The Dimensions of Fairy Tale Romance

When Wilhelm Grimm's recently discovered tale was published in 1988 as Dear Mili—put aside the question of whether that story represents an authentic folktale out of the oral tradition—what Maurice Sendak's illustrations demonstrated was the multi-dimensionality of the story. The young girl, rushed into the forest to escape the horrors of war (both an archetypal war and a real war), sits in the woods, her guardian angel sleeping behind her. Gnome-like figures crossing a bridge behind her suggest that the child is the prototype of all refugees, fleeing from war. On another level the pictures suggest the various needs of a child as she grows to maturity. And on yet another level it is a story about story—as, perhaps, all good stories are.

The suggestion of these illustrations is that folktales are expressions of complicated motivations; they are short explorations into the human soul, with all of its needs and sublimities and vagaries and ills. This is precisely what recent scholarship in folklore has shown, including the admirable collection of essays, The Brothers Grimm and Folktale, edited by James McGlathery. In his most recent work, Fairy Tale Romance, McGlathery sets out to examine the portrayal of sexual desire—of romance—in the fairytale. He asserts at the outset that he is challenging a belief in the naiveté and innocence of the fairy tale, though he would be hard pressed to find a contemporary critic who would describe fairy tales in these terms; he challenges a straw man long since blown away. Nevertheless he deals with an important facet of fairy tales: how they describe or establish situations in which romantic love plays a significant, if not overwhelming, role. By examining the literary fairy tales—tales based upon oral "texts" but transcribed through the medium of the literary imagination—of the Grimm brothers, Basile, and Perrault, McGlathery is able to conclude that many of the tales speak directly to and about the erotic elements of love and marriage. Despite revisions and filterings and editings, those elements, McGlathery asserts, are still clear in the tales.

McGlathery goes on to demonstrate this clarity by dividing his considerations according to types of relationships: brother/sister, beauty/beast, father/daughter, witches and hags, reluctant and true brides, reluctant and true grooms. Each chapter is a series of interpretive vignettes, short examinations of fairy tales which fit into the respective categories, each examination rigorously pushing the presence of erotic love—regardless of the nature of the relationship being discussed.

Now it is not difficult to perceive the presence of erotic love in fairy tales, particularly when the definition of that term is left so vague as to imply any kind of sexual attraction. The young prince's attraction to Sleeping Beauty or to Snow White, or the attraction of the frog to the princess whose golden ball he restores, seems quite evident, an integral part of the story. But in McGlathery's reading of the tales there are no distinctions between the kinds of love that the stories depict; no matter what the relationship, McGlathery reads demonstrations of love as inevitably erotic love. Parental love, sibling love, filial love, romantic love—all seem to have pretty much the same qualities; they all move in precisely the same direction.

The result is that this study of fairy tales is unrelentingly one-dimensional. Over and over, the tales are interpreted to mean about the same thing: all deal with awakening erotic love and its attendant frustrations and glories. While this is an important element in the fairy tale, McGlathery's refusal to put the stories in any context other than that of erotic love, or to consider that element as one of many in a complex tale, leads inevitably to interpretive distortion.

McGlathery thus proposes an unfortunate series of conjectures about the meanings of the fairy tales under examination, conjectures which can only be supported if one accepts the grid which McGlathery forces onto the tales. In his analysis—and I take the following...