Wilson, Megan 1
FAIRY TALES, HORROR, AND UNCANNY PROTAGONISTS OF THE 19TH CENTURY
Megan Wilson
Department of English
Dr. Neil Weijer, Dr. Kenneth Kidd
Special & Area Studies Collections Department, Department of English
University of Florida
21 April 2021
Wilson, Megan 2
Abstract
Nearly everyone is familiar with fairy tales. In the minds of so many, tales such as Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood evoke a time full of laughter, play, and adventures to far-off places only one’s imagination could conjure up. The mysterious, magical figures inhabiting earlier versions, however, are ambiguous to the point of being eerie. They both entrance and possibly frighten their audiences. My research investigates the overlap between 19th century fairy tales and the emerging genre of horror, looking specifically at Charles Perrault, Brothers Grimm, and Henry James’ novel The Turn of the Screw. I am interested in the protagonists, often women and children, because they play very similar roles now thought to be much different. Characters such as Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, or the Maiden without Hands represent what is understood as the uncanny because they lie somewhere between a child and an adult. Early illustrations often depicted these characters as children or young women, and yet their experiences in the story reflect those of someone else entirely. So, what are they? In fairy tales and horror, the child figure is ultimately a replication of the adult’s subconscious fears. They are less of a person and more of a “thing” in the eyes of the wicked stepmother and of the governess in The Turn of the Screw, which gives way for more supernatural or inhuman elements to enter the narrative. Although the adult may be why the uncanny exists in these genres, children are the embodiment of it.
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Introduction
In 19th century fairy tales and horror, children were often amidst the narrative’s struggles and triumphs, a critical piece to the happily ever after ending many readers now anticipate. The child’s significance, however, comes from the ambiguous role they play in these genres. As readers, we try to understand and relate to their character, but the child is ultimately unknowable and stands as an obstacle between adults and the reality they may have envisioned. In this essay, we are diving headfirst into the realm of fairy tales in search of answers surrounding the protagonists: why children, why women, and why the uncanny? The uncanny is an important link between women and children, and its configuration in select fairy tales has allowed me to view protagonists of 19th century horror in the same way. Thus, the fairy tales I want to discuss eventually merge with the horror genre by way of the uncanny. I will analyze Henry James’s novel The Turn of the Screw and discuss his narrative in relation to fairy tales from the Brothers
Grimm. The two genres fit together like puzzle pieces, 19th century horror mirroring the fairy tale with similar tropes, character traits, and the uncanny, ambiguous atmosphere. Beyond the fairy tale’s journey to love, however, there are more sinister qualities awaiting those who can find them. Jack Zipes, a renowned scholar in folklore and children’s literature, says in his essay The
Potential of Liberating Fairy Tales for Children, “. . . once we begin listening to or reading a fairy tale, there is estrangement or separation from a familiar world inducing an uncanny feeling which is both frightening and comforting” (309). As I will discuss in future chapters, the uncanny emerges when we become conscious of repressed childhood desires or events. It is a lingering representation of the past in combination with something completely foreign.
While thinking about the uncanny in connection to women and children, I found Zipes’s book The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood to be quite helpful. The book is a
Wilson, Megan 4 journey, Zipes leading his readers through different interpretations of Little Red Riding Hood and the many ways the story has been told. Tales collected by the Grimms, first published in the 19th century, and earlier versions written by Charles Perrault, show the uncanny predominantly within the protagonists, often a young girl from a harsh background experiencing trauma in ways readers cannot always discern. By the end of Zipes’s book, audiences learn that the contrast between 19th century fairy tale writers and their contemporaries is considerably influenced by society’s perception of women and children at the time. The Brothers Grimm collections of Little
Red Riding Hood portray the female child as a strong, brave girl able to wrestle her way past the wolf. Rather than creating an atmosphere of inherent weakness and female incompetence, the
Grimms illustrate to readers a more independent heroine who slowly maneuvers her way into other narratives throughout the 19th century. It also important to understand that the Grimms were much more vulgar in their retellings in that they regularly talk of incest, torture, emotional abuse, and sexual abuse. In an 1882 anthology of the Grimms, that which is titled Household
Stories, the wolf eats Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother, whereupon a huntsman skins the wolf and finds the two alive inside. With earlier versions, which Zipes says “[border] on puerility” (Trials and Tribulations 23), gore is much less prominent, if at all. Charles Perrault, who published his stories in the late 17th century, depicts Little Red Riding Hood as an inept image of a child’s carnal desires, the moral of the story essentially being to avoid strangers if you are a young, pretty girl. Audiences can see similar characteristics in his other works like
Cinderella or Snow White and the Seven Dwarves where sexual desires, abuse, and female rivalries lie in the minuscule details of the story. Perrault is brilliant, but he also belittles females by implicating their inferiority. Knowing the differences between Perrault and the Grimms is important because their differences are part of what influenced my overall argument. Over time,
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English and American storytellers have taken primitive German and French versions, eliminating the more sinister elements so as to create a more appropriate story for children, hence the stories we see in quite recent film-adaptations and children’s books. Disney’s relationship with the original fairy tales is almost nonexistent given that more violent deaths and sexual undertones are completely eliminated from their narratives. Fairy tales have often been misinterpreted as exclusively children’s stories, but studies such as Zipes’ show that their roots lie in much more diverse forms of entertainment where suggestive elements and hidden tropes wait for any and all readers. Thus, who are the stories really for and how do audiences feel when reading them?
Psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim focuses his attention on the child’s psychology, which is important for my paper because I am interested in the character’s thoughts and how they reflect and affect the reader. In The Uses of Enchantment, Bettelheim looks at the story of Cinderella through a lens of repressed desires and Freud’s oedipal complex, also known as the castration complex (259). It is a theory Freud proposes as part of his argument for the uncanny, describing the oedipal complex as a child’s attraction towards a parent of the other sex and also the fear of losing their own sexual organs. What makes the concept a willing contributor to the uncanny is its altering of the child’s perceived self into a figure less innocent and more “other,” or ambiguous. It also adds to the confusion of the fairy tale’s intent, the “what” and “for who” are these stories truly meant to reach. Bettelheim then discusses the relationship between children and fairy tales, looking more closely at the child reader and ways in which they may interpret the story and relate to it. Overall, he argues that fairy tales help children develop and cope with their own feelings. What I am particularly interested in, however, is seeing what we can learn about the uncanny child protagonist as represented in fairy tales and in horror literature. Merging reality with fantasy tends to influence concerns with what is real and what is presumably unreal,
Wilson, Megan 6 and I think this inevitably highlights the child character’s own, uncanny attributes because in understanding the real versus unreal dichotomy, readers can then acknowledge the same separation in the story’s protagonists. The child reader, even without realizing, is almost always forced to meet both the familiar and the unfamiliar in what they initially thought was a reflection of themselves, i.e. the fairy tale child. I would also like to note that an uncanny experience really depends on the reader, but this does not take away from the story or the protagonist being uncanny. The uncanny is subjective in that we all have different perceptions of what reality is, but it also fits into spaces we would least expect it. Even if the reader fails to have an uncanny experience, the uncanny can still be present because characters and stories are independent of their audiences.
In terms of the uncanny and children, Victorian literature is one of the building blocks for establishing the creepy child in what most would argue are much more realistic settings. This era of writing was heavily centered on conveying and integrating elements of the supernatural into the plots of stories. Women and children were often placed at the forefront of the strange occurrences where whispered voices, erratic behaviors, and dark aesthetics enveloped female leads before anyone else. The Turn of the Screw, perhaps one of the most infamous supernatural stories of the 19th century, is focused on the governess’s psychological downfall. Deception and lies are two major themes integral to the story’s uncanniness because with them, audiences tend to feel conflicted by what is real and what is in the governess’s head. These themes also help to convey the unsettling atmosphere around children in that they highlight the child’s cleverness and their ability to have knowledge adults do not. The child-adult relationship is a power dynamic, and when a child does something to change this dynamic, it triggers the adult’s anxiety.
Ghostly sightings, slamming doors, hushed voices, and the odd, submissive behavior of the
Wilson, Megan 7 house staff is enough to convince the governess that there is something wrong with the children, that they are the reason everything is off balance. James takes his characters and his audience on an adventure with no return, which makes his story even more important for establishing sameness between fairy tales and horror of the 19th century.
By acknowledging the uncanny, I was able to recognize a duality within the child protagonist as well as the adult. This duality establishes the child as unfamiliar and rather unsettling because they may resemble a child, but behave like an adult. In some stories, the adult may even take on the role of a child, especially in behavior, enabling this uncanny connection between them. Although I will discuss this more closely in future chapters, illustrations from the
Grimms and The Turn of the Screw further inspired my argument for the liminality and uncanniness of the aforementioned figures. Both children and adults emulate something they may or may not be. Childhood in Victorian England was not always about education, children interacting with children, or having fun in a time of blissful innocence. Childhood was a stage of perpetual maturation because the ultimate goal was becoming an adult and going to work.
