The Classic Fairy Tales_Norton Critical Edition Read online

  The Editor

  MARIA TATAR is the John L. Loeb Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures and Folklore and Mythology at Harvard University. She is the author of Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood, Off with Their Heads! Fairy Tales and the Culture of Childhood, and many other books on folklore and fairy tales. She is also the editor and translator of The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen, The Annotated Brothers Grimm, The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales, The Annotated Peter Pan, and The Grimm Reader.

  COVER: Maxfield Parrish, Enchanted Prince (1934, oil on board). Art © Maxfield Parrish Family, LLC. Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. © Copyright 2016 National Museum of American Illustration™, Newport, RI. Photo courtesy Archives of the American Illustrators Gallery™, New York, NY.

  A NORTON CRITICAL EDITION

  THE CLASSIC FAIRY TALES

  TEXTS

  CRITICISM

  SECOND EDITION

  Edited by

  MARIA TATAR

  HARVARD UNIVERSITY

  For Lauren Blum and Daniel Schuker

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Editor

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  The Texts of The Classic Fairy Tales

  Neil Gaiman • Instructions

  INTRODUCTION: Little Red Riding Hood

  The Story of Grandmother

  Charles Perrault • Little Red Riding Hood

  Brothers Grimm • Little Red Cap

  Italo Calvino • The False Grandmother

  Roald Dahl • Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf

  Roald Dahl • The Three Little Pigs

  The Tale of the Tiger Woman

  Tsélané and the Marimo

  INTRODUCTION: Beauty and the Beast

  Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont • Beauty and the Beast

  Giovan Francesco Straparola • The Pig King

  Brothers Grimm • The Frog King, or Iron Heinrich

  Angela Carter • The Tiger’s Bride

  Urashima the Fisherman

  The Enchanted Frog

  The Swan Maiden

  Chonguita

  The Dog Bride

  INTRODUCTION: Snow White

  Giambattista Basile • The Young Slave

  Brothers Grimm • Snow White

  Anne Sexton • Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

  Neil Gaiman • Snow, Glass, Apples

  INTRODUCTION: Sleeping Beauty

  Charles Perrault • The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood

  Brothers Grimm • Briar Rose

  Gabriel Garcia Márquez • Sleeping Beauty and the Airplane

  Wilfred Owen • The Sleeping Beauty

  INTRODUCTION: Cinderella

  Rhodopis

  Yeh-hsien

  Cinderella

  Cinderella

  Charles Perrault • Donkeyskin

  The Three Gowns

  Joseph Jacobs • Catskin

  The Story of the Black Cow

  Lin Lan • [Cinderella]

  The Princess in the Suit of Leather

  INTRODUCTION: Bluebeard

  Charles Perrault • Bluebeard

  Brothers Grimm • Fitcher’s Bird

  Brothers Grimm • The Robber Bridegroom

  Joseph Jacobs • Mr. Fox

  Mr. Bluebeard

  The Forbidden Room

  Mast-Truan

  Margaret Atwood • Bluebeard’s Egg

  Edna St. Vincent Millay • Bluebeard

  INTRODUCTION: Tricksters

  Brothers Grimm • Hansel and Gretel

  Fulano de Tal and His Children

  Brothers Grimm • The Juniper Tree

  Joseph Jacobs • The Rose-Tree

  The Singing Bones

  Charles Perrault • Little Thumbling

  Alexander Afanasev • Vasilisa the Fair

  Momotaro, or the Peach Boy

  Joseph Jacobs • Jack and the Beanstalk

  INTRODUCTION: Hans Christian Andersen

  The Little Mermaid

  The Little Match Girl

  The Girl Who Trod on the Loaf

  The Red Shoes

  The Emperor’s New Clothes

  The Nightingale

  INTRODUCTION: Oscar Wilde

  The Selfish Giant

  The Happy Prince

  The Nightingale and the Rose

  Criticism

  Ernst Bloch • The Fairy Tale Moves on Its Own in Time

  • From Better Castles in the Sky at the Country Fair and Circus, in Fairy Tales and Colportage

  Walter Benjamin • From The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov

