were regarded and analyzed in other disciplines. Although other possibilities exist, three principal functions emerged: the fairy tale as an illusion, as an allusion, and as a paradigm. As illusion, fairy tales regularly suggest that events may develop according to a pattern that diverges sharply from that which daily experience would lead the fairy tale narrator or listener (or reader) to expect. Walt Disney's American versions of some of the best-known fairy tales provide an illusion of good and evil which in no way corresponds to the far more subtle surfacing of malevolence in society. He and his animators sketched an equally illusory set of feminine qualities which corresponded to widely held post- World War II notions about femininity. Allusive use of fairy tales frequently involves social institutions, personal relationships, and individual development. By alluding to a widely known body of material, a writer may, for example, utilize

xu

Pre/ace

fairy tale elements as a contrapuntal ground for plot and character development, safely assuming that readers share the knowledge referred to. Fairy tale figures often appear in advertisements for household products in Western Europe, Japan, and the United States. At the opposite extreme, Jungian fairy tale analysts accept fairy tale characters and events as allusions to a deep psychological reality generally hidden from view. And, finally, in many societies fairy tales function as a paradigm both for understanding the community and for determining and developing individual behavior and personality within that community. Within a given corpus, these paradigms are generally consistent both with each other and with society's requirements. Bruno Bettelheim's influential study, The Ude.J of Enchantment, best represents this approach. However, when these paradigms no longer overlap with individual, group, or societal expectations, as is true with many fairy tales whose current form was fixed during the nineteenth century, radical reinterpretations or rewritings occur, as in Germany in the 1970s. These three theoretical functions provided points in a framework for thinking about fairy tales and their relationship to society. As a group we took advantage of the looseness of the term "fairy tale" in English and thus we were also able to include tales which shade off into other genres, such as the folktale, the wonder tale, and the literary fairy tale, as well as the fairy tale as it is rendered in illustrations. This flexibility opened the door to considering fairy tales and their social functioning from numerous points of view: anthropological, folkloristic, literary, historical, juridical, artistic, psychoanalytical, semiotic, and architectural. This volume of essays unites several separate but related aims. The first is to explore the interpenetration of fairy tales and society, a subject so boundless that thousands of pages would be required to encompass it adequately. Nonetheless, the varied and sometimes opposing perspectives express the disparate concerns of different disciplines and attempt at least to begin that fascinating study, with the fairy tales which emerge from a long-published past considered along with those from oral tradition. The second aim is to describe and assess current research on fairy tales. A regrettable lacuna exists where I had hoped to address the subject of fairy tales in Africa, Asia, and the PacifiC Basin. Numerous efforts to secure contributions representing these areas produced promises but no papers. A historical perspective is also sadly missing, an area in which much productive work has been done in recent years. A third aim is to acquaint both the scholarly and the lay fairy

Pre/ace

XIll

tale - reading public with contemporary German research in addition to research originally presented at the conference entitled "Fairy Tales and Society: Illusion, Allusion, and Paradigm." The essays by Heinz Rolleke and Rudolf Schenda further this aim. Also, Hans-Jorg Uther's account of the EnzyklopilJie {)e.J Miirchend taps into work that is relatively unfamiliar among the non-German-reading public, while Rainer Wehse's contribution sums up the results of international narrator research. Finally, the brief annotated bibliographies pinpoint those studies which each contributor has identified as important for the development of his or her essay. It is my hope that this collection will broaden the purview of serious readers and investigators of fairy tales. The articles offered here suggest the range of interpretive possibilities by introducing the broad variety of contemporary approaches to fairy tale research in the United States and Europe. The conference from which the majority of these papers derive was remarkable both for its liveliness and for the public interest it aroused. Held at Princeton University in 1984 and supported by the Departments of Anthropology, Architecture, Comparative Literature, English, and Germanic Languages and Literatures, the Graphic Arts Collection, the Program in European Cultural Studies, and the Program in Near Eastern Studies, it brought together an unusually broad assortment of scholars and professionals, students and lay participants. Social workers, jurists, and psychiatrists joined professional storytellers and folklorists in vigorous discussions. I would like, in particular, to acknowledge several individuals who chaired sessions at the conference and who contributed greatly to its success: James R. Beniger, James W. Fernandez, John W. Fleming, Walter H. Hinderer, Ulrich G. Knoepflmacher, Robert M. Maxwell, and Anthony Vidler. Others presented papers which for one reason or another could not be included here: Gillett G. Griffin, Hermann G. Rebel, Dale R. Roylance, and Anthony Vidler. The Council of the Humanities, in the person of its chair, W. Robert Connor, generously supported first the idea and then the implementation of the conference, a collegial act for which I am particularly grateful. The conference owed its existence to the unstinting support and assistance of the New Jersey Committee for the Humanities, whose executive director, Miriam Murphy, provided continuing encouragement. I am very grateful for additional grant support from the New Jersey Committee for the Humanities to defray the expenses incurred in preparing this book.