Perhaps this can even explain some of the uncertainty around child characters at the time. Fairy tales were meant to identify with audiences, but the differences that surface in later versions allude to the different experiences children were beginning to have. Children are thought to be innocent beings, but fairy tales, despite what most audiences believe, actually influenced my skepticism of the child as truly innocent.
Now, I want to shed light on how the uncanny is usually defined. Freud refers to the uncanny as the unheimlich and the heimlich, meaning the unfamiliar and the familiar. What happens is the unfamiliar invades the familiar, which in turn creates the eerie, distressing feelings people have when they encounter the uncanny. When we do not recognize something within our
Wilson, Megan 8 own reality, it scares us because we cannot explain it. Freud may be a controversial figure, but I think he introduces the uncanny in a way that applies to my understanding of 19th century fairy tales and horror. His interpretation of the fairy tale is much different from my own, however.
Freud states, “Indeed, the fairy tale is quite openly committed to the animistic view that thoughts and wishes are all-powerful, but I cannot cite one genuine fairy tale in which anything uncanny occurs” (153). According to him, fairy tales fulfill our expectations of being unrealistic before we encounter them; therefore, they cannot be uncanny. Audiences anticipate the adventure into an unknown realm or the magical spells of the fairy godmother, which to Freud, disposes of any uncanny feelings. The uncanny is not supposed to be an expectation because it is something beyond human comprehension and control. Both Zipes and Bettelheim disagree with Freud’s argument, as do I, because it seems that Freud solely focuses his attention on the reader’s expectations, failing to consider that the reading experience, like the uncanny, is different for everyone. While I think the reader is important in my own study, I also have to consider the protagonist as well as her opponent. What about them – the child and the adult figure?
Children can be uncanny for different reasons, but many of these reasons start with the adults in their life. The adult represses memories from childhood, often the most traumatic ones, so the stories written by adults for children, or about children, are simply vague recollections of a past experience. In films and in literature, audiences may witness repressed childhood memories resurfacing, where the nightmarish monster that hid in the little girl’s closet is now standing in front of her twenty years later. If it is true that fairy tales are renditions of prior events, perhaps the Grimms and Perrault were foreshadowing, if not, recalling the struggles children and women faced. If so, they do it in such a way that psychological experiences and unconscious desires become recurrent for women and children in any domain. Fairy tales are versions of repressed
Wilson, Megan 9 memories, a place where the writer, the reader, and the protagonist all share the same uncertainty about their own stories.
Women in 19th century literature commonly represent women in the real-life, both in their struggles and in their achievements. Throughout the era, spirituality, individuality, and increased celebration of the childhood experience were emphasized in many books and poems.
In the text Victorian Ghosts in the Noontide: Women Writers and the Supernatural, Vanessa
Dickerson argues the role of Victorian women as somewhere between man and angel, as a handmaid to “male genius” (28). She writes:
By [acting on their supernatural gifts] Victorians were after all reaffirming a primitive,
age-old connection between mystery and women, whose powers – “bleeding painlessly in
rhythm with the moon, drawing people from their bodies, producing food from their
bodies for the young” – had inspired in early men both fear and awe. (qtd. 28)
Women were coming into their own, asserting themselves “beyond the domestic realm . . .
[where] at her best ultradomestic energies were hysterical” and at worst, demonic (qtd. 29). To entertain themselves and their kids, many women looked to spiritualism and literature, both their writing and reading of it. Witchcraft, séances, mesmerism, mind-reading; these practices became hobbies alongside the stories women created because it symbolized their independence from men, allowing them to feel in control and connected to something only other women could understand. Spiritualism opened doors to this “other” realm that was then incorporated into many of the Victorian stories people still read today.
The supernatural in fairy tales has been analyzed by numerous scholars, but my goal is to show how the supernatural in horror stories and stories like Cinderella feed off one another. I want to utilize arguments from other scholars to assemble my own thoughts and explore different
Wilson, Megan 10 ways in which the uncanny finds itself in 19th century fairy tales and the emerging genre of horror. In particular, I am interested in their shared themes of innocence, or lack thereof, repression, and envy. Also, why are women and children at the forefront? What makes them uncanny? In what ways do real-life experiences help us understand why their characters are depicted in such a way? Are children uncanny because childhood is the one experience we have all had and lost? In my thesis, I want to address these questions by framing the female and child protagonist from select stories as a fracture in reality’s surface, combining the real and the unreal in such a way that psychological and supernatural experiences fuse to create this realm of ambiguity.
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Chapter 1
Fairy tales are the world in which women and children become even more convoluted individuals. In this chapter, I will discuss the tales of Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, and
The Maiden without Hands to show not only their complexity, but also what makes their characters such a great influence on future horror stories. Cinderella is a widely popular tale studied by various scholars throughout the years, so to give this section a foundation, I found it best to start with this story of a young girl forced into a family who completely abhors her.
Cinderella’s character illustrates an image of sublime beauty where the uncanny slowly evolves.
Perfection is thought to be unattainable, but her ethereal qualities say otherwise, and they ultimately influence the darker parts of her life, most notably the wicked stepmother. The story tells of her father remarrying an evil woman with two daughters, who in many versions are quite ugly in comparison to Cinderella. Following the loss of her mother, Cinderella is devastated, only to be forced into a life of household chores, ragged clothing, and an absent father. The story continues where she is forbidden from attending the ball, but her fairy godmother saves the day.
She dresses the young girl in a beautiful gown and in a horse drawn carriage, takes her all the way to the castle where Cinderella dances the night away, falls in love with the prince, and lives happily ever after. Charles Perrault helped establish the Cinderella story many readers know and love today. He published his fairy tales in the latter part of the 17th century, procuring much of his work from earlier legends and myths. In writing his stories, Perrault pays close attention to the female’s submissive role, despite the victorious ending she often receives. If we consider social hierarchies from the 17th century and into the Victorian era, women were commodities exchanged between fathers and young men seeking marriage.
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In Perrault’s twelfth edition titled The Little Glass Slipper, readers find Cinderella’s well- established name originates from a nickname her stepmother gave her: Cinder-breech. It is said that she would “sit in the chimney-corner amongst the cinders” (The Little Glass Slipper 7), but her stepsisters eventually settled on the now infamous name she bares, meaning little ashes.
These names tell a story in their own way, foreshadowing the immense jealousy and neglect imposed on Cinderella by her stepfamily. For child readers then and now, Cinder-breech may sound humorous, but Perrault’s intent was perhaps much deeper than that. He tells of women and children as incapable of finding their way without the help of someone else, the “someone else” typically being a man or in this case, both a fairy godmother and a man. Many fairy tales include a male figure saving the woman, but Cinderella is also able to overcome her hardships with the help of her godmother propelling her onto a more liberated path of love and forgiveness.
Dorothee Ostmeier, a Professor of Literature and Folklore, did a study of the Cinderella film
Ever After. She highlights the phrase “magic realities,” which are especially noteworthy in earlier versions of the tale. Ostmeier writes the following:
In all traditional Cinderella tales, magic agents initiate the reader into social liberation
and act as mediations between two realities: the corrupt social reality and the redeeming
magic reality. The social reality is marked by envy, hatred, selfishness and
sadism/masochism provoked by the feudal system. (114)
Reality is individual. It is both an experience and a conception that everyone perceives differently depending on social class or individual desires. However, as times change, so do these social and magic realities that Ostmeier refers to. In Perrault, magic reality is in no way realistic while social realities, as Ostmeier claims, imitate “17th century female virtues such as
‘sweet disposition,’ ‘kindness,’ and ‘graciousness,’” an appreciation for godfathers and
Wilson, Megan 13 godmothers included here as well (116). The Grimms, however, deviate from the story’s more traditional path where brutal dismembering, death, and magic take the form of white birds who animate Cinderella’s prayers. Her initial graciousness versus the later supernatural/magical abilities she obtains tells of the ever-changing childhood experience as well as the author’s intent. Perrault emphasizes the child’s forgiveness and grace despite everything, but the Grimms impose fear on their readers by creating an impenetrable child figure with the ability to outwit anyone. The difference in Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, the primitive belief of childhood innocence to a more modern portrayal of childhood gone wrong, is where questions become really prominent for me. I want to understand why children and women suddenly become superior literary figures by the 19th century, and thus how this change gives way for the uncanny and perhaps motivated the genre of horror then and even now.