  Robert Darnton • Peasants Tell Tales: The Meaning of Mother Goose

  Max Lüthi • Abstract Style

  Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar • [Snow White and Her Wicked Stepmother]

  Karen E. Rowe • From To Spin a Yarn: The Female Voice in Folklore and Fairy Tale

  Marina Warner • From The Old Wives’ Tale

  Jack Zipes • Breaking the Disney Spell

  Donald Haase • From Yours, Mine, or Ours? Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, and the Ownership of Fairy Tales

  Maria Tatar • From Sex and Violence: The Hard Core of Fairy Tales

  Lewis Hyde • From Slipping the Trap of Appetite

  Maria Tatar • From Female Tricksters as Double Agents

  Cristina Bacchilega • From The Fairy-Tale Web

  Jessica Tiffin • From Magical Illusion: Fairy-Tale Film

  Hans-Jörg Uther • From The Types of International Folktales

  Vladimir Propp • From Folklore and Literature

  • From Morphology of the Folktale

  Maria Tatar • Valediction

  Selected Bibliography

  Copyright

  Norton Critical Editions: Victorian Era

  Introduction

  “That’s nothing but a fairy tale.” Dismissive phrases like this one ignore just how powerfully the world of make-believe is implicated in the making of beliefs. Storytelling is anything but frivolous, juvenile, shallow, and inconsequential. If fairy tales have a high quotient of weirdness, it is because they recruit the extraordinary to help us understand the ordinary and what lies beneath it. Riddles wrapped in mysteries inside enigmas, they challenge us to make sense of nonsense.

  Fairy tales may present us with counterfactuals—C. S. Lewis called them “lies breathed through silver”—but they also transmit higher truths that help us navigate reality.1 More important, they hold forth the promise of escape to a better and more colorful Elsewhere. As Neil Gaiman puts it, what you bring back from reading fairy tales and fantasy fiction is “knowledge about the world and your predicament … weapons … armour: real things you can take back into your prison. Skills and knowledge and tools you can use to escape for real.”2

  The term fairy tale has not served the genre well. The sprightly supernatural creatures featured so prominently in the name rarely make an appearance in representative stories. There are no fairies in “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Jack and the Beanstalk,” or “Beauty and the Beast.” And although there may be enchantresses and fairy godmothers in “Cinderella” and in “Rapunzel,” they bear no resemblance to the woodland creatures found frequently in British and Celtic lore. It was the French, more specifically Mme d’Aulnoy, author of many literary fairy tales, who gave us the term contes de fées, leading us to frame the stories as if they turned on the lives of diminutive folk rather than ordinary people—men and women, girls and boys, all of whom are up against monsters of one kind or another.

  There is
magic in fairy tales, and the presence of enchantment is perhaps the defining feature of the genre.3 We are not so much in the realm of fairies as in the domain of what J. R. R. Tolkien referred to as Faërie, that “Perilous Realm” where anything can happen. Rumpelstiltskin spins straw to gold; Hansel and Gretel discover a woodland cottage with a roof made of bread and windows of spun sugar; a skull lying on the forest floor begins to talk; a boy sails down the river in a peach. Again and again we witness transformations that create a crisis, breaking down the divide between life and death, nature and culture, animal and human, or self and other. Magic implies metamorphosis, and presto! we can see the clear link between these two defining features of the fairy tale.

  Fairy tales take up deep cultural contradictions, creating what Claude Lévi-Strauss called “miniature models”—stories that dispense with extraneous details to give us primal anxieties and desires, the raw rather than the cooked, as it were. They use magic, not to falsify or delude, but rather to move us to imagine “what if?” or to wonder “why?” And that move, as both Plato and Aristotle assured us, marks the beginning of philosophy. Minimalist and miniaturized, fairy tales require us to fill in gaps, to think more and think harder about what moves the figures in them. We rarely learn what goes on in the minds of Cinderella, Jack, or Rumpelstiltskin—we just watch them in action. While fairy-tale heroes and heroines wander, we track their moves and wonder, in both senses of the term, at their adventures. It is no surprise that the term wonder tale has been proposed and embraced as an alternative to the misleading “fairy tale,” for it captures both the animating force of fairy tales and our sense of awe before the secondary worlds they build.4

