European Fairy Tales from the Renaissance to the Late Victorian Era

List of Illustrations

3.1. Golden Branch, illustrated by Gordon Browne, 1893.

3.2. The Princess Carpillon, illustrated by Gordon Browne, 1893.

3.3. Little Red Riding Hood, illustrated by Honor C. Appleton, 1913.

3.4. Blue Bird, illustrated by Edmund Evans, 1898.

3.5. Master cat, illustrated by Honor C. Appleton, 1913.

3.6. Beauty and the Beast, wood engraving by Walter Crane, 1896.

4.1. The Frog Prince, illustrated by Millicent Sowerby, 1909.

4.2. Snow White Wood engravings, The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs 1892.

4.3. Hänsel, illustrated by Arthur Rackham, 1909.

4.4. Grethe and the witch, illustrated by Arthur Rackham, 1909.

4.5. Sweetheart Roland, illustrated by Arthur Rackham, 1909.

4.6. Six Swans, illustrated by Millicent Sowerby, 1909.

4.7. The White Snake from Lucy Crane’s 1886 English translation of Grimms’ Fairy Tales, illustrated by her brother, Walter Crane, courtesy of Toronto Public Library, Osbourne, Collection of Early Children’s

5.1. Little Mermaid illustration from Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales, 1880.

5.2. The Red Shoes, Tales for the Young, Hans Christian Andersen, 1847.

5.3. The Emperor’s New Clothes, illustrated by Helen Stratton, 1899.

Acknowledgements

The writing of this book was a long journey which would not have been possible without the support of a number of committed individuals. First and foremost, I would like to express my special gratitude to Professor David Levine for his invaluable scholarly inputs and constant encouragement. I am also grateful to Professor. Madhavan K. Palat, formerly of the Jawaharlal Nehru University and the present editor of the Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru as well as Professor Ruth B. Bottigheimer, Research Professor in the Department of Cultural Analysis and Theory at Stony Brook University State, New York. Both kindly read an earlier draft of this book and offered invaluable critical comments and insightful suggestions. Professor Jack Zipes provided expert advice and kindly made available some of his own materials. I am also grateful to Professor Emeritus Dieter Misgeld and Professor Harold Troper for their valuable critical comments. I would also like to express my gratitude to my friend Dr. Hormoz Khakpour who helped with the editorial part of this book.

Finally, I feel a deep sense of gratitude to all members of my family, my wife Soheila Nikzadeh, my son Mehrtash Samadzadeh and his wife Noran Fishir, my daughter Mahsa Samadzadeh, and my step-daughter Pegah Kavianpour, who all inspired and encouraged me in every step of the way throughout this long journey.

Preface

As a child listening to my father’s wonder tales by the fireside on cold winter nights, I was fascinated by their magical and supernatural features which had no boundaries. I always wondered what these features, so integral to the tales, signified and what the moral of the stories was. I was particularly interested in getting into the mind of the female protagonist in the story of “A Girl Who Renounced the World”, whose character and personality intrigued me greatly. She was a young beauty who chose a reclusive life and was determined not to ever marry. Yet, being a warrior, she was very much engaged with her surrounding world and in constant dialogue with men, whom she despised. But contrary to her intention, she fell in love with a prince, whom she encountered in a combat, and with whom she ultimately unites in marriage. The captivating female warrior had to cast aside her sword in favour erotic love.

There were dozens of other tales with intriguing plots which I still remember, but I could not make sense of them at the time, and when I asked my father what these stories could possibly meant, his answer was always moralistic: “If you be good and do well in school, you, too, will be a prince”. He was right. This was in the second half of the twentieth century when education still had a magical effect not only as a means of upward social mobility, but as an empowering experience, firmly entrenched in social and political awareness.

Introduction

The fairy tale and childhood are both independent subjects of historical inquiry that came into their own in the course of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, respectively. Whereas the fairy tale was established with the Brothers Grimms’ Children’s and Household Tales (1856),^* childhood was academically recognized mostly with the publication of Philippe Ariès’ provocative book, Centuries of Childhood (1962). Ever since, numerous studies have appeared on the two subjects, ranging from psychoanalytical to historical.

What is not fully explored, however, is the interplay of childhood and the fairy tale in a manner both consistent with and opposed to the imperatives of modern discipline. This is evident in the changing concepts of childhood in the Western society in different phases of modernity. While until the late nineteenth century the literary construction of childhood for the most part reflected a repressive culture and ideology subservient to the power elite^**, thereafter it acquired a ←1 | 2→liberating potential to redeem not only children but also women, the underclass, the unlettered, and the colonized, just as it had earlier been used as a discourse of domination against the same categories of people. It is at this historical juncture that the medieval and modern concepts of childhood are juxtaposed to present an alternative philosophical view of humanity in keeping with the emancipatory message of modernity.

This book consists of five chapters that cover a wide variety of related themes. Chapter 1 provides a background to the understanding of childhood as a historical subject. It begins with a secular initiative in historiography which was part of the recognition of human agency in history. It brought to the fore a broad spectrum of socially marginalized groups to demand representation. Within this general context, the notion of the child as both the subject and agent of history ←2 | 3→gained currency. Though by no means a unified group in socio-economic terms, children share features and aspirations such as the tendency to break free of social barriers, which characterize them as conceptually unique. At the same time, viewing children as historical subjects opens the path to the recognition within each adult of the repressed child striving to redeem itself. Here, I introduce a particular level of historical agency associated with childhood which is hidden or unconscious, and therefore in need of being unveiled. This chapter is primarily based on the views of other scholars and thinkers on the subject, which together help us to arrive at an understanding of childhood agency.

In Chapter 2, I explore some of the major events in modern European history in order to provide a historical background to the emergence of the fairy tale as a new literary genre. Paramount among these events are: the formation of absolutist states leading to the future nation-state, the expansion of trade routes and money economy, the civilizing process, the invention of the printing press, the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, and a new scientific and anthropocentric worldview. These processes irreversibly set apart the modern from both the medieval and ancient worlds. The separation is marked by a disruption in the affinity between humankind and the animal kingdom, in the mixing of ages, and in the interplay of the elite and popular cultures, which had been characteristic of pre-modern societies. A new social elite with its predominantly print culture increasingly superseded oral culture. Hence, fairy tales became the literary expression of the changing world that not only echoed the will of an aspiring middle class, but helped disseminate its moral and cultural values in an indirect and yet powerful manner. What is more, they also acted as a medium of socialization, especially as their authors appealed to both parents and children as their target audience.

Chapter 3 examines the emergence of fairy tales as a literary genre as well as the manner in which they change character over time. The focus is on the distinctly secular aspect of the genre in its historical trajectory as the narrative structure of the tales shifts from one secular issue to another. I begin with the Venetian Giovanni Francesco Straparola (ca 1480–1558?), author of La Piacevoli Notti (The Pleasant Nights), arguably the pioneer of modern fairy tales. His tales were markedly different from any previously written fables or folk tales, in that they conveyed the prospect of a better life for an aspiring middle class. Such a prospect would have been inconceivable in the pre-modern world where social status and prerogatives were inseparably interlaced. Characteristically, Straparola’s rags-to-riches stories carry the imprint of a new era of commerce and industry that signalled the erosion of old privileges, while at the same time giving rise to new opportunities and new paths of social upliftment.

Chapter 4 begins with an overview of German history in the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth century, which intends to provide a historical background to the fairy tales of the Grimm Brothers. In Germany, the quest for cultural identity and national unity brought together diverse social groups and classes around a commonly shared language, thus setting the tone for the multi-class character of German nationalism. Here, language represented a common cultural patrimony as the most distinctive feature of nationhood that encompassed all those living within its linguistic and geographical boundaries.

Hence, the notion of an authentic German national identity, culture, and ideology, all perceived as pure and natural, blossomed with the image of the child firmly lodged in the popular imagination. The child became the primordial example of an imagined nation and the microcosm of a real one aspiring to excel in its cultural and moral endeavours. All this set the context for a Romantic concept of ←4 | 5→childhood that was neither the exclusive by-product of a myth of national origin nor limited in its scope and application to a specific age group. Yet, childhood, though seemingly a virtuous and much valued concept, served a repressive culture and ideology that excluded all those whose eccentric behaviour or distinct identity would divest the nation of its cultural purity, or children of their childlike qualities. The latter were placed under surveillance as the image of the innocent child gained currency, an image that had to be preserved through a strict medium of socialization.

In Chapter 5, I explore an alternative view of childhood that emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century and challenged its projected image by a predominantly adult/male elite. This is where the liberating potential of modernity begins to assert itself at different levels. I demonstrate this by analysing selected works by such literary figures as Charles Dickens, Lewis Carroll, George MacDonald, and Hans Christian Anderson, who in varying degrees depart from the Romantic notion of childhood. Dickens’ The Personal History of David Copperfield offers a distinctly novel concept of childhood. It is a significantly enlarged concept that presents a mixture of the medieval and modern view of childhood. Dickens’ child of fiction is a labouring child with middle-class aspirations, who shares the adult qualities of the medieval child as well as the childlike characteristic of the modern child. It is also a child hero who in his struggle to break free of the repressive world of adults is entrusted with the task of redeeming women, the underclass, and the socially marginalized.

Next is an interpretation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland from historical and philosophical perspectives. It is a turning point in the history of childhood as it marks a significant break with the Romantic image of the child. The break is manifested in Alice’s personal attitudes towards the anomaly of Wonderland and the orderly structure of the real world she descends from, both of which immensely shape her perception of herself as a child. This takes the form of a new adult-child economy that on the one hand recognizes the adult qualities in a child, and on the other instils childlike characteristics in adults. Alice is the personification of this phenomenon in Carroll’s imagination; she not only mediates between the medieval and modern concepts of childhood, but also by virtue of being a female redeems women and ultimately humanity.