Despite what audiences may think, Cinderella is not all good. Her character is a representation of bad disguised as good in that she reflects the wicked stepmother’s past self as well as her desires. Cinderella is [externally] a pure figure existing within an impure world and surrounded by impure individuals. The greatest impurity, i.e. her stepmother, forces her to accept abuse and resort to outside agents in order to get what she wants. While in many versions of the story it seems clear who is good and who is bad, the Brothers Grimm complicate the threshold initially separating Cinderella and her wicked stepmother. The Grimms highlight Cinderella’s supernatural, witch-like abilities alongside the stepmother’s hope for a better life, both of which are interchangeable attributes between the two. Magic was Cinderella’s leverage, however, and her only way of achieving her happy every after. The wicked stepmother, also a magical being, works relentlessly to get her way even though she never does. At the end of the day, both
Wilson, Megan 14 characters want similar things – freedom from the past and unwavering love – so why are they commonly understood as opposites when their experiences and desires mimic one another?
Jack Zipes is the inspiration behind my newfound interest in understanding the darker parts of fairy tales. His book The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood encouraged me to search for any parallels I could find between Little Red Riding Hood and other fairy tale heroines. Zipes describes her character as a “pretty, defenseless girl” (Trial and Tribulations 9), and I think Cinderella also fits this category quite well. In the text, Zipes cites a passage from
French writer Lilyane Mourey who provides a clearer image of the female role, first being the leads in Perrault’s tales. Mourey argues “stupidity” and women go hand in hand for the 17th century writer, where he finds “intelligence could be dangerous” being that it is the attribute for men while beauty is the sole attribute for women (qtd. Zipes, 29). Cinderella was pretty and obliging, practically nothing more to Perrault, so he further weakened her by disposing of the ability to stand up for herself. Cinderella never spoke to her father about the way she felt because she feared he would reprove her complaints of the stepmother and sisters (Perrault, The Little
Glass Slipper 9). By the end of The Little Glass Slipper when the prince asks for Cinderella’s hand in marriage, her stepfamily begs for forgiveness and Cinderella unhesitatingly obliges, embracing them and seeking their affection. Perrault chooses this route only to prove a point that women were reliant, especially on money and, without a doubt, love. Marriage, family, and status were important to everyone at the time, not just women, but Perrault only emphasizes this need in the female figure because without money or a husband, women were nothing.
The story of Little Red Riding Hood is much different from Cinderella, but the two girls both share traits that communicate female inferiority. Little Red Riding Hood too possesses beauty and naivety. She is submissive in the same way as Cinderella behaves with her
Wilson, Megan 15 stepmother, but Little Red Riding Hood submits to a male lead, the infamous wolf. In anthologies such as Robinson Crusoe and Household Tales, the wolf is manipulative and emotionally abusive, seducing the little girl with “clever sexual innuendos” (Zipes, Trials and
Tribulations 14). He lures Little Red Riding Hood into the bed with him, creating what may be an amusing atmosphere for young readers, but for other generations, one that is incredibly tense.
A young child in the same bed as some strange “man” conveys a situation that is both manipulative and predatory on the part of the wolf. Even though Little Red Riding Hood believes the wolf is her sick grandmother, audiences know the truth, which makes the story’s intended message conflicting as readers navigate their way through the story. Zipes says Little Red Riding
Hood symbolizes a child’s sexual awakening and their willingness to do anything to please the older male figure. I agree, but I would also argue that the story equally highlights male dominance and also perplexes readers by making them question the intended audience as well as the overall lesson. Should children avoid strangers in the woods, or should parents be more cautious and aware of what children do on their own or with others? Should parents be more cognizant of how children use their imagination, how they play, or what experiences they have in the real world? In Perrault’s version from the Sunbeam Series, the wolf says to Little Red Riding
Hood, “I like you better than soup” (Red Riding Hood 8). She then undresses herself and climbs into bed with him. The atmosphere between the two, especially in this moment, implies sexual tension and I would argue it even compares to the dominant-submissive relationship between two adults. His large eyes, ears, and teeth were essentially made for her, signifying the need for him to have every part of her within his reach. It goes so far as an obsession, both the wolf’s obsession with feeding on her, but also with having her intimately. Little Red Riding Hood is
Wilson, Megan 16 entertainment, but it is also a warning, informing children and parents of the potential dangers, i.e. sexual predators, lurking in the woods waiting for “her” to come along.
Parents want control over their children, sometimes to help them and other times to defeat them. Little Red Riding Hood’s mother warns her not to talk to strangers, but even still, the child completely disregards it the moment the wolf approaches her. Children, although dependent beings, are independent thinkers capable of knowing much more than society lets on.
They can make decisions free from adults and in recognizing this feat, adults lose their control over both the child and whatever situation the child is in. A child’s imagination and originality are facets parents try to control, but ultimately cannot. The child psyche is an unknowable place where anything can come to fruition, which is an ability humans lose as they transition from childhood to adulthood. What appears to be a helpless little girl could very well be something else entirely, an adult imposter or an “it” resembling a child. Because there is no one way for them to be, children become these liminal others who can take on the role of whatever or whoever they want. In fairy tales, the adult and child are both separate yet synchronized beings, the difference being that the adult is more afraid of the child’s capabilities than the child is of them.
The stepmother and other villains like the wolf are individuals who instigate the role of the uncanny, liminal child. The evil stepmother often dominates the family and controls every facet of the child’s life. Cinderella is forced to clean everything in the household and is knowingly isolated from the outside world, ridiculed in everything she does out of the stepmother’s spite and a deep-rooted envy to be as Cinderella is. Her figure appears in other fairy tales like Snow White or Hansel and Gretel, but even in different stories, the stepmother remains an epitome of female desire and the blanketed fear adults have of children. By the end of the
Wilson, Megan 17 story, the domineering adult is defeated by the child protagonist such that Cinderella marries the prince and the wolf is killed by Little Red Riding Hood’s savior. Bettelheim makes an interesting point in The Uses of Enchantment when asserting the stepmother is a symbol or preservation of
“the good mother.” Death enables the good mother to remain good, but following her death comes the emergence of her evil counterpart. The child protagonist and even the child reader generally feel hatred or resentment towards this new adult figure, thus “preserving” the goodness of the real mother because the child cannot see the stepmother and good mother in the same way
(Bettelheim 83). The good mother-stepmother duo is essentially a reincarnation of the individual, but one in which the reincarnated figure exemplifies the opposite of the original. The evil stepmother is instrumental to fairy tales as we know them because she creates the drama, the ambiguous atmosphere, and an untamed jealousy that emphasizes the constant fear parents have of their children being better than them. Christy Williams claims in her article Who’s Wicked
Now? The Stepmother as Fairy-Tale Heroine that the Brothers Grimm would kill off the good mother so they could introduce the villain of the story (5). In doing so, the Grimms were aware that the audience would become enveloped by their own curiosity. Will the villainous stepmother kill? Kidnap? Become a hero rather than a villain? Will she die? The stepmother is unpredictable and this captivates audiences in a similar way the child protagonist does.
Discussing the good mother and the stepmother with each other has reminded me of
Freud’s uncanny element known as the double. Freud describes the double as an “object of terror” taking on the form of shadows, reflections, portraits, or real people (143). The double, also a doppelganger, is understood as two identical figures often comprised of traits the other individual does not have. He recognizes fellow psychoanalyst Otto Rank’s expansion on the theory in the translated 2003 edition of The Uncanny. Rank claims, “The double was originally
Wilson, Megan 18 an insurance against the extinction of the self or . . . ‘an energetic denial of the power of death,’ and it seems likely that the ‘immortal’ soul was the first double of the body” (qtd. 142). The stepmother is not necessarily the good mother in denial, but a reflection of her. She echoes this
“immortal soul” in that she lives on in the good mother’s place; however, the stepmother remains her own individual. She stands as more of a doppelganger, an embodiment of the evil that the good mother repressed. In other words, she impersonates the good mother’s role while simultaneously being her opposite, which makes her comparable to Rank’s theory, but not quite the same.
The child protagonist then perceives the stepmother as “other” whether they realize it or not. In fairy tales, the adult and child are both distinct figures who also share many similarities.
