House-training the Id
Marina Warner, Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale
Oxford University Press, 232pp, £10.99, ISBN 9780198718659
reviewed by Helen Tyson
Once upon a time, my mother took a school friend and me to a theatre production of Grimm’s fairy tales. I don’t remember much about the performance, but seared into my mind is one vivid scene: one of the ugly sisters, cloaked, hunched, sinister, and very ugly, reaches across and plucks out the other sister’s eye, a trail of bloody tendons spewing out like a rainbow in its wake. My seven-year-old self, more familiar with the 1950 Walt Disney Cinderella, with its friendly cooing birds, singing mice and promise of dreams come true, was startled. The production, some detective work tells me, was Grimm Tales, directed by Tim Supple at the Young Vic in 1994 and based upon adaptations of the classic fairy tales by Carol Ann Duffy. But my memory, it turns out, is slightly wrong. Looking at the published script now, the ugly sisters didn’t tear each other’s eyes out; rather, as in ‘Aschenputtel’, the German story written down by the Grimm brothers a hundred years after Charles Perrault’s French ‘Cendrillon’, it was in fact the birds, inspired by the spirit of Cinderella’s dead mother, who pecked out the sisters’ eyes.
Memory works in strange ways in relation to such childhood scenes of storytelling, which are fraught with complex adult projections. Writing about Grimm’s fairy tales alongside other children’s classics in a 1925 essay, Virginia Woolf insisted that nobody ever remembers reading such books for the first time, because these are ‘not books, but stories communicated by word of mouth in those tender years when fact and fiction merge, and thus belong to the memories and myths of life, and not to its aesthetic experience.’ Childhood stories, read aloud by parents to their children ‘before they can quite distinguish fact from fiction,’ become bound up in our imaginative lives, interwoven in the stories we use to narrate ourselves. Woolf was alert to the hold these stories have over the childish imagination, but also to the fantasy of childhood at work in our adult romancing of this scene. In Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse (1927), Mrs Ramsay sits in a Madonna-like pose, reading Grimm’s fairy tale ‘The Fisherman’s Wife’ to her son James:
This scene of mother and child reading is familiar but, as Marina Warner reminds us in Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale, it is also thoroughly modern, ‘formed by modern ideas about children, the value of stories, and the truth of the imagination.’
Tracing the written form of fairy tale back to the craze for fairy stories which took hold in 17th and 18th-century France, when Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier and Charles Perrault first began collecting and writing the stories down, Warner asks us to imagine the history of fairy tale as a map. The two most ‘prominent landmarks’ on this map are Perrault’s Histoires ou Contes du temps passé (‘Tales of Olden Times’, 1697) and the Grimm Brothers’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen (‘Children’s and Household Tales’, 1812), but Warner – an expert and eloquent guide in this magical terrain – unfurls the map to reveal an extraordinary and far-reaching landscape of tales and their tellers. Fairy tales in their earliest written forms were not aimed at children, but were part of a broad movement of nationalist feeling combined with curiosity about a nation’s folk people and their culture. In France the quest for fairy tales was bound up with a rejection of classical myth combined with ‘ethnographical curiosity about the French and their true identity.’ In England a ‘combination of religious confusion and Enlightenment insatiability’ inspired religious, scholarly and antiquarian interest in the folklore of the land, while in Scotland, Ireland and Wales, fairy tales were similarly part of an excavation of national identity. When the Grimm Brothers’ Children’s and Household Tales was first published in Germany, it consisted of 86 stories, with an apparatus of notes running to hundreds of pages. Contrary to its title, this weighty work was not intended for bedtime reading with mother. It was a scholarly effort designed to retrieve a national German culture. This nationalist enterprise was not only misguided – fairy tales, Warner observes, ‘have proved stubborn and repeating emigrants, always slipping across borders’ – but had chilling after-effects, as the Grimm stories were co-opted into Nazi propaganda.
