Ghent University Faculty of Arts and Philosophy
Tired of Waiting: Edith Sitwell’s Fairytale Poems
Supervisor: Dr. Van Durme Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of “Master in de Taal- en Letterkunde: Engels” by Ilse Deceuninck
August 2015 Deceuninck 2
Acknowledgements
The best stories usually start with the words “once upon a time” and it seems appropriate that I start my dissertation with the same words. Once upon a time, a little girl was born and she was not quite perfect. A little too uncoordinated and a little too opinionated, her family worried what would become of her as soon as she left the safety of her home. They knew that it was bound to happen someday, since the girl was headstrong and keen on doing things her own way. They resolved to become the girl’s fairy godparents, offering support and love when she needed it.
They made the girl realise that it was ok to occasionally stray from home, because there would always be someone waiting whenever she returned. Over time, the little girl became a woman and developed a mind of her own. She worked hard on finding her “happily ever after”, always remembering that she would not have made it so far without the help of her very own fairies.
I have encountered many “fairies” in my life, people who brightened my day with a mere smile or a kind word. I want to use this section to particularly thank the “fairies” who have made this dissertation possible. First and foremost, I would like to express my gratitude towards my supervisor Dr. Van Durme. Her patience, advice and expertise made all the difference.
Secondly, I would like to thank my family and friends. They mean the world to me and I am forever grateful for their continuous support. Finally, I would like to thank my grandparents for showing me that magic does exist. Thank you for giving me ample opportunities to make my dreams come true. It is to you, marraine and pepe, that I dedicate this master dissertation.
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Table of Contents
1 Introduction ...... 6
2 Once Upon a Time: Modernism and Fairy Tales...... 11
2.1 On Fairytale Studies ...... 11
2.2 On Modernist Studies...... 18
2.3 Modernist Fairytale Studies: An Interdisciplinary Approach...... 22
3 Contextualising Edith Sitwell’s Fairytale Poems ...... 25
3.1 Fairy Tales in the Modern Era ...... 25
3.2 The Personal Nature of Edith Sitwell’s Fairytale Poems...... 29
3.3 Differences in Reception...... 32
4 When the Shoe Fits: Sitwell and Fairytale History...... 35
4.1 Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy - Les Contes des fées ...... 36
4.1.1 Characterisation ...... 38
4.1.2 Narration ...... 40
4.1.3 Intertextuality ...... 43
4.1.4 Style ...... 45
4.2 The Modernists ...... 47
4.2.1 Edith Sitwell and modernist ballet ...... 47
4.2.2 Edith Sitwell and modernist poetry ...... 51 Deceuninck 4
5 The Sleeping Beauty (1924) ...... 57
5.1 Traditional Fairy Tale or Fairytale Retelling? ...... 58
5.1.1 Chronotope ...... 58
5.1.2 Attitude to the supernatural ...... 60
5.1.3 Characterisation ...... 61
5.1.4 Optimism ...... 62
5.1.5 Action versus character development ...... 64
5.1.6 Narratological features ...... 65
5.2 Fairy Tale or Myth?...... 66
5.2.1 Chronotope ...... 67
5.2.2 Attitude to the supernatural ...... 68
5.2.3 Characterisation ...... 68
5.2.4 Optimism ...... 70
5.2.5 Action versus character development ...... 71
5.2.6 Narratological features ...... 72
5.3 Concluding Remarks ...... 73
6 Prelude to a Fairy Tale (1927) ...... 75
6.1 Fairy Tale, Fairytale Retelling or Myth? ...... 76
6.1.1 Chronotope ...... 76
6.1.2 Attitude to the supernatural ...... 77
6.1.3 Characterisation ...... 78
6.1.4 Optimism ...... 79 Deceuninck 5
6.1.5 Action versus character development ...... 80
6.1.6 Narratological features ...... 81
6.2 Concluding Remarks ...... 81
7 Conclusion ...... 83
8 Works Cited ...... 87
9 List of Abbreviations ...... 95
(27 370 words)
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1 Introduction
We stand outside our own time, outside Time itself maybe (Tolkien 32)
Fairy tales have been around for centuries and have inspired many artists and authors. Ann
Martin states that “the sheer variety of fairy tales in modernity suggests that the texts [are] an almost inescapable source of reference for the writers” (7). While she refers to modernism in particular, the statement is applicable to almost every literary movement. Both in the past and in the present, writers have used fairytale themes and motifs to create expectations in terms of content and structure. For instance, the words ‘once upon a time’ immediately evoke certain associations that shape the reading experience. In recent years, scholars have shown an increased interest in the relationship between fairy tales and literary movements as works by
Jack Zipes (2006), Vanessa Joosen (2008) and Ruth Bottigheimer (2012) illustrate. Numerous studies have appeared on the Victorian and postmodern period, whereas studies on the modern period have been scarce. Laura Martin affirms that “there is not much scholarship yet on fairy tales and modernism” (694), despite some notable exceptions such as Ann Martin’s Red Riding
Hood and the Wolf in Bed: Modernism’s Fairy Tales (2006). Studies on modernist fairytale poetry are almost non-existent, even though most modernist poets alluded to fairytale content.
Mieder even goes as far as to claim that all poets at least once referred to fairy tales during their careers (752). There is no conclusive evidence that can explain the lack of scholarly interest, but there are some indications as to why modernist fairytale poems are often disregarded in favour of more canonical works. The most likely explanation can be traced back to the rise of postmodernism, the literary movement that succeeded the modernist period. During the second half of the twentieth century, fairy tales “enjoyed an explosive popularity in North America and
Western Europe” (Bacchilega 3) and scholars became enraptured by the vast amount of fairytale Deceuninck 7 retellings. Especially the works of female poets such as Anne Sexton, Olga Broumas and
Maxine Kumin received a lot of attention, partly because their work was much more accessible on a material and intellectual level than that of their modernist counterparts. Harries asserts that these kind of poems are “constantly reread, discussed and written about, [while] other texts from the same era fade into the background, or the shadowy recesses of the stacks, or archives, or rare book rooms” (20). Postmodern fairy tales rose to prominence, while most fairytale poems that were written in the first half of the twentieth century gradually disappeared from the literary canon. They became neglected texts, which is why they are currently “hard to get a hold of, hard to comprehend and hard to pin down” (Dowson and Entwistle 60). Furthermore, many of the modernist fairytale features were transferred to the postmodern period and grouped together as exclusively postmodern techniques. As a result, the modernist fairytale tradition was largely forgotten and twentieth-century fairytale retellings became associated with postmodernism. This seems to be confirmed in studies by Cristina Bacchilega (1997), Elizabeth
Wanning Harries (2001) and Vanessa Joosen (2008). While they all address the relationship between postmodern authors and their literary predecessors, they never explicitly refer to the modernist fairytale tradition. It is this evolution that, combined with the difficulties researchers encounter in locating modernist poems, in part explains why there has been so little interest.
Generally speaking, fairytale studies are still in their infancy when it comes to their integration in university programs. A comparison of English literary programs at the five
Flemish universities shows that there are few courses devoted to children’s literature and even fewer to fairy tales in particular. Fairytale studies remain an underdeveloped research area, a relative novelty that contrasts with the more canonical adult literature taught at universities.
Their obscure position in Flemish literary programs is somewhat odd, especially since fairy tales “have been produced in English literature in a variety of genres (novels, poetry, short stories, picture books) and for a broad range of age groups” (Joosen 459). Fairy tales and Deceuninck 8 fairytale retellings have been an unmistakable part of English literary history and have been transformed so many times that “the creation of a new fairy tale is not merely a re-creation or variation of a fixed form, but art” (Bernheimer 4). The association between art and fairy tale is necessary for this dissertation as well as for the rediscovery of modernist fairytale creations as a whole, since it opens academics’ eyes to the literary, aesthetic and artistic qualities of the tales. It is exactly this kind of eye-opening that this dissertation hopes to achieve with the discussion of two forgotten fairytale poems by a modernist author.
The Sleeping Beauty (1924) and Prelude to a Fairy Tale (1927) were both written in the
1920s by one of the grand literary ladies of the time, Edith Sitwell. Dowson and Entwistle assert that “in terms of publications, awards, works of criticism, innovations and reputation, Sitwell
[was] the major woman poet of the twentieth century. Her work appears in most anthologies between 1925 and 1965” (20). Sitwell wrote twenty poetry collections in her lifetime as well as nine non-fictional works, one novel and an autobiography that was published posthumously.
Her modernist contemporaries admired her work so much that her reputation in the first half of the twentieth century easily matched that of other famous modernist poets such as T.S. Eliot and W.B. Yeats. Her fame dwindled in the second half of the twentieth century though and has only been restored in recent years as critical studies and biographies indicate. Poetry collections such as Façade (1922) and Bucolic Comedies (1923) have received the most attention, while others are still waiting for their turn “under the microscope in extended interpretative analyses”
(Bobby 8). The latter is true for the two fairytale poems Sitwell wrote, since none of them have ever been singled out for further research. This dissertation changes that oversight by foregrounding the ways in which these modernist poems can be deemed fairytale material. More specifically, the analysis wants to focus on the combination of fairytale and mythological characteristics as it is this particular combination that warrants the poems’ unique position within fairytale history. This dissertation argues that such a combination is special and inserts Deceuninck 9 features from both modernist and fairytale studies to illustrate the poems’ innovative nature.
Each study of modernist fairytale poetry is already revolutionary in its own right, but this study does something new by concentrating on two different aspects. Both fairytale history and fairytale characteristics will be taken into account, as it is this twofold focus that enables this dissertation to contribute something new to existing research on (modernist) fairytale poetry.
To support the findings in a coherent manner, there are several subdivisions. The first chapter introduces some insights from studies on fairy tales and modernism. Since it would have been impossible to address all authors that ever published something on the topic, only some representatives were selected and included in this dissertation. It was a deliberate choice to redirect the focus from well-known scholars such as Greimas and Propp to relatively new ones such as Joosen and Harries. Their theories on fairy tales and fairytale retellings seamlessly correspond with modernist notions of tradition and innovation, which is why their writings will serve as a theoretical framework for the analysis later on. Bruno Bettelheim’s ideas on myths and fairy tales will also be used, since his work can be considered “an absolutely relevant intertext for fairy-tale retellings” (Joosen 250). The second chapter contextualises the fairytale works. The first part deals with fairy tales in their broadest sense, by touching upon their presence in the modernist era as well as upon the somewhat artificial debate between high and popular culture. The second part narrows the context down to the fairytale poems in particular and takes a closer look at their personal nature and their differences in reception. Edith Sitwell’s life is briefly addressed to accentuate some of the personal features, but this is the extent of the biographical information that is provided in this dissertation. More comprehensive studies on her life include Victoria Glendinning’s Edith Sitwell: A Unicorn among Lions (1981) and
Richard Greene’s Edith Sitwell: Avant Garde Poet, English Genius (2011). The third chapter centres on fairytale history and fairytale parallels. Once again a choice was made to forego obvious authors such as Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm in favour of a less obvious Deceuninck 10 one. The first part examines similarities between Edith Sitwell and Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, one of the most popular French conteuses of the seventeenth century. Sitwell used the conteuses’ “dramatic narrative structure, frightening plot lines, and endings that were discursive or disheartening” (Joyce 30) to achieve a level of innovation that surpassed contemporary fairytale works. The second part addresses modernist influences from the different arts as well as modernist defamiliarisation techniques. This part may seem out of place in a chapter devoted to fairytale history, considering that most modernist authors were Sitwell’s contemporaries, but it is nonetheless necessary. The modernist movement shaped the way in which Sitwell wrote and its characteristics need to be included in order to fully grasp the poems’ special place in
(fairytale) history. The fourth and fifth chapter analyse each fairytale poem separately by focussing on characteristics from traditional fairy tales, fairytale retellings and myths. It should be noted though that the analysis of Prelude to a Fairy Tale is smaller in scope than that of The
Sleeping Beauty, mainly because there are almost no academic studies on the poem. The conclusion then looks ahead at the future and offers some advice on how to best analyse modernist fairytale texts. In the end, all elements are recapitulated and a door to another time is opened. As J.R.R. Tolkien once said, fairy tales “have now a mythical or total unanalysable effect, […] one which it cannot spoil or explain; they open a door on Other Time, and if we pass through, though only for a moment, we stand outside our own time, outside Time itself maybe” (32). By discovering the timeless elements within Edith Sitwell’s fairytale poems, this dissertation not only hopes to shed some light on modernist fairy tales but also on the modernist era as a whole. In accordance with Tolkien, the hope is to discover something more about a time that both lies beyond and within the reach of (scholarly) imagination.
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2 Once Upon a Time: Modernism and Fairy Tales
The way to read a fairy tale is to throw yourself in (Auden)
This chapter does not address any specific modernist fairytale poems, but provides a theoretical framework for the analysis in subsequent chapters. There appear to be as many definitions and theories as there are scholars and it therefore seems useful to start with a clarification of some key concepts. Different aspects of modernist and fairytale studies will be emphasised to create an interdisciplinary theoretical approach that combines elements from both research fields.
While most scholars focus on either modernism or fairy tales, they need to be brought together
“to explore what fairy tales mean in and to modernism” (A. Martin 13).
2.1 On Fairytale Studies
While there were some influential fairytale studies in the first half of the twentieth century – such as Propp’s structural approach (1928) or Jung’s psychoanalytical approach (1930s) –, most scholarly works on fairy tales were written in the second half of the twentieth century. From the 1970s onwards, the increased interest in fairy tales led to a “fairy-tale renaissance” (Joosen
3) as the amount of fairytale retellings and fairytale studies expanded. Various theories and methods emerged during this period, all accentuating different aspects of fairy tales and the time in which they were written. This makes it challenging to find a universal definition that encompasses all features of a fairy tale. This has also been observed by Harries, who claims that “nothing is more difficult than to try to define a fairy tale in twenty-five words or less, and all dictionaries fail miserably” (6). Not one dictionary entry is able to convey the complexity that is typical of the genre and researchers therefore often feel the need to divide fairy tales into smaller and more comprehensible units. For the purpose of this dissertation, three different Deceuninck 12 categorical pairs need to be addressed in order to establish workable fairytale units: oral folk tales and literary fairy tales, traditional tales and fairytale retellings, and fairy tales and myths.
The first categorical pair addresses the differences between two variants, namely by contrasting the oral folk tale with the literary fairy tale. Fairy tales are part of folklore and have their roots in oral culture, which is why the first tales were transmitted orally and written down only later. Oral folk tales were collected and transformed into written fairy tales for a more cultivated audience from the seventeenth century onwards, as fairytale collections by Charles
Perrault and the Brothers Grimm illustrate. Jens Tismar was the first modern scholar to formulate the differences between the categories in the late 1970s – early 1980s and it has been used ever since as a theoretical framework for fairytale research. Jack Zipes paraphrased these categorical differences in his introduction to The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales (2000):
[The literary fairy tale or das Kunstmärchen] distinguishes itself from the oral folk tale
(das Volksmärchen) in so far as it is written by a single, identifiable author; (2) it is thus
synthetic, artificial and elaborate in comparison to the indigenous formation of the folk
tale that emanates from communities and tends to be simple and anonymous; (3) the
differences between the literary fairy tale and the oral folk tale do not imply that one
genre is better than the other; (4) in fact, the literary fairy tale is not an independent
genre but can only be understood and defined by its relationship to [others] (xv).