The two may show indistinguishable behaviors, or maybe the child takes on a role that an adult would normally play. Considering the child’s point of view can help us better understand their motives as well as what makes them an additional foreign presence. Fairy tale children are driven to compare their two mothers, searching for any similarities and eventually coming to the conclusion that there are none. This comparison contributes to the child’s behavior throughout the story – devastated by the good mother’s passing and angered or confused by the wicked figure sent to replace her. The child broadcasts their emotions in different ways: disobeying, deception, or complete submission. Ultimately, their character is motivated by the way the adult figure treats them, both in fiction and in real life. Children, especially in fairy tales and in late
19th century horror, are their own category of people. I would describe the child as a figure who grows, but never actually grows up. They are somewhere between innocent and experienced, vulnerable and resilient, little and big, and the concrete stance they take somewhere in this in between is quite beguiling to see as a recent fairy tale analyst. Even still, readers want to relate to
Wilson, Megan 19 the child because they are compelled to believe it will give them a sense of comfort. In his brief review of Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment, Joseph Nagy claims:
[Bettelheim gives children] an opportunity to get involved in fantasy situations and
problems that they can relate to their own; children arrive at truths passed down through
the tradition of storytelling and now internalized and spontaneously valid within the
individual recipient of that tradition. (1)
With Freud’s double in mind, the child reader sees his or herself in the fairy tale. Yet, what I find myself struggling to grasp is whether the story’s protagonist is influenced by reality or if reality is influenced by the protagonist. Where does the uncanny child originate? The most common understanding of the uncanny is that it is unfamiliar. Freud argues it is a “return,” or an unconscious clinging to the ambiguity of what was once familiar to us (xliii). The uncanny is an internal experience and the child becomes a representation of it when they behave in a peculiar way as seen from the adult’s perspective. When children are surrounded by bizarre events, the uncanny inevitably materializes and ignites unsettling feelings in readers and in the story’s characters. If an adult reflects on the past, there are going to be gaps in their memory where they subconsciously know something happened, but their conscious self represses it. Readers may encounter the uncanny in fairy tales when the protagonist experiences something they have also experienced. Maybe they share the same abusive parents and neglect, or hallucinations and strange voices while home alone, all of which can be disturbing events that our psyche strives to protect us from. Stories like Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, or The Maiden Without Hands are those with the ability to unlock the door to our subconscious and allow us access to a darker world we forgot existed.
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Continuing on, Little Red Riding Hood has been crucial in my understanding of fairy tales, horror, and children across different stories. Her curiosity of the dark forest and her willingness to interact with the wolf are implications of a child’s carnal desires, which are feelings even the child is likely unaware of. Adults often avoid recognizing this category of thoughts in children because it is both intimidating and inconsistent with what they think is normal for a child. Normal is what the adult can predict, and when the ability to predict is no longer possible, all control is lost. It is unnerving to think of children as being aware of sex or anything related to it because to know would typically mean to have done or, at the least, to have witnessed. According to Freud and many other scholars, children are sexual beings and their sexuality, or understanding of it, plays a large part in the development process. Vern Bullough, an American historian and sexologist, performed a study on child sexuality where he utilized details from fairy tales while looking at Freud’s theory of the oedipal complex. Bullough traces the uncanny back to childhood fantasies and fears, where the child and their parent of the same sex compete for an intimate relationship with the other parent (Freud liv). He also argues Freud attributed sexuality to human development in that sexual experiences during childhood influence the behavior a child will have as an adult (Bullough 7). In Cinderella, the love triangle between the stepmother, the father, and Cinderella can be linked to Freud’s oedipal complex because the father loves Cinderella in a way the stepmother will never know. Perrault and the Grimms both recognize the stepmother’s envy as lying deeper than just physical appearance or personality.
She loathes Cinderella’s relationship with her father, so much so that in some versions, the stepmother kills him and in others, she emotionally abuses Cinderella while manipulating the father into believing everything is okay.
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On the surface, Cinderella and horror have no correlation, but what allows her tale to fit into my discussion is the perfect persona her character emanates in nearly all versions of the story. Her divine-like presence motivates the eerie details that change only slightly between different authors and editions. Perrault’s Cinderella character is a vessel for the uncanny where her abilities are hidden beneath her own beauty and kindness. The Grimms, however, give
Cinderella agency. They enable her supernatural gifts and underline her deception of adult figures in her life. The shift occurring between Perrault and the Grimms is what convinced me that Cinderella can be an uncanny fairy tale because it illuminates the young female protagonists increased power over everyone else. Children and women become agents in their own lives as well as in stories, something both new and frightening for a male-dominated 19th century society.
This agency eventually introduced horror like Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, which deals with very similar questions of power and more clearly illustrates where or who the uncanny emerges from.
Another step closer to horror is the manifestation of the supernatural in fairy tales, predominantly, and more to my own interest, those of the Brothers Grimm. The supernatural transpires in the form of evil queens, stepmothers, fairy godmothers, and talking animals lurking amidst the trees of a dark forest. These figures share the same characteristic, that being magic, which imparts uncanny qualities on not only them, but on the child protagonist as well.
Audiences, including myself occasionally, are prompted to wonder why the child so often becomes a victim to the supernatural; however, I would argue this is a misconception. Children are really antagonists for it, supernatural perpetrators in that they imagine and believe in what adulthood takes away from the individual. Adults and children understand the world differently and because children are at a place in life where anything is possible, they feed off the
Wilson, Megan 22 supernatural generating their imaginations. In fairy tales, the supernatural rings true despite fairy tale audiences lack of anticipation for it, and this is because the child serves as a portal for otherworldly experiences. Psychoanalysis defines the supernatural as a force or entity that goes beyond human understanding and scientific explanation. Both it and the uncanny coincide in that they work towards a common goal: perplexing the reader and positioning themselves in the protagonist. The occult, which evolved primarily in the 16th century, relies on a belief in the supernatural and knowledge of a reality science deems impossible. It has become even more popular in recent years with speculation surrounding religious practices and new scientific discoveries, or lack thereof. Typically, the occult and the supernatural concern themselves with magic, as I mentioned, spiritualism, and witchcraft, all of which surfaced rather abruptly in the
Victorian period, around the time the Grimms’ tales were published. Women were the main communicators with the spiritual realm, and they did so as a sort of hobby or form of entertainment. It was an ability they possessed that men often did not, so in the eyes of society, women as well as children were “others,” regarded as more spiritual beings because they made themselves more susceptible to abnormality. By this, I mean women and children willingly and successfully communicated with outside forces. The Grimms Little Red Riding Hood and
Cinderella both render supernatural elements such as the endearing, magical figure of the fairy godmother and the terrorization of a talking, predatory wolf. What the supernatural does in these instances is amalgamate characteristics or figures from reality by giving them otherworldly attributes and creating a figure with presumed inhuman, or human if we consider the wolf, capabilities.
To elaborate further, I want to discuss a lesser-known tale from the Brothers Grimm, often entitled The Maiden without Hands. The tale appeared in many anthologies, both of the
Wilson, Megan 23
Grimms’ stories and of stories for children more generally, like the anthology Robinson Crusoe.
The story begins with a poor miller who has nothing left but his family, his mill, and a large apple tree standing beyond it. While in the woods, the miller meets an evil spirit disguised as an elderly man who says to him, “I will make you rich, if you will promise to give me what is standing behind the mill” (Grimm, Robinson Crusoe 22). He assumes the man means the apple tree, so the father reluctantly agrees and goes on his way. Arriving home, he is thrilled by his newly acquired riches. However, when his wife asks for an explanation, she quickly realizes the deal her husband made: wealth in exchange for their poor daughter who was standing behind the mill when the two men negotiated. The evil spirit, also the devil, faces obstacles each time he returns for the miller’s daughter because her hands are too clean. The act of cleaning her hands was the maiden’s way of removing any interaction with evil that day and because the devil is an unclean, impure entity, he could not touch her. The devil eventually persuades the father to cut off his daughter’s hands so she could not clean herself, which he does, leaving the young, handless girl in the forest to fend for herself. The maiden is soon met by an angel and in time marries a king who found her eating fruit from his garden. As the story progresses, the maiden has the king’s child, but the devil tries coercing the mother-in-law to kill both the maiden and her newborn son. They survive, however, both with an angel’s help and mercy from the King’s mother, and by the end of the story, everyone is happily reunited. The Maiden without Hands is useful in my discussion of the uncanny and fairy tale protagonists because once again, audiences encounter a female lead enveloped by the strange and the unfamiliar disguised in human form.
The role of the devil and of divine spirits juxtaposes the role of the fairy godmother and the wicked stepmother. The Maiden without Hands is also a tale of a young girl’s struggle in transitioning from childhood to adulthood, despite her apparent adult experiences. I found this
Wilson, Megan 24 particular tale uncanny because the Grimms confuse the adult and child by trapping the maiden between the two phases of her life. She is unable to carry out the typical role of an adult – unable to fully care for herself or her own child – and this in mind emphasizes my interpretation of the child/adult figure as liminal.
Innocence and childhood go hand in hand, but in fairy tales, this connection is often lost.
