Angela Carter's Book Of Fairy Tales Read online

  But one story in this book, ‘How a Husband Weaned His Wife from Fairy Tales’, shows just how much fairy stories could change a woman’s desires, and how much a man might fear that change, would go to any lengths to keep her from pleasure, as if pleasure itself threatened his authority.

  Which, of course, it did.

  It still does.

  The stories here come from Europe, Scandinavia, the Caribbean, the USA, the Arctic, Africa, the Middle East and Asia; the collection has been consciously modelled on those anthologies compiled by Andrew Lang at the turn of the century that once gave me so much joy – the Red, Blue, Violet, Green, Olive Fairy Books, and so on, through the spectrum, collections of tales from many lands.

  I haven’t put this collection together from such heterogeneous sources to show that we are all sisters under the skin, part of the same human family in spite of a few superficial differences. I don’t believe that, anyway. Sisters under the skin we might be, but that doesn’t mean we’ve got much in common. (See Part Six, ‘Unhappy Families’.) Rather, I wanted to demonstrate the extraordinary richness and diversity of responses to the same common predicament – being alive – and the richness and diversity with which femininity, in practice, is represented in ‘unofficial’ culture: its strategies, its plots, its hard work.

  Most of the stories here do not exist in only the one form but in many different versions, and different societies procure different meanings for what is essentially the same narrative. The fairy-tale wedding has a different significance in a polygamous society than it does in a monogamous one. Even a change of narrator can effect a transformation of meaning. The story ‘The Furburger’ was originally told by a twenty-nine-year-old Boy Scout executive to another young man; I haven’t changed one single word, but its whole meaning is altered now that I am telling it to you.

  The stories have seeded themselves all round the world, not because we all share the same imagination and experience but because stories are portable, part of the invisible luggage people take with them when they leave home. The Armenian story ‘Nourie Hadig’, with its resemblance to the ‘Snow White’ made famous via the Brothers Grimm and Walt Disney, was collected in Detroit, not far from the townships where Richard M. Dorson took down stories from African Americans that fuse African and European elements to make something new. Yet one of these stories, ‘The Cat-Witch’, has been current in Europe at least since the werewolf trials in France in the sixteenth century. But context changes everything; ‘The Cat-Witch’ acquires a whole new set of resonances in the context of slavery.

  Village girls took stories to the city, to swap during endless kitchen chores or to entertain other people’s children. Invading armies took storytellers home with them. Since the introduction of cheap printing processes in the seventeenth century, stories have moved in and out of the printed word. My grandmother told me the version of ‘Red Riding Hood’ she had from her own mother, and it followed almost word for word the text first printed in this country in 1729. The informants of the Brothers Grimm in Germany in the early nineteenth century often quoted Perrault’s stories to them – to the irritation of the Grimms, since they were in pursuit of the authentic German Geist.

  But there is a very specific selectivity at work. Some stories – ghost stories, funny stories, stories that already exist as folk tales – move through print into memory and speech. But although the novels of Dickens and other nineteenth-century bourgeois writers might be read aloud, as the novels of Gabriel Garcia Marquez are read aloud in Latin American villages today, stories about David Copperfield and Oliver Twist did not take on an independent life and survive as fairy tales – unless, as Mao Zedong said about the effects of the French Revolution, it is too soon to tell.

  Although it is impossible to ascribe an original home for any individual story and the basic plot elements of the story we know as ‘Cinderella’ occur everywhere from China to Northern England (look at ‘Beauty and Pock Face’, then at ‘Mossycoat’), the great impulse towards collecting oral material in the nineteenth century came out of the growth of nationalism and the concept of the nation-state with its own, exclusive culture; with its exclusive affinity to the people who dwelt therein. The word ‘folklore’ itself was not coined until 1846, when William J. Thomas invented the ‘good Saxon compound’ to replace imprecise and vague terms such as ‘popular literature’ and ‘popular antiquities’, and to do so without benefit of alien Greek or Latin roots. (Throughout the nineteenth century, the English believed themselves to be closer in spirit and racial identity to the Teutonic tribes of the North than to the swarthy Mediterranean types that started at Dunkirk; this conveniently left the Scots, the Welsh and the Irish out of the picture, too.)

  Jacob Ludwig Grimm and his brother, Wilhelm Carl, philologists, antiquarians, medievalists, sought to establish the cultural unity of the German people via its common traditions and language; their ‘Household Tales’ became the second most popular and widely circulated book in Germany for over a century, dominated only by the Bible. Their work in collecting fairy tales was part of the nineteenth-century struggle for German unification, which didn’t happen until 1871. Their project, which involved a certain degree of editorial censorship, envisaged popular culture as an untapped source of imaginative energy for the bourgeoisie; ‘they [the Grimms] wanted the rich cultural tradition of the common people to be used and accepted by the rising middle class,’ says Jack Zipes.

  At roughly the same time, and inspired by the Grimms, Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe were collecting stories in Norway, publishing in 1841 a collection that ‘helped free the Norwegian language from its Danish bondage, while forming and popularizing in literature the speech of the common people’, according to John Gade. In the mid nineteenth century, J.F. Campbell went to the Highlands of Scotland to note down and preserve ancient stories in Scots Gaelic before the encroaching tide of the English language swept them away.