This distinction is useful, mainly because it accentuates the singularity and intertextuality of the literary fairy tale. The selected poems within this dissertation can all be deemed literary fairy tales, as they are written by a specific author and as they use allusions to either fairytale or mythological material. They are all carefully constructed writings that offer many possible readings, depending on the theoretical and cultural framework that authors and readers use.
Most known fairy tales are in fact literary fairy tales. Even canonical tales like “The Sleeping
Beauty” and “Cinderella”, which were written in the seventeenth century and popularised in Deceuninck 13 the twentieth century, are intertextual and equivocal in nature. In the introduction to Off with
Their Heads! (1992), Maria Tatar has claimed that “our fairy-tale canon is drawn for the most part, from collections produced by Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, and those collections are marked by strong rewritings (in the case of Perrault) and by repeated editorial interventions (in the case of the Grimms)” (xxi). By definition, all fairy tales discussed and alluded to in subsequent chapters can be considered literary fairy tales instead of oral folk tales.
Henceforth, the term fairy tale will only be used in reference to the literary fairytale genre and its specific characteristics. The literary fairy tale’s attention to form and intertextuality provides the groundwork for the analysis and allows for further categorisation due to their occurrence in both modernist and fairytale studies (cf. infra).
The second categorical pair evolved from the definition of the literary fairy tale and was first defined by Harries in 2003. Harries contrasted compact tales with complex tales, the latter corresponding more or less to the literary fairy tale. Compact tales are one-dimensional and unmediated, whereas complex tales are “‘intertextual’ and ‘stereophonic’, Roland Barthes’s terms for the ways all writing is intertwined with other writings” (Harries 17). This categorisation has its merits and is certainly useful in its consideration of allusions to other works, but it is too narrow to be considered an addition to Tismar’s literary fairytale characteristics. Vanessa Joosen therefore alters Harries’ definitions to create a more innovative fairytale distinction, one that takes into account several intertextual relations as well as the readers’ expectations. She distinguishes traditional fairy tales from fairytale retellings, in which the former do not stress intertextuality to the same extent as the latter. Traditional fairy tales are based on conventional fairytale patterns, whereas fairytale retellings like to toy around with these conventions to create something new. Both came into being roughly around the same time, though fairytale retellings only became popularised from the twentieth century onwards.
The chart on page ten summarises the differences between the tales, though it should be noted Deceuninck 14 that not all features need to be present at the same time. The differences are based on a traditional “horizon of expectation” (Joosen 20), a term which was first coined by Hans Robert
Jauss. It refers to the expectations readers have before they start reading a text and the manner in which these expectations are met. For instance, readers of fairy tales anticipate black-and- white characters who battle each other on their way towards a happy end. If these or other fairytale elements are not present in the tale, the traditional horizon of expectation is disrupted and the readers feel as if they have been cheated. In New Perspectives on Fairy Tales (2008),
Joosen connects these so-called ruptures to fairytale retellings and uses seven narratological domains to indicate the ways in which fairytale retellings differ from traditional fairy tales. The category style has been left out for this dissertation, since the poems’ stylistic elements have already been described by scholars such as Michel Cusin (1979), Sonja Samberger (2005) and
Dowson and Entwistle (2005). The chart on the next page therefore only consists of six narratological domains instead of the seven that were originally used by Vanessa Joosen.
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Differences between traditional tales and fairytale retellings according to Joosen1
TRADITIONAL TALE FAIRYTALE RETELLING
Chronotope One-dimensional Multi-dimensional Indefinite time and space Definite time and space
Attitude to the supernatural Magic non-intrusive Realistic alternatives Serious wishes and curses Boundary magic and realism
Characterisation Limited functions Diverse functions Extreme contrasts No black-white distinctions One-dimensional and flat Multi-dimensional and round Matching exterior & interior Evil deeds put in perspective
Optimism Optimistic Pessimistic and cynical Good protagonist No clear-cut protagonist Reward and punishment Happy ending uncommon
Action versus Quick progress Psychological development character development Predictable order No predictable order No long descriptions Long descriptions No focus on feelings Focus on feelings
Narratological features Linear narration Not always linear narration Omniscient, 3rd p narrator Marginal, 1st person narrator Simple narrativity: one plot Complex narrativity: # plots
1 This chart was created based on the information in Vanessa Joosen’s doctoral dissertation (2008), pages 20-26. Deceuninck 16
The selection of poems within this dissertation can be named fairytale retellings in terms of narration, character development and optimism (cf. infra) and even the other features are present to some extent. Joosen’s comparison will prove to be an excellent analytical tool for the analysis in chapters three, four and five. It reinforces the notion of intertextuality present in
Tismar’s definition and it adds something new by touching upon the manners in which classical fairy tales can be disrupted. These elements provide a clear theoretical foundation and can be interpreted as a starting point to discuss the intertextual relation between myths and fairy tales.
The third and last categorical pair is one that broadens the scope to include mythology.
The relationship between myths and fairy tales is somewhat ambiguous in nature, since it is hard to determine where myths end and fairy tales start. Bruno Bettelheim affirms that there is no clear demarcation between the two literary genres: “in most cultures, there is no clear line separating myth from folk tale or fairy tale; all these together form the literature of preliterate societies” (25). Many fairy tales incorporate elements from myths and some fairy tales even seem to have been directly derived from them. It is this literary ambiguity that has led scholars such as Mircea Eliade (1968), Bruno Bettelheim (1977), Marina Warner (1995) and Jack Zipes
(1994) to investigate the relationship between both genres. They all tried to formulate distinctive theoretical frameworks, either from psychoanalytical, folkloristic or literary points of view. However, “myths and folk tales blended very early in the oral tradition, and in many modern oral and literary narratives it is very difficult to tell them apart” (Zipes, Fairy Tale as
Myth 3). This was the case for Edith Sitwell’s fairytale poems, which were a unique blend of myths and fairy tales. Since these poems will be analysed in chapters four and five, an analytical framework is needed that compares fairytale features with mythological ones. The chart on the next page uses Bruno Bettelheim’s insights from The Uses of Enchantment (1977) to summarise the differences between both genres, though the psychoanalytical focus has been filtered out.
While the book dates back to the 1970s, the observations are still applicable to current research. Deceuninck 17
Differences between myths and fairy tales according to Bettelheim2
MYTHS FAIRY TALES
Chronotope Definite time and space Indefinite time and space Majestic and unique events Ordinary and homely events
Attitude to the supernatural Spiritual force Magical/fantastical force In touch with divinity In touch with primitive ideas
Characterisation Unique characters Typical characters Proper names General/descriptive names Clash mortals vs. gods Clash good vs. evil Superhuman protagonist Non-superhuman protagonist
Optimism Pessimistic Optimistic Tragic ending Happy ending Reward in heaven Reward on earth
Action versus Adult reasoning Childish reasoning character development Symbolic descriptions Simple descriptions Psychological development Logical and simple progress
Narratological features Cyclical narration Linear narration Complex narrativity: #plots Simple narrativity: one plot Demands made on listener No demands made on listener
2 This chart was created based on the information in Bruno Bettelheim’s book (1977), pages 8-13, 25-27, 36-46 and 62. The subsections were derived from Joosen’s doctoral dissertation (2008), pages 20-26. Deceuninck 18
The comparison is structured according to Joosen’s narratological domains and can be deemed an addition to fairytale studies. It allows for a discussion of mythological allusions as one of the poems’ most prominent intertextual features. Since myths and fairy tales were “embedded in the childhoods of so many modern theorists and artists” (A. Martin 35), it is both necessary and helpful to study these literary genres together. There are of course many more theories and methods when it comes to fairy tales, but the combination of these three categorical pairs creates the best framework for the analysis of the fairytale poems within this dissertation.
2.2 On Modernist Studies
Like fairytale studies, the amount of studies on modernism has increased in the last couple of decades. Davis and Jenkins observe “a remarkable renaissance in the study of modernist literature” (3) as well as an increase in methods and theories. Numerous definitions exist and it is almost as hard to find a concise definition for modernism as it is for the fairy tale. This was observed by Sonja Samberger who states that “any definition of modernism is an attempt at fixing the characteristics of a certain style of writing (or art), and there is not one definition but many” (19). It is indeed difficult to find a definition that contains all the features of modernism, mainly because the modernist movement was known for its enormous diversity. Several schools followed each other in rapid succession and it would be an inconceivable task to include all of them in this overview. This section will therefore only focus on those features that prove to be the most suitable for a comparison with fairy tales, namely the modernist clash between tradition and innovation and the use of the mythic(al) method. Together with the previously mentioned fairytale categories, they will provide the means for a thorough discussion of
Sitwell’s two fairytale poems: The Sleeping Beauty (1924) and Prelude to a Fairy Tale (1927).
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The modernist movement started at the beginning of the twentieth century and lasted until the mid-1940s.3 It was known for its hodgepodge of different styles and moods, which were later either discussed as separate entities or grouped together under the term ‘avant garde’.
Paul Peppis describes the avant garde as “an unprecedented irruption across the West of oppositional artistic movements, experimental art and writing, little magazines and alternative presses, unconventional performances, and spectacular happenings” (28). In an ever-changing society, many things happened at the same time and many people found it difficult to keep up with them. They became focussed on expressing their own individuality, fearing that they would otherwise get lost in the twentieth-century mass culture. The same was true for most modernist authors, who also wanted to find their place in society. They felt the need to compose their work in an entirely new manner, to explore the possibilities of everything the arts had to offer. They combined or transformed elements from several artistic domains to make new and heterogeneous art forms that expressed their own identity. Their ambition to make it all new was in this context somewhat paradoxical, however, because many modernist authors were only able to create something new by referring to the past. Fernald has noted that “the relation of modernist writers to their past was far richer, more complex and more contentious” (13) than is usually assumed and it can be worthwhile to investigate this modernist obsession with tradition and innovation. It will become clear that this not only allows for a discussion of modern intertextuality, it also establishes valuable connections between modernist and fairytale studies.
The modernist quest for innovation was often marked by an ambivalent attitude towards tradition. This was expressed by T.S. Eliot, who was not only one of the most well-known authors and literary critics of the modernist era but also someone whom Edith Sitwell considered a dear friend. Eliot introduced the notion of tradition in an essay entitled “Tradition
3 While there is no consensus over the exact dates, most modernist overviews usually use a 1900-1945 timeframe. See Samberger (2005), Davis and Jenkins (2007) and Dowson and Entwistle (2005). Deceuninck 20 and the Individual Talent” (1921) as something that should be felt rather than imitated. Mere imitation was not enough, modernist writers had to look at their literary predecessors if they wanted to become aware of their own position in time and space. According to Eliot, tradition was the key to innovation and each work of art needed to be constructed in relation to the past:
No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his
appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot
value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. […]
What happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens
simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it (Eliot 153).
Overlap between the past and the present was encouraged, as long as the artist did something new with the source material. These insights are useful in so far as they can be applied to modernist fairytale poems. Fairy tales have been part of literary history for centuries and can be considered part of the tradition Eliot referred to. They were readily available material that modernists could use and adapt in any way they liked, since they were aware that the audience would recognise them without any difficulty. The possibilities were endless, ranging from mere allusions to full-fletched adaptations and parodies. Modernist poets seemed to favour the intertextual technique of allusion though, which is why this will be the focus of the analysis.
Contrary to definitions of fairy tales and modernism, a straightforward definition of allusion is relatively easy to find. Abrams defines allusion as “a passing reference, without explicit identification, to a literary or historical person, place or event, or to another literary work or passage” (13). It is one aspect of intertextuality that reoccurs quite frequently in modernist fairytale poetry, presumably because it enabled authors to combine traditional content with innovative techniques. By inserting references to fairy tales, the poems became variable and instable texts that could be interpreted in various ways depending on the readers’ state of minds.
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That tradition and innovation could coincide with one another through the use of allusions was something that was once again noted by T.S. Eliot. He reviewed James Joyce’s work in an essay called “Ulysses, Order and Myth” (1923) and invented the term mythic method to refer to the ways in which allusions were used. Following his previous theories on tradition,
Eliot believed the mythic method to be a wonderful combination of past and present literary features. It allowed authors to be traditional as well as innovative, a feat which was not easily achieved in the modern era. The modern society was forever changing and its changeable character needed to be expressed one way or another. Eliot was convinced that allusions provided the answer, because they created “a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity” (qtd. in Lodge 101) that dismissed straightforward interpretations. His observation is useful, because it indicates the overlap between modernist texts and fairytale retellings. Like modernist texts, fairytale retellings strive to be innovative by toying around with traditional conventions. They, too, create a ‘continuous parallel’ between the past and the present and often insert allusions to create ambiguity. That is why Joosen claims that fairytale retellings can only be understood in relation to a “source-text, the so-called ‘pre-text’, which is the traditional fairy tale” (13). Since there are so many versions of traditional tales, it is, however, hard to determine which version is made intertextual in the first place (A. Martin 8). Simple meaning is rejected, since readers have to figure out for themselves how they want to interpret the text and intertext.
Both modernist writings and fairytale retellings use the mythic method to create “sites of textual and social interaction, where readers negotiate literary norms” (A. Martin 9) and it is as such possible to argue that the mythic method has a wider scope than modernist literature. It can be linked to other literary genres, such as folklore and fairy tales, as well as to almost every other Deceuninck 22 literary movement.4 Only some minor alterations are needed to be able to do that. Eliot’s initial focus on myths is too narrow-minded to be transferred to other domains and the definition thus needs to be tweaked to include other literary genres. This was also argued by Rachel Blau
DuPlessis, who stated that a more “capacious term” (117) was needed. She redefined the mythic method as an inclusive theoretical concept that incorporated several different elements such as
culturally important stories (like fairy-tales and folklore), conventional narratives and
their teleology (like the marriage/death plots of nineteenth-century novels),
mythological/religious materials (Greco-Roman, Christian, Norse, sometimes Jewish
and more) and ideologies (DuPlessis 117).
By bringing fairy tales into the equation, DuPlessis was one of the first scholars to illustrate how modernist and fairytale studies could be brought together to establish an extensive analytical framework. Most modernist theories and definitions provide ample opportunities towards a more accessible interdisciplinary approach, especially once researchers become aware of their use and relevance. How this cross-fertilisation can be achieved on a practical level will briefly be discussed in the next section and again in the conclusion of this dissertation.