It disappears not only in the child’s ambiguous adventure into the realm of carnalities, i.e. the forest, but innocence is lost the moment the child is on their own. What fairy tales convey is a duality in their protagonists, where the young girl is described in a child-like way, and yet her behavior resembles someone much older. In her work “Bourgeois Innocence Lost,” Imke Meyer writes, “children are a version of an adult self-walking around as other, an uncanny doppelganger
– they may be seen to embody an adult’s past, and they may embody a version of a self that an adult casts into an uncertain future” (185). The child character replaces the adult figure by taking on all the responsibilities or behaving more maturely. This in itself is uncanny because the child looks like a child (familiar), but no longer is (unfamiliar). Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, the maiden: these female protagonists are all frozen in time, figures of the uncanny in that they grow up and mature throughout the story, but they never actually grow up. According to Meyer, children have a “vexing” nature. They embody innocence, happiness, and loss, standing as figures of both good and bad (185). Liminality, more clearly expressed in their persona, is what contributes most to the child’s uncanniness.
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Chapter 2
Horror is a genre I have always been fascinated with, even as a child myself. The eeriness, the fear, the adrenaline: these feelings that emerge from horror stories are what enchant people like me because we so easily find ourselves in the middle of it all. Although the two are presumed opposites of each other, horror incorporates fairy tale tropes as a foundation for constructing its own stories, and my intent is revealing the ways in which we can rightfully establish horror as a contemporary fairy tale. Horror thrusts readers and viewers into a separate realm, a place outside the scope of human understanding because it is not necessarily “normal” or something we know. It is ambiguous, and this same ambiguity persists within fairy tales as well. In Fairy Tale Films: Visions of Ambiguity, co-authors Greenhill and Matrix describe the genre as a “shape shifter and medium breaker” between earlier oral tales, Perrault, the Brothers
Grimm, and the much more recent Walt Disney versions (3). Fairy tales were initially unambiguous narratives, most telling a very similar story. The story was often, if not always a woman or child waiting to be saved by a heroic, but truthfully more villainous, male figure. But, in doing research with different texts from different periods, I found that the stories gradually become more vague, contrary to Freud’s belief in the readers having certain expectations for them. As the 19th century went on, fairy tales soon epitomized horrific events and details, sometimes clearly and other times more subtly. Horror, as I would describe it then, is the strange, liminal space through which fairy tale elements linger, just in different contexts. The ambiguity of horror derives itself from the lack of separation between real and fantasy, examples being the human-like animal or the human-like machine as seen in Frankenstein (Stewart 41). Is it one, the other, or both?
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Noël Carroll, a philosopher of contemporary art, describes the type of horror I am most interested in his work The Nature of Horror, that which he refers to as “art-horror” (51):
Art-horror, by stipulation, is supposed to refer to the product of a genre that crystallized
roughly around the time of the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and that has
continued, often cyclically, to persist through the novels and plays of the nineteenth
century and the literature and films of the twentieth. (qtd. 51)
Frankenstein serves as a pivotal example of the classic horror figure, alongside vampires, werewolves, or evils spirits who haunt the grounds of an old, gothic mansion. During the
Victorian era, ghost stories and tales of suspense began creeping their way into the literary sphere. As Carroll notes, horror is intended to promote a specific response for the audience, a response that is generally influenced by that of characters in the story (52). Audiences are meant to feel anxious and unsure of precisely what makes the story so unsettling. Stephen King, films like Halloween or Friday the 13th, and many more horror stories generate uncanny feelings because the audience is not meant to predict what will happen next. Suspense builds from the gradual lowering or raising of the eerie music. The sky darkens and before anyone realizes, it is only the audience, the protagonist, and some unknown entity waiting for the opportunity to seize them both. Scholars like Carroll argue that horror and fairy tales both embrace these monstrous, unfamiliar creatures. From my understanding of Carroll’s work, however, it seems monsters in horror stories are extraordinary creatures living in an ordinary world while fairy tale monsters are ordinary living in an extraordinary world (52). Freud offers a similar point of view, that of predictability, when arguing that the uncanny themes of “death and the raising of the dead” are
“commonplace” in fairy tales (Freud 153). Being able to predict characteristics of the story means it is not only un-uncanny, but also quite different from horror. I still disagree with Freud
Wilson, Megan 27 on this argument though because fairy tales have changed greatly over the centuries. The storylines remain similar for the most part, but the ways in which different people tell these stories means the audience’s general expectations are not always accurate or true. Between horror and fairy tales, an important commonality is the protagonist who suffers emotional turmoil and ultimately decides the fate of the narrative as well as the audience’s experience.
When thinking of tales such as Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood, we recognize a young female protagonist who exemplifies society’s perception of women. With Perrault, readers find he is interested in evoking the female’s weakness and low social status, whereas the Grimms are interested in telling the harsher truth of female experiences. The Grimms’s stories were heavily motivated by society and culture. How did fairy tales motivate horror though, both modern-day horror and the emerging genre of horror in the 19th century? In the coming paragraphs, I will examine The Turn of the Screw to highlight its relationship with earlier fairy tales. Then, I will turn my attention to the protagonists and discuss why and how their roles parallel those of fairy tale characters in the Grimms. Ambiguities between characters like Cinderella and her stepmother are important to remember throughout this discussion because their relationship corresponds with that of the adult and child characters in the novel.
Written by Henry James, The Turn of the Screw was published in 1898 and later finds itself the epitome of Victorian horror. The book is about a young governess who cares for two very peculiar children, Miles and Flora, and they all live together in a beautiful country estate known as Bly. The former governess, Miss Jessel, disappeared under unknown circumstances with another mysterious caretaker, Peter Quint. The children were then left under the care of their housekeeper, Mrs. Grose, until the new governess came along. Miles was away at boarding school when the governess arrived, but he is introduced early in the story after being kicked out
Wilson, Megan 28 of school for what are once again, mysterious reasons. Flora, the other child, was a beautiful, peaceful presence in the governess’s unsettling first days at Bly, which as we will learn, never quite go away. Bly holds many secrets, most of which are concealed by the children, and these secrets ultimately contribute to the gradual decline of the governess and her eventual loss of sanity. “Not knowing” really ignites human fear because it means there is a lack of control. As humans, we want to know what is going to happen at all times. The governess, in her ignorance, feels powerless over the omniscient child figures, which eventually drives her insane. Power is perhaps the most anticipated trait for adults in their relationships with children, so when the governess realizes she has no superiority, her newfound role as the parental figure is stripped away.
As with death or the world coming to an end, awareness of the child’s ever-increasing dominance induces anxiety in adults. Cosmic Horror, or what some refer to as Lovecraftian
Horror, is slightly different from The Turn of the Screw and its more gothic style. However, I think the definition of it can help explain the governess’s slip into insanity. Cosmic Horror is essentially the madness that follows a person’s confrontation, willing or not, with the chaos of an unknowable world. When the outside, that which we cannot know, invades our known world, it gives rise to human insanity and thus enables the uncanny to materialize. In this instance, the children represent chaos and the governess represents madness. The definition more generally implies that the uncanny appears in horror whenever we feel something is going to happen, but we cannot know exactly when or what it will be. The jump scare is a good example. At the end of the day, the ambiguity of horror is perhaps its most frightening attribute.
The Turn of the Screw is a great representation of the child as unknowable, a story composed of incessant questions that remain unanswered even after many years of scholarly
Wilson, Megan 29 studies, cinematic portrayals, and more general interpretations such as my own. Miles and Flora embody ambiguity in the sense that neither characters nor audiences can determine the experiences that have made them so bizarre. Audiences are left with no concrete answers, just individual interpretation and plenty of confusion. Shoshana Felman’s article Turning the Screw of Interpretation argues the governess is kept from knowing certain things. Felman notes that when the governess becomes aware of this restriction, “the sense of what she does not know, exists and is in fact possessed by – or possessing – someone else” (157). Knowledge, or the absence of knowledge, is a curse. Knowing what will happen can very well cause anxiety, but not knowing invokes fear because it deems us helpless. The governess progressively loses her mind hearing hushed voices and seeing ghostly apparitions around the property, but the children are unbothered given they know the true nature of these events.
My deeper understanding of the text, and also taking into consideration Jack Clayton’s
1961 film The Innocents, has led me to discern James’s subtler hints in the novel, such as the governess’s fear of the physical and emotional development of the children. Their development is coupled with the promiscuous adult figures, or ghosts, who influence them in secret. In relation to fairy tales, what can be said of the young characters is that they lose the childhood innocence accompanying most children in the known world. Little Red Riding Hood is stripped of her innocence the moment she enters the woods, a plausible symbol of her sexual curiosity.