  Fairy tales, like myths, capitalize on the kaleidoscopic with its multifaceted meanings: sparkling beauty, austere form, and visual power. Once told around the fireside or at the hearth, with adults and children sharing the storytelling space, they captured the play of light and shadow in their environment, creating special effects that yoked luminous beauty with the dark side. Imagine a time before electronic entertainments, with long nights around campsites and other sources of heat and light, and it is not much of a challenge to realize that human beings, always quick to adapt, began exchanging information, trading wisdom, and reporting gossip. “Literature,” Vladimir Nabokov tells us, “was born on the day when a boy came crying wolf wolf, and there was no wolf behind him.”5 And that boy’s story was no doubt compact, electrifying, and vivid. Once the conversation started about that wolf, it was easy enough, in subsequent versions, to begin adding, embellishing, exaggerating, and doing all the things that make for lively entertainments. Fairy tales are always more interesting when something is added to them. Each new telling recharges the narrative, making it crackle and hiss with cultural energy.

  With the invention of printing, the rise of literacy, and the twin forces of urbanization and industrialization, fairy tales moved gradually from oral storytelling cultures into pamphlets, broadsheets, and books, with improvisational energy and antic variation shut down, not for good of course but at least slowed down. Removed from Tolkien’s Cauldron of Story (where they had simmered away with successive generations adding new ingredients) as well as from Salman Rushdie’s Ocean of the Streams of Story (with its swiftly moving rainbow currents), print cultures enshrined standard tale versions that made variants deviations from the norm rather than unique reinventions.6 Those canonical versions of a story are nothing more than a fiction propping up our faith in defunct archetypes.

  Giovan Francesco Straparola’s The Facetious Nights (1551/1553), Giambattista Basile’s Pentamerone (1634/1636), Charles Perrault’s Tales of Mother Goose (1697), and Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s Children’s Stories and Household Tales (1812/1815) serve as landmarks on the path from oral storytelling traditions to print culture. These collections, like our own postmodern retellings, remind us that there is no original when it comes to fairy tales. To the contrary, these stories circulated in multiple versions, reconfigured by each teller to form a uniquely new tale with distinctly different effects, hence the advantages of referring to multiforms of a tale rather than variants. When we say the word Cinderella, we are referring not to a single text but to an entire array of tales with a persecuted heroine who may respond to her situation with defiance, cunning, ingenuity, self-pity, anguish, or grief. She will be called Yeh-Hsien in China, Cendrillon in Italy, Aschenputtel in Germany, and Catskin in England. Her sisters may be named One-Eye and Three-Eyes, Anastasia and Drizella, or she may have just one sister named Haloek, as is the case in an Indonesian tale. Her tasks range from tending cows to sorting peas to fetching embers for a fire.

  Although the multiforms of a tale can now be found between the covers of books and are often attributed to individual authors, editors, or compilers, the tales themselves derive largely from collective efforts. Here’s how Angela Carter reminded us that no one person can claim to be an authoritative source for a fairy tale: “Who first invented meatballs? In what country? Is there a definite recipe for potato soup? Think in terms of the domestic arts. ‘This is how I make potato soup.’ ”7 The story of Little Red Riding Hood, for example, can be discovered the world over, yet it varies radically in texture and flavor from one culture to the next. Even in a single culture, that texture or flavor may be different enough that a listener will impatiently interrupt the telling of a tale to insist: “That’s not how I heard it.”

  In France, Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother are devoured by the wolf. End of story. The German version recorded by the Brothers Grimm stages a rescue scene in which a hunter intervenes to liberate the girl and her granny from the belly of the wolf. A wolf in costume invites Caterinella, an Italian Red Riding Hood, to dine on the teeth and ears of her grandmother. A Chinese girl named Goldflower manages to slay the beast that wants to devour her by throwing a spear into its mouth. The mother of an African girl rescues her daughter from a predator by placing vipers and scorpions into the sack used by the monster to stow away his victims.