2.3 Modernist Fairytale Studies: An Interdisciplinary Approach
It has been mentioned before that studies on the relationship between modernism and fairy tales have been limited. The publication of Ann Martin’s book Red Riding Hood and the Wolf in Bed in 2006 was a first attempt to redeem the situation, with its profound discussion of fairytale allusions in novels by Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes and James Joyce. The book is usually considered to be one of the most extensive studies on the interplay between modernist prose
4 This was confirmed in the article “The Mythic Method and Intertextuality in T.S. Eliot’s Poetry” (2012) by Manjola Nasi. He believes that the mythic method can be found in almost every literary era, both on a practical and theoretical level. It is important to note that Nasi used the mythic method and intertextuality interchangeably. Deceuninck 23 and fairy tales. Unfortunately, no similar work exists on the connection between modernist poetry and fairy tales. While Jacquilyn Weeks’ doctoral dissertation Fairies, Fairy Tales and the Development of British Poetics (2011) tentatively addresses the need for a more thorough insight in modernist fairytale poetry, it never specially touches upon modernism. The future looks promising though, because a new online journal on fairy tales and myths will be published in 2015. The semi-annual Transformations: A Journal of Myths and Fairy Tale Studies hopes to increase scholarly interest by focussing on fairy tales and modernism in prose and poetry. 5
In anticipation of such a study, an elementary interdisciplinary approach needs to be invented for the analysis of modernist fairytale poems. Even though some scholars have tackled
Edith Sitwell’s fairytale poetry before, they have never solely paid attention to the intersection between modernism and fairy tales. Samberger (2005) focusses mostly on stylistic and poetic features, Dowson and Entwistle (2005) discuss gender characteristics and Van Durme (2012) analyses its relation to contemporary musical compositions. None of them take fairytale history into account, nor do they try to bring modernist and fairytale studies together. It almost seems as of this were impossible to do, as if “high modernism [was] not the best place to look for parallels” (Van Durme 177) with fairy tales. This dissertation argues that such a combination is nonetheless possible, by inserting some features from both research fields that lend themselves perfectly well to an interdisciplinary approach. Each study of modernist fairytale poetry is innovative in its own right, but this study does something new by dividing the analysis in two different parts. The first part puts Edith Sitwell’s fairytale poems in line with major fairytale retellings throughout the centuries, while the second part examines her poetry according to fairytale conventions. The main focus lies on the use of allusions, a technique which was used by renowned modernists such as T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ezra Pound and
5 The co-editors are Jacquilyn Weeks and Julie Sauvage. For more information about the journal, consult the websites: http://english.uiowa.edu/people/julie-sauvage or https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/54305. Deceuninck 24
Virginia Woolf as “a form of gate keeping, an exercise in exclusivity” (Hanna 61) that frustrated readers to no end. Most of the times, the references were difficult to grasp and an addendum with notes was required to understand the poetry. This also seems to have been the case for
Edith Sitwell’s fairytale poems, though no such addendum was ever added by either herself or her editors. Researchers such as Margaret Bond Odegard (1956), Richard Greene (2011) and the ones already mentioned have been fascinated by Sitwell’s use of allusions and have tried to uncover references to art, music and theatre in the last couple of decennia. They usually ignored fairy tales and fairytale retellings as a point of reference, presumably because these tales represented “the volatile relationship between high art and mass culture” (Huyssen vii).
Modernist works were seen as variable and exclusive, whereas fairy tales were stable and accessible. This can explain why an analysis of Edith Sitwell’s fairytale features has never been done before. Chapters two until five attempt to change that oversight, by examining specific fairytale references. Both known and unknown fairy tales and fairytale retellings will be mentioned to illustrate how fairytale history was used to undermine tradition. Chapter four and five specifically zoom in on techniques connected to fairytale retellings and on the manners in which these techniques unsettle the readers’ horizon of expectation. The modernist use of the mythic method will be discussed as a combination of fairytale and mythological characteristics, mainly because they are the two most prominent literary genres in Sitwell’s fairytale poetry.
The overall aim is to demonstrate how a modernist poet managed to manipulate both traditional fairytale and mythological conventions to create an entirely new work of art. Ultimately, this dissertation’s interdisciplinary framework wants to show the possibilities of cross-fertilisation.
By combining different research areas with one another, typical blind spots are revealed and a new kind of understanding comes about that is both useful and practical in scholarly research.
Deceuninck 25
3 Contextualising Edith Sitwell’s Fairytale Poems
These tales rank next to the Bible in importance (Auden 240)
The introductory quote by W.H. Auden was not far from the truth in regards to fairy tales in the modernist era. By the end of the nineteenth century, it could no longer be denied that fairy tales had become as widely acceptable and as popular as the Bible. They had penetrated all layers of society and fairytale collections were as a result guaranteed to be instant bestselling successes.
This chapter will zoom in on this evolution by examining the peculiar position of fairy tales within the literary landscape. It would be impossible to discuss Edith Sitwell’s fairytale poems without at least referring to the presence of fairy tales in the modernist era. The first part will outline the ambiguous position of fairy tales in the debate on high and popular culture, whereas the second and third part will contextualise Sitwell’s fairytale poetry in particular.
3.1 Fairy Tales in the Modern Era
Edith Sitwell’s fairytale poems were certainly not a standalone occurrence in the modernist era.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, fairy tales “as an institution had expanded to include drama, poetry, ballet, music, and opera” (Zipes, When Dreams Came True 23). They had become an integral part of modern culture, especially due to the efforts of fairytale collectors and storytellers in France, Germany and Denmark. These foreign tales were in turn translated and published for a British audience, which is why Edith Sitwell was already familiar with “the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Andersen” (TCO 38) at a young age. There were almost no British equivalents in existence, mainly because the fairytale genre was slower to develop in Great Britain than on the Continent. Instrumental in establishing a British fairytale tradition was Andrew Lang, who started a noteworthy fairytale collection in 1889 that lasted Deceuninck 26 until 1910. Stein asserts that “although criticized for being unscientific, his fairy-tale books were enormously popular and did much to establish an academic interest in the fairy tale in
Britain” (206). His twelve volumes did not only contain fairy tales from popular authors such as Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, but also included fairy tales from less well-known
French, Norse and Russian authors such as Madame d’Aulnoy and Madame de Beaumont.
Since Lang’s collection alone consisted of no less than four hundred and thirty-seven different fairy tales, it should come as no surprise that the early twentieth-century fairytale canon was so incredibly varied that it inspired all kinds of authors. They based their work on existing literary fairy tales, while at the same time creating literary fairy tales of their own. Examples include fairytale operas by Giacomo Puccini and Paul Dukas (Benson 704), Ballet Russes performances that included either fairytale themes or fairytale content (Benson 648), musical compositions by Ravel and Debussy that were based on seventeenth-century French fairy tales (Hannon and
Duggan 385) and twentieth-century surrealist paintings that could “unquestionably be considered fairy-tale works” (Bernheimer 73). Kate Bernheimer does therefore not exaggerate when she claims that “from the early twentieth century to the present, fairy tales have had an explosive effect on a vast range of contemporary art” (74). Researchers have mostly focused on the relationship between fairy tales and the modernist visual or performing arts, however, either intentionally or unintentionally choosing to avoid modernist literature as an artistic fairytale domain. They neglected to discuss the interplay between both literary genres, despite the omnipresence of fairy tales in the modern era. Especially modernist poetry was deemed incompatible with fairy tales, even though many modernist poems contained “direct fairy-tale references, and its poetic language – striving through new syntax to make new meaning – [was] fairy-tale-like in tone” (L. Martin 694). It is in this context useful to look at the debate between high and popular culture, since it emphasises some of the prevailing tendencies in modernist research. The distinction explains the divergence between fairy tales and modernist poetry and Deceuninck 27 adds further proof to the insights that were provided in the introduction and in chapter one.
The difference between high and popular culture is often addressed in modernist studies as “ideal types or stereotypes. They are […] American versions of the original German distinction between Kultur and Massenkultur, which are usually translated as ‘culture’ and
‘mass culture” (Gans 5). Most studies strictly separate them from one another, even though the distinction was less artificial and less strict in real life. Raymond Williams is usually quoted on the topic, since he was the one of the first authors that theorised the difference between the two forms of culture. According to him, popular culture is defined as “’well liked by many people’;
‘inferior kinds of work’; ‘work deliberately setting out to win favour with the people’; culture actually made by the people for themselves” (Storey 5). Fairy tales seem to conform to all these definitions and can thus be interpreted as part of popular culture. They were used by both commoners and artists to attract and entertain all layers of society, no matter their positon or their education. Additionally, mass-distributed fairy tales were considered inferior to individualised ‘cultured’ literature from the Victorian era onwards and were often banned to nurseries and schoolrooms as something to be chiefly affiliated with children. For instance,
Andrew Lang explicitly stated that his fairytale collection was “intended for children, who will like, it is hoped, the old stories that have pleased so many generations” (1). Lang’s words reveal the effects of mass distribution, since the inclusion of fairy tales within children’s culture and mass culture had caused people to look at fairy tales in a somewhat benevolent manner. The observation is particularly remarkable in light of (modern) fairytale history. Fairy tales were at one point in time deemed ‘highly cultural’ works that were written for an adult audience in an exceedingly intelligent manner. Maria Tatar even asserts that “fairy tales were never really meant for children’s ears alone. Originally told at fireside gatherings or in spinning circles by adults to adult audiences, fairy tales joined the canon of children’s literature (which is itself of recent vintage) only in the last two or three decades” (The Hard Facts of the Grimm’s Fairy Deceuninck 28
Tales xxvi). In the centuries preceding the modernist era, literary fairy tales frequently consisted of gruesome and complicated storylines that were more appropriate for adults than for children.
To illustrate, Snow White’s stepmother was punished to wear burning shoes until she died,
Cinderella’s stepsisters were punished by birds who pecked their eyes out, Sleeping Beauty and her prince had to kill the cannibalistic queen to save their children and Little Red Riding Hood was raped before being eaten alive by the wolf. It was not until the nineteenth century that “fairy tales for children were sanitized and expurgated versions of the fairy tales for adults” (Zipes,
Fairy Tale as Myth 14). The result of this extensive simplification was that fairy tales became firmly entrenched in popular culture from the end of the nineteenth century onwards. It should be noted though that there was a distinct difference between traditional fairy tales and fairytale retellings. Whereas traditional fairy tales were indeed popular domain, fairytale retellings were often deemed high cultural domains. DiBattista and McDiarmid have observed that the distinction between the two cultures was not as straightforward as many theorists would like to believe, since most artists seemed to view popular “cultural phenomena and entertainments unique to their times […] as an inalienable part of modern life, hence unavoidable subject matter whose forms as well as content might be assimilated or reworked, playfully imitated or seriously criticized” (5). Fairy tales were an equally ‘inalienable part’ of the modernist era and were often used by artists to create new high art forms. Their position in the cultural debate was ambivalent, since their traditional forms belonged to popular culture while their innovative and subversive forms frequently belonged to high culture. Edith Sitwell’s fairytale poems exemplify this ambivalent position perfectly, since both popular and high culture were present to some extent. The poems were based on traditional fairytale content, while their wittiness and their poetic artistry made them ‘high art’ to be read by a more cultivated audience. They were as such the perfect example of cross-fertilisation between fairy tales and modernism, between high and popular culture and between individualised and mass culture. Deceuninck 29
3.2 The Personal Nature of Edith Sitwell’s Fairytale Poems
Edith Sitwell wrote The Sleeping Beauty (1924) and Prelude to a Fairy Tale (1927) during the interbellum, at a time when people often looked inwards to make sense of the outside world.
Both of her modernist fairytale poems address her life, though The Sleeping Beauty does so to a larger extent than Prelude to a Fairy Tale. It can be assumed that Sitwell chose fairy tales as a framework, because “the loneliness that seemed to pervade them” (TCO 39) echoed the loneliness that she had felt as a child. Her poetry mirrors the sentiment behind many of Hans
Christian Andersen’s fairy tales, such as “The Little Mermaid” and “The Little Match Girl”, since they too were often about young women who felt abandoned by their loved ones. The poems can be interpreted as an attempt to come to terms with the past and there are as such many scenes that depict Sitwell’s life “as a child and a young girl” (TCO 60). Unfortunately, these personal scenes were often overlooked by readers and reviewers. Case in point was Edgell
Rickword who wrote a positive review about The Sleeping Beauty in The Times Literary
Supplement of 1924, but who remarked that the “most sensitive poets often construct masks for their emotions rather than expose their keenest feelings. We may have every respect for such a course in its relation to character while regretting its effect on art” (204). Rickword failed to recognise the profound emotions behind the poem’s complexity, even though they were every bit as real and as keen as he wanted them to be. The critic Stanley J. Kunitz fared slightly better in March 1931 when he noticed that, while Edith Sitwell could “annoy one to distraction with her hyperbolic artifices, her Gallicisms, her Chinoiseries” (339), she managed to put “in her verse as well as in her prose […] the accents of her heart” (341). These two reviews illustrate that Sitwell’s poetic artistry often succeeded in distracting readers from looking for the poems’ origins or from uncovering the hidden emotions, at least until Edith Sitwell herself indicated their more personal nature in her autobiography. The Sleeping Beauty was mainly written about her past as a child, whereas Prelude to a Fairy Tale focused on her feelings as “a poet who had Deceuninck 30 been disappointed in her search for a husband” (Greene 178). While Sitwell’s personal experiences are not the key focus of the analysis, it is nonetheless worthwhile to discuss some of them in the context of her fairytale poetry. Entire studies can be devoted to the interplay between her life and work, but the examples here are only meant as a means to contextualise the poems. They lay bare the intricacies of Sitwell’s mind, while they at the same time underline the reasoning behind some of her narrative choices. Since allusions to Sitwell’s life were more profound in The Sleeping Beauty, the examples will be centered solely on that fairytale poem.
A first striking feature of The Sleeping Beauty is that the fairytale protagonist has absentee parents. In Perrault’s tale of “The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood”, the heroine has loving parents who dote on her and who are very much involved in the destruction of the spinning wheels. They eventually decide to leave their child behind, but not without making sure that their daughter never has to doubt their love for her. Sitwell’s heroine is less fortunate and has to rely more on the help of her servants than that of her parents. The king is only mentioned once in canto three, whereas the queen is so panicked that she seems to lose all rational thought. She settles for an image of her daughter “formed to please the Court” (SB 4.39) and disappears completely from sight from canto five onwards. It is the ancient chamberlain who decides to protect princess Cydalise from Laidronette’s horrible curse and who whisks her away from the palace: “For after Laidronette’s wild rage was spent,/The chamberlain to the child’s nursery went/And sped her far away, like the East Wind/To worlds of snow, far from the fairy’s mind” (SB 4.44-47). He is also the one who orders the maids to destroy all the spindles and it is he who, together with the other servants, becomes a surrogate family to the young princess. The major characters are therefore mostly servants, ranging from kitchen maids to governesses and gardeners. They were modelled after Lady Londesborough’s servants, who all “seemed so ancient that they seemed to have strayed out of the eighteenth century” (TCO
59). Lady Londesborough was Edith Sitwell’s maternal grandmother with whom she spent a Deceuninck 31 lot of time. Since she often stayed in her grandmother’s house amongst servants, it can be understood why many of the fairytale servants were based on Londesborough’s real-life counterparts. A second feature is linked to the first one, namely the decision to use a gardener as narrator for the embedded framework. This seems an odd choice, especially since a traditional fairytale narrator is “usually a ‘third-person’ narrator who, thanks to the naturalizing
‘once upon a time’ fairy tale frame, is usually considered to be objective” (Bacchilega 3).
