"From Rags to Riches: Fairy Tales and the Family Romance"

For all their variety and richness, fairy tales display a remarkable number of recurrent structural and thematic patterns. Even the cast of characters enacting the plots of these tales remains uncommonly stable for a genre that has enjoyed global popularity. As the eminent Russian folklorist Vladimir Propp has shown, every figure in this broad cast of characters can be assigned to one of seven "spheres of action" and thereby takes on one of seven clearly defined roles.¹ At the risk of engaging in radical reductionism, some recent critics have advanced the view that fairy tales stage a conflict between a hero and his antagonist. All other characters play only supporting roles as allies of one or the other.² This dichotomy between helpers and adversaries seems indeed to be as basic to the structure of fairy tales as the persistent binary oppositions between good and evil, weak and strong, humble and royal, young and old, familiar and alien.

In order to extend our understanding of the significance of these oppositions, it will be useful to analyze the situations that induce the hero to leave home for the other world of the fairy tale. The family (more specifically, the nuclear family) furnishes the basic configuration of the tale's characters: mother, father, and child. Only rarely is a grandparent cast in a cameo role; uncles, aunts, cousins, and other distant kin are entirely absent from the repertoire of characters. The world of the fairy tale is generally inhabited by two groups of figures at opposite ends of the social spectrum: royal personages and humble folk.³ Fairy tales trace a development from rags to riches, from punishment to reward, from the dissolution of one nuclear family to the formation of a new one.⁴ The tale's hero is essentially a wanderer. His journey takes him from home to a marvelous world of enchanted forests, foreign terrain, and royal kingdoms, and finally back to a modified and elevated form of his first home. The hero's story takes place in the remote past, "a long time ago, when wishing was still of use," as the Brothers Grimm put it. Yet the wishes expressed by the adolescent heroes of fairy tales are rarely fulfilled instantaneously, as some critics would have it.⁵ Rather, the unexpressed thoughts and fantasies of these heroes are translated, from the moment that they leave home, into palpable physical form.

The familiar formula—"once upon a time"—that generally launches the fairy tale and constitutes its most characteristic feature also ushers in a description of the specific family situation that draws the hero from home to the arena of the marvelous. Home, normally the locus of stability and security, comes to figure as the abode of powers at once hostile and sinister.⁶ Beginning with a stable situation—the nuclear family at home—the fairy tale quickly shifts to a state of disequilibrium. One member of the nuclear family disturbs the initial tranquility and renders life at home intolerable. The motives for the hero's departure vary: he may be a burden to his impoverished parents; he may be the target of maternal envy or paternal anger; or he may wish to avoid punitive measures for his transgressions. In the tales I propose to review, the child-hero is always a victim: he has been neglected, punished, or abandoned by his parents. Escape from home becomes his sole source of consolation. Yet his flight does not take him into a magical kingdom where every wish comes true, but into a world where he encounters villains with powers far more formidable than those of the villains he left behind him at home.

The story of Hansel and Gretel admirably illustrates the way in which an evil parent at home is reflected and distorted in the mirror of the fairy-tale world. The stepmother who fails to provide and drives the children from home reemerges in the woods as a deceptive provider—a cannibalistic fiend masquerading as a magnanimous mother.⁷ In other tales, say "Brother and Sister," the equation between the two figures is explicitly...