In olden times, when wishing was having...: Classic and contemporary fairy tales

Headnote

1.

Whatever is an exit from that country...cannot be an entrance.

JOHN CROWLEY, "The Green Child"

THE fairy tale, as a literary/cultural genre, has traditionally been associated with women; and women have, in different times and in distinctly different ways, impressed upon these tales the nature of their deepest fantasies. The fairy tale of tradition has been imaginatively transformed in recent decades into what might be called the "re-visioned" fairy tale, in which the archetype is retained but given a distinctly contemporary interpretation by individual artists.

Distinguished archivists like the pioneering Charles Perrault (whose Histoires ou contes du temps passe appeared in 1697), Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm (whose Die Kinder- und Hausmarchen appeared in various volumes, 1812-1857), and Hans Christian Andersen (whose collections appeared 1837-1874) have been male, but most of the material they collected was provided by women. It is of one of these extraordinary sources that Wilhelm Grimm speaks so warmly in the preface to an early Grimms' edition:

[This woman] retains fast in her mind these old sagas-which talent, she says, is not granted to everyone. She recounts her stories thoughtfully, accurately, with uncommon vividness and evident delight-first quite easily, but then, if required, over again, slowly, so that with a bit of practice it is possible to take down her dictation, word for word.

The very expression "fairy tale" calls to mind a quintessential female sensibility; the tales are "old wives' tales," "Mother Goose tales." This association has long been an ambiguous one, not altogether flattering to women, and frequently disturbing.

For the term "fairy tale" is itself ambiguous. Sometimes it is frankly pejorative, dismissive. Its received connotation has to do with benign, rather brainless fantasy: And they lived happily ever after. But many fairy tales are nightmares of senseless cruelty and violence (as in "The Girl without Hands" a father chops off his daughter's hands to save himself from the devil-and this, one of the "good" fathers in the Grimm collection); and the terms of "happiness" in others (Hansel and Gretel's reconciliation with the father who had left them to die in the forest, for instance; the torture death of Snow White's wicked stepmother) are problematic to say the least. Girls and women are the uncontested property of men,...