It was not until the Victorian period, when writers, collectors and publishers began to aim their stories particularly at children, that the identification of fairy tales with childhood took root. Woolf’s scene of Mrs Ramsay reading to James is, in this sense, quintessentially Victorian, right down to Mrs Ramsay’s mournful longing for her children never to grow up, which echoes Mrs Darling’s exclamation at the beginning of JM Barrie’s Peter and Wendy (1911): ‘Oh, why can’t you remain like this forever!’ Woolf explores the potential tyranny of this adult desire for eternal childhood innocence, and Warner too reminds us that in Barrie’s work it’s the grown-ups who yearned to regain the paradise of Neverland. The modern fairy tale, she observes, may have been aimed especially at children, but is has always hovered between adults and children, serving as a conduit for the disenchanted adult’s desire for re-enchantment. The ‘emotional blackmail’ when Peter, in the stage version of Peter Pan, asks the audience to clap their hands and save Tinkerbell, ‘remains fractured by the irony that however loud we clap to show our faith, Barrie isn’t sincere and neither are we.’ If the children in the audience are convinced, they’re the ‘dupes of a need that adults feel, which children meet.’
In her first foray into the world of faery, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (1994), Marina Warner commented on the supposed malleability of the child listener: ‘Children are not likely to be committed to a certain way of thought; they can be moulded, and the stories they hear will then become the ones they expect.’ This is both the pleasure and the peril of a form which offers escape and wish-fulfilment, yet in doing so might seem to enshrine conservative values. Warner’s writing on fairy tales is distinguished by her unique capacity to track the specific ideological and historical pitfalls of the form (the Nazi co-option of the Grimms’ fairy tales is a case in point) and at the same time to argue persuasively for the pleasures and possibilities of wonder. Warner charts the risks of Disneyfication, patriarchal indoctrination and the ‘de-fanging’ force of the culture industry, but insists with ethically-driven determination that it is not shameful to take pleasure in the land of fantasy. It is precisely in the fairy tale’s solicitation of desire that it can be a form of subversion.
In The Uses of Enchantment (1976), the psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim argued that the savage and brutal landscape of fairy tales encodes universal unconscious human experiences. Following in Freud’s footsteps, Bettelheim insisted on reading fairy tales like dreams, claiming to uncover the latent desires and terrors of our collective unconscious. Not everyone agrees with this approach. To all Bettelheim’s psychoanalysing, Philip Pullman retorts: ‘There is no psychology in a fairy tale.’ It is true that, as Pullman writes, the characters in fairy tales ‘have little interior life; their motives are clear and obvious.’ But Warner, although firm about the flaws in Bettelheim’s thesis, also points out that fairy tales are dream-like, in that they are ‘disjointed, brilliantly coloured, they overlook rational cause and effect, they stage outlandish scenes of sex and violence, and they make abrupt transitions without rhyme or reason.’ The child reader, Bettelheim maintained, projects him or herself into the fairy tales, which provide an ‘outlet’ for the raging hostilities and desires of unconscious infantile life. By projecting her bad feelings about her mother onto the wicked stepmother, for example, the little girl’s guilt and anxiety is assuaged; ‘Snow White’ becomes a form of therapy, and the child is buttressed against the potential disruptions of psychic life. This is what Angela Carter termed, brilliantly, ‘house-training the id.’
Following feminist critics before her, Warner takes issue with Bettelheim’s ‘universalist assumptions about society, the family, and male-female relations, which make him overlook cultural differences over time.’ His ‘house-training’ has been felt as most insidious in relation to what he has to say about little girls. This is not just a failing on Bettelheim’s part; Warner points out that, in general, we have not paid so much attention to what the fairy tale has to say to the little boy, and her reading of the problem of masculinity in fairy tales suggests that such ‘deep waters’ are still ‘proving hard to plumb.’