  The events leading up to the Irish Revolution in 1916 precipitated a surge of passionate enthusiasm for native Irish poetry, music and story, leading eventually to the official adoption of Irish as the national language. (W.B. Yeats compiled a famous anthology of Irish fairy tales.) This process continues; there is at present a lively folklore department at the University of Bir Zeit: ‘Interest in preserving the local culture is particularly strong on the West Bank as the status of Palestine continues to be the subject of international deliberation and the identity of a separate Palestinian Arab people is called into question,’ says Inea Bushnaq.

  That I and many other women should go looking through the books for fairy-tale heroines is a version of the same process – a wish to validate my claim to a fair share of the future by staking my claim to my share of the past.

  Yet the tales themselves, evidence of the native genius of the people though they be, are not evidence of the genius of any one particular people over any other, nor of any one particular person; and though the stories in this book were, almost all of them, noted down from living mouths, collectors themselves can rarely refrain from tinkering with them, editing, collating, putting two texts together to make a better one. J.F. Campbell noted down in Scots Gaelic and translated verbatim; he believed that to tinker with the stories was, as he said, like putting tinsel on a dinosaur. But since the material is in the common domain, most collectors – and especially editors – cannot keep their hands off it.

  Removing ‘coarse’ expressions was a common nineteenth-century pastime, part of the project of turning the universal entertainment of the poor into the refined pastime of the middle classes, and especially of the middle-class nursery. The excision of references to sexual and excremental functions, the toning down of sexual situations and the reluctance to include ‘indelicate’ material – that is, dirty jokes – helped to denaturize the fairy tale and, indeed, helped to denaturize its vision of everyday life.

  Of course, questions not only of class, gender, but of personality entered into this from the start of th
e whole business of collecting. The ebullient and egalitarian Vance Randolph was abundantly entertained with ‘indelicate’ material in the heart of the Bible Belt of Arkansas and Missouri, often by women. It is difficult to imagine the scholarly and austere Grimm brothers establishing a similar rapport with their informants – or, indeed, wishing to do so.

  Nevertheless, it is ironic that the fairy tale, if defined as orally transmitted narrative with a relaxed attitude to the reality principle and plots constantly refurbished in the retelling, has survived into the twentieth century in its most vigorous form as the dirty joke and, as such, shows every sign of continuing to flourish in an unofficial capacity on the margins of the twenty-first-century world of mass, universal communication and twenty-four-hour public entertainment.

  I’ve tried, as far as possible, to avoid stories that have been conspicuously ‘improved’ by collectors, or rendered ‘literary’, and I haven’t rewritten any myself, however great the temptation, or collated two versions, or even cut anything, because I wanted to keep a sense of many different voices. Of course, the personality of the collector, or of the translator, is bound to obtrude itself, often in unconscious ways; and the personality of the editor, too. The question of forgery also raises its head; a cuckoo in the nest, a story an editor, collector, or japester has made up from scratch according to folkloric formulae and inserted in a collection of traditional stories, perhaps in the pious hope that the story will escape from the cage of the text and live out an independent life of its own among the people. Or perhaps for some other reason. If I have inadvertently picked up any authored stories of this kind, may they fly away as freely as the bird at the end of ‘The Wise Little Girl’.

  This selection has also been mainly confined to material available in English, due to my shortcomings as a linguist. This exercises its own form of cultural imperialism upon the collection.

  On the surface, these stories tend to perform a normative function – to reinforce the ties that bind people together, rather than to question them. Life on the economic edge is sufficiently precarious without continual existential struggle. But the qualities these stories recommend for the survival and prosperity of women are never those of passive subordination. Women are required to do the thinking in a family (see ‘A Pottle o’ Brains’) and to undertake epic journeys (‘East o’ the Sun and West o’ the Moon’). Please refer to the entire section titled: ‘Clever Women, Resourceful Girls and Desperate Stratagems’ to see how women contrived to get their own way.

  Nevertheless, the solution adopted in ‘The Two Women Who Found Freedom’ is rare; most fairy tales and folk tales are structured around the relations between men and women, whether in terms of magical romance or of coarse domestic realism. The common, unspoken goal is fertility and continuance. In the context of societies from which most of these stories spring, their goal is not a conservative one but a Utopian one, indeed a form of heroic optimism – as if to say, one day, we might be happy, even if it won’t last.

  But if many stories end with a wedding, don’t forget how many of them start with a death – of a father, or a mother, or both; events that plunge the survivors directly into catastrophe. The stories in Part Six, ‘Unhappy Families’, strike directly at the heart of human experience. Family life, in the traditional tale, no matter whence its provenance, is never more than one step away from disaster.

  Fairy-tale families are, in the main, dysfunctional units in which parents and step-parents are neglectful to the point of murder and sibling rivalry to the point of murder is the norm. A profile of the typical European fairy-tale family reads like that of a ‘family at risk’ in a present-day inner-city social worker’s casebook, and the African and Asian families represented here offer evidence that even widely different types of family structures still create unforgivable crimes between human beings too close together. And death causes more distress in a family than divorce.