Sitwell’s choice only makes sense when once again taking into account her childhood. Her father was an absent presence in her life, someone who was more obsessed with his landscaping projects than his children (Greene 25). All three Sitwell children have at one point in time commented upon their father’s obsession with gardens and Edith Sitwell has also inconspicuously touched upon it in her autobiography. In describing her paternal grandmother’s old gardener, she claimed that he “spoke of flowers tenderly, as fathers sometimes (I suppose) speak of their children” (TCO 59). The words between brackets are telling in light of her relationship with her father, since George Sitwell was not the most affectionate of men. It is possible that she chose a gardener as narrator to create similarities with a father who was partly responsible for the loss of her youthful dreams. This seems to be exemplified in canto nine, which describes the youth of princess Cydalise: “The princess was young as the innocent flowers/That bloom and love through the bright spring hours” (SB 9.1-2). It is the gardener’s task to look out for the flowers’ wellbeing and failure to do so leads to flowers that “bruise and wound the heart and sense/With their lost and terrible innocence” (SB 9.39-40). Sitwell’s narrative choice can thus be considered another way of addressing the past. Other examples include the presence of the Dowager Queen, who is too consumed by the past to do something to help the princess, the stuffed parrot which symbolises “the stifling effect of her conventional upbringing” (Dowson and Entwistle 65) and the reoccurrence of Queen Anne’s portrait that must have served as a reminder of long hours of portrait posing with several family members. Deceuninck 32
These examples are certainly not exhaustive, but they are illustrative of the person that hid behind the fairytale façade. It is important to keep this in mind, especially since other examples will come to light during the analysis of the fairytale poems in chapters four and five. They reveal the more personal nature of Sitwell’s poetry and they counter Rickword’s criticism that she did not expose her deepest feelings.
3.3 Differences in Reception
While Edith Sitwell’s modernist fairytale poems were written in the same style and based on similar content matter, they were received and transmitted in a vastly different manner. Whereas
The Sleeping Beauty had great success and became popular immediately after its publication,
Prelude to a Fairy Tale disappeared almost entirely into the background from the moment it was written. Several factors account for this discrepancy in terms of reception, not in the least
Edith Sitwell herself. Her letters and autobiography indicate a certain pride towards The
Sleeping Beauty and stress the emotions that were involved in the literary endeavour. The poem was extremely personal and included many references to either people, places or art that Edith
Sitwell had encountered. Whether the readers were familiar with all the allusions was another question altogether, but the poem was definitely prized for its stylistic and artistic excellence.
Prelude to a Fairy Tale on the other hand was less personal and seemed to have been perceived by Sitwell as a watered down version of her first fairytale poem. Her attempt to write “another modernist fairy tale, this time Cinderella or ‘Cendrillon’ intertwined with a retelling of the story of Venus and Psyche from which it is thought to derive” (Greene 178) was not met with the same enthusiasm as The Sleeping Beauty and Sitwell started to resent it soon after it was written.
Even though she republished a shortened version with the new title Prelude to a Fairy Tale in
March 1927, she never really got over her initial dislike. She shunned the poem in her later correspondence as a letter to Pavel Tchelitchew illustrates: “I once wrote a very bad poem based Deceuninck 33 on that. One day I may write a good one” (qtd. in Greene 179). That day never came to pass though, since she abandoned writing major fairytale retellings immediately after the publication of the Cinderella poem. It is likely that her own ambiguous feelings caused the two poems to be transmitted differently. Sitwell favoured The Sleeping Beauty and decided to include it in almost all of her poetry collections. It is consequently relatively easy to find full copies of the poem in libraries and book stores. There is even a digitalised version of the entire poem on the
Surlalune fairytale website, which is devoted to the preservation of traditional fairy tales and fairytale retellings. In contrast, almost no full copies of Prelude to a Fairy Tale can be found.
Sitwell included it in early poetry collections up until the 1930s, but it is almost impossible to find it in later editions. The website www.poetryexplorer.net has a copy of the poem, but it is difficult to determine to which extent it matches Sitwell’s original due to the many changes she made during its publication history. The title is an example of such a revision and further distinguishes Prelude to a Fairy Tale from The Sleeping Beauty. It can be assumed that both fairytale poems were initially named after their fairytale heroines, namely Cinderella and the
Sleeping Beauty, but something must have made Sitwell decide to discard a direct comparison between her second fairytale poem and its prosaic counterpart. Based on her letter to
Tchelitchew, it is likely that she felt disappointed in herself and that she did want to associate her work with a well-known fairy tale. That is why Prelude to a Fairy Tale continues to linger on the praecipe of fairytale history, whereas The Sleeping Beauty does not shy away from a direct comparison with its literary ancestors. These differences lend additional support to the assumption that Sitwell perceived the poems differently and can partly explain why most researchers have differentiated between The Sleeping Beauty and Prelude to a Fairy Tale. That is, most scholars have paid attention to Sitwell’s first fairytale poem as works by Odegard
(1956), Cusin (1979), Glendinning (1981), Samberger (2005), Dowson and Entwistle (2005) and Greene (2011) illustrate. The poem was easy to access and provided them with the means Deceuninck 34 to research different aspects, ranging from stylistic features to biographical ones. Furthermore,
The Sleeping Beauty “was well received and the first of her works to appear simultaneously in an edition in the United States” (Dowson and Entwistle 63). Due to its widespread popularity, the poem remained one of Sitwell’s most well-known poems and never disappeared into the background like so many other works from the same era. In comparison, Prelude to a Fairy
Tale was a totally different story. A lot harder to access, the poem never achieved the same amount of admiration and was almost never mentioned by scholars. Ann Martin describes the poem merely as a rewriting of “Cinderella” Sitwell was involved in (36), Greene only states that Sitwell felt negatively towards the original (178) and Glendinning and Odegard mention the poem’s existence as an afterthought. It almost seems as if the authors have all adopted
Sitwell’s careless attitude towards the source material and it is as such difficult to find entire studies on the poem. Even though both poems are interesting in their own right and deserve to be investigated for what they are, only The Sleeping Beauty has received scholarly attention in the past. This dissertation attempts to do something about that misunderstanding, by bringing both fairytale poems together in an analysis for the first time ever.
Deceuninck 35
4 When the Shoe Fits: Sitwell and Fairytale History
We all carry, inside us, people who came before us (Callanan 159)
It has been mentioned in the first chapter that a distinct difference between oral folk tales and literary fairy tales is their relation to the past. Whereas oral folk tales “lack any relation to past and future, to time altogether” (Lüthi 11), literary fairy tales can never be disconnected from the past. That is why literary fairy tales often contain either direct or indirect references to historical, literary and artistic characters or events. In the last fifty years, research on these kind of references has increased and many allusions have been unveiled. However, each new discovery led to new research questions and many fairy tales refused to conform to single interpretations as a result. This was also pointed out by Robyn McCallum, who believed that “a definitive textually grounded interpretation is infinitely deferred partly because of […] the impossibility of collecting every version and variant, and partly because any interpretation is in part the product of the culture in which it is produced” (22). Every analysis of fairy tales depends on a number of circumstances and not one analysis can claim to state the whole truth.
This part will only concentrate on one aspect of literary fairy tales, namely their relation to the past. The connection between Sitwell’s fairytale poems and fairytale history has never been studied before, even though ample evidence can be obtained to prove the interaction. The examples provided here were not chosen at random, but were based on their prevalence both in the modernist era and in Edith Sitwell’s own life. Mme d’Aulnoy’s tales continued to be published in fairytale collections and probably came to Sitwell’s attention through Maurice
Ravel (Van Durme 178), and the modernist contemporaries were chosen because of their ability to inspire with clever inversions and poetic ingenuity. Though this chapter will chiefly stress similarities between the tales in terms of style and content, it should be noted that there was Deceuninck 36 also frequently overlap between the ways in which the works were perceived by the audience.
This was especially true for the writings of Edith Sitwell and Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, with whom this overview will start.
4.1 Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy - Les Contes des fées
Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville, Comtesse d’Aulnoy (1650-1705) was one of the most important conteuses of the seventeenth century and someone who helped to establish the literary fairytale genre. Born into a rich aristocratic family, she was raised to be a well-mannered and well-educated woman fit to be someone’s wife. She was married off when she was barely fifteen years old to the wealthy but older baron d’Aulnoy, a marriage which her family would soon come to regret. They hatched a plot against the baron in the hopes of removing him from Marie-
Catherine’s life, but they failed to complete it and, in turn, created even more dire circumstances for the young woman. She was arrested on charges of conspiracy (but never convicted) and spent some time imprisoned as punishment for her family’s crimes. As soon as she was released, she decided to travel the Continent before setting up a separate household in Paris. By 1690, she and her husband had completely separated and lived in different parts of the country. While he was gambling and drinking, she was looking after their six children, “living a semi-religious life and conducting a literary salon. It was [also] at this time that she began to write the fairy tales that have kept her reputation alive” (Blamires 70). She continued to work on them until she died and managed to establish a literary reputation that rivaled that of Charles Perrault. Her
Les contes de fées (1696) and Contes nouveaux ou les fées à la mode (1697) remained enormously popular in France and were even partially translated in English a couple of years later. Considering the life that she led and the countless fairy tales that she produced, it is strange then that “aujourd’hui, de Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, le grand public connaît presque rien”
(Mainil 19). Marina Warner (1995), David Blamires (2008) and Ruth Bottigheimer (2002) have Deceuninck 37 all commented upon this evolution and have remarked that d’Aulnoy gradually receded into the background in favour of male storytellers. Nineteenth-century translations “made her edifying by deadening her language, her tone, her chosen balance between the lyric and the mordant”
(Warner 166) and it is only in recent years that her original wit and artistry have been discovered in scholarly research. Just as Bennett named Edith Sitwell a forgotten modernist, so could
Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy be named a forgotten conteuse. In fact, many similarities exist between d’Aulnoy and Sitwell. While these similarities have never been researched before, it can nevertheless be said that both authors “responded to many of the same social and literary cues” (Bottigheimer 3). They were both extremely well-liked by their contemporaries and they did much to renew the literary scene of their time. Mme d’Aulnoy was in part responsible for the acclaim of the fairytale genre and is usually credited to be the one who invented the term fairy tale, while Edith Sitwell was partly responsible for the wide-spread appeal of modernism due to her involvement in the movement and her support of relatively unknown authors. They were both innovators in their own right and a force to be reckoned with in the literary field, which is why it is peculiar that their fairy tales have been gathering dust until the 1970s. Jane
Tucker Mitchell has discerned that “there is relatively little written specifically about the tales, most writers treat [them] in a general fashion along with other writers of fairy tales” (31). While
Mitchell’s work specifically addresses Mme d’Aulnoy’s tales, the same can be more or less said for Edith Sitwell. She too is often treated in the same breath with other authors from the same era and it is only in the last three or four decennia that she has gotten the attention that she deserves. It seems only right to bring these two ‘forgotten authors’ together by focussing on the similarities between Mme d’Aulnoy’s tales and Edith Sitwell’s fairytale poems. They will be centered on four domains, namely characterisation, narration, style and intertextuality, and they will prove Bottigheimer’s claim that both authors used complementary literary cues. Deceuninck 38
4.1.1 Characterisation
In terms of characterisation, direct parallels can be drawn between the two fairytale narratives.
The most obvious examples are the characters of Laideronnette and Chatte Blanche, who were both heroines in Mme d’Aulnoy’s tales and who were incorporated in Sitwell’s Sleeping Beauty fairy tale as side characters. Laideronnette was originally the protagonist of “Le Serpentin
Vert”, a tale about a young princess who is cursed with ugliness by an evil fairy as soon as she is born. As Mainil has observed: “comme La Belle au bois dormant, une fée qui n’a pas été invitée vient interrompre le baptême et la scène des dons” (149). Laideronnette decides to hide away her ugliness from the world and finds shelter in the land of the Pagodas, where she encounters a green serpent that takes care of her. Enchanted by his conversation, she marries the green serpent on condition that she never tries to look at him before seven years have passed.
Laideronnette fails to keep her promise and both she and the green serpent are punished for their actions. After many trials and tribulations, true love wins out, however, and both the green serpent and Laideronnette become beautiful human beings who live happily ever after as king and queen of the Pagodas. It is telling that Sitwell chose Laideronnette to be the evil fairy that curses princess Cydalise, especially since Laideronnette was originally the one who was cursed.
The experience would normally enable her to understand the princess’s plight, but the opposite is true. This begs the question whether Sitwell’s version of Laidronette is identical to Mme d’Aulnoy’s original. Usually textual clues can help to determine which version of a character is made intertextual in the first place, but here they do nothing but cause confusion.
Laidronette’s status as a princess and her name are reminiscent of the early stages of “Le
Serpentin Vert”, before Laideronnette “is transformed into a beautiful woman and given the name Queen Discrete” (Zipes, Art of Subversion 52). However, her attitude and her age do not correspond with this timeline. She is described as an old and wicked fairy who spreads darkness wherever she goes, the complete opposite of the virtuous young woman present in Mme Deceuninck 39 d’Aulnoy’s tale. Her speech starts with the words: “I am very cross because I am old/and my tales are told/and my flames jewel-cold” (SB 1.123-125), which indicates that her story has already been told. Something must have happened at the end of Mme d’Aulnoy’s tale that made
Laidronette the person who she is and readers are left to wonder what that was. Taking into account the original, Laidronette’s name then becomes more than a passing reference and includes a wealth of background information on the character. Without the name, Laidronette would be a mere caricature of a villain. She would serve as nothing more than the antagonist who moves the story forward and she would remain underdeveloped. It can be assumed that the intertextual reference was used to eliminate black-and-white distinctions and to create a multifaceted character. Furthermore, by creating a twisted version of a beloved fairytale character, Sitwell was able to put herself in a long line of fairytale history while at the same time distancing herself from it. The same was true for her treatment of Chatte Blanche, who was another heroine created by Mme d’Aulnoy. Originally an enchanted princess cursed to live as a cat, Sitwell banned the character to the sidelines and transformed her into a fairy who works as a nursery maid for the young princess. The traditional fairytale features are all left out, so that only her speech and her appearance in canto four remind readers of “La Chatte Blanche”:
The fairy Chatte Blanche rocks you slow,
Like baskets of white fruit or pearls
Are the fairy’s tumbling curls -
Or lattices of roses white
Where through the snows like doves take flight.