Women have been ‘bracketed with children’ since the earliest criticism of fairy tales, on account of the genre’s strong affinities with romance; like children, women were seen by writers such as John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau to be susceptible to the sway of foolish fantasy. In Bettelheim’s hands the fairy tale becomes a kind of lesson in femininity - a very limited and particular kind of femininity. Warner cites Bettelheim on ‘Cinderella’:
The fairy tale becomes a medium through which the little girl learns to accept and to master her anxieties about her sexuality – a sexuality which is nonetheless confirmed in this passage from Bettelheim as ‘dirty and degraded.’ In the postwar period, women raised on the Disney classics Snow White (1937) and Cinderella (1950) rebelled both against the patriarchal indoctrination they saw at work in these saccharine versions, and against the normalising tendencies of Bettelheim’s account. Writers such as Anne Sexton and Angela Carter ‘seized hold of fairy tales and shook them till the stories choked, spat out the poison, and sat up ready for a different day.’ But, while critical reading of the Grimm Brothers’ editorial ‘tinkering’ revealed the time-bound, class-bound and gender-circumscribed nature of these versions of the tales, what Warner describes is not simply a lesson in disenchantment. In The Bloody Chamber (1979), Angela Carter harnessed the energy of the women’s liberation movement and the magnetic potency of the traditional fairy tales to reveal the latent erotic content and subversive potential of these ancient stories.
Without ever succumbing to Bettelheim’s ahistoricism, Warner maintains a faith in the capacity of fairy tales to speak certain truths about human existence, even to help ‘transmute’ the horrors of existence by putting them in the fairy frame. At the heart of this book is the question of the relationship between fairy tale and truth. Warner cites Italo Calvino’s seeming contradiction: ‘folktales (fiabe) are real’. Populated by magic carpets, elves, ogres, giants, genies, hobgoblins and pixies, these fantastic stories nonetheless speak of real themes and real passions. Unspeakable, unbelievable things happen in fairy tales, but they are also recounted daily in the news. Warner puts Daniel Pelka, the little boy starved and tortured by his parents, alongside Hansel and Gretel, who are abandoned by their parents and find themselves prey to a cannibal witch. Josef Fritzl, who imprisoned his daughter in a cellar and kept her there for 24 years, fathering seven of her children, echoes the stories of violence, imprisonment and incest that appear in fairy tales from innumerable different cultures.
One of the defining features of fairy tale is the happy ending, but it is precisely this idea of the ‘consolatory fable’, as Calvino described fairy tales, that speaks of the stories’ roots in the reality of human suffering. The quest for the happy ending finds its origins in an all too familiar reality. The power of the fairy tale resides in its ability to nudge us from adult scepticism towards childish suspension of disbelief: ‘we are not always placed in doubt as to what to believe, but rather invited to return to an imaginary state of trusting fictions.’ Warner’s unparalleled attentiveness to the pleasures of this peculiar imaginary space makes this little book a pleasure to read.
Memory works in strange ways in relation to such childhood scenes of storytelling, which are fraught with complex adult projections. Writing about Grimm’s fairy tales alongside other children’s classics in a 1925 essay, Virginia Woolf insisted that nobody ever remembers reading such books for the first time, because these are ‘not books, but stories communicated by word of mouth in those tender years when fact and fiction merge, and thus belong to the memories and myths of life, and not to its aesthetic experience.’ Childhood stories, read aloud by parents to their children ‘before they can quite distinguish fact from fiction,’ become bound up in our imaginative lives, interwoven in the stories we use to narrate ourselves. Woolf was alert to the hold these stories have over the childish imagination, but also to the fantasy of childhood at work in our adult romancing of this scene. In Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse (1927), Mrs Ramsay sits in a Madonna-like pose, reading Grimm’s fairy tale ‘The Fisherman’s Wife’ to her son James:
Oh, but she never wanted James to grow a day older… Nothing made up for the loss. When she read just now to James, ‘and there were numbers of soldiers with kettle-drums and trumpets’, and his eyes darkened, she thought, why should they grow up, and lose all that?... She would have liked always to have had a baby. She was happiest carrying one in her arms. Then people might say she was tyrannical, domineering, masterful…
This scene of mother and child reading is familiar but, as Marina Warner reminds us in Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale, it is also thoroughly modern, ‘formed by modern ideas about children, the value of stories, and the truth of the imagination.’