  The ever-recurring figure of the stepmother indicates how the households depicted in these stories are likely to be subject to enormous internal changes and reversals of role. Yet however ubiquitous the stepmother in times when the maternal mortality rates were high and a child might live with two, three or even more stepmothers before she herself embarked on the perilous career of motherhood, the ‘cruelty’ and indifference almost universally ascribed to her may also reflect our own ambivalences towards our natural mothers. Note that in ‘Nourie Hadig’ it is the child’s real mother who desires her death.

  For women, the ritual marriage at the story’s ending may be no more than the prelude to the haunting dilemma in which the mother of the Grimms’ Snow White found herself – she longed with all her heart for a child ‘as white as snow, as red as blood, as black as ebony’, and died when that child was born, as if the price of the daughter were the life of the mother. When we hear a story, we bring all our own experience to that story: ‘They all lived happy and died happy, and never drank out of a dry cappy’, says the ending of ‘Kate Crackernuts’. Cross fingers, touch wood. The Arabian stories from Inea Bushnaq’s anthology conclude with a stately dignity that undercuts the whole notion of a happy ending: ‘. . . they lived in happiness and contentment until death, the parter of the truest lovers, divided them’ (‘The Princess in the Suit of Leather’).

  ‘They’ in the above story were a princess and a prince. Why does royalty feature so prominently in the recreational fiction of the ordinary people? For the same reason that the British royal family features so prominently in the pages of the tabloid press, I suppose – glamour. Kings and queens are always rich beyond imagining, princes handsome beyond belief, princesses lovely beyond words – yet they may live in a semi-detached palace, all the same, suggesting that the storyteller was not over-familiar with the lifestyle of real royalty. ‘The palace had many rooms and one king occupied one half of it and the other the other half,’ according to a Greek story not printed here. In ‘The Three Measures of Salt’, the narrator states grandly: ‘in those days everyone was a king’.

  Susie Hoogasian-Villa, whose stories came from Armenian immigrants in a heavily industrialized part of the (republican) USA, puts fairy-tale royalty into perspective: ‘Frequently kings are only head men of their villages; princesses do the menial work.’ Juleidah, the princess in the suit of leather, can bake a cake and clean a kitchen with democratic skill, yet when she dresses up she makes Princess Di look plain: ‘Tall as a cypress, with a face like a rose and the silks and jewels of a king’s bride, she seemed to fill the room with light.’ We are dealing with imaginary royalty and an imaginary style, with creations of fantasy and wish-fulfilment, which is why the loose symbolic structure of fairy tales leaves them so open to psychoanalytic interpretation, as if they were not formal inventions but informal dreams dreamed in public.

  This quality of the public dream is a characteristic of popular art, even when as mediated by commercial interests as it is today in its manifestations of horror movie, pulp novel, soap opera. The fairy tale, as narrative, has far less in common with the modern bourgeois forms of the novel and the feature film than it does with contemporary demotic forms, especially those ‘female’ forms of romance. Indeed, the elevated rank and excessive wealth of some of the characters, the absolute poverty of others, the excessive extremes of good luck and ugliness, of cleverness and stupidity, of vice and virtue, beauty, glamour and guile, the tumultuous plethora of events, the violent action, the intense and inharmonious personal relationships, the love of a row for its own sake, the invention of a mystery for its own sake – all these are characteristics of the fairy tale that link it directly to the contemporary television soap opera.

  The now defunct US soap opera Dynasty, whose success was such a phenomenon of the early 1980s, utilized a cast list derived with almost contemptuous transparency from that of the Brothers Grimm – the wicked stepmother, the put-upon bride, the ever-obtuse husband and father. ‘Dynasty’s proliferating subplots featured abandoned children, arbitrary voyages, random misadventur
e – all characteristics of the genre. (‘The Three Measures of Salt’ is a story of this kind; R.M. Dawkins’s marvellous collection of stories from Greece, most from as recently as the 1950s, frequently demonstrates Mother Goose at her most melodramatic.)

  See also ‘The Battle of the Birds’ for the way in which one story can effortlessly segue into another, if there is time to spare and an enthusiastic audience, just as the narrative in soap opera surges ceaselessly back and forth like a tide – now striving towards some sort of satisfactory consummation, now reversing itself smartly as if it has been reminded that there are no endings, happy or otherwise, in real life: that ‘The End’ is only a formal device of high art.

  The narrative drive is powered by the question: ‘What happened then?’ The fairy tale is user-friendly; it always comes up with an answer to that question. The fairy tale has needed to be user-friendly in order to survive. It survives today because it has transformed itself into a medium for gossip, anecdote, rumour; it remains hand-crafted, even in a period when television disseminates the mythologies of advanced industrialized countries throughout the world, wherever there are TV sets and the juice to make them flicker.

  ‘The people of the North are losing their stories along with their identities,’ says Lawrence Millman, echoing what J.F. Campbell said in the West Highlands a century and a half ago. But this time, Millman may be right: ‘Near Gjoa Haven, Northwest Territories, I stayed in an Innuit tent which was unheated, but equipped with the latest in stereo and video gadgetry.’