Introduction 1 the Eight Elements of Intertextual Use of Fairytales

Notes Introduction 1. Rather confusingly Tatar uses the word ‘folklore’ to refer to the entire field of collected narratives of oral cultures, and the phrase ‘folk lore’ to refer to those folkloric narratives that are realistic rather than fantastic in nature. 1 The eight elements of intertextual use of fairytales 1. This can be seen in the different names given to certain stories. The Grimms’ version of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ is called ‘Little Red Cap’. Due to diffi- culties in translation, stories even within the Grimms’ collection are known by different names. One fairytale has been translated as ‘Thousand Furs’, ‘Thousandfurs’, ‘All Fur’ or left in the original German as ‘Allerleirauh’ (All kinds of fur). Another tale, a variant of Bluebeard we will see more of below is known as ‘Fitcher’s Bird’ or ‘Fowler’s Fowl’ depending on the whim of the translator and the edition of the text used by the critic. It was this indeterm- inacy of naming that led to the practice of referring to tales by the numbers by which they appear within the Grimms’ collection, so a reader can tell that by ‘Thousandfurs’ they mean the tale 65 which is labelled in other books as ‘Thousand furs’. The Grimms’ had no such idea in mind, however, and their collection is not organised with tales grouped like- with -like, and the adoption of the tale numbers led to some critics comparing tales from other cultures with the Grimms’ ‘number 3’. 2. This remains a theoretical possibility as I have yet to come across such a text. Furthermore, even if this case did exist, the same mechanisms of reading would be set up in the mind of a reader who already knew of the existence of the identically titled predecessor text. The reader would still read the text attempting to attribute the character of Snow White, the prince, the dwarves to different characters and in this way even if the new text bore no relevance whatsoever in the view of the author the reader would still read the text intertextually, with reference to patterns imported from the prior text. 3. This seems an archaic point made in an era after the criticism of Barthes’ ‘The Death of the Author’, but, paradoxically, the author’s explicit sanction still seems to be the difference between an accepted (and perhaps somewhat boring) reading of the intertextual relation between two texts and a critic’s speculative interpretation. The case of The Collector is interesting because the title is the only place an author could link the novel to the fairytale. Due to the novel’s mode of narration by the perpetrator (Clegg) and the victim (Miranda), neither of these would particularly want to compare their situ- ation to Bluebeard. Clegg, deluded and barely literate might not have heard of the tale, and constantly denies responsibility for his actions where Miranda, 170 Notes 171 who optimistically fools herself into thinking there is a possibility of release obviously, prefers not to consider the possibility of her death. 4. A feature which, in a novel, is not necessary at all. The 1997 Film Snow White: A Tale of Terror has the protagonist/Snow White character given the name Lilliana Hoffman, a change from folkloristic allegoric naming to the non-allegoric naming that Philippe Hamon identifies as one of the major features of realistic narrative (Hamon 1992: 168). 5. The one major exception I can think of to this is in the world of Hollywood remakes, where revisions (or remakes) of old films are relatively common, and what is more, usually signal their relationship to the original by way of having an identical title. 6. A mise en abyme is defined by Lucien Dällenbach as ‘any internal mirror that reflects the whole of the narrative by simple, repeated or “specious” (or paradoxical) duplication’ (Dällenbach 1977: 36 author’s emphasis). 7. Metatron is the angel who serves as the voice of God, Baruch the name of an Old Testament prophet. In using these names Pullman links his text with the scripture in a way that transcends the retelling of Eve’s ‘fall’ that makes up the main plot of the His Dark Materials trilogy and extends the intertextuality that characterises this magnum opus. Jibreel is, of course, the Islamic version of the angel Gabriel, a fact that becomes increasingly relevant as he begins to sprout a halo and an ethereal glow while the other main character, Saladin, begins to grow horns and a tail. 8. And it is for this reason that I consider texts incorporating a synopsis of the fairytale as the only examples where the reader is forced to acknowledge an intertext. Lack of prior knowledge, and indeed the reader’s own familiarity with the intertext, is rendered trivial by this method. 