Although her character is naïve and very much child-like, her encounter with the wolf takes away her virtue as a result of his emotional and attempted physical abuse of her. Experiences in these stories, chosen or not, alter the character’s transition from childhood to adulthood. In fairy tales, we encounter children in such a way that they are no longer children experiencing the familiar laughter and play of the childhood modern-day kids enjoy. Rather, they are caring for
Wilson, Megan 30 themselves, working in the home, and suffering abuse by figures who reality deems as either too good or too bad. For Miles and Flora, violence and abuse were likely common experiences before the governess came along. The children were isolated by their former caretakers, Peter
Quint and Miss Jessel. Mrs. Grose often looked the other way if things went awry, or at least she attempted to, so when discussing the children’s early lives with the governess, she suggests, but never outwardly admits what may or may not have happened to them. Child abuse in The Turn of the Screw is similar to the abuse that takes place in earlier fairy tales. Quint, like the wolf in
Little Red Riding Hood, convinced Miles to believe that their circumstances were normal. He would spend time alone with the boy, creating a bond that even death could not break. Regarding
Quint’s personality:
Mrs. Grose considered as if it were perhaps a little case for a sense of shades. “I’ve never
seen one like him. He did what he wished.”
“With her?”
“With them all.” (James 78)
The governess’s thoughts of “perverse horror” upon hearing Mrs. Grose summarize what I would describe the children’s past experiences to be. By perverse horror, this means the impurities she began to imagine taking place between Miles and Quint. The irony of this scenario is that the governess parallels Quint in her own way by obsessing over the children and even putting herself in vulnerable situations with them, one of which I will describe shortly. James writes, “To do it in any way was an act of violence, for what did it consist of but the obtrusion of the idea of grossness and guilt on a small helpless creature who had been for me a revelation of the possibilities of beautiful intercourse?” (202). I believe the “it” is a reference to the children’s molestation, if not, potentially a reference to possessing them. Nevertheless, from this quote
Wilson, Megan 31 extends the plausible belief that Miles was forced into sexual relations with Peter Quint. The governess, amidst her psychological downfall, begins to feel for Miles in a romantic way as a result of his maturity, but also her own lack of physical intimacy. I would describe the two characters as opposites to their appearance. Audiences perceive a child, Miles, and an adult, the governess, but their intellects emanate a contrast, or perhaps a switch between the two in that
Miles is more of the adult and the governess acts as the child. In his film The Innocents, Jack
Clayton very obviously shows the governess as an older woman and Miles as a young boy, but their frame of mind diverges from the physical attributes they obtain. Miles is constantly aware, a gentleman with wide eyes and such advanced vocabulary that one would never guess he could be as young as he is. The governess also reminds me of characters like Little Red Riding Hood with her naivety and unrelenting curiosity, or submission, towards the opposite male lead. She is willing to do anything for the “man” in her life and the willingness, the obsession with pleasing him, is what ultimately fuels her impending turmoil.
There is an exhausting amount of scholarship on The Turn of the Screw, both connecting it to fairy tales and the uncanny. “Fairy Tale Turned Ghost Story: James’s The Turn of the
Screw,” written by Lisa Chinitz, discusses the merging of the fairy tale into a Victorian ghost story through which “the readers experience a crisis in reality testing that is nothing less than uncanny” (qtd. Jones 2). What James’ achieves with his version of the uncanny is an ambiguous portrayal of characters combined with ghostly allusions that serve as a doppelganger to the fairy tale in which the storyline is mimicking. Doppelgangers can be described as two physically indistinguishable figures, one good and the other evil, although this is not the case every time.
The governess comes from an impoverished background with no experience taking care of children. Even still, she lands the job at Bly and her excitement from the new adventure
Wilson, Megan 32 transpiring in her life is heightened at the start of the novel. And yet, her character quickly becomes erratic, which audiences will see early in the story when she hears voices and sees apparitions throughout the estate. The governess, in these ways, conforms to the typical fairy tale lead as “a valiant little heroine who is trying to make the best of her unfortunate lot but who is unhappily beset by ogreish and awful obstacles” (16). Like Sleeping Beauty perhaps, cursed with an eternal sleep, the governess is cursed with uncertainty and an inability to unsee the haunted world around her. Her “eternal sleep” is within a nightmarish reality in which she found herself trapped. Or, like Little Red Riding Hood and the wolf, the governess harbors affection and intrigue towards someone much different from her – a manipulative figure masked as a kindhearted individual, i.e. Miles/Quint and the grandmother/wolf.
Abnormal events permeate The Turn of the Screw. Ghosts, strange noises, and an eerie setting leave room for the uncanny to present itself in the novel by introducing the weird in what seemed like a perfectly normal world. Traces from fairy tales within James’s horror story allows for this notion of the doppelganger, or the double, that Freud describes as “a repetition of childhood fantasies or beliefs . . . which have been discarded or repressed” (Freud lii). Though most fairy tales from the Grimms obtain sinister characteristics audiences see in more contemporary horror, the Grimms also implement these elements in such a way that convinces readers of a happier ending. Fairy tales are deceiving and often subtle or simplistic in their representation of evil, whereas stories like The Turn of the Screw, though ambiguous, illuminate sinister elements of cannibalism, apparitions, abuse, or gory dismemberment. The ambivalence, both the good and the bad existing within and between these two genres, implies that late 19th century horror emphasizes the darker parts of fairy tales. Horror typically ends in tragedy, or at the least, “until next time” in order to keep the audience wanting more. The genre’s menacing
Wilson, Megan 33 events are mostly shown in the form of death, sometimes following the death of an important person to the story or to the protagonist. When thinking of characters like Peter Quint or Miss
Jessel, I am reminded of the convincing belief that they abused the children before they died and throughout the story, aim to possess them, if not already. James also suggests something awry in the character of Mrs. Grose. She rarely admits to much when it involves the children, but she does tell the governess that Quint and Miles were good friends, that “It was Quint’s own fancy.
To play with him I mean – to spoil him” (James 62, 63). From this, we get a sense of Mrs.
Grose’s fear for Quint, thus causing me to believe his control over the household easily allowed him to take advantage of the people around him, both in life and in death. Oftentimes, audiences will see an increasing fascination transpire between the good and evil characters in horror stories.
The governess fantasizes about both Quint and Miles while Quint’s ghost basically torments her for his own satisfaction. Her inferiority to Miles and Flora is emphasized in her apparent need to know everything about them, which again, heightens her collapse. The children, in turn, find enjoyment in the governess’s immense struggles, whispering purposefully in front of her and blatantly ignoring certain questions she asks them.
Horror is certainly ambiguous, but it leaves the subtlety to its counterpart. Keeping in mind Jack Zipes work with Little Red Riding Hood can help with our understanding of why fairy tales and horror exemplify Freud’s doppelgangers. Stories like Little Red Riding Hood call attention to the female child’s sexual awakening. Her enhanced sensual curiosity when entering the forest leads to her encounter with an older, male figure – the wolf. He is a symbol of predation and somewhat of a double to Little Red Riding Hood’s perceived innocent character.
Fairy tales in general communicate this same message by highlighting the young girl’s innocence while also hinting at something that opposes it. Usually, fairy tales want to teach a harsh lesson
Wilson, Megan 34 in a less harsh way, often using comedy or magic or pure coincidence. This is why the wolf may seem comical or Cinderella’s stepmother cruel, yet also relatable. What horror does differently is it educates audiences by inciting fear, scaring us into doing whatever it takes to avoid imminent dangers. Audiences might expect that a story centered on children would not be so horrific, but that is simply not the case with The Turn of the Screw. Placing Miles and Flora in the middle of supernatural events erases any innocence or purity readers may have initially associated with them. The supernatural is anything but pure. Ghosts and demonic figures are unclean spirits attempting to inhabit a world they have no part in and in trying to live through Miles and Flora, the children too become impure.
Children in fairy tales and horror are compelling with their complex presence and unpredictable behaviors. In the stories I have discussed, I often found myself wondering if the child was really a child at all. What particularly struck me with Miles and Flora is the way James chose to interpret them. Children in general are mirror images of the adult’s past self, despite whether or not they carry a similar resemblance. The child symbolizes forgotten hopes and dreams and in wishing them well, they become everything the adult is not or perhaps never was.
They are the innocent, the good, and the right to everything that grown-ups did wrong when they were in their shoes. With that comes a keen sense of envy and thus a fracture in the surface of the adult-child relationship. In Cinderella for instance, readers witness jealousy from the stepmother.