Do, do,
Princess, do,
How furred and white is the fallen snow (SB 4.3-10). Deceuninck 40
The similes and descriptions create similarities between the princess’s nursery maid and the beautiful white cat who was the protagonist of the original tale. Sitwell’s reasons for including
Chatte Blanche remain unclear, but it probably had something to do with the palace in which she lived. Chatte Blanche’s kingdom was surrounded by walls “qui représentaient l’histoire de toutes les fées, depuis la création du monde jusqu’alors; les fameuses aventures de Peaud’Ane, de Finette, […], de la Belle au bois dormant, de Serpentinvert et de cent autres, n’y etoient pas oubliées” (d’Aulnoy, CDF 458). Her transfer to the palace of Sleeping Beauty may indicate that she has brought along the entire fairytale history and her presence as a nursery maid can hence embody direct transmission of fairytale conventions. This example once again exemplifies Sitwell’s ability to use tradition in a puzzling manner. While the character of Chatte
Blanche has ties to Mme d’Aulnoy’s tale, she is just different enough to make the readers doubt the resemblances between both versions of the characters. Like d’Aulnoy before her, Sitwell refused to adhere to one frame of reference when it came to fairytale characters. She opted to blend several styles, themes and motifs with one another instead so as to create highly intertextual tales similar to “Le Serpentin Vert” and “La Chatte Blanche”. It is by definition possible to claim that both women responded to the demands of their own time, by “blending
[…] older motifs with the newer ideas of [their] own time, thus appealing to man’s instinctive yearning for primitive beliefs while keeping him in touch with his own times” (Mitchell 109).
4.1.2 Narration
On the level of narration, the overlap between the tales of Mme d’Aulnoy and Edith Sitwell continued. For instance, the use of an embedded framework was a technique favoured by the
French conteuses, as they often created tales that were “set within a longer narrative, or simply framed with an introductory dialogue” (Harries 106). This was noticeably absent from traditional fairy tales told by men and seems to have been restricted to female storytellers only.
By creating her own kind of embedded framework, it can be assumed that Sitwell included Deceuninck 41 herself once more in the history of the conteuses. Even though “no English translation has ever included Mme d’Aulnoy’s frame tale peritexts” (Raynard and Bottigheimer 170), they were still present in many French editions and Edith Sitwell likely encountered them either directly or indirectly through her acquaintances. Of the two poems, The Sleeping Beauty is the one that shows the most similarities with the narrative style of the French conteuses. It starts off with a gardener who “was old as nightingales/that in the wide leaves tells a thousand Grecian tales”
(SB 1.43-44) and who warns travellers to stay away from the woods. He is a somewhat peculiar character, especially since his skills set extends far beyond the reach of a common gardener.
Not only is he able to play the bagpipe, he also manages to tell a tale that is filled with mythical and oriental allusions. He functions as an intradiegetic and allodiegetic narrator who, as a secondary witness, is able to tell the story of the Sleeping Beauty to a traveller who passes by:
Thus spoke the ancient man, wrinkled like old moonlight
Beneath dark boughs. Time dreamed away to night,
And while I heard the leaves like silver cymbals ring
He told me this old tale of Beauty’s mournful christening (SB 1.61-64)
By doing this in such a manner, Harries observes that Sitwell followed the conteuses’ example since their earliest fairy tales were “also told by a character in the [narrative], sometimes in very contrived situations” (64). While the presence of the educated gardener may seem absurd at first sight, it makes sense when understanding him to be another layer meant to create confusion. That is, the inclusion of an embedded framework adds another interpretative layer to the poem and establishes one more subplot. If the readers want to understand all of it, they have to actively navigate between the past and the present as well as between the several story lines that are interwoven into the poem. In contrast, Prelude to a Fairy Tale has no embedded framework and starts in medias res. Nonetheless, it can be argued that the entire poem serves as an introductory frame for either Mme d’Aulnoy’s “Finette Cendron” or for Charles Perrault’s Deceuninck 42
“Cendrillon”. The heroine is fleetingly introduced in the poem, whereas the tale of Cupid and
Psyche is foregrounded. The characters function as foreshadowing, since “the germs of folk- tale were also those of myth” (Mitchell 102). Despite the extradiegetic and heterodiegetic narrator in the second poem, temporal and spatial confusion is still achieved through the use of several plots. As such, both poems refuse to conform to traditional narratological conventions connected to fairy tales. The lack of a happy end is another feature that defies fairytale tradition and can once again be linked to the French conteuses. Mme d’Aulnoy ends four of her fairy tales on a tragic note and, while this may seem a small number, it is remarkable that they even exist in the first place. Fairy tales normally do not deviate from the ‘happily ever after’ pattern, but when they do “the mood is stoic, the author shrugs her shoulders with cool irony; dourness also aligns the late seventeenth-century fairy tale with the comic fantasist’s mode” (Warner
164). The same kind of irony is present in the fairytale poems. The heroines are not granted a happy end and they are both doomed to remain in a trance-like state. The tale of the Sleeping
Beauty ends with “the brutish forests close around/the beauty sleeping in enchanted ground”
(SB 25.1-2), while the Cinderella-like tale ends with a heroine whose “radiance is/still unawakened by the spring light’s kiss” (PFT ll. 592-593). Sitwell does not create princes or fairies that can save the heroines, instead she defies the traditional endings and choses to let them venture into the dream-like world on their own. Like the French conteuses, Sitwell recognises that not every fairy tale requires a happy ending. It is more important to include a moral, albeit an implicit one. When the gardener urges the stranger to “never sigh for a strange land/and songs no heart can understand” (SB 26.35-36) or when time is deemed something that merely “shapes the poem’s close/and measures our small distance to the sun/and moments like his bee-winged motes that run” (PFT ll. 555-557), the moral always seems to be that it is fruitless to long for a time gone by. Like in many of d’Aulnoy’s fairy tales, readers are taught that true growth can only be achieved when they look forwards instead of backwards. Deceuninck 43
4.1.3 Intertextuality
The intertextual technique of allusion was a third feature that both authors had in common, though the technique cannot be attributed to Mme d’Aulnoy alone. Many authors used allusions in their works and it would be incorrect to claim that Sitwell merely followed d’Aulnoy’s lead.
However, the common source material and the manner in which the allusions were applied hint at specific similarities between the two authors. Especially their use of mythological allusions are worth mentioning. Bottigheimer has discerned that Mme d’Aulnoy created characters that
“shared their world with gods and mythical creatures like Eolus, Boreas, Zephir, Aurora, Diana and [others]” (9), thus transforming both traditional myths and fairy tales. Sitwell did the same in her fairytale poems, albeit in two different ways. In The Sleeping Beauty, myths and mythical characters were chiefly evoked through similes and metaphors. For instance, the presence of
Laidronette at the christening is compared to the unbidden presence of the goddess Eris at the wedding of Thetis and Peleus. When Laidronette enters the palace, “the little fawning airs are trembling wan;/and silver as Leda’s love, the swan,/the moonlight seems, the apricots have turned to amber,/cold as from the bright nymph Thetis’ chamber” (SB 1.111-114). Like
Laidronette, Eris was not invited to the festivities and she retaliated by creating discord amongst the goddesses. She threw a golden apple into the audience, meant for the fairest goddess of them all, and inadvertently created the Trojan War as a result. That is, the Trojan prince Paris was brought into the equation to name the fairest goddess and he chose Aphrodite in exchange for the most beautiful woman on earth: Helen, the daughter of Leda and Zeus. With just a few well-chosen words, Sitwell was able to allude to a complex mythological narrative and thus set the tone for the rest of her poem. The actions of Laidronette and Eris continue to linger long after they are gone, which is evidenced from the names and actions later on in the narrative. It is no coincidence that Cydalise played “at Troy Town in the palace garden, tossed/and through the smiling leaves of summer lost/a round compact gold ball, the smaller image/of this hard Deceuninck 44 world, grown dry of any love” (SB 12.8-12). By featuring a golden ball in a town named after
Troy, Sitwell continued the myth of the golden apple and invited her readers to search for even more clues. Not only did she thereby create consistency, she also revealed some of the major themes of the poem. Forgotten tragic beauties featured prominently in the story (cf. chapter four) and were often addressed through the use of mythological allusions. This was similar to
“la manière personnelle dont Madame d’Aulnoy se sert de la mythologie. Ils vont de la simple allusion à une partielle ou totale réécriture du mythe” (Defrance 219). Sometimes myths were merely mentioned in passing to reinforce the themes and motifs of the fairy tale, other times myths were completely rewritten to include the fairytale characters. The former was true for
Sitwell’s Sleeping Beauty tale, the latter for her Cinderella tale. In her Prelude to a Fairy Tale, fairytale characters are added to the myth of Cupid and Psyche instead of the other way around.
The myth functions as the main narrative, the fairy tale as the subplot. That is why Cinderella and the Greco-Roman god Mars can be mentioned in one and the same breath: “But Cinderella found the servants out/and Marshal Mars loud-roaring with the gout/and aiming his old rusted blunderbuss/at nothing firing; with that martial fuss” (PFT ll. 105-108). These characters can encounter one another without difficulties in the land of fantasy and it is perfectly normal for them to have a conversation with one another. The cross-fertilisation between myths and fairy tales was in that respect more conspicuous than in The Sleeping Beauty, but the “clever turns of thought that greatly delight the unsuspecting reader” (Mitchell 91) were still present. That is the reason why the relation between myths and fairy tales is such an important part of the analysis in the succeeding chapters. The Greco-Roman characters were more than mere allusions, they were a way of concealing “lower-class tales with an abundance of literary and cultural references” (Zipes, The Irresistible Fairy Tale 32). Like d’Aulnoy before her, Sitwell expertly transformed traditional fairy tales and myths into witty and innovative works and is thus possible to say that the similarities between them went beyond the use of mere allusions. Deceuninck 45
4.1.4 Style
Style and particularly the use of elaborate descriptions was a fourth area in which both authors excelled and the last one to be discussed here. Their works were instances of “narrative art, bristling with invention, wit, and a kind of poetic justice” (Barchilon 358) and seemed to have been written with an adult audience in mind. Their attention to detail and their zest for intellectual wordplay made the works popular in their own era, but unfortunately also caused them to disappear in later years. Harries has observed that readers started to prefer the simplified fairy tales of Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm in the nineteenth and twentieth century, thereby abandoning the more “baroque descriptions and romance situations” (Harries 44) of
Mme d’Aulnoy and her successors. The fixed, accessible formats and conventional language typical of traditional fairy tales were consequently neither present in d’Aulnoy’s fairytale collections nor in Sitwell’s fairytale poetry. Their tales were instead complex narratives
“enhanced by [an] imaginative style, [an] unusual vocabulary and [a] natural flow of language”
(Mitchell 136). Both women were able to create marvellous contexts with just a few felicitous phrases, as was clear from their description of the pagodes. These characters appeared in “Le
Serpentin Vert” and The Sleeping Beauty (1924) as Laidronette’s subjects, creatures that were both fantastical and mythical in nature. Mme d’Aulnoy described them in great detail and concretised them greatly, whereas Edith Sitwell left much to the imagination and preferred to set the mood by creating elaborate and despondent comparisons. While the resulting tales were different in terms of content, they were the same in terms of stylistic eloquence. Both authors created an atmosphere that set the mood for the rest of the story and, through their word choice, they indicated how they wanted their characters to be seen. D’Aulnoy seemed to consider
Laidronette and the pagodes as not that different from the rest of the world. They were no typical black and white fairytale characters and they did not deserve to be treated as such. In contrast,
Sitwell seemed to view Laidronette and the pagodes as irredeemable and unwanted creatures: Deceuninck 46
Les uns sans brans, les autres sans pied, des bouches à l’oreille, des yeux de travers, des
nez écrasés: en un mot il n’y pas plus de différence entre les créatures qui habitent le
monde, qu’il en avait entre ces pagodes (d’Aulnoy, NC 379)
Her dwarfs as round as oranges of amber
Among the tall trees of the shadow clamber […]
And ancient satyrs whose wry wig of roses
Nothing but little rotting shames discloses;
They lie where shadows, cold as the night breeze,
Seem cast by rocks, and never by kind trees. (SB 1.162-163, 1.168-171)
In addition to the peculiar word choice in the excerpts, the name of Laidronette’s kingdom also deserves some attention. The word pagoda refers to an oriental temple and seems a rather odd choice for the name of a fairytale kingdom. It is likely that the name was an indication of the authors’ interest in foreign cultures, an interest which they had acquired while travelling the continent (Greene 170, Mainil 152). Though both authors were inspired by foreign cultures,
Edith Sitwell easily surpassed Mme d’Aulnoy first steps into the oriental world. She inserted the most exotic elements, as was evidenced from cantos seventeen until twenty-two in The
Sleeping Beauty and from the first few stanzas of Prelude to a Fairy Tale. These cantos were rife with foreign features, ranging from Italian and Spanish music to Chinoiseries and marriage proposals by African kings and sultans. Together with other stylistic elements such as repetitions, symbols and rhythms, they showcased her ingenuity and added yet another element to the overall complexity of the poems. They were representative of the interaction between different cultures, different styles and different authors and they further emphasised the relation between Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy and Edith Sitwell. The overlaps between the fairytale techniques were thus “not mere excess or self-indulgent play, but rather subtle guides for reading” (Harries 43) the poems and for understanding their position towards fairytale history. Deceuninck 47
4.2 The Modernists
Edith Sitwell and modernism were almost synonymous with one another, since she was one of the most active authors within the movement. She was enormously popular in the first half of the twentieth century and was at the time close friends with renowned modernists such as T.S.
Eliot, W.B. Yeats, Dylan Thomas, Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein. Her literary salons were a gathering place for all kinds of people; “apart from the writers, musicians and artists, there were Londesborough relatives, who regarded the other guests as something of a mystery”
(Greene 113). They likely formed the inspiration for many of her poems, including her two fairytale ones. Though Sonja Samberger (2005) and Debora Van Durme (2012) have already researched some of the parallels between Sitwell’s poetry and other modernist works, their research has never solely focussed on her fairytale poems. This section will do something about that, by extending their research to the realm of fairy tales and fairytale compositions.
4.2.1 Edith Sitwell and modernist ballet
Personal letters indicate that Edith Sitwell was never one to really care for ballet, which is why it is odd that her fairytale poems seem to be indebted to two well-known ballet performances of the early twentieth century: Diaghilev’s “The Sleeping Princess” (1921) and Ravel’s “Ma
Mère L’Oye” (1912). Greene claims that Sitwell wrote her two fairytale poems at a time when she “became swept up in [her brother] Sacheverell’s devotion to the Ballet Russes, which had returned to London in September 1918” (150). Her brother had befriended the founder of the
Ballet Russes, Sergei Diaghilev, and often took his sister to see the colourful ballet performances. It is likely that he took her to a performance of “The Sleeping Princess”, which premiered in London in 1921 and which ran for 114 performances. Both the ballet and the musical score by Tchaikovsky could be considered fairytale retellings, with both productions
“assigning new names to the characters, creating additional characters and episodes, and Deceuninck 48 enhancing the magical aspect of the story” (Nikolajeva 609). The ballet followed the traditional tale closely in terms of content, but was innovative in terms of costumes and sets. According to the National Gallery of Australia, the costumes and sets were so excessive and detailed that they left the ballet company almost bankrupt. They state that the “lavish use of expensive materials and couture-like construction and detailing, with the final detail of every costume personally overseen and approved by Diaghilev” (National Gallery of Australia) cost Diaghilev a fortune, forcing him to close the production after only a couple of months had passed.
