The Haunted Wood, page 9
The main artery through which the modern Western fairytale canon passes down to us, though, is the Grimm Brothers. They came a little later. But, as with Basile (whose work was known to the Grimms), the title of their canonical work is misleading. The first, two-volume edition of their fairytale book (1812 and 1815) is called, in German, Kinder- und Hausmärchen – that is, Children’s and Household Tales. But still, these were not for children. The Grimm Brothers were, in their pioneering and slightly haphazard way, professional folklorists.
Their project, slightly ironically, given how internationally and cross-culturally tangled folktales turn out to be, was to build an archive of old German literature with a view to, as Jack Zipes has put it, “recovering the ‘true’ nature of the German people.”*
In fact it’s not until a decade later, in 1825, that an audience of children was specifically sought in the pared down “small edition” – containing only fifty stories, stripped of its scholarly apparatus and embellished with illustrations. There was a market emerging – as Newbery had established a few decades earlier in England – for a distinctive literature for children, and the desire to start to cater for these children was an editorial influence on the Grimms’ progressive reshaping of their tales.
It’s a commonplace that, especially compared to Disney’s versions, the Grimm Brothers’ originals are rather darker than we’re accustomed to.† Immediately following “Cinderella,” in the first edition, are two versions of the tale called “How Some Children Played at Slaughtering.” In its least embellished form, it runs as follows. Two brothers watch their father slaughter a pig. That afternoon, they decide to “play at slaughter” and one slits the other one’s throat. Their mother, bathing a younger child upstairs, hears the screams and rushes downstairs. She takes the bloody knife and stabs the surviving brother in the heart. Meanwhile the child she left unattended drowns in the bath. She hangs herself. On returning from the fields her husband dies of grief. It’s hard to imagine that becoming a Disney movie.
The fairytales we know now have almost all made a long journey from what in the US is called a “hard-R” to PG certificate. In the process these stories have been refined in such a way as to fit our social set-ups and our notions of childhood as neatly as Cinderella’s foot fits into her slipper. Take, for instance, the evolution of that very story.
Cinderella is to be found in countless traditions all over the world – there are Chinese, Khmer, Tibetan, and Ancient Greek stories about humble and put-upon girls whose footwear ends up rescuing them. The Greek geographer Strabo reports that the Egyptians told the story of Rhodopis (“rosy-cheeks”), a pretty slave girl whose sandal is stolen by an eagle and dropped in the lap of the Egyptian king, who seeks her out and marries her. In China, where a version is attested as early as the mid-800s, Ye xian is dressed for the ball by magical fish-bones – and it’s a golden slipper that finally connects her to her prince.
The earliest European written version of the story is Basile’s “Cenerentola,” translated by Nancy Canepa as “The Cinderella Cat.” As the story opens, the heroine has a doting father and a wicked stepmother; but she also has a kindly sewing teacher who becomes her confidante: “the poor little thing was always complaining to the teacher of her stepmother’s ill-treatment, saying, ‘Oh, God, couldn’t you be my little mommy, you who give me so many smooches and squeezes?’”
But this sewing teacher does not, as you might have expected, stand in for the fairy godmother. She persuades Zezolla (as Cinders is called here) to murder the wicked stepmother by slamming the lid of a chest shut on her head. Zezolla then talks her father into marrying the sewing teacher in the hopes that, as she was promised, they’ll live happily ever after. After only a week, the scheming seamstress turns into a wicked stepmother herself: she produces “six daughters of her own whom she had kept secret up until then,” installs them in the household, and Zezolla, now renamed Cinderella Cat, “ended up being demoted from the royal chamber to the kitchen and from a canopied bed to the hearth, from sumptuous silks and gold to rags, from the scepter to the spit.”
The supernatural agent that dresses Cinderella for the ball, in this version of the story, is not a fairy godmother but a magical date tree. And what in the best-known versions is a golden or glass slipper is, in Basile’s Neapolitan dialect, a chianiello, which can mean a corksoled patten, or an overshoe designed to stop a long dress trailing in the filth of the street; but which has the penumbral association of the chopine, a platform shoe associated with prostitution.
The moral and emotional set-up here is treacherous. Cinderella herself is steeped in blood before the main section of the tale even starts. Her apparent protector turns out to be her principal antagonist. Her supposedly doting father, when the prince turns up searching for the owner of the lost slipper, admits, “I have a daughter, but she looks after the hearth and is an unworthy wretch and does not deserve to sit at the same table at which you eat.” There’s even a suggestion that it was Zezolla’s neediness that turned the sewing mistress to scheming in the first place: “she chanted [her complaints] so incessantly that she planted a wasp in the teacher’s ear” so she was “blinded by evil spirits.”
The story ends with a curiously opaque and generalized moral. The ambitious sisters, now forced to curtsey to their new queen as Zezolla is crowned, “nearly died of anger, and […] quietly stole away to their mother’s house, confessing in spite of themselves that those who oppose the stars are crazy.” Zezolla has, in her apotheosis, somehow sidled out of the story – it’s for the stepsisters to learn the lesson of the tale, and the lesson is one that effectively chalks up all that has happened, all the moral reverses and psychological cruelty, to the operations of impersonal fate.
That is almost the opposite of what we now expect from children’s literature proper: most children’s stories place their stress on the possibility of agency and the value of moral responsibility. Virtue is rewarded and vice punished – and you expect a certain integrity of character. Villains, though they might feign virtue, will always be villainous under the mask; heroes and heroines will be, though flawed, pure of heart. Courageous or ingenious action, rather than blind fate, determines the outcome of the story.
That framework of morality and individual agency is the one on which even more sophisticated stories play knowing variations. Yet that framework is a historically contingent one. It is shaped in the West, as we’ll go on to see, by a pervading cultural Christian sensibility, by Enlightenment individualism and by developing notions of what childhood meant and what sort of moral creatures children are. As these notions develop, as stories develop, they leave traces of what they were before: in their patterns and structures as well as in their “morals,” in their worldviews as well as in their worlds.
Cinderella, meanwhile, proliferates. Later in the seventeenth century, Charles Perrault published the version that gives us the pumpkin and the glass footwear: “Cinderilla; Or, The Little Glass Slipper” appeared in Perrault’s 1697 Tales and Stories of the Past with Morals, or Tales of Mother Goose – along with “Sleeping Beauty,” “Bluebeard,” “Puss In Boots” and “Red Riding Hood.” His “Cinderella” is quite a different proposition to the earthy, almost feudal world of Basile’s: it is something more like a high-society romance.
Writing his fairytales as exercises in whimsy for the literary sophisticates of Paris in the age of Louis xIv, Perrault goes to town on fashionable details. We encounter in one scene alone “plaited ruffles,” “red velvet suit with French trimming,” a “gold-flowered manteau,” “double pinners,” and “a diamond stomacher.” And, of course, it introduces those glass slippers – pantoufles de verre – which may have been an inspired creative mishearing: medieval versions of the story have her in pantoufles de vair, or grey squirrel fur. The ending is distinctly civilized, too. No speechless rage or podiatric mutilation for the stepsisters. “Cinderilla, who was no less good than beautiful, gave her two sisters lodgings in the palace, and that very same day matched them with two great lords of the court.” The moral: “The fairies’ gift of greatest worth / Is grace of bearing, not high birth.” Grace, rather than beauty or nobility, is what is most to be admired. The Grimms’ version of the story – “Aschenputtel” – is, like most of their tales, more grounded in peasant life, or at least in a recognizably domestic life where the unfortunate heroine sleeps in the embers of the fire. As in older versions of the story, it’s not a fairy godmother but a magic tree that grants Cinderella’s wishes – this one having been planted on Cinderella’s mother’s grave. The ugly sisters aren’t ugly, incidentally: “they had beautiful features but proud, nasty, and wicked hearts.” The tasks they set Cinderella to get on with while they’re at the ball – separating lentils and peas – descend from the story of Cupid and Psyche, as do the magical animal helpers (ants in that story; pigeons in this one) who allow the task to be accomplished. The bloody conclusion, in which each of the sisters attempts to fit into the slipper by mutilating her own foot with a knife, is a world away from the suavity of Perrault: “The prince looked down and saw that the stockings of the bride were coloured red and that her blood was streaming out of the slipper.”
The sanguinary part of the Grimms’ version is now, quietly, forgotten. What we’re seeing, in the progress of stories like “Cinderella” from the oral tradition into a literary or written one, is something feral being tamed. They are given a particular place and style according to the worlds of their tellers and their audience: and in due course they make their way from the literary salon to the nursery, the bedside table and eventually the Disney box set. They became children’s stories.
Their roots in orality also mark another of the distinctive inheritances that folktales pass on to children’s writing. The basic world of the Eurasian fairy story is one that is both soaked in fantasy and magic – and, paradoxically, also close to the human life-world. Magic, in these stories, is not the exclusive property of remote and abstract divinities. It is a widespread technology. Witches and wizards, giants and ogres, fairies and dragons are familiar if dangerous aspects of the world to its wary human inhabitants.
The protagonists of these stories are not gods and heroes: they are woodcutters and huntsmen, blacksmiths and farmers, merchants and tinkers. Kings and princes sit atop the social hierarchy as they did in medieval Europe. And what stands for the numinous and unknown in the fairytale is what stood for the numinous and unknown in the superstitious world in which they were told: the wolf-patrolled forest at the center of which you might find a gingerbread house, or Baba Yaga’s hut standing on chicken-legs; the haunted wood.
The special appeal of so much children’s writing is that it encompasses that paradox. It tells stories of adventure – often magical or fantastical – but it roots them, at least to start with, in worlds familiar enough to invite its readers to imagine that the protagonists could be them. We could all be Charlie Bucket, or Alice lazing on a summer afternoon by the river before she first catches sight of the white rabbit.
So, despite their difference in register, Basile, the work of the French authors of contes de fées, the Grimms (not to mention the Russian folklorists, and the orientalizing fabulists who made One Thousand and One Nights a European literary sensation at the beginning of the nineteenth century) all had something more important in common. They drew from each other as well as from oral and classical tradition – and they were, originally, writing tales for an audience of literary adults.
It’s possible to speculate that the European folklore craze might have burned itself out. It might have, from this distance, looked like the folding of an ancient form of storytelling into a literary framework, to be in turn superseded by more sophisticated narrative forms as the novel itself started to get going around the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Yet something else happened. These tales started to be recast as stories for children – and as templates for the more sophisticated and individual children’s stories that were to come.
A bridging figure was Hans Christian Andersen (1805–1875). He was the odd one out, in a way, because most of the stories he produced were invented rather than adapted. It is testament to the continuing popularity (and high literary status) of fairytales in the nineteenth century that having started as, in his words, a “poor washerwoman’s son who ran about with wooden shoes,” he became one of the most celebrated European authors of his day. His work was to go from Copenhagen around the world. His writing became popular in India in his own lifetime, in China he is still revered as “Antushun,” and his stories such as “The Little Mermaid” and “The Snow Queen” are now core components of the Disney canon (the latter as Frozen).
Andersen grew up in a one-room home, which doubled as his shoemaker father’s workshop, in the slums of Odense on the island of Funen in central Denmark. His grandfather had struggled with mental illness, one grandmother had been locked up for having three children out of wedlock and his aunt was the madam of a brothel. He was a shy, awkward boy – physically ungainly (adult acquaintances were to remark on the “grotesque ugliness of his face and hands” and Elizabeth Barrett Browning said he was “rather like his own ugly duck”) and bullied by his peers.
Even in adulthood he was socially gauche: when he visited Charles Dickens, he overstayed his proposed two-week visit by three weeks. Dickens’s daughter Katey remembered him as “a boney bore who stayed on and on,” while Dickens himself complained to a friend, as if his houseguest was a disease, “we are suffering very much from Andersen.”* He had fierce, unreciprocated crushes on women and men alike – “I long for you as though you were a beautiful Calabrian girl,” he wrote to a male friend – but likely died a virgin. He never fitted in.
Yet his childhood was suffused with magical thinking and, nourished by the stories that his father read him from One Thousand and One Nights, the fantasies of escape and transformation that were later to emerge in his work. He himself escaped and transformed. After his father’s death, he left home to make his way in the world alone at the age of fourteen, and on reaching Copenhagen he finagled a place in a ballet school (he was cast as a troll) and moved from there to a miserably Gradgrindian grammar school.
Yet by his early twenties, with the help of a philanthropic high society patron, he started to make a literary career – and in 1835 he published the first of a three-booklet collection (the third booklet came out two years later) called Fairy Tales Told for Children. That collection included “The Princess and the Pea,” “Thumbelina,” “The Emperor’s New Clothes’ and the story that was to make his name, “The Little Mermaid.” The high literary reaction to these was at very best lukewarm: the Danish Literary Gazette sniffed that “it is no empty convention that one must not put one’s words together in the same disorderly fashion as one may do […] in oral speech.”
What affronted critics was precisely what was to make the stories so popular with children: their idiom was that of ordinary speech, their fantastical elements spun out of recognizable domestic scenes and objects (ducklings, tin soldiers, tinderboxes and candles) and they had an unruly and sometimes opaque moral order. Andersen drew on the orality and moral unpredictability of the original folktales – but harnessed them in the service of a distinctive children’s literature, not inherited but invented, and grounded in fear and surprise and longing, wonder and delight.
* * *
So as the middle of the nineteenth century approached, those two lines of inheritance – the earnest didacticism of Christian moralists, and the unpredictable whimsy of the fairytale, a religious form and a secular one – were in place. What came next was to twist and tangle them out of all recognition, gleefully mocking the first thing and taking the second in a surreal new direction.
* His book was published under the pseudonym Gian Alesio Abbatutis: “the dejected one.”
† Giambattista Basile, The Tale of Tales: or, Entertainment for Little Ones, trans Nancy Canepa (Wayne State University Press, 2007), [p].
* J. Zipes, The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm (Princeton University Press, 2014), [p].
† I hope the reader will appreciate the strength of character it has taken to avoid punning on their name.
* Michael Slater, Charles Dickens (Yale University Press, 2009), [p].
III
DOWN THE RABBIT-HOLE
Lewis Carroll · Charles Kingsley · Thomas Hughes · Boy’s Own · W.H.G. Kingston · Captain Marryat · G.A. Henty
THE DAWNING OF THE GOLDEN AGE
LOOKED AT IN ONE WAY, THE MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY was a time of worldliness, prosperity, and unprecedented national self-confidence. The Anglican Church marched in lockstep with the Crown. Empire was in its pomp; and the fruits of that pomp had never been more visible at home. At mid-century, marvels of technology and global exotica flowed into the Great Exhibition of 1851.
The very venue – Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace, thrown up in London in less than a year – was a scintillating image of technological ingenuity. Inside it were the most advanced telescopes in the world, daguerreotypes, cutting-edge home appliances, demonstrations of steel-making, and advanced agricultural technologies. Colt’s new revolvers spoke of growing technologies of war, while the Koh-i-Noor diamond and artifacts from New Zealand whispered of riches beyond the sea. The launch of the yacht race that was to become the America’s Cup spoke of the ever-greater ease of getting there.
