Shakespeare, whose theatre greatly partook of folklore, helped the axiom set in. Lewis Caroll succumbed to the tradition and had a henpecked king piteously dominated by his Queen of Hearts. The moral of popular stories runs clear : Give a woman executive power and she is likely to foolishly ignore habits and customs that maintained harmony in home affairs. It looks as if the king's wife has always been an intruder and a bad counsellor. Just ask SnowWhite and Cinderella(1), Eliza and her eleven brothers(2), there's no trusting a female ruler. To what extent, we may ask ourselves, has the mythical pattern influenced historians stating that real monarchs and tyrants owed their falls to their egoistical wives, Nefertiti, Marie-Antoinette or Alexandra Fedorovna ? Not to mention political commentators and the way they've been stereotyping contemporary first ladies, be they American or European. Behind every great man there's a great woman, behind every lousy statesman there's an ogress. Fairy tales did teach us that a living stepmother is a harpy and her offspring the miniature doubles of their mother-monster.That a good girl must rely on her beauty and modesty to meet her prince charming and live happily ever after. That such ideals are upheld by dependable ghostly substitute mothers that prompt the girl to strive for adequacy. So should we still believe the smiling fairy or banish her from our bookshelves and mindsets ?
Can we still look for role models in a genre perceived as essentially pedagogical but also suspiciously ideological ?
On a psychoanalytical level, the death of the actual mother conveniently urges the princess to look for a caring mate that might fill the emotional void left gaping. In the paradigmatic tale, a fifteen-year-old girl starts journeying the world after her mother has passed on. The mother-daughter bond has to be broken so that heterosexual bonding might occur. In her quest to find Prince Charming, the teenager will be helped by a powerful female figure, most likely her godmother, that may be construed as the spectrum of her late mother. Everything seems to suggest a good mother is a dead mother. Indeed, traditionally , fairydom has been a largely feminine realm .Men are mostly implements of the plot, often being relegated to the mere role of reward for the girl's trials and tribulations. Female characters, on the other hand, are pulling the strings of fate. But because marriage is the regular outcome of the story, female protagonists cannot but perceive each other as dangerous rivals, unless, yet again, they're dead. Granted though, men hardly fare better in fairyland. Besides being beguiled by their shrewish spouses, they flout moral principles and repeatedly go against the supposedly cultural taboo of incest, bidding their own daughter to marry them(3). They will also send their young brides to the funeral pyre on the mere allegation of witchcraft and grave robbery(4). Unlike their female counterparts, they generally have no supernatural aid or mentor to lead them on and keep making terrible blunders. If the insecure ladies will cunningly kill out of jealousy, their dull male partners are liable to commit crimes because they just don't get it : they have a hard time trying to keep what their Royal Prerogative has offered them, the most beautiful girl on the realm.
The one cause of all that topsyturvy, the one factor that brings about female rampage and male depraved passion is a princess's exceptional beauty. The ironic twist of fate is that the latter has to pay dearly for her compelling charms, and prove she's worth the cursed privilege. For if the heroine took advantage of her sexual allure immediately that would rank her among the sluts so that she must ignore her beauty or rather suffer from it before gaining her right to sexual gratification. The various hardships she has to go through can easily be viewed as sado-masochistic rituals that shift sexual initiatives onto the villain. Thus the traditional fairy tale hardly corresponds to a glorious definition of the bildungsroman, the novel of education : the princess has to show obedience and compliance if she wants to go ahead and reach her goal, this is more about submission and repression than about self-empowerment.
Of course her beauty fits conservative standards : the younger, thinner, blonder, fairer the girl, the better. Her feet and her fingers are of childish sizes, her modesty and her lack of sexual savvy are evidenced by her propensity to blush. However, that beauty is not so much an ideal model to be pursued as a fixture of the genre, an invariant that systematically triggers off the whole narrating process. Although I firmly believe the images of female frailty fed to young girls through fairy tales act as incentives to further depreciate their selves and cultivate mannerism rather than intelligence and psychological autonomy, I also suspect most authors of fairy tales used those ageist/sexist/racist stereotypes in a partly critical way. Humour permeates those stories that stemmed from oral narratives and carried on using all the stratagems evolved by storytellers to build up some connivance with the audience. At the risk of slightly upsetting the general or perhaps Victorian/bourgeois interpretation of fairy tales as edifying stories, I would argue that a major purpose of storytelling might have been to deride and lampoon more than to lecture. In other words, the tools of deconstructivist practices were already there for the taking. I share Bettelheim's opinion(5) that a good fairy tale must present several layers of interpretation and appeal to the subconscious to allow every listener to make it their own. The only thing is Freudian psychologists like him forgot to practise what they preached and often reduced tales to oedipal archetypes, thus buying into patriarchal conceptions of socialisation. This subversive quality does not rule out moralistic aims, but rather extends their modes of expression. Like in a conventional satire, the mighty rich that inhabit fairyland recurrently abuse their powers. Fairies ally with Queens to grant privileges and deal out punishments. Justice is missing in fairyland, let us not be mistaken by the supposed happy-ending : it is but a lull in the tormented lives of waifs and strays. Soon another story will befall those stock characters and blow away all their castles in the air. Soaps function the same way, bad luck, repressed hatred dog the heroines so that they can never get any long-lasting rest. Besides, the causative relationship established between exceptional beauty and terminal bliss both lends weight to societal pressures on women to conform to erotico-aesthetical norms and makes the whole thing look like a farce. In fairyland desire rules and if our wishes are fulfilled we would be fools to mistake them for reality. If they are not-and this is what any budding feminist listener/reader will resent-- we'd better open the forbidden door and let our own desire take control.