Nonetheless, the extravagant costumes struck a chord with Sitwell and resonated in her description of the party guests who entered the castle at the moment of the princess’ christening:
“Oh, the pomp that passed those doors; /Trains still sweep the empty floors, /Pelongs, bulchauls, pallampores, /Soundless now as any breeze/Of amber and of orangeries/That sweeps from isles in Indian seas/” (SB 1.65-70). The materials that Sitwell used to describe the costumes were a far cry from the materials that were typically used in the twentieth century. They were more commonly associated with orientalism, an association which Sitwell would continue to evoke in both fairytale poems. Prelude to a Fairy Tale (1927) starts with a description of forgotten beauties and the ladies’ attire is once more reminiscent of the lavish costumes used in the ballet:
All kinds of watered silks those great sprays wet, --
The gros de Sidon, foulard pekinet,
And Chine de Syr the wind loves; trellises,
All gilded by the heat, spangle the dresses
With emerald grapes; like flashing water, thin
Cashmere Alvandar and nacre pekin
Show by the lake’s clear temple and great domes
In Venus’ park where little Psyche roams (PFT ll. 11-18). Deceuninck 49
Sitwell invites her readers on a journey that goes beyond ordinary twentieth-century life and uses the rich unique materials as a form of escapism. The foreign materials serve as a way of distancing herself from the mass production of common materials such as cotton and linen and at the same time stress the pre-eminence of orientalism in the first half of the twentieth century.
The oriental focus was also noticeable in other ballet performances, such as the one by
Maurice Ravel. Originally a piano piece, then a musical score, and finally a ballet performance,
“Ma Mère L’Oye” was based on well-known fairy tales by French authors (Zank 121). Sitwell herself said that she used the music as a source of inspiration while writing her fairytale poems and there are indeed several elements that find their echo within her poems. Van Durme has already discussed most of the similarities in her doctoral dissertation (2012), but it is worth mentioning in this dissertation as well. Ravel’s fairytale suite mainly needs to be addressed in order to understand the importance of the character of Laideronnette. In his suite, the tale of
Laideronnette and the tale of the Sleeping Beauty are two distinct fairy tales. The heroine of
Ravel’s third piece “Laideronnette, Impératrice des Pagodes” is Laideronnette, a young princess who gets cursed by the evil fairy Magotine at the moment of her birth. In contrast, the heroine of “Pavane de la Belle au Bois Dormant” is Aurore, a young princess who gets cursed by the evil fairy Carabosse at the moment of her christening. Both the names of Aurore and Carabosse were associated with known variants of the fairy tale in the early twentieth century, mainly due to Tchaikovsky’s musical score. Sitwell was one of the first authors to alter the names of the female characters and it is likely that she cross-referenced Ravel’s interpretation of the tales in order to do so. Ravel’s take on Laideronnette is important information for the readers, since it offers crucial background information on a character that remains otherwise vague in Sitwell’s fairy tale. Readers are left to wonder what has happened to a character who was once deemed worthy to be the heroine of her very own fairy tale. Consequently, her presence within Sitwell’s poem adds another layer to the meaning of the tale and provides a new perspective to both the Deceuninck 50 original tale of Madame d’Aulnoy and to the musical score of Ravel. Even more striking in this respect is that Sitwell also seemed to have adopted the oriental focus of Ravel’s score. Van
Durme states that “the spirit of Ravel’s piece is congenial to Laidronette’s appearance in The
Sleeping Beauty. Ravel’s Impératrice introduces excitement and brilliance […and] it pentatonicism adds an instantly exotic flavour” (179). Sitwell mirrors this exotic flavour in several descriptions as well as in a couple of characters. The Sleeping Beauty (1924) has the most obvious references to oriental cultures. In canto eighteen, two foreign men are resting side by side. One of them ‘is swarthy as the summer wind-/A man who travelled from a far country;/The other Soldan in his pomp and panoply/Seems like le Roi Soleil in all his pride/When his gold periwig is floating wide” (SB 18. 4-8). Not only is it odd to include the men in the fairy tale, it is also paradoxical to compare the sultan and the Sun King with one another. The sultan represents oriental cultures, while the Sun King represents civilised western cultures. However, Sitwell’s mocking reference to the gold periwig indicates that she would prefer a primitive culture over an artificial and material one. In canto nineteen, Sitwell then evokes the Spanish culture with references to siestas, castanets, orange trees and tambourines and introduces the readers to the “Soldan and the King of Ethiop’s land/[who] approach as suitors for your daughter’s hand” (SB 19.50-51). Suitors from the princess’ own kingdom never present themselves, only foreign princes and kings ask for her hand in marriage. In Prelude to a Fairy Tale (1927), the references to orientalism are less obvious and are more evoked through descriptions and similes. For instance, the lake by which Cupid and Psyche roam is four times compared to “the Great Wall of China’s domes and arches” (PFT l. 58), even though the myths and mythological characters discussed in the tale were Greco-Roman. Though traditional fairy tales were usually known for their straightforward and one-dimensional universes, the references to foreign cultures nevertheless make sense considering Sitwell’s intent to write modernist poems. Modernist fairytale poems such as Sitwell’s were known for disrupting the Deceuninck 51 readers’ horizon of expectation and the foreign locations, references and characters would have been inserted as a way to defamiliarise traditional fairytale conventions. The lavish ballet performances and dramatic musical scores of her time inspired her to write exotic and extravagant scenes unlike anything anyone had ever seen before in fairy tales and they further enabled her to establish a unique position within the modernist and the fairytale genre.
4.2.2 Edith Sitwell and modernist poetry
Like fairy tales, modernist poetry is a multifaceted genre. Numerous theories and approaches exist, each one accentuating different aspects, and it would be impossible to refer to them all in this chapter. Instead, this section will focus on the modernist features the ‘artistic outlaws’ used, a name which was created by Sonja Samberger to describe a group of female authors who
“emphasized their individuality and pursued their own styles quite independently” (26).
Samberger groups the techniques of Edith Sitwell, Amy Lowell, Gertrude Stein and Hilda
Doolittle together to demonstrate the similarities between these four independent authors. Her insights regarding modernist defamiliarisation techniques are especially important, because they accentuate the disruptive modernist qualities of the poems. The term defamiliarisation was first coined in 1917 by the Russian scholar Victor Shklovsky and has been used ever since in modernist studies. András Bálint Kovács defines defamiliarisation or ostrannenie as “the usage of such poetic narrative devices that thwart the audience’s automatic associative processes and provoke the audience to find other ways of making sense of the work of art” (Jullier 178).
Kovács refers to a disruption of the readers’ horizon of expectation and acknowledges the time that readers need to figure out for themselves how they want to deal with the unfamiliarity and uncertainty of the disrupted narrative. The term is useful, because it can be linked to both modernist and fairytale research. Even though Edith Sitwell likely used defamiliarisation techniques as a way of connecting with other modernist authors, they nevertheless had a direct impact on the content, structure and perception of her two fairytale poems. Deceuninck 52
Samberger argues that Sitwell used defamiliarisation techniques both on the level of the text and the intertext: via multidimensional temporal universes, colourful language and complex allusions. On the level of the text, Sitwell created multidimensional temporal universes in both fairytale poems. In The Sleeping Beauty (1924), there are two main universes that are situated at different points in time. Both the ancient gardener and the traveller are part of the present time, which is the time when the story of princess Cydalise is told for the first time.
They are both storytellers within that universe and they both share responsibility for conveying information to the readers. The traveller disappears once the story shifts to past time and the ancient gardener becomes solely responsible for conveying the narrative of the Sleeping
Beauty. The entire tale takes place in past time and the traveller has to wait until the gardener rejoins the present-time universe before he can once again become a part of the narrative. Less obvious is the multidimensionality within Prelude to a Fairy Tale (1927). While the entire tale seems to take place within a single temporal universe, close inspection of the allusions reveal that this is not the case. The Roman Julius Caesar is mentioned in the same breath as the
Romantic poet Lord Byron, the Roman god Mars and the eighteenth-century officer Horatio
Nelson. The allusions refer to different eras and the entire narrative seems to jump from one timeframe to another. Since Sitwell herself wrote the poem as a series of dream sequences, it is likely that she did not feel the need to create a single temporal universe for her characters.
Through her allusions and her narratological choices, she was more interested in “combining the past and the present, the timeless and the temporal” (Samberger 64) than in creating a single temporal universe consistent with traditional fairy tales. Traditional fairy tales usually take place within an indefinite, one-dimensional universe where there are no other temporal clues than the words ‘once upon a time’ and ‘happily ever after’. However, the Cinderella poem
Sitwell wrote deviated from traditional patterns and was, due to its use of temporal defamiliarisation, more in line with modernist works than with traditional fairytale ones. Deceuninck 53
The connection with modernism was further emphasised by the use of “colourful nouns, verbs and adjectives” (Samberger 138). Her sentences recall a world of imagination, a world where fantasies and dreams are free to roam in child-like wonder, but they are the same time too excessive to completely lose yourself in. Her intricate language reveals her need to question
“the serious connection between names and objects by naming as many things and persons as possible” (Samberger 138). That explains why almost all of her fairytale characters have proper names, such as princess Cydalise, housekeeper Mrs. Troy, the kitchen maids Jane, Anne,
Audrey and Phoebe, the farm-maid Rosa and the fairies Laidronette and Chatte Blanche. Their proper names indicate that their existence surpasses that of ordinary fairytale characters, who usually “remain [...generic or] unnamed, thus facilitating projections and identifications”
(Bettelheim 40). By naming her characters, Sitwell moved away from the realm of traditional fairy tales and firmly settled her fairy tales within the modernist tradition. Her linguistic style differed from the simplistic, repetitive style that was commonly used in traditional fairy tales.
Though repetitions appear in the fairytale poems, they always appear with minor alterations in order to disrupt the readers’ expectations. In The Sleeping Beauty (1924), the gardener’s introduction and final address seem the same at first sight, but there are slight differences. The young man described in the introduction as a ‘mere felon’ is in the final address named Jonah, a man who “met an ancient satyr crone,/Cold as the droning wind the drone/Hears when the thickest gold will thrive/Summer-long in the combs of the honey-hive” (SB 26.15-18). The old crone convinces Jonah to sail for a foreign land, but he drowns before he can arrive there. This is new information, as there were never any specific clues in the introduction as to why the young man sailed “for a far strand/To seek a waking, clearer land” (SB 1. 13-14). The ambiguity that clouded Jonah’s demise in the introduction is solved and serves as a reminder of what can happen to men who leave their homeland searching for foreign treasures. The implicit moral seems to be that it is better to stay at home and appreciate all the things you already have. Unlike Deceuninck 54 traditional fairy tales, the moral can only be deducted by decoding the altered repetitions. In
Prelude to a Fairy Tale (1927), the repetitions create a kind of never-ending loop. The polka starts with a demure “(tra la la la-) trap the Fair” in line 189 and then builds in crescendo towards lines 217-223: “Tra la la la, trap the Fair./Tra la la la la --/ Tra la la la la --/ Tra la la la la la la la/La/La/La!” There is no simple resolution in sight like in traditional fairy tales and it almost seems as if the characters will forever be stuck in their trance-like dance. The dance at the same time celebrates and ridicules the simplicity of fairy tales, another illustration of Sitwell’s wish to both honour and distance herself from traditional fairy tales. The poems’ repetitive structure can confuse readers of traditional fairy tales, who are more used to simple solutions and chronological narratives. It is likely that Sitwell consciously used intricate names, descriptions and repetitions to deviate and defamiliarise the traditional fairytale genre as it was then known.
On the level of the intertext, one more defamiliarisation technique can be found.
Complex allusions were often used by modernist authors to defamiliarise both the real world and the fictional world, a technique which Sitwell also liked to use. Her allusions to Greco-
Roman mythological characters are worth mentioning in this context, since they both complicated and emphasised the underlying themes of the fairytale poems. They were inserted as some sort of “‘mythological quotations’, thus some distant and artificial creations, and fragments [were] used in order to convey the dilemma of ‘the status of the art and the artist in an ever-changing and destructive world’” (Samberger 49). In The Sleeping Beauty (1924), almost all allusions to Greco-Roman female characters are linked to tales of doomed beauties.
Leda’s seduction by Zeus is mentioned when Laidronette enters the castle for the first time, the rape of Philomela by her brother-in-law Tereus and her subsequent transformation to a nightingale is alluded to in the description of a gardener who was “old as tongues of nightingales/That in the wide leaves tell a thousand Grecian tales” (SB 1.43-44), the pursuit of
Daphne by Apollo is addressed in canto eighteen and the love between Endymion and Selene Deceuninck 55 is referred to in canto seven. While all these characters were considered to be extremely beautiful, their beauty always resulted in heartbreak and misery. Leda and Helen were in part responsible for the destruction of Troy, Philomela and Daphne were forced to leave their human existence behind and Endymion eventually succumbed to an eternal slumber. Female beauty was as such not prized to the same extent as in traditional fairy tales. Fairytale protagonists such as Snow White and Sleeping Beauty have names that reflect their beautiful features, whereas fairytale antagonists usually have hideous features. The beautiful characters are destined for a happy end, the hideous characters are destined to meet their demise. Sitwell, however, turned these conventions upside down. The beautiful princess Cydalise does not receive a happy end and is destined to sleep forever, whereas the ugly Laidronette is the one who gets to have the last laugh. The allusions defamiliarise the value traditional fairy tales bestow upon female beauty and seem to warn the readers beforehand that a happy end might not be in store for the princess. In Prelude to a Fairy Tale (1927), the focus lies on a dream-like world. Dreams are the central theme of the narrative, since the entire tale can be interpreted as one dream sequence.
Greco-Roman characters are no longer merely alluded to, but appear beside fairytale characters.
For instance, the innocence of Cupid and Psyche is mentioned alongside Mars and Cinderella:
“But Cupid too was dreaming, could not wake./Still held: for deep within his woodland cottage/Mars waits for little Psyche with his pottage,--/That scullion Cinderella who now lives/To take the honey from the straw thatched hives” (PFT ll. 85-90). Disrupting the boundaries between fairy tales and myths, Sitwell made Mars and Cinderella neighbours. Only in the dream world could such a situation be “possible and probable. Time and place does not exist; on an insignificant basis of reality the imagination spins and weaves new patterns: a blend of memories, experiences, spontaneous ideas, absurdities and improvisations” (Strindberg 176).
Readers do not have to understand the Greco-Roman characters’ background stories, their presence alone is enough to warrant the poem’s peculiar dreamy nature. By inserting them as Deceuninck 56 full-fletched characters instead of referring to them via similes and metaphors, Sitwell emphasised the absurd character of the dream and defamiliarised the idea that fairytale characters live in isolation in a fairytale world. In contrast to her first fairytale poem, her mythological allusions thus defamiliarise traditional fairytale characterisation instead of female beauty. Everything becomes possible, which includes cross-characterisation between different literary genres. In fact, all Sitwell’s defamiliarisation techniques are illustrative of how modernism made everything possible. During the modernist era, boundaries between the known and the unknown disappeared and “familiarity […did] not necessarily lead to a better understanding” (Samberger 148). In an ever-changing world, even something as stable as the fairytale genre was not secure anymore. Traditional fairytale patterns were mixed and matched and elements from different artistic fields were added in order to create something entirely new.