9. The cover to one American edition of The Handmaid’s Tale which Atwood described as ‘a knock-out!’ helps readers recognise the fairytale intertext, as it depicts two red-robed handmaids carrying baskets (Wilson 1993: 379). 10. The riding hood is an addition by Perrault, but it is significant that it was adopted and became an important part of both literary and oral retellings of the tale after Perrault (Levorato 2003: 6–7). Its symbolic connotations are covered in extreme depth by Zipes in his Trials and Tribulations, but the tradition of viewing it symbolically can be said to have been started by Fromm who believed that its colour represented menstruation. 11. Wealth and an isolated home are also characteristics of the wizards in ‘Fitcher’s bird’ and Calvino’s ‘Silver Nose’, and the robber in ‘The Robber Bridegroom’ and ‘Mr Fox’. 12. The Aarne–Thompson index significantly resembles Linnaeus’ system for scientifically taxonomising all species and tracing the relations between them. 13. This figure is, of course, questionable. Some of the motifs may be cases of either/or particularly the two Tabus (a tale with a prohibition on looking at ghosts and eating human flesh is harder to imagine), although if the protagonist were a princess and the ogre a cannibal then the criteria for G400, R11.1 and G81 would be fulfilled. 14. Here is a chain of analogy where Caliban = Cannibal (suggested anagram- matically in The Tempest even though there is no evidence that Caliban has ever tasted human flesh) = Motif G81 = Bluebeard. The representation of 172 Notes the Bluebeard figure as uncultured is also a feature of Byatt’s Babel Tower, where the husband doesn’t understand poetry, Atwood’s Bluebeard’s Egg with its naïve heart surgeon (!), and even Carter’s Nights at the Circus, where the duke may be rich, but his taste is also rather gauche and meretricious. 15. Indeed the definition of ogre is also problematic within the AT motif index. The ogre can be a giant, a serial killer, a witch, a queen and apparently, it seems, even a hare. This flexibility resembles Propp’s system of terming characters as ‘functions’, in that it does not matter to the structure of the story what name the villain has, he is the villain because he behaves villain- ously. Nevertheless, it is odd that a villain who happens to be a robber is treated entirely differently to one who is not. 16. The Disney revision of Collodi’s serial/novel makes this reading more obvious to the modern-day viewer substituting a whale for the original story’s ‘terrible fish’. However, what the popular belief specifies as a ‘whale’ is referred to in the book of Jonah as a ‘great fish’ (Wunderlich and Morrisey 2002). 17. A ‘palimpsest’ is a piece of writing that is on top of a previous piece of writing, the term derived from the medieval practice of having a piece of parchment that was reused over and over again to prepare early drafts. Genette adapts this term to apply to intertextuality, denoting the original as text the hypotext (hypo from underneath) and the text that supersedes it as the hypertext. 18. It is impossible to overstate the extent to which this study is indebted to feminist revisions of the fairytale. It is the rise of feminism which led to the first socio-political criticism of the fairytale, and the patriarchal messages that are embedded within it. The feminist correctives to fairytales which placed women in stronger roles, in addition to the criticism of the fairytale form, led to the contemporary criticisms of Zipes, Warner and Tatar et al. which have proved invaluable to my book. It is not a coincidence that Hutcheon considers feminism and other types of counter-cultural theory that grew in prominence in the latter half of the twentieth century the force that created postmodernism. 19. As we saw above, some allusory character names are more explicit than others. 20. There is an earlier reference to ‘the Castle of Murder’, a tale of the Bluebeard genus but which is obscure enough for me to discount here. Only a folklore enthusiast would know that this is the title of one of the tales that was featured in the first edition of the Grimms’ Kinder Und Hausmarchen to be discarded in the later editions (Carter 2001b: 33). 21. Lorna Sage points out that the ‘new woman’ has always been part of Carter’s work: ‘New Woman’ had been on the margins of Carter’s picture since the beginning; there’s a minor character, Emily, who walks away unscathed from the murderous mess at the end of Shadow Dance and she does it because she’s already an adept, she knows the story in advance: ‘I found this key in one of his trouser pockets, see, and I thought, you know, of Bluebeard’ (Sage 2001: 234).

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