Jealousy comes from a place of nostalgia as well as pain because the stepmother knows that she will never be as perfect as her stepdaughter. She will never know her beauty nor the love she receives from the world, and the hatred the stepmother begins to feel only intensifies as the narrative progresses. Lack of control is what drives the older female antagonists mad. The governess is relentless in her efforts to know what the children are hiding from her and she loses
Wilson, Megan 35 herself in the process. She chooses to be naïve and emotionally manipulative in order to get her way, but by the end of the novel, no one, including the audience, is entirely satisfied. The stepmother seeks control in creating a scarce father figure and, similarly, manipulating and/or forcing the stepdaughter to become a servant. However, the moment the child stands up for herself in whatever form that may take, the evil that once pervaded the stepmother’s character disappears. Villains obtain their control in the havoc they wreak and although I would not necessarily place the governess in the villain’s category, her persistence gets the best of her and eventually leads to Miles’s death. These examples amplify the idea that the child is everything the adult is not, thus instigating this internal battle between the adult character and her own subconscious. The adult really struggles to accept the child as superior, where they often feel a sense of happiness, but also unrelenting anger. Anger or frustration, as we learn, can easily turn into an obsession with defeating the child, this “other,” problematic figure. What typically ensues is a victory for the child though, so I would strongly argue that children hold the power in their relationships with adults. They run the show and the moment they begin to independently alter their own story or acquire knowledge that we (adults) do not have, it frightens us and we stumble down a path of utter confusion. Children are generally understood to be pure virtuous, but in fairy tales and horror stories, they are much closer to the threshold that exists between these terms. Somewhere between the good and the bad, the pure and the impure, is where the child figure persists and our inability to know where precisely they are can be horrifying. Adults are supposed to preside over children, but what we find in these stories is a “child” character who presides over the adult.
Throughout the novel, James alludes to the children’s sublime-like characteristics. The sublime is comparable to a few different terms in psychoanalysis, but its own definition would be
Wilson, Megan 36 something so beautiful that it is terrifying – something amazing yet inexplicably strange to the point that we become overwhelmed by its presence. It is often in connection with nature such as mountains, oceans, or the Northern Lights, but The Turn of the Screw uses the sublime philosophy in a different way. Before discussing this, I just want to quickly mention that the sublime juxtaposes two very important terms I have mentioned in this paper: unheimlich and heimlich, or unfamiliar and familiar. Textbook definitions depict the sublime as “an emotional state” or a “feeling . . . ‘provoked by an object in nature before which the imagination trembles’”
(qtd. Baker 306). However, James imparts the sublime on Miles and Flora, as described in the following: “Why, of the very things that have delighted, fascinated, and yet, at bottom, as I now so strangely see, mystified and troubled me. Their more than earthly beauty, their absolutely unnatural goodness” (James 115). The children are mesmerizing figures who captivate not only the attention of the governess, but of audiences as well. As readers, we are taken on a journey through the governess’s psyche, settling somewhere between gothic horror and psychological realism. The gothic is a very interesting genre of horror and I feel that it exemplifies our feelings of confusion by entrancing us with both a tragedy and a romance. Psychological realism, however, is the slightly more compelling aspect of James’s writing in that it introduces readers to a much deeper part of the human psyche. Instead of reading a story about a woman who moves into a beautiful country home and cares for two beautiful children, audiences are shown the darkness that rests within us all through the eyes of an individual who collapses mentally. Horror instills fear in different ways, one way being to subconsciously, or sometimes even consciously, place audiences into the narrative. Bettelheim argues that children read fairy tales because they see themselves in the young protagonist, comparing and contrasting their own experiences to that of the characters. Thinking of this in terms of psychological realism, we also find ourselves in
Wilson, Megan 37 the story and by reading it from the governess’s perspective, we too become lost and confused, slowly losing our own sanity. Henry James wants readers to feel what the characters feel – sadness, perplexity, fear – and he does this in The Turn of the Screw by implementing two deceitful, uncanny child figures in complete control of the story and of their own lives.
Expanding on this notion of children in control, I want to look more closely at the moment Miles and the governess kiss. In instances like this, it is difficult to truly understand the governess’s motives because throughout the story, readers get the impression that she has unrevealed feelings for Miles. James wants to convince audiences that her obsession is with getting answers about the past, but perhaps her real obsession is with having Miles to herself, romantically or otherwise. In chapter 11 of the novel, their kiss is described as “the end of everything,” the governess folding into Miles’s arms while trying not to cry (James 112). She loves him not just as a mother loves her son, but as a woman who loves her husband. The world stops turning, her emotions become erratic, and the desire to protect and to have Miles only intensifies from this moment onward. The governess essentially reflects Miles in his own relationship with Peter Quint. Her thoughts and actions emanate from her obscured feelings for the boy, which for me, really magnifies her ambiguity. She is both an adult and a child, a reciprocal to the child figure’s role as this liminal other. The kiss she shares with Miles further confuses her feelings for him and leaves audiences questioning whether Miles is really a child at all. If so, what does that make the governess? My interpretation is that she, like other prolific characters I have mentioned, is lost, if not, imprisoned in the transitional phase between childhood and adulthood. She is troubled and remains in the same, unsettling territory for the entirety of the story because the uncanny leaves her no other choice.
Wilson, Megan 38
The Turn of the Screw is my epitome of horror as the contemporary fairy tale because it conveys both women and children as detached from reality. The Victorian woman, as exemplified by the governess, borders insanity, but I also find myself sympathizing with her character. Homogenous to the wicked stepmother, her desire to know the truth and to feel love is far from blameless. However, her inability to reexamine the child’s role, to see them as anything other than deceptive and evil, inevitably leads to her own downfall. The Turn of the Screw’s ongoing debate – is it supernatural or psychological – is dependent on the reader, my own research telling me it may be a little of both. The governess loses herself at the hands of what we assume are supernatural children possessed by their former, abusive caretakers. The children are arguably the initial creators of the story’s ambiguity in that readers, along with the governess, are confused by who or what they truly are. Apparitions and strange noises allude to the supernatural, however, the story never tells us whether these events were real or simply in the governess’s head. Thus, the threshold between reality and fantasy is almost incomprehensible where the children may or may not be ghosts and the governess may or may not be experiencing these events in real-time. Nevertheless, the protagonists in The Turn of the Screw still mimic the obscurity of fairy tale protagonists in the way they leave readers questioning not only real versus unreal, but more importantly, child versus adult.
Wilson, Megan 39
Chapter 3
The narrative is critical to my argument of fairy tales as modern-day horror stories, but that does not discount the importance of their illustrations. I have found illustrations incredibly helpful because seeing the way others perceive children has increased my understanding of their characters as liminal. Throughout my research, I have looked at illustrations from the Brothers
Grimm, some from Charles Perrault, and also other children’s stories from different periods in time. Millicent Sowerby was an English illustrator of the late 19th and early 20th century. Her drawings depict children as seen in reality while closely resembling my own interpretation of the fairy tale child. She illustrated children’s books like Childhood and Yesterday’s Children, both of which I read alongside some of the Grimms’ tales. I would first like to discuss the Grimms, noting that different anthologies convey very different visuals of the child characters. Published in 1890 and illustrated by Richard André, Grimm’s Household Fairy Tales exhibit characters like
Little Red Riding Hood in a very feminized way. Her soft features evoke vulnerability and innocence, her small figure thus enabling the audience to understandably anticipate a children’s story. Little Red Riding Hood, in this collection, actually looks like a child. That is often the case with her character because she was initially written as young girl, but in some editions, her older, more masculine facial features take away this aspect of her. Grimm’s Fairy Tales Retold in
Words of One Syllable was the first collection of the Grimms that I recognized renowned female protagonists being illustrated as less delicate figures. In this same version, Cinderella’s character resembles an adult figure controlled by a childish psyche. My increased knowledge of fairy tales now tells me that the narratives tend to depict the female protagonist in one way while illustrations, more often than not, introduce an entirely different individual. The Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm was illustrated by Arthur Rackham, another English illustrator associated
Wilson, Megan 40 mostly with classical art rather than more contemporary styles of painting. In his images,
Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood are even more feminine and youthful than in the previous anthologies I mention. Rackham combines both mellow and somber colors, illustrating the female protagonists in a romanticized way by providing them with a softness amidst the harsher, more rigid features attributed to the wolf and the stepmother. He better illustrates what I first envisioned for the Grimms and ultimately contributes to this overlap between fairy tales and horror by bringing the horror elements to life in his drawings. A black cat’s piercing stare, witches flying across the page, dead trees branching every which way with demonic figures and shapes emerging from within them – these characteristics replicate horror and the supernatural by providing readers with a very clear visual of the way horror is understood even in today’s world. From the Grimms’ collections mentioned in this chapter, it became apparent to me that illustrations change, if even gradually, along with society. Fairy tale publication likely render the young protagonist as liminal, a combination of both adult and child, because not all children were expected to survive to adulthood. The childhood experience was therefore fixated on the notion of becoming an adult as quickly as possible. I would argue that earlier anthologies better convey the naïve child while their illustrators create a visual for the uncanny, adult-like child.
Later illustrations, such as Rackham’s from the early 20th century, show audiences that child characters new and old are subject to change because reality is ever-changing. Instead of illustrating the ambiguous adult-child figure, Rackham draws a child who looks like a child, the narrative then being where the child’s adult experiences reside.