XIV

Pre/ace

In closing I would like to make two personal acknowledgments. The first is to the Department of Comparative Literature at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, which has exemplified academic hospitality during the year in which this book was in preparation. The second is to my companion of many years, my husband, Karl S. Bottigheimer, with whom a thirty-year conversation has provided continuing delight.

Ruth B. Bottigheimer Stony Broole, NY Decemher 1985

Introduction LUTZ ROHRICH

The fairy tale is the first poetic form with which people come into contact in their lives. For most of us it is one of the deepest and most enduring childhood impressions. Even those of us who as adults no longer read or listen to fairy tales still recognize "the hundred years' sleep." We also speak of a "Cinderella existence" or "the forbidden door," phrases we understand whether we are highly educated or not and which indicate how much more deeply fairy tales have penetrated our general consciousness than any other book-based memones. Public interest in fairy tales has been rekindled in a quite astonishing manner in recent years, exceeding all expectations. Fairy tales have won new adherents among both the young and the old. This phenomenon has nothing to do with nostalgia, nor does it simply signal a flight from a technically rational world into neo-irrationalism. Instead, I believe, more and more people are recognizing that fairy tales are essential and substantial stories which offer paradigmatic examples of conflicts in decisive life situations. Associations and societies for the preservation and investigation of fairy tales annually gather a large international public which is Translated by Ruth B. Bottigheimer.

2

Lutz Roricb

both learned and broadly interested in the subject. An immense fairy tale literature in translation has made accessible the fairy tales of exotic countries and distant peoples. Publications series and encyclopedias attempt to collect and present national fairy tale treasures. At the same time, emphasis in fairy tale research has shifted noticeably in the past decade. More and more frequently, contemporary folklori&tic, sociological, psychological, pedagogic, functional, and structural research has joined traditional cultural-historical, philologically literary, or comparative studies. The collection of essays in this book is due to the indefatigable energy and the active involvement of Ruth B. Bottigheimer. These essays approach questions inherent in Marcben und GCdelucbajt ("fairy tales and society") from diverse points of view and with a variety of methods. The tales taken as the basis encompass vast geographical areas and great spans of time: from the Grimms to the TbolMand and One Nigbt,}, from the Greece of antiquity to the present. Nearly all the important questions that have recently been directed at fairy tales, their narrators, and their audience converge here. These include • the question of the reality and of the cultural-historical background of fairy tales; • the question of what social prototypes fairy tales should convey to contemporary readers and in particular to children; • the question of who the narrators were and whether, consciously or unconsciously, they wove autobiographical reminiscences into their narratives; • the question of the narrative event itself as a social communicative act. Yet other research perspectives in this book allow us to see the world of the fairy tale with fresh eyes. One literary critic poses questions about how ancient mythology was received and accepted literarily in the medieval period and now. Other critics examine the problems of genre definition, such as the difference between literary fairy tales or legends and folk and fairy tales. Modern folk narrative research makes allowance for traditional genres themselves having changed, with the orally recounted tale frequently becoming a "book tale." But other related stories, such as the memoir, the gossip tale, and the joke, have come within the purview of folklorists. Even within the limited circle of folklorists and textual scholars, more scholarly points of view differ widely in these essays. Scholarship never comes to a halt. A hundred answers here will spawn a thousand new questions somewhere else: monographs and case studies on individual fairy tales that seemed to have long belonged to the past are enjoying great popularity, especially when they

Introduction

3

pass beyond their own ethnic borders instead of simply adding to existing studies or searching for an archetype; Eurocentrism in folk narrative research has begun to fade; the investigation of black African folk narrative has struck out in completely new directions. A question that has perhaps not been treated at sufficient length in this volume and in which I have been interested for a long time is the question of fairy tales and folk narrative as a source for cultural and socio-historical information about cultural change and evolution. The tales themselves certainly declare nothing about their own date of composition, saying only: "Once upon a time ... ," "In days of old, when wishing still worked ... ," "Many, many years ago .... " Naturally, certain indicators of both era and culture remain; they speak of kings, for example, and thus establish a monarchical era. Professions, however, are almost totally absent. Any number of poor people exist in fairy tales-woodcutters, woodsmen, charcoal burners, hunters, and shepherds. This group is expanded by soldiers and a few artisans like millers or tailors. Merchants, however, seldom appear. Why are there no teachers, no postmen, no railwaymen, no electricians, gas station attendants, or mechanics? Fairy tales clearly belong to a preindustrial period, but nonetheless they continue to survive, accommodating themselves with very few basic changes. Dragons, giants, and dwarfs make us think of magic days of yore; witch burnings, torture, and horrible punishments remind us of late medieval and early modern systems of punitive justice. If we accepted "Lucky Hans" at face value, we would have to conclude that we are still in an age of barter and agrarian economy, not yet in a money economy. But in other tales different circumstances obtain. The history of fairy tales or folk narratives can be inferred from preserved texts and from historical sources or the indications of age offered by motifs. Even contemporary fairy tales mirror an earlier world view with their beliefs about life and death, the here and now, and the hereafter; the appearance of demonic figures like giants, dwarfs, fairies, sorcerers, dragons, and trolls; the use of supernatural intervention in the form of blood, hair, and spittle as power-bearing entities; and the presence of sympathetic animals and plants and of archaic beliefs such as taboos and the power of names. Fairy tales retain what appear to be traces of ancient hunter culture beliefs, such as the help of a grateful animal whom the hunter has spared; death and subsequent revival by means of bones; totemistic characteristics like comprehending animal speech; and shamanistic traits recognizable in the elaborated motif of the world tree and the journey to the nether world. In the area of law and custom the fairy tale has also preserved ancient material-like matriarchal inheritance and horrifying penal-