Tracing the written form of fairy tale back to the craze for fairy stories which took hold in 17th and 18th-century France, when Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier and Charles Perrault first began collecting and writing the stories down, Warner asks us to imagine the history of fairy tale as a map. The two most ‘prominent landmarks’ on this map are Perrault’s Histoires ou Contes du temps passé (‘Tales of Olden Times’, 1697) and the Grimm Brothers’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen (‘Children’s and Household Tales’, 1812), but Warner – an expert and eloquent guide in this magical terrain – unfurls the map to reveal an extraordinary and far-reaching landscape of tales and their tellers. Fairy tales in their earliest written forms were not aimed at children, but were part of a broad movement of nationalist feeling combined with curiosity about a nation’s folk people and their culture. In France the quest for fairy tales was bound up with a rejection of classical myth combined with ‘ethnographical curiosity about the French and their true identity.’ In England a ‘combination of religious confusion and Enlightenment insatiability’ inspired religious, scholarly and antiquarian interest in the folklore of the land, while in Scotland, Ireland and Wales, fairy tales were similarly part of an excavation of national identity. When the Grimm Brothers’ Children’s and Household Tales was first published in Germany, it consisted of 86 stories, with an apparatus of notes running to hundreds of pages. Contrary to its title, this weighty work was not intended for bedtime reading with mother. It was a scholarly effort designed to retrieve a national German culture. This nationalist enterprise was not only misguided – fairy tales, Warner observes, ‘have proved stubborn and repeating emigrants, always slipping across borders’ – but had chilling after-effects, as the Grimm stories were co-opted into Nazi propaganda.
It was not until the Victorian period, when writers, collectors and publishers began to aim their stories particularly at children, that the identification of fairy tales with childhood took root. Woolf’s scene of Mrs Ramsay reading to James is, in this sense, quintessentially Victorian, right down to Mrs Ramsay’s mournful longing for her children never to grow up, which echoes Mrs Darling’s exclamation at the beginning of JM Barrie’s Peter and Wendy (1911): ‘Oh, why can’t you remain like this forever!’ Woolf explores the potential tyranny of this adult desire for eternal childhood innocence, and Warner too reminds us that in Barrie’s work it’s the grown-ups who yearned to regain the paradise of Neverland. The modern fairy tale, she observes, may have been aimed especially at children, but is has always hovered between adults and children, serving as a conduit for the disenchanted adult’s desire for re-enchantment. The ‘emotional blackmail’ when Peter, in the stage version of Peter Pan, asks the audience to clap their hands and save Tinkerbell, ‘remains fractured by the irony that however loud we clap to show our faith, Barrie isn’t sincere and neither are we.’ If the children in the audience are convinced, they’re the ‘dupes of a need that adults feel, which children meet.’
In her first foray into the world of faery, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (1994), Marina Warner commented on the supposed malleability of the child listener: ‘Children are not likely to be committed to a certain way of thought; they can be moulded, and the stories they hear will then become the ones they expect.’ This is both the pleasure and the peril of a form which offers escape and wish-fulfilment, yet in doing so might seem to enshrine conservative values. Warner’s writing on fairy tales is distinguished by her unique capacity to track the specific ideological and historical pitfalls of the form (the Nazi co-option of the Grimms’ fairy tales is a case in point) and at the same time to argue persuasively for the pleasures and possibilities of wonder. Warner charts the risks of Disneyfication, patriarchal indoctrination and the ‘de-fanging’ force of the culture industry, but insists with ethically-driven determination that it is not shameful to take pleasure in the land of fantasy. It is precisely in the fairy tale’s solicitation of desire that it can be a form of subversion.
In The Uses of Enchantment (1976), the psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim argued that the savage and brutal landscape of fairy tales encodes universal unconscious human experiences. Following in Freud’s footsteps, Bettelheim insisted on reading fairy tales like dreams, claiming to uncover the latent desires and terrors of our collective unconscious. Not everyone agrees with this approach. To all Bettelheim’s psychoanalysing, Philip Pullman retorts: ‘There is no psychology in a fairy tale.’ It is true that, as Pullman writes, the characters in fairy tales ‘have little interior life; their motives are clear and obvious.’ But Warner, although firm about the flaws in Bettelheim’s thesis, also points out that fairy tales are dream-like, in that they are ‘disjointed, brilliantly coloured, they overlook rational cause and effect, they stage outlandish scenes of sex and violence, and they make abrupt transitions without rhyme or reason.’ The child reader, Bettelheim maintained, projects him or herself into the fairy tales, which provide an ‘outlet’ for the raging hostilities and desires of unconscious infantile life. By projecting her bad feelings about her mother onto the wicked stepmother, for example, the little girl’s guilt and anxiety is assuaged; ‘Snow White’ becomes a form of therapy, and the child is buttressed against the potential disruptions of psychic life. This is what Angela Carter termed, brilliantly, ‘house-training the id.’