Sowerby’s illustrations in Childhood and Yesterday’s Children fall somewhere between earlier illustrations from the Grimms and those in later versions. She uses vibrant colors and evokes a similar softness in her characters like that of Richard André and Arthur Rackham, but
Wilson, Megan 41 her interpretation of childhood comes across as a more sorrowful experience to me. Her child characters often look sad, nostalgic, and perhaps even curious while the realness of their eyes makes it feel, as a reader, that they are staring directly at you. Realism in art is a way of giving audiences a glimpse of what reality was once like. Keeping this in mind, the message of childhood innocence is strong within Sowerby’s early 20th century illustrations because children in real life were, and to many still are, understood as innocent beings. In placing these stories next to the Brothers Grimm and especially novels like The Turn of the Screw, the adult attire almost erases their innocence for me and replaces it with something more ambivalent. I often found myself sympathizing with the children, however. Their authenticity in Sowerby’s illustrations persuaded me to relate and to feel whatever they do, which reminded me of
Bettelheim’s study on the child reader’s experience when reading fairy tales. Reading about children in literature is much different from seeing images of them, the reason being that words can only give a reader so much. Images, on the other hand, tend to be more compelling for people. Similar to beauty being a woman’s greatest achievement, the attractiveness of certain visuals can captivate a larger audience, especially a younger audience, more easily than words can.
These illustrations of childhood are also important when looking at illustrations of The
Turn of the Screw. Illustrators John La Farge and Eric Pape created images that bring to life the bizarre relationships developing throughout the story. La Farge’s illustration, as published in
Collier’s Weekly, shows a much older governess with her arm around Miles whose character looks more like a teenager rather than the young boy described in the book. The two are gazing into each other’s eyes, which emphasizes the broadly understood idea that the governess and
Miles have a more intimate connection than the story lets on. La Farge is practically saying “if
Wilson, Megan 42 you do not believe there is something between them, then maybe this will change your mind.”
The black and gray color scheme alongside the images hazy tone makes for a dream-like experience shared between them. In it, the uncanny permeates only in the solid, dark background beyond them, leaving the governess and Miles to have their own moment apart from the unsettling world they live in. Pape’s images, on the other hand, are a little more sinister. The governess is lightly shaded against the black backdrop where the shadowy figures of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel appear faintly. The image of her and Miles more closely resembles James’s description of them as well as my own visualization of the characters because their appearances convey innocence. In the illustration, Miles looks at the governess longingly while she looks at the ground, which implies a much subtler aspect to their relationship – Miles is just as infatuated with the governess as she is with him.
In this discussion, I think it also important to call attention to the differences between the
Grimms’ illustrations and those from Eric Pape in particular. Pape creates images that closely align with the characters appearances as they are described in the story, but illustrators Arthur
Rackham and Richard André tend to deviate from their narratives. I point this out because it echoes the liminality of protagonists in the same stories. Rackham and André generate even more ambiguity by creating a tension between the story and their pictures. In other words, they further complicate the role of the adult and child protagonists in the stories I have discussed. As for Pape, he clings to James’s narrative, which is already ambiguous, and he capitalizes on it by showing audiences a very young, gentleman-like Miles standing next to an older but somewhat juvenile governess. Here, I am referring specifically to Miles’s attire and the governess’s facial expression. Pape did not need to deviate from the narrative to highlight the story’s ambivalence because The Turn of the Screw was already so bizarre. Instead, he emphasizes this notion
Wilson, Megan 43 throughout his drawings and he helped drive my own assertion that the governess and Miles switched places in what was initially supposed to be a grown woman caring for a young boy. By the end, the role of the adult and of the child, both in the narrative and in illustrations, becomes a rather gray area where neither figure can be clearly defined as one or the other.
Wilson, Megan 44
Conclusion
If my research with fairy tales and Henry James has taught me anything, it is to keep an open mind when reading their literature. The 19th century is an era saturated with fairy tales and ghost stories, so the belief that these genres somehow work together was never too far off in my mind. Reading the Grimms’ tales alongside Charles Perrault was not only exciting, but bittersweet for someone who grew up so invested in knowing their every detail. However, the reading experience now versus then has been so much different. With that, I really wanted to understand why, apart from the more obvious reason being that I have grown up. Do other readers like me feel this way too? The protagonists caught my attention most because of their similarities, even between Perrault’s 17th century publications and the Grimms from the 19th century. As I discuss in chapter one, the young, timeless fairy tale heroine is an image of primal beauty whose greatest feat is deception. In fairy tales, she embodies the figure of a child or young woman, but her true self is forever hidden behind a mask that convinces audiences she is pure. I describe the child figure, that is Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, and the maiden, as liminal and uncanny because each of them represent a type of individual that is almost too perfect for this world. Perfect is a stretch even for them, however, because the world they live in is made up of many impurities – evil witches, demonic figures, and predatory animals. The child is also questionable and disturbing in that they do not always give the impression of someone so young. I often write that the protagonist may look like a child, but convey an adult persona. The
Grimms’ illustrations especially convinced me of the child’s liminal qualities because their illustrators further complicate our understanding of the protagonists as children. Pictures of Little
Red Riding Hood and Cinderella oftentimes contradict the author’s description of them, which for me, made it difficult to categorize their characters as either adult or child. Thus, they are the
Wilson, Megan 45 unsettling in between, a place where the stepmother, the wolf, and the evil spirit also, in their own way, are confined. These characters are supposed to resemble an adult or parental figure, but like the child, they exemplify a naivety that only children are thought to possess.
As for The Turn of the Screw, it not only tells a similar story of a young woman venturing off into foreign territory, but the story’s characters correspond to characters in the Grimms. In chapter two, I describe the children and the governess both as representations of an “other,” detached from reality and constantly stuck in a state of ambiguity. Good versus bad, superior versus inferior, real versus unreal: this story, like Perrault and the Grimms, influence audiences to question which is true. The adult antagonist and the uncanny child are the bridge that connects fairy tales with the emerging genre of horror in the 19th century. Their figures represent a reflection of the reader’s own life as well as the reader’s limited knowledge of an outside world.
Horror, as already mentioned, is ambiguous and unsettling and like the fairy tale, it motivates audiences to think outside the box in terms of their own version of reality.
Throughout my paper, I have posed questions regarding the audience and how readers feel when encountering stories such as the ones I have discussed. Society is compelled to believe that fairy tales are meant for children, both to entertain and in some ways relate to them. My research, however, tells me there is something deeper to be said of fairy tales and their intended readers. Fairy tales may have been written for anyone, thus explaining why such diverse experiences take place in the narratives. On the surface, the child protagonist emits a purity other characters lack, but I have found that the child and their adult wrongdoers work together to create the uncanny atmosphere, despite the persistent battle authors describe between them. The uncanny in Little Red Riding Hood or in The Turn of the Screw originates in the protagonist’s more human attributes, which is partly why audiences become unsettled when reading these
Wilson, Megan 46 stories as adults. The fairy tale as strictly fiction quickly becomes an obscurity in adulthood. My child self never saw the young protagonist as weird or the adult figure as abusive and manipulative. I saw what the author wanted young readers to see – innocence, magic, adventure
– but encountering the stories now, I am convinced the Grimms and Perrault strived for their adult readers to be afraid of the unknowable, that being the fairy tale child, the adult, and who takes on which role. From the start, these ambiguities reminded me of horror stories because horror evokes the same basic questions as fairy tales. Why women, why children, and why the uncanny?
The simple answer would be that women and children were different, especially from the men who wrote stories about them. Women were capable of evil, children were secretive, and the man essentially lived as a guest in his own home completely unaware of what was really taking place within its walls. Perhaps authors like James and Perrault wrote female characters as insane and weak because they resented women for challenging the man’s place in society. The Grimms, conversely, turned the female’s newfound superiority into something unsettling, which inevitable led me to envision fairy tales and horror as one in the same. The Grimms’ tales are blatantly creepy, just like any horror story. After further research, I was able to ascertain that Perrault, who better fits the category of traditional fairy tales, can also be uncanny in the way he attributes such otherworldly qualities to his female characters. Beauty and perfection were merely a façade for the wicked stepmother and the liminal child.
In the end, I would say happily ever after is temporary. As readers, we can accept that the stories really end the way they do – marriage, death, lessons learned – or we can look further and ask ourselves if these experiences are all that adult women and children truly know. There should be more and even if we, as readers, cannot fully comprehend who or what certain characters are,
Wilson, Megan 47 we can at least imagine that their life goes beyond the preconceived notions of 19th century society. Women and children from the Grimms, Perrault, and The Turn of the Screw live on in the endless, uncanny world of what I like to call horrifying fairy tales. In these stories, there is both beauty and repulsion, but together, they create the uncanny, liminal protagonists for which I will always applaud and fear.
Wilson, Megan 48
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