Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies

1. Performing Wonders: Postmodern Revisions of Fairy Tales

1 PERFORMING WONDERS: POSTMODERN REVISIONS OF FAIRYTALES We tell stories because, in order to cope with the present and to face thefuture, we have to create the past, both as time and space, through narrating it. _W.F.H. NICOLAISEN Story demands sadism, depends on making something happen, forcing a change in another person, a battle of will and strength, victory/defeat, all occurring in a linear time with abeginning and an end. —TERESA DE LAURETIS (revising Laura Mulvey) ABUNDANCE, RATHER THAN LACK, motivates this study. Reproduced in a variety of discourses, fairy tales in the second half of the twentieth century have enjoyed an explosive popularity in North America and Western Europe. While many adults may not remember, and many children may not have been exposed to versions of "Snow White" or "Beauty and the Beast" other than Disney 's, we nevertheless respond to stereotyped and institutionali /,ed fragments of these narratives sufficiently for them to be good bait in jokes, commercials, songs, cartoons, and other elements of popular and consumer culture. Most visible as entertainment for children, whether in the form of bedtime-stories or of games and props marketed in conjunction with a movie or TVseries , fairy tales also play a role in education. Not only are children encouraged to retell or dramatize them in schools, but college students encounter them again in across-the-curriculum readers and in courses on children's literature and folklore. This legitimizing of the genre has extended to several psychotherapeutical approaches and contexts. Bruno Bettelheim's Freudian study The Uses of Enchantment is still a landmark, though critically revisited; professional storytellers have been instrumental in helping abused children move beyond a burdened-by-guilt stage; and Jungian popularizers, as Gertrud Mueller Nelson in her hopeful Here All Dwell Free and Robert Bly in his mythifying Iron John: A Book About Men, have enlisted fairy tales in their best-seller projects of healing the wounded feminine and masculine.1 Creative writers seem Performing Wonders 3 equally inspired by the fairy tale, which provides them with wellknown material pliable to political, erotic, or narrative manipulation . Belittled, yet pervasive and institutionalized, fair)' tales are thus produced and consumed to accomplish a variety of social functions in multiple contexts and in more or less explicitly ideological ways. Thinking of the fairy tale predominantly as children's literature, or even as "literature of childhood," cannot accommodate this proliferation of uses and meanings. The fairy tale "cannot be defined one-dimensionally," and in any case, "adults have always read, censored, approved, and distributed the so-called fairy tales for children" (Zipes, "Changing Function" 28 and 23). While keeping in mind the history of the fairy tale as literature for children , it is within the adjacent realms of folklore and literature that I intend to seek a clearer understanding of contemporary transformations of fairy tales. Though not the only legitimate mode of inquiry, this approach is historically and generically sound. Why? Because the "classic" fairy tale is a literary appropriation of the older folk tale, an appropriation which nevertheless continues to exhibit and reproduce some folkloric features. As a "borderline" or transitional genre, it bears the traces of orality, folkloric tradition, and socio-cultural performance, even when it is edited as literature for children or it is marketed with little respect for its history and materiality. And conversely, even when it claims to be folklore , the fairy tale is shaped by literary traditions with different social uses and users. The context of folklore and literature, and more specifically the more limited field of folk and literary narrative, is also especially productive to the analysis of those transformations found in the privileged, though not isolated, concern of this book—postmodern literary texts for adults.2 Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, literary authors have exploited the fairy tale in a variety of ways. To cite only a few of the most prominent examples , the fairy tale serves as structuring device for Charlotte Bronte in Jane Eyre and William Faulkner in Absalom, Absalom! as an explicitly ideological theme for Charles Dickens in Hard Times and Anne Sexton in Transformations, or as an expectation-setting allusion for HenryJames in What Maisie Knew and for Italo Calvino in his early works, starting with // sentiero deinidi di ragno. Literary authors such 4 Chapter 1 as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in "The Fairy Tale" or George MacDonald in "The Day Boy and...