Following feminist critics before her, Warner takes issue with Bettelheim’s ‘universalist assumptions about society, the family, and male-female relations, which make him overlook cultural differences over time.’ His ‘house-training’ has been felt as most insidious in relation to what he has to say about little girls. This is not just a failing on Bettelheim’s part; Warner points out that, in general, we have not paid so much attention to what the fairy tale has to say to the little boy, and her reading of the problem of masculinity in fairy tales suggests that such ‘deep waters’ are still ‘proving hard to plumb.’
Women have been ‘bracketed with children’ since the earliest criticism of fairy tales, on account of the genre’s strong affinities with romance; like children, women were seen by writers such as John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau to be susceptible to the sway of foolish fantasy. In Bettelheim’s hands the fairy tale becomes a kind of lesson in femininity - a very limited and particular kind of femininity. Warner cites Bettelheim on ‘Cinderella’:
However Cinderella may have felt about dwelling among the ashes, she knew that a person who lives thus appears to others as being dirty and uncouth. There are females who feel this way about their sexuality, and others who fear that males feel this way about it. […] By handing [Cinderella] the slipper to put her foot into, the prince symbolically expresses that he accepts her the way she is, dirty and degraded.
The fairy tale becomes a medium through which the little girl learns to accept and to master her anxieties about her sexuality – a sexuality which is nonetheless confirmed in this passage from Bettelheim as ‘dirty and degraded.’ In the postwar period, women raised on the Disney classics Snow White (1937) and Cinderella (1950) rebelled both against the patriarchal indoctrination they saw at work in these saccharine versions, and against the normalising tendencies of Bettelheim’s account. Writers such as Anne Sexton and Angela Carter ‘seized hold of fairy tales and shook them till the stories choked, spat out the poison, and sat up ready for a different day.’ But, while critical reading of the Grimm Brothers’ editorial ‘tinkering’ revealed the time-bound, class-bound and gender-circumscribed nature of these versions of the tales, what Warner describes is not simply a lesson in disenchantment. In The Bloody Chamber (1979), Angela Carter harnessed the energy of the women’s liberation movement and the magnetic potency of the traditional fairy tales to reveal the latent erotic content and subversive potential of these ancient stories.
Without ever succumbing to Bettelheim’s ahistoricism, Warner maintains a faith in the capacity of fairy tales to speak certain truths about human existence, even to help ‘transmute’ the horrors of existence by putting them in the fairy frame. At the heart of this book is the question of the relationship between fairy tale and truth. Warner cites Italo Calvino’s seeming contradiction: ‘folktales (fiabe) are real’. Populated by magic carpets, elves, ogres, giants, genies, hobgoblins and pixies, these fantastic stories nonetheless speak of real themes and real passions. Unspeakable, unbelievable things happen in fairy tales, but they are also recounted daily in the news. Warner puts Daniel Pelka, the little boy starved and tortured by his parents, alongside Hansel and Gretel, who are abandoned by their parents and find themselves prey to a cannibal witch. Josef Fritzl, who imprisoned his daughter in a cellar and kept her there for 24 years, fathering seven of her children, echoes the stories of violence, imprisonment and incest that appear in fairy tales from innumerable different cultures.
One of the defining features of fairy tale is the happy ending, but it is precisely this idea of the ‘consolatory fable’, as Calvino described fairy tales, that speaks of the stories’ roots in the reality of human suffering. The quest for the happy ending finds its origins in an all too familiar reality. The power of the fairy tale resides in its ability to nudge us from adult scepticism towards childish suspension of disbelief: ‘we are not always placed in doubt as to what to believe, but rather invited to return to an imaginary state of trusting fictions.’ Warner’s unparalleled attentiveness to the pleasures of this peculiar imaginary space makes this little book a pleasure to read.