  Virtually every motif, trope, and image in a fairy tale, from the red riding hood of the girl in the woods to the glass slipper of the young woman at the royal ball, seems subject to change. In the British Isles, Cinderella goes by the name of Catskin, Mossycoat, or Rashin-Coatie. The challenge facing one Italian heroine is not spinning straw to gold but downing seven plates of lasagna. The father of a Norwegian Beauty pleads with his daughter to marry a white bear, while the mother in another tale runs interference for a snake. In Russia, the cannibalistic witch in the forest has a hut set on chicken legs surrounded by a fence with posts made of stacked human skulls. Rumpelstiltskin goes by many different names, among them Titelitury, Ricdin-Ricdon, Tom Tit Tot, Batzibitzili, Panzimanzi, and Whuppity Stoorie.

  While there is no original or standard version of “Cinderella,” “Sleeping Beauty,” or “Jack and the Beanstalk,” there is a basic plot structure (what folklorists refer to as a “tale type”) that appears despite the rich cultural variation. “Beauty and the Beast,” for example, according to the tale-type index (known as the ATU) first compiled by the Finnish folklorist Antti Aarne in 1910 and revised by Stith Thompson and Hans-Jörg Uther, consists of the following narrative moves, presented schematically as follows:

  I.  The monster as husband

  II.  Disenchantment of the monster

  III.  Loss of the husband

  IV.   Search for the husband

  V.   Recovery of the husband

  Once we see the bones of the narrative known to folklorists as tale type 425C, we recognize in a flash that “Beauty and the Beast” is structurally related to “East o’ the Sun and West o’ the Moon,” along with other stories, such as “Cupid and Psyche.” The stable core offers a useful tool for comparative analysis, bringing together tales that exhibit spirited variation, with beasts that include goats, mice, hedgehogs, crocodiles, and lions, along with heroines who must cover vast tracts of land in iron shoes, sort peas from lentils in an imp
ossibly short time, or trick a rival into letting them spend the night in a castle. Improvisational energy has always kept the fairy tale alive. Tellers walk down familiar paths but can branch off into new terrain at any moment, then wander back onto familiar territory.

  Given the possibilities for creative reinvention, it seems odd that so many writers have approached fairy tales with hushed reverence. The myth of fairy tales as some kind of holy scripture was energetically propagated by Charles Dickens, who brought to what he considered the literature of childhood the same devout piety he accorded children. Like the Brothers Grimm, Dickens hailed the “simplicity,” “purity,” and “innocent extravagance of fairy tales,” even as he praised the stories as powerful instruments of constructive socialization: “It would be hard to estimate the amount of gentleness and mercy that has made its way among us through these slight channels. Forbearance, courtesy, consideration for the poor and aged, kind treatment of animals, the love of nature, abhorrence of tyranny and brute force—many such things have been first nourished in the child’s heart by this powerful aid.”8 George Cruikshank, the artist who illustrated Dickens’s novels, took issue with the views of his contemporary. In the story “Hop-o’-my-Thumb,” a variant of “Jack and the Beanstalk,” he finds a protagonist who is an “unfeeling, artful liar, and a thief.” “Surely there is not much ‘purity’ in lying and thieving, and such a display of artful falsehood and successful robbery cannot be very advantageous lessons for the juvenile mind,” he added in outrage.9

  Even in 1944, when Allied troops were locked in combat with German soldiers, W. H. Auden decreed the Grimms’ fairy tales to be “among the few indispensable, common-property books upon which Western culture can be founded.” To drive home the point about fairy tales as sacred texts, he emphasized that the tales “rank next to the Bible in importance.”10 Like the devaluation of fairy tales, the overvaluation promotes a suspension of critical faculties and prevents us from taking a good, hard look at stories that are so obviously instrumental in shaping our values and aspirations. The reverence brought by some readers to fairy tales mystifies these stories, making them appear to be a source of transcendent spiritual truth and authority. That kind of mystification fosters a hands-off attitude and conceals the fact that fairy tales are constantly shape shifting, endlessly adaptable as they turn into different versions of themselves depending on the cultural surround.