4

Lutz Rorich

ties - as remnants of judicial procedures. Fairy tales depict human sacrifice, the exposure of infants and children, and even cannibalism. They portray practices paralleling initiation customs and ancient customs connected with wooing a bride, with marriage, and with birth, such as assigning an unborn child to a supernatural being. But the characteristic quality of fairy tales only appears when magical and supernatural forces are somehow sublimated, made harmless, and rendered formulaic. Fairy tales continually modernize themselves and replace older cultural features with more recent ones. From the earliest stages of storytelling, there has presumably also existed a rather more fantastic yarn-spinning tendency along with apparently archaic fairy tale content. Other kinds of tales which surface in ludic forms and fictions of wish-fulfillment, such as the tales about lazy and industrious people or the shrewd and the simple folks, probably never had anything to do with folk belief. In the ancient world stories already existed which one may regard rather as novellas alongside tales of magic, one prototype for which is the tale of Rhampsinitus's treasury told by Herodotus in the fifth century B.C., which corresponds to the Grimm tale about the master thief. Philological questions join cultural-historical ones in fairy tale research. For instance, which texts are authentic and which are only compilations, reworkings, or counterfeits? Are the Grimm texts only "fakelore"? There is also the rediscovery of fairy tales by the hermeneutical disciplines, expressed in the theme of the 1984 International Folk Narrative Research Congress, "The Quest for Meaning." But philological answers are needed to determine which texts should be the basis for exegeses and interpretations. Is it, one must ask, even admissible to base an interpretation on a single version? And then one wonders for whom these interpretations have any value: for the narrators, for the collector and publisher, for the "people," or only for the interpreter? The social role of fairy tales can be analyzed - as this volume proves - on many different levels. "Fairy Tales and Society" is indeed a broad field which extends into each of the directions considered above. In the past decade the women's movement in particular has sharpened our view of the role of the feminine in fairy tales. Completely new perspectives have resulted. This volume repeatedly addresses this theme, not only because women are the authors of these articles, but also because their interest seems justified by the material itself, for it is principally female figures who occupy central positions in fairy tales. They are as important in the frame tale of the ThoLMand

Introduction

5

and One N~lbtd as in the spinning-chamber tales of European peoples. Concepts like the "Cinderella complex" or the "Sleeping Beauty syndrome" have entered general parlance, and women's roles in Grimms' Fairy Tai&J stretch from "The Virgin's Child" to "The Clever Peasant Girl." As feminist commentators contend, there are, indeed, astonishing relics and role constraints in connection with gender f'rom the patriarchal realm. While the man carries out heroic deeds, the woman generally plays a menial role. She is abased as goosegirl, or else she leads a cindermaid existence at the domestic hearth. As Frau Holle's serving maid she is rewarded f'or diligent and devoted housework. Or else she keeps house for the seven dwarf's, while they - as menleave home for work in the morning. Negative female stereotypes reveal themselves particularly in the female antagonist roles of wicked stepmother or witch. Can tales which pass on such material continue to lay claim to a legitimate place in the modern world? Or have these tales perverted children's sense of reality, leading parents to rear their children with unrealistic dreams? And will such reading cause children to see a witch in every old woman? The scholarly contributions to this volume accord with the urgency of these questions. There are titles such as "Silenced Women in Grimms' Tales," which balance the f'act that women themselves have begun to publish collections of' women's f'airy tales which accentuate previously hidden active female qualities, for example, Tbe Woman

Wbo Left Home to Save Her HlMband (Die Frau die att.l:W.q, ihren Mann zu erwden, Frankfurt, 1983). Analyzing gender-specific female roles naturally casts doubt on male heroic roles, which must now be rethought. (See Katalin Horn, Der aktive und ()er pa