The modernists’ intent was to disrupt the readers’ expectations, which is why their fairytale creations were more in line with fairytale retellings than with traditional fairy tales. Even though
Edith Sitwell’s fairytale poetry closely resembled fairytale works by Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy in terms of narratological choices and modernist works by the artistic outlaws in terms of defamiliarisation, her poems nevertheless can also be interpreted as fairytale retellings. They are unique writings that hold a special position both in modernist and in fairytale history.
Deceuninck 57
5 The Sleeping Beauty (1924)
Once we have accepted the story, we cannot escape the story’s fate (Travers 55)
The Sleeping Beauty (1924) was the first fairytale poem Edith Sitwell wrote and can undoubtedly be named her most popular one. The poem consists of twenty-six stanzas and recounts the story of Cydalise, a young princess who is cursed by the evil fairy Laidronette at the moment of her christening. Laidronette, who feels slighted for not being invited to the party, curses Cydalise to prick her finger on a spinning wheel as soon as she is of age: “For if the
Princess prick her finger/Upon a spindle, then she shall be lost/As a child wandering in a glade of thorn/With sleep like roses blowing soft, forlorn” (SB 1.134-137). The curse sends the entire palace staff in a frenzy, as they are desperate to save the young princess before it is too late.
From that moment onwards, Sitwell deviates from the well-known variants of “The Sleeping
Beauty” as the focus is replaced to the household staff. The heroine and her family members are moved into the background, whereas the hero is completely removed from the narrative.
The prince, who normally is responsible for kissing the young princess awake, is warned off by the old gardener at the entrance of the woods. The gardener tells him that it is better to “keep my lad, to the good safe ground” (SB 1.10) and all future potential candidates are forbidden to enter the “brutish forests [that] close around/The beauty sleeping in enchanted ground” (SB
25.1-2). The princess is forced to remain asleep forever and there is no hope of her ever escaping her cursed fate. The story refrains from ending with the happily ever after that readers are accustomed to and is, as such, more in line with disruptive fairytale retellings than with traditional fairy tales. In fact, most fairytale elements within the poem suggest that Sitwell’s modernist work can be interpreted as a fairytale retelling. This will be explained in the next section by means of Joosen’s distinction between fairytale retellings and traditional fairy tales. Deceuninck 58
5.1 Traditional Fairy Tale or Fairytale Retelling?
The moment Edith Sitwell wrote The Sleeping Beauty (1924), she was probably unaware of how her poem would contribute to the fairytale genre. That is not to say that she did not choose the genre for a reason, but her reasons had more to do with accepting her childhood memories than with purposely creating a new fairy tale (cf. chapter two). She never consciously addressed each narratological domain in the same way fairytale scholars do, which is why they have never troubled themselves by turning their gaze to Sitwell’s fairytale poetry. Fortunately, Joosen’s dissertation offers a framework that enables scholars to look beyond traditional research methods. Her theories allow for the discovery of fairytale features in forgotten works, as the focus lies on fluidity and disruptions of the fairytale genre. She raises two important questions, which will be used as guidelines for this analysis: 1) “how fluid are the boundaries between the two genres [of traditional fairy tales and fairytale retellings], and how have they been disrupted?
2) Why do authors feel the need to disrupt them in the first place?” (Joosen 27). The answers to these questions will be provided throughout this chapter and will be recapitulated at the end.
5.1.1 Chronotope
Traditional fairy tales normally are one-dimensional and are situated within an indefinite time and space, whereas fairytale retellings are multi-dimensional and take place within a definite time and space. Traditional fairy tales have a universal and timeless appeal, since no contextual clues are needed to understand the narrative. Everyone can imagine ‘a castle in a faraway kingdom’ or ‘an enchanted forest’, no matter when or where one lives. In contrast, fairytale retellings often have a very specific spatial and temporal setting. Readers need to decode contextual clues if they want to discover the tale’s exact time and location. Sitwell’s poem corresponds with the traditional fairytale genre when it comes to the chronotope. The narrative is mostly set in an enchanted forest, where nature seems to be the only one that is truly living: Deceuninck 59
Then birds like Fortunatus moved again
Among the boughs with silent feathered feet -
Spraying down dew like jewels amid the sweet
Green darkness; figs, each like a purse of gold,
Grow among leaves like rippled water green and cold.
‘Beneath those laden boughs,’ the gardener sighs,
‘Dreaming in endlessness, forgotten beauty lies. (SB 1.48-54)
Trees and birds are full of life, surprising travellers with their colourful presence, whereas the characters from the narrative are either completely forgotten or so ancient that they seem to have come from another time altogether. The entire tale is one-dimensional in scope as almost all actions take place on the castle grounds within the enchanted forest. There is a brief scene in canto one where Laidronette returns to her “vast palace/Where now, at last, she can unleash her malice” (SB 1. 151-152) and there is canto eighteen where “beneath a wan and sylvan tree/Whose water-flowing beauty our tired eyes/Can feel from very far, two travellers lie” (SB
18.1-3), but these scenes are too brief to really include it as part of a multi-dimensional universe.
There are never any indications as to where the story takes place, apart from the location of princess Cydalise’s suitor in canto twenty, which warrants its universal and timeless appeal.
While the iconic words “once upon a time” are missing, the story is indeed set in an indefinite time as there are never any specific clues that determine the time in which the tale is set. Both the presence of the ancient gardener and the adverbs of time such as “long since” and “far beyond time’s sleepy bond” (SB 1.41-42) indicate that the tale took place in the past, but that is as far as temporal clarifications go. Intertextual references to mythology and the Bible also provide little evidence for the determination of an exact chronotope. It indeed reveals that the tale is set in a time when both mythological and biblical tales were known, but this is the case for almost all fairy tales. An example would be the traditional tale of “Snow White”, where the Deceuninck 60 heroine eats a poisoned apple reminiscent of Eve’s Original Sin. Since intertextual references remain limited to well-known old stories, the spatial and temporal setting never becomes explicit and the chronotope never gets the chance to move beyond that of traditional fairy tales.
5.1.2 Attitude to the supernatural
The connection to traditional fairy tales remains consistent when it comes to the poem’s attitude to the supernatural. The tale is centered upon a non-intrusive magical curse that drives the story forward, a curse that is unavoidable no matter how hard the household staff tries to destroy it.
They remove all the spindles from the castle and forbid its use on the castle grounds, but they make a fatal error in never informing Cydalise about the curse. As such, the princess’ first reaction upon seeing a spindle is one of curiosity: “Oh, the curious bliss!.../It pricks my finger now. How strange this is -/For I am like that lovely fawn-queen dead/Long since – pierced through the pool-clear heart’, she said” (SB 14.102-105). The princess’ lack of information about an object that could potentially harm her as well as her inquisitive nature leads to her undoing, an event which is typical of traditional fairy tales. The same sequence of events is repeated on a smaller scale in the gardener’s framed narrative of Jonah. Jonah too is advised/cursed by an old crone to do something he should not do and he too meets his ultimate demise because of all-encompassing curiosity. Both Cydalise and Jonah remain asleep at the end of the narrative, cursed until eternity to be nothing more than memories. Like most fairytale authors, Sitwell left out explicit morals and created wicked fairies and old crones to implicitly address the possible dangers that people could encounter in life. The magic behind the predictions of the old crone and Laidronette firmly settles the story within the boundaries of the traditional fairy tale. Whereas no child would ever be cursed with the prick of a spinning wheel for having an inquisitive nature and whereas no traveller would ever be punished by drowning for wanting to leave his or her homeland behind, the serious nature of the magical curse nevertheless cautions readers to be careful when encountering new things. In real life, children Deceuninck 61 would not have needed a curse. Their caretakers would have made them aware of possible dangers and they would have been able to avoid somewhat similar circumstances.
5.1.3 Characterisation
The boundaries between traditional fairy tales and fairytale retellings first start to become hazy in terms of characterisation. There are more than thirty characters in the narrative, an unusually high amount for a fairy tale. They range from kitchen and country maids to faraway kings, queens, princes, princesses and even ghosts. Like in traditional fairy tales, the characters remain one-dimensional and flat as there never is any real progression. When “from the shrilling fire leaps Laidronette./The ghostly apparition that appeared/Wagged from her chin a cockatrice’s beard;/She crouches like a flame, the adder-sting/Of her sharp tongue is ready, hear her sing”
(SB 22.18-22), it becomes obvious that she has not changed a bit. She is still the hideous creature that appeared in canto one and she is still out for revenge. Mrs. Troy remains the cross old lady that roams the halls of the castle, the queen remains obsessed by the past, the household staff keeps performing their tasks without question, the young princess who “grew in beauty till she seemed/That gentle maid of whom Endymion dreamed” (SB 7.-3-4) remains beautiful forever and even joins Endymion in his endless beauty sleep from canto fourteen onwards. The characters never have a moment of self-realisation, they never move beyond their self- proclaimed stupor and they are therefore never able to break Laidronette’s curse. Moreover, despite the multitude of characters, the fairytale functions remain limited and several roles are not fulfilled. There is a clear antagonist in the figure of Laidronette, but there is no clear protagonist as in the traditional Sleeping Beauty tale. Princess Cydalise only appears sporadically and has to share the spotlight with other characters such as kitchen maid Jane, housekeeper Mrs. Troy, the gardener, the governess and even with the ghost of princess
Jehanne. There is no male hero in the story, mainly because there was never a third fairy in
Sitwell’s tale who countered Laidronette’s curse with her own wish of true love’s kiss. In fact, Deceuninck 62 most characters do not seem to have a function usually associated with fairy tales. They belong to Sitwell’s fairytale world rather than to the fairytale world created by Perrault and the Brothers
Grimm. They are minor deviations from the traditional fairytale pattern, especially compared to the character of Laidronette. As mentioned in chapter three, the name of Laidronette was associated with the fairytale heroine of Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy. By naming the evil fairy
Laidronette, Sitwell seemed to ensure a double reading of both tales. Laidronette’s evilness indicates that there must have been a sequel to d’Aulnoy’s tale, which ended with the beautiful
Laidronette living happily ever after in the land of the Pagodas. Sitwell’s Laidronette, however, has become evil and has come to possess so much magic that she is able to curse the princess.
The need to discover what has happened to Laidronette lessens the impact of her actions to some extent, as readers know from the original tale that the honourable Laidronette could never have become evil without a reason. It is likely that Sitwell’s inclusion of the name Laidronette was meant to put her evil deeds into perspective, as such an action would have made “the black and white distinction between good and evil fade […]” (Joosen 23). Though the name may seem insignificant to most, it can indeed be interpreted as a first conscious attempt to move away from traditional interpretations of “The Sleeping Beauty” towards a more ambiguous one.
5.1.4 Optimism
Though there are many versions of the fairy tale with many different takes on the antagonist, ranging from a cannibalistic mother-in law to an ogre and a fairy who can transform into a dragon, they all have one thing in common. They all share the happy end, by which time the prince and the princess are reunited with one another to live happily ever after in their kingdom.
From the nineteenth-century onwards, it had become standard for traditional fairy tales to end on a happy note. There were a few rare exceptions such as some tales by Hans Christian
Andersen, but those tales never achieved the same status as the ones that ended happily. Conny
Eisfeld argues that “even [when they did not] end with a happy ending, many of them still Deceuninck 63 provide[d] the reader with optimistic impressions” (17). Edith Sitwell was the odd one out, since she did neither in her tale. Rather than ending with an optimistic message, she pessimistically doomed her Sleeping Beauty to remain asleep until eternity. She silenced the entire castle until only the surrounding birds, trees and flowers could be heard. She only allowed nature to run its course, each new day beginning with the colourfulness of flowers and the serenity of the eternal sleeping princess: “Like bunches of country flowers/Seem the fresh dawn hours./And the young dawn creeps/Tiptoe through my room…/Never speaks of one who sleeps/In the forest’s gloom” (SB 25.15-20). There are three possible explanations as to why
Sitwell decided to end the poem on a sour note. The first possible explanation has to do with the personal nature of the poem. As mentioned in chapter two, Sitwell wrote the poem as a means to deal with the memories of her parents. Since they never fully accepted her as their own, she had to find a way to express her grief. Her decision to let the princess sleep and her message to kitchen maid Jane to “forget the pain/In your heart. Go work again” (SB 24.26-27) were illustrative of the difficulties she experienced and could be interpreted as ways of comforting herself. The second possible explanation was touched upon by Van Durme. She notes that “the princess’ eternal slumber allows her to preserve her little girl’s fantasy world forever” (174). The lack of a hero to kiss the princess awake may then have more to with keeping the fairytale patterns alive than with disrupting them. Rather than forcing the princess to grow up, get married and have children, Sitwell allows her heroine to be asleep forever in a child-like innocence. The interpretation of the ending in that case changes from a bleak one to a friendlier one. The third and last possible explanation is related to Sitwell’s fairytale princess.
The princess is not the same paragon of virtue as she is in other fairy tales. She is someone who teases others, who “through the curtains […plays] ‘Bo-Peep’,/with fleecy lamb-tailed clouds when she should sleep” (SB 7.7-8) and she seems to have somewhat of a mischievous attitude.
Since she is not above other children in that respect, it is possible that Sitwell wanted to prove Deceuninck 64 that she should not receive any special treatment. Like all other children, she should accept the consequences of her actions, even when it costs her something so dearly as her ability to stay awake. Though it is unclear which of these reasons lay behind Sitwell’s decision to deviate from the usual fairytale optimism, it definitely led to a break from the traditional fairytale genre.
5.1.5 Action versus character development
The break from traditional fairy tales continued in terms of character development. Though the presence of flat characters normally hints at traditional fairytale actions, the focus of the poem lies more on narration, conversation and lament. The feelings of the characters are centralised, from the thoughts of jaded beauty Mrs. Troy who laments silently “how harmless has been my life -/Yet when a young girl I had strife!” (SB 22.62-63) to the Dowager Queen’s inner turmoil that “the rose, the peach, and the quince-flower red/And the strawberry flower in the snow are dead./If none of the rose-tribe can survive/The snow, then how can our poppet [Cydalise] live?”