For here happiness and misfortune are tossed around in an erratic way, the name of the game being the transference of magical(sexual and political)power. Beauty is just one extremely powerful gift among the array of bounties that fate or fairies will gracefully deliver. Sometimes writers blatantly use the trick derisively, intimating that physical perfection depends on the whims of nature/fairies . Think of how an offended senior fairy can ruin your youth. Thus Old Magotine turns a newborn princess into an ugly duckling. It is indeed a toss-up, as one twin grows into a beautiful maiden while the other increases in ugliness day by day. Madame d'Aulnoy(6) conjured up Magotine, Carabosse's capable sister, weaving together her own plot with old legends of witches. Fairy tales belong to mythology and each author picks up stock characters from the age-old pool of hero(in)es and monsters. Mme d'Aulnoy partially subverted the genre when she introduced an ugly heroine but kept the traditional sado-masochistic narrating dynamics of trials and rewards. The fact is many female storytellers placed the superficiality of physical beauty at the core of their tales, the most famous of them being Madame Leprince de Beaumont, author of The Beauty and the Beast(7). Leprince borrowed from d'Aulnoy's Green Snake the characters of the twin sisters, Belote and Laidronette and worked out a fable placing the culture of the mind above the art of coquetry. Her tale was a lesson for girls not to neglect their education , an admonition that was repeated by British philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft thirty years later(8). No wonder female storytellers insisted on the potentially harmful effect of youth beauty : many of them had personally gone through forced marriages to elderly husbands and striven to escape matrimonial prison. Being handsome could be a burden and attract unrequited passion. What didn't change much in those tales written by female authors was the victim status of the heroine. She still had to lose and go through humiliation in order to win. But the changing process didn't stop there. Further on, feminist rewritings started inverting roles and turned the witch/wicked fairy into the real abettor(9), sisterhood thus replacing rivalry. Did that kill the genre ? No. After all, didn't fairy tales use to be women's stories, popular myths transmitted by nannies and mothers to their young girls to teach them morals and warn them against life's dilemmas and hardships ? The phantasmal nature of the genre allows all kinds of messages to be delivered. Certainly, fairy tales can be used as cultural tools against women's emancipation. American writer Colette Dowling identified women's alleged fear of success as " the Cinderella Complex "(10). Although her description of the syndrome of social inadequacy seems to relate more to the babyboomers than to the younger generations of active women, her analysis still conveys relevancy when she links social conditioning to mostly female mental disorders such as anorexia nervosa , " the bizarre starvation syndrome in which adolescent girls diet themselves right out of existence in a sadly paradoxical attempt to get some control over their lives " or the " neurotic dependency "of battered wives. Women, she contends, were trained to expect salvation from the outside world so they underplay their own potentialities and feel contrived to stunt their physical and intellectual growth. Obviously a feminist educator feels queasy about inculcating the same depency patterns in young girls and will tamper with the text's apparent sexist overtones when relating classical and culturally unavoidable tales to mystery-craving kids, twisting the end of the story, making freedom rather than marriage and love the outcome of the plot.Yet traditional fairy tales harbour other psychological patterns that strangely tally with feminist approaches : take the pattern of the father's betrayal that belong in many a prologue to the genre, it does teach girls about the sometimes painful change of attitude shown by formerly ego-boosting fathers as their daughters lapse into alien femininity. Fairy tales also tackle issues rarely acknowlegded in more sedate children's literature, like sibling rivalry and parental abuse.
It seems the imaginative genre provides some room for wishes and phobias to be expressed. That is why there has been an unflagging swirl of feminist revisionist versions of authoritative folktales(11). As some turned to science fiction to create a political utopia or dystopia, others(or indeed the same fantasists)would rather delve into the Jungian world of fairies to search for new paths leading to new dreams or nightmares. The project is to reclaim fantasy from conservative ideologies. It sometimes involves a return to earlier drafts of the tales. Thus English writer Angela Carter edited two books that compiled " original " versions of folktales from around the world(12), as a tribute to the genre that extols " heroic optimism ", reveals our fears, while comforting us with its nursery rhyme quality. Carter liked the rawness, the violence and mental perversion that characterize folktales. She didn't want to do away with the crudest aspect of the genre, with its cannibalism/rape motif, its string of revenge tricks and murders, yet she deliberately chose stories where female figures stood tall, proud, and in control of their destinies. Still, the risk of re-telling " old wives'tales " is the reinforcement of popular stereotypes like the figures of the nagging wife and infuriate husband. Again, the reader is free to construe such patterns as sociologically relevant or politically harmful and biased. When modern writers set about inventing new tales they are inclined to give more psychological substance and complexity to their heroes. Often switching to introspective first-person narrating, they take us through fantastic voyages, as does Jeanette Winterson in her acclaimed Sexing the Cherry(13), a politico-poetic tale all about travelling, travelling across time boundaries, space boundaries, mind and gender boundaries. You can trust Winterson to turn traditional tales upside down and alter your perception of princes and witches. A third approach to fairy-tale rewriting is to integrate classical motifs into mundane short stories and novels. Perhaps one of the most frequently revisited motifs is the symbolism of Sleeping Beauty. Although its interpretations diverge, the heroine's fall into unconsciousness is largely conceived of as a time of introspection rather than passive waiting. American nineteenth-century writer Kate Chopin used it that way in The Awakening and more recently Joyce Carol Oates had a " clinican "version of it in her story " the Crossing "(14).
French Naturalist storytellers also revisited the genre and pushed the logic of irony to its dire conclusion, shattering the heroine's dreams of romantic redemption. Emma Bovary(15), like her foresister Cinderella, dreamt of meeting her prince at the ball but her own destiny falls short of the happy-ending rounding off most fairy tales. She would undoubtedly have benefited from the feminist warning not to bet on the prince. To be honest, though, in Madame Bovary, it is the aristocratic lad who supposedly drops a cigar case that the eponym will cherish as a fetish for a while and to no avail. The magic simply won't operate. No benevolent godmother will untangle the toils of fate. Just as god disappeared from morality, fairies largely disappeared from female epics. The down side of this change of tone is that modern-day popular culture has often proved unable to come up with a new satisfying ending. Series and thrillers hammer out the same grim ending to a girl's attempts to roam the world alone : she is all too often slain by a serial killer on his rounds. Rapists and murderers may be more real than fairies and monsters but they play out the same function, frightening girls into passivity and demureness. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, with all her pretensions to asserting girl power, can hardly be deemed a positive role model. The values the teenage icon defends are plain xenophobia and paranoia, thinly disguised as vampire hatred.Yet another work of Gothic fiction inspired by medieval aesthetics and morals ? Perhaps, but nothing too subversive in there , just the ghost of a she-devil.
(2)Hans Christian Andersen, The Wild Swans, 1838
(3)Charles Perrault, The She Donkey's Skin, 1694 ; Grimm, The Girl without Hands, 1857 ; about the motif of incest in fairy tales see http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/incest.html#shifting by Professor D. L. Ashliman
(4)Andersen, op.cit.
(5)Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment, Penguin Books, 1976
(6)Madame d'Aulnoy(Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville), Serpentin-vert, 1698
(7)Mme Leprince de Beaumont, Le magasin des enfants, 1757
(8)Mary Wolstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792
(9)Delia Sherman, Carabosse, : http://www.endicott-studio.com/cofboss.html
(10)Colette Dowling, The Cinderella Complex,Pocket Books, 1981 ;American psychologist Matina Horner introduced the idea of women's " fear of success " in the 1970's
(11)For a cogent review of feminist criticism and re-writing see : Jack Zipes, Don't Bet on the Prince, Routledge, 1989
(12)Angela Carter, The Virago Book of Fairy Tales, and The Second Virago Book of Fairy Tales,Virago, 1992
(13)Jeanette Winterson , Sexing the Cherry, Vintage, 1996
(14)Joyce Carol Oates, " The Crossing ",in Ruby Slippers, Golden Tears, ed.Ellen Datlow&Terri Windling, Avon Eos,1999
(15)Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 1857