Eudora Welty's The Robber Bridegroom: A New Use of the Fairy Tale

The most common formulaic beginning of fairy and folk tales, "once upon a time," was "rule[d] out" by Eudora Welty in her well-known essay "Place in Fiction": "there are only four words, of all the millions we've hatched, that a novel rules out: 'Once upon a time'" (782). Welty, however, was referring here to the novel as a genre in which these words must not be used because "They make the story a fairy tale by the simple sweep of the remove—by abolishing the present and the place where we are instead of conveying them to us" (782). This gives us a little leeway if we look at a "fairy tale" by Welty—namely her Shoe Bird—but not if we examine a "novel" such as The Robber Bridegroom. Is this work a novel? Is it a fairy tale? I will try to show that The Robber Bridegroom is a narrative that has elements of the fairy tale, elements widely definable as "realistic," and elements of the tall tale, all in a mixture of literary codes that opens up to a new, hybrid form characterized by irony and parody, a form that was much ahead of its time in 1942 and that can be seen as announcing the re-writing of traditional genres that took place in the 1960s and 1970s. This experimentation with a new form goes beyond modernism into what is typically labeled as postmodernism.

Any one will recognize that the very title of this work is taken from "The Robber Bridegroom" ("Der Räuberbräutigan"),¹ as told—or more exactly, written—by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in their collection Kinder- und Hausmaerchen, one of the most influential collections of folk and fairy tales throughout the Western world in the nineteenth century, translated as early as 1820 into English. In the nineteenth-century American literary world, such great writers as Nathaniel Hawthorne in his Grandfather's Chair or Joel Chandler Harris with his Uncle Remus Tales owe much to the Grimms. In Our Wonder World "were the fairy tales—Grimm, Andersen, the English, the French" that Welty recalls among her childhood readings (OWB 846).

The Grimm tale exists in two versions: the first version of "The Robber Bridegroom" appeared in the first edition of the collection in 1812; the second version in an 1857 edition. The biggest difference between the two tales is that the beautiful young woman who becomes Rosamond in Welty's book is the daughter of a prince in the first version and the daughter of a miller in the second version. In Welty's version, Rosamond is neither of these, as she is the daughter of a planter.² It may be useful to recall the plot of the Grimms' tale in both versions: The prince's (or miller's) daughter must marry a rich man; she does not like him very much though she goes to his castle (or house) in the forest along a path marked by the fiancé with ashes (or ribbons) and by the girl with peas and lentils. At the fiancé/robber's house she finds an old woman who tells her they will kill her. She is also warned by a bird who tells her "Turn back, turn back, young maiden dear / Tis a murderer's house you enter here." ("Kehr um, kehr um, du junge Braut, / Du bist in einem Moerderhaus.") She enters the house, hides behind a barrel, and then the robbers come with another girl. They kill her and cut off her wedding ring finger, which falls into the hands of the hidden maid. She goes back home, tells her dream to her father and fiancé, and finally shows them the cut-off wedding finger to prove that it was not a dream. The fiancé is chased away or killed.

Welty's plot is much more complicated, although there is a beautiful girl going into the woods to the robbers' house, where it is not she who is killed. Instead, she is kept as a servant, and she cleans and cooks...