The Philosopher’s Pen Part One
As I’ve written a modern day fairy tale for older children I thought it was worth asking the question: what are fairy tales for?
A little girl is enticed into bed by a dangerous wolf disguised as grandmother. A usurped princess-in-rags is comforted by a decapitated talking horse. A queen wishes to devour the heart and liver of her hated step-daughter. A chick believes the sky is falling on his head and goes off in search of the king.
What do such a disparate set of tales have in common? The content includes talking animals, royalty, cannibalism, cruelty, comedy and desire. Even so most people could identify these narratives as fairy tales. This is despite the fact that an academic definition of the genre is still problematic. Angela Carter reminds us that “the term fairy tale is a figure of speech and we use it loosely to describe the great mass of infinitely various narrative that was, once upon a time, and still is sometimes, passed on by word of mouth.”
To move, therefore, from the question ‘what is a fairy tale?’ to the question ‘what function does a fairy tale perform?’ might prove daunting to the most experienced academic. Fairy tales have been analysed from a vast range of perspectives: mythic, anthropological, psychoanalytical, Marxist, Feminist and Structuralist to name but a few.
Jack Zipes, viewing the tales within a historical context, argues that they were both products of and vehicles for the ruling ideology and hence functioned as a form of social control. Countering this is the psychoanalytical approach of Bettelheim which places the fairy tale outside of any socio-historical reality and claims that they are universal, symbolic expressions of the human psyche. A third interpretation from narratologist A. Wilson draws on both structuralism and Freud to posit a theory of magical thought.
One must consider too the association of fairy tales with children. Certainly this relationship only came about towards the end of the seventeenth century after the modern notion of ‘childhood’ had started to develop, and the French court literati began adapting and writing down old folk tales for young readers. Yet, as Hugh Crago points out, “it still remains true that when children’s literature began, it was to the body of folk tales that [the writers] turned as a source of appropriate material for instructing and entertaining the young.”
So, in our attempt to unlock the secrets of ‘Once upon a time…’ we shall journey into the dark forest of modern criticism and endeavour to discover if fairy tales are ideological tools, existential dramas, collective magical thought processes or something else altogether…