Children, War, and the Imaginative Space of Fairy Tales

In childhood, only the surroundings show, and nothing is explained. Children do not possess a social analysis of what is happening to them, or around them, so the landscape and the pictures it presents have to remain a background, taking on meaning later, from different circumstances.

--Carolyn Kay Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman (33)

The landscape that provided the background to Carolyn Kay Steedman's 1950s South London childhood was, in her earliest years, still that of World War II. As she writes in Landscape for a Good Woman, her remarkable "story of two lives"--her own and that of her mother: "The War was so palpable a presence in the first five years of my life that I still find it hard to believe that I didn't live through it. There were bomb-sites everywhere, prefabs on the waste land . . ." (29). In a comparative study of Steedman's Landscape for a Good Woman and German writer Christa Wolf's Kindheitsmuster (Patterns of Childhood), literary critic Elizabeth W. Harries has shown how postwar women writers have used fairy tales as devices to interpret their childhoods--Steedman's against the landscape of postwar London's working-class and Wolf's against the landscape of Nazi Germany and its aftermath. As Harries demonstrates, fairy tales become "stories to think with, stories that do not necessarily determine lives but can give children (and adults) a way to read and to understand them" (124); they provide children "with a way of reading and even predicting the world" (126). ¹ Noting the nearly irresistible "compulsions of narrative," Steedman herself relates on the basis of personal experience how a story becomes an "interpretative device" (143-44). Her own story told in Landscape for a Good Woman is in large measure a demonstration of her statement that, during her postwar childhood, "[l]ong, long ago, the fairy-stories were my first devices" (143) for interpreting childhood--a childhood lived during its earliest years in a landscape scarred by violence, a postwar "waste land" of "bomb-sites."

Following Steedman's lead, I want to explore how children use fairy tales to interpret their landscapes and their experiences in them. I am specifically interested in how children of war--especially as adults later reflecting on their violent wartime childhoods--have had recourse to the space of fairy tales to interpret their traumatic physical environments and their emotional lives within them. Elsewhere I have suggested how the utopian structures in fairy tales have played a role in the lives of children who experienced the trauma of war, exile, and the Holocaust (Haase). Drawing on the fairy-tale theories of two figures who were themselves exiled from the Third Reich--the unlikely pair of philosopher Ernst Bloch and psychologist Bruno Bettelheim--I stressed in particular the fairy tale's potential as an emotional survival strategy based on its "anticipation of a better world" and its "future-oriented" nature (87, 94). That approach underlined in effect the temporal dimension of the fairy tale's utopianism, especially as a projection of a better time. Here, however, I shall demonstrate that space--or place--plays an equally important role in the child's interpretation of the trauma caused by war. To do this, I shall (1) consider the nature of time and space in the classic fairy tale; (2) establish how the ambiguity of fairy-tale spaces creates an imaginative geography that lends itself to the representation and mapping of wartime experience; and (3) adduce examples from autobiographical accounts that show how fairy tales have been used to comprehend and to take emotional control over the war-torn landscape of childhood. ²

In exploring this terrain, I shall be building on Jack Zipes's theory of the "liberating potential of the fantastic" (Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion 170-92). Using Freud's notion of the unheimlich (the uncanny), Ernst Bloch's utopian philosophy of...