(SB 5.2-5). Long descriptions are preferred over action-packed sequences, as is evidenced from the various elaborate symbols, similes and metaphors that are used in the poem. Thoughts rather than actions drive the story forward, since the only two major actions that occur are the disruption of the christening and the enactment of the sleeping curse. In both instances, it is
Laidronette who sets about a sequence of events that impacts the succeeding cantos. Her presence in canto one causes the palace inhabitants to wonder “what beauty ripens from dark mold/After the sad wind and the winter’s cold?/But a small wind sighed, cooler than the rose/Blooming in desolation, ‘No one knows.’” (SB 8.21-24). The servants fruitlessly try to thwart Laidronette’s plans to enact the curse, but come to realise in canto fourteen that all their attempts have been for naught. Laidronette’s reappearance in canto fourteen sets about the curse that puts the young princess asleep. From canto fifteen onwards, the palace inhabitants are then left to wonder what has to happen now that the curse is in effect, but once again reach the conclusion that nothing can be done. They have to resume their work and forget about the Deceuninck 65 sleeping beauty who remains hidden in the fairytale forest. Though Vanessa Joosen states that
“some retellings, particularly those in the form of poems, leave out a substantial part of the action, because it is assumed that the reader is already familiar with the plot” (24-25), Sitwell’s fairytale poem seems to do more than just leave out a substantial part of the tale. It refuses to let the characters undertake any form of action that could save the princess and, in doing so, completely disrupts the predictable order of the traditional fairy tale. The main conflict of the tale never gets resolved and the poem ends in the same way as it started, with the idea that long forgotten beauties should stay forgotten and that it is better not to dwell on the past for too long.
5.1.6 Narratological features
That there is no predictable fairytale order in the poem has as much to do with the narratological choices as with the focus on character development. Though narration has already been discussed in chapters two and three, some aspects will be repeated in this context. The narrator of the embedded tale is the ancient gardener, a character who lingers on the margins of the actual fairy tale. He appears in canto three, when “through the broad green leaves the gardener came/With a basket filled with honeyed fruits of dawn” (SB 3.1-2), but that is the extent of his physical involvement in the fairy tale. He does seem to have ears and eyes everywhere, however, since his rendition of the tale includes the conversations and inner thoughts of different characters inside and outside the castle walls. Examples of the latter include canto one when Laidronette rejoins her servants in the land of the Pagodas, canto thirteen where Malinn and the sun have a conversation near the sea and canto eighteen where a sultan and a distant traveller are talking in a faraway country. The gardener’s ability to shift between different locations, perspectives and time zones enables him to create several side plots within one and the same tale. Even the allusions to the mythological characters are a way of creating multiple plots, since readers have to understand their content in order to envision the richness of the fairytale world. Though the fairy tale is told in a chronological order, the shift between the past Deceuninck 66 and the present causes the poem to deviate from the traditional fairy tale. The narration within the embedded tale closely resembles that of a third person omniscient narrator, since the information seems to come from a neutral source who is privy to the thoughts of different characters on different locations. The gardener never inserts his own opinion in the narration, which makes it impossible to claim that the gardener is the first person narrator typical of fairytale retellings. In contrast, the narrator of the frame tale is the lyrical I. As someone who encounters the ancient gardener while travelling through the woods, the lyrical I describes everything he hears and sees in canto one, lines one until sixty-four. As an outside character, he becomes the marginal first person narrator that was missing in the embedded tale. Just like the gardener, the lyrical I is part of Edith Sitwell’s enterprise to “make use of a more complex and narratological organization of plot elements than a traditional fairy tale” (Joosen 25). Both characters represent Sitwell’s ability to create a fairytale poem that both respected and disrupted the fairytale genre as it was known in the twentieth century. Furthermore, they exemplify the possibility of combining traditional fairytale features with those of fairytale retellings.
5.2 Fairy Tale or Myth?
During the modernist era, many poets used allusions to either fairy tales or myths as a way to
“interrogate, resist, affirm or reproduce cultural myths and values” (DuPlessis 125). Sitwell went one step further and combined them with one another, to both resist and affirm tradition.
Though the allusions to the Greco-Roman characters have been noticed by Samberger (2005),
Dowson and Entwistle (2005) and Greene (2011), they have never been connected to fairy tales.
They have always been studied in isolation, despite the similarities between both literary genres.
Fairytale retellings and myths in particular have much in common, as the works of Joosen and
Bettelheim indicate. Their theories allow for an analysis of fairytale and mythological features.
Joosen’s two questions (cf. supra) remain applicable in this context, though now with the small Deceuninck 67 distinction that the fluidity between fairy tales and myths is questioned instead of the fluidity between traditional fairy tales and fairytale retellings. The elements discussed in this section contribute to the analysis provided in the previous subsection. Possible overlap between characteristics of myths and fairytale retellings has been filtered out in order to avoid repetition.
5.2.1 Chronotope
The narrative resembles traditional fairy tales in terms of spatial and temporal setting, but there is some doubt as to the nature and tone of the events. Though most of the tale is centered on ordinary and homely events, there are a few instances where the tale zooms in on unique ones.
Cantos seventeen until nineteen are examples of such unique events. Their presence is a mere interlude, a moment to step back from the imminent threat that looms over the entire narrative.
The main focus lies on common servants’ activities within the castle. The tone often switches between the grandeur of myths and the simplicity of fairy tales, the only deviation Sitwell allows in terms of chronotope. Elaborate similes and metaphors are used to mythicize ordinary tasks and events. For instance, the princess’ visit to a farm nearby the castle becomes an event so rich in associations that it hardly seems to resemble simple fairytale formulas anymore. On her visit, “the Princess passed goats, gold as wheat/With a kind white milky beat,/Under the wide leaves mild as milk;/The billowing pigs with ears of silk;/Maternal cows with a white horn/As hard and dry as rustling corn” (SB 10.41-46). The similes here create a world of wonder, a world where each object receives an eccentric and elaborate connotation. Sitwell does not seem to leave too much room for imagination, the readers are always told how they have to see characters, events and objects. Like myths, the events are told in a detailed and majestic manner that is too conspicuous to be considered part of fairytale tradition. However, the events still take place within an indefinite time and space reminiscent of traditional fairy tales. The chronotope is in that respect a perfect combination of myths and fairy tales, a combination so peculiar that it could only have been included in a modernist fairytale retelling. Deceuninck 68
5.2.2 Attitude to the supernatural
The narrative’s attitude to the supernatural is another example of the fluidity between myths and fairy tales. Like in traditional fairy tales, magic causes the main conflict that sets the entire fairy tale in motion. There are no divine or spiritual forces that interfere in the princess’ life, though it can be argued that the presence of “all the whimpering sad ghosts” (SB 9.5-6) disturbs the peace of the household staff. Their presence is unusual within a fairy tale, but can be interpreted as a hint of what is to come for the beautiful princess. Princess Cydalise will await the same destiny as the other lost princesses as soon as the curse is in effect. Like princess
Jehanne, she will be forced to roam the castle halls in her dreams and her (sleeping) presence will haunt the servants so much that all they can do is talk about her in scared whispers.
Likewise, the references to myths also act as a form of foreshadowing rather than as an indication of the supernatural world. The characters of Daphne and Endymion provide the most obvious clues about the fate of the cursed princess. Like the princess, these characters were once considered to be extremely beautiful. Their loveliness stunned both mortals and deities, a situation which would eventually lead to their doom. Heavily pursued by supernatural forces, both Daphne and Endymion were transformed into inanimate objects at the end of their stories.
The characters’ fate mirrors that of the princess, since all three of them were silenced forever, unable to escape their cursed existence. Based on the contextual clues, it is then possible to claim that Sitwell inserted references to these myths to foretell the fate of the princess.
Supernatural or divine forces do not fulfil the same roles as in myths, but instead remain locked within the boundaries of allusion. They are merely inserted to enforce the inevitability of
Laidronette’s curse and the attitude to the supernatural remains as such more fairytale oriented.
5.2.3 Characterisation
This domain is once more the first place where Sitwell truly starts to blend the characteristics of myths and fairy tales with one another. Though there is a definite clash between the evil Deceuninck 69
Laidronette and the virtuous palace inhabitants, it never has the same effect as in the other fairytale variants. The violent encounters with Laidronette emphasise the lack of action from the other characters and reverse the traditional triumph of good over evil. Laidronette is the only one whose wishes have come true at the end of the tale, a complete reversal of the resolution so common in traditional fairy tales. Though these fairytale characteristics are implemented with a twist, they nevertheless remain part of the traditional fairytale genre. The one deviation Sitwell includes is the use of proper names, a feature typical of myths. Bruno
Bettelheim asserts “that every myth is the story of a particular hero […]. Not only do these mythical characters have names, but we are also told the names of […] the other major figures in a myth” (40). In contrast, fairy tales more often use generic names to refer to the character’s physical or mental attributes. Edith Sitwell combines both generic and unique names with one another in her first fairytale poem. Most female characters are named, such as Spanish beauties
“Dolores, Inez, Manuccia, Isabel and Lucia” in canto nineteen, “Dido, Queen of Carthage” in canto six, country maids “Phoebe, Audrey and Anne” in canto two and princess Cydalise in canto six. Most male characters have generic names and are referred to as mere gardeners, chamberlains, kings, sultans and travellers. There are many possible readings of such a division.
Feminist readings could interpret the division as an assertion of femininity, psychoanalytical readings could interpret it as a triumph of the female self and cultural readings could interpret it as a reflection of modern society. Though these interpretations all have their merit, there seems to have been more at stake. Samberger states that the fairytale characters have “merely exchangeable names, they are used as images rather than as individual characters, and their names alone evoke many associations” (184). Rather than creating characters with unique background stories, Sitwell used names that recall a world of associations. As soon as the readers became familiar with those associations, Sitwell started to tear them apart. The fluidity of names meant that gardeners could become literate and musical narrators, that chamberlains Deceuninck 70 could become protective father figures, that the beautiful human Laidronette could become the evil wicked fairy that curses Cydalise and that the destruction of Troy could be linked to the cross old housekeeper. The names resulted in hazy boundaries between myths and fairy tales, between tradition and renewal, and further linked the poem to the genre of fairytale retellings.
5.2.4 Optimism
The narrative’s pessimistic end has been discussed above, but the inclusion of myths perhaps provides a fourth reason why Sitwell included a different end than was usual. Bruno Bettelheim notes that “a significant difference between [fairy tales and myths…] is the ending, which in myths is nearly always tragic, while always happy in fairy tales” (37). In the case of the fairytale poem, the inclusion of myths strangely provides a glimmer of hope instead of one of desolation.
Like many characters from myths, the princess is unable to find redemption on earth. She is turned into an inanimate object at the end of the narrative and there is no hope of her ever turning back to an animate form. The only possible redemption the princess can hope to find is if she ever travels to heaven. The idea seems to be confirmed in several cantos of the poem, most noticeably in canto four. Angels visit the young princess in her nursery room and teach
“her how to be sweet and wise/With kisses faint as butterflies” (SB 4.26-27). They describe heaven to the princess, which seems an absolute paradise for children. There they never have to climb into bed at certain hours, they never have to say difficult prayers and they are free to dance to their heart's content. The latter becomes significant when taking into account the name of the princess. Cydalise could have been a reference to the French ballet “Cydalise et le chèvre- pied”, which was first performed in 1923 (Alexandre 69). If princess Cydalise indeed had the skills set of a prima ballerina, she would have marvelled at the opportunity of being able to dance in heaven. She would have been transfixed by “the lips and eyes/That spoke of some far undimmed paradise” (SB 11.28-29) and she would have been amazed by their descriptions:
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They said, ‘When you go up to heaven
The nursery clock shall never strike seven.
Your boudoir shall be of white satin,
You shall not say your prayers in Latin –
But you shall dance a minuet
On heaven’s floors: frizzed mignonette
Shall seem your curls, of heaven flowers
Most fair; and you shall sit in bowers
Of honeysuckle sweet as those pink fires
Whereby the angels dry their locks upon the light’s gold wires.’ (SB 4.28-37)
Since myths usually departed from the idea that their characters would obtain their reward in heaven, this reference can be interpreted as a means to carry out a traditional feeling of optimism. Despite the tragic end of the fairy tale, readers can find consolation in the idea that the princess will at one point in time travel to heaven to dance with the other angels. To follow this mythological convention means to believe in a happily ever after that is not immediately noticeable but that is there nonetheless. In this context, the inclusion of myths can be considered a replacement of the traditional fairytale patterns that were missing in Sitwell’s fairytale poem.
5.2.5 Action versus character development
Myths and fairytale retellings have much in common in terms of character development, with the only difference that myths pay more attention to symbolic descriptions. Though Bettelheim asserts that fairy tales and fairytale retellings also use “fantastic symbolic images for the solution of problems” (40), the symbolic descriptions remain easily recognisable. Readers can understand them without too much difficulty and they do not require too much reasoning.
Encounters with wicked fairies and old crones progress in a logic and simple order in fairy tales Deceuninck 72 and one action sequence is rapidly followed by another. Myths on the other hand focus more on the inner turmoil of the hero or heroine. Complex symbolic images are used to represent the trials and errors of the protagonist and an adult-like reasoning is required to decipher them all.
Edith Sitwell’s poem corresponds more to myths than to fairy tales when it comes to the use of symbols. Dowson and Entwistle argue that her fairytale poem “seems to demand a decoding of symbols which cannot be fully translated” (62). One such symbol that frequently occurs is the apple. The name itself appears only once in canto sixteen when lovers on a country fair “are golden as the boy/Who gave an apple smoother than the breeze/To Lady Venus, lovely as the seas;/Their lips are like the gold fires burning Troy” (SB 16.35-38). It is the only reference to the physical item, all the other times the fruit is merely alluded to. For instance, when in canto twenty-one “the thin flames seem gold and whispering leaves/Of trees in the Hesperides, whose faint sound grieves” (SB 21.3-4), Sitwell seems to make another reference to apples, this time to the ones that were stolen by Hercules in the garden of the Hesperides. Sitwell never specifies the meaning of the symbol, but it can be assumed that the apples indicate the inevitability of fate. Just as Paris and Hercules were unable to escape their fate, so were the fairytale characters unable to escape theirs. Consequently, Sitwell’s use of myths is the most obvious within this narratological domain. She establishes complex symbolic descriptions of mythic proportions through the use of mythological references and asks her readers to interpret them on their own.
5.2.6 Narratological features
The demands Sitwell makes on the readers continue in terms of narration. Like in myths, the narration shifts between the past and the present and is told in a cyclical order rather than in the linear order of fairy tales. Like with the domain of character development, Sitwell uses complex mythological symbols, repetitions and allusions as a means to establish the tale’s cyclical nature. For example, cantos four and fifteen use the same soft and mesmerising tune. The difference is that the references to the “honeyed tune” (SB 4.15) and the “honeysuckle sweet” Deceuninck 73
(SB 4.36) of heaven’s environment have now become associated with the princess. The princess has become someone who flows “like a tree that drips with gold” (SB 15.3), which could imply that she in her dream-like state has found a place reminiscent of the heaven that was described in canto four. Names, symbols and even actions are repeated and emphasise the recurrent character of the narrative. Laidronette’s wish in canto one starts with the words “I will turn the cream sour,/I will darken the bower,/I will look through the darkest shadows and lour -/And sleep as dark as the shade of a tree/Shall cover you…Don’t answer me” (SB 1.129-133). Her predictions start to become true as soon as she enters the palace in canto fourteen: “Butter and cream/Turn hard as a jewel/The shrill flames scream,/The leaves mutter, ‘Cruel’ (SB 14.94-97).
The words are an almost perfect rendition of Laidronette’s wishes and link the cantos back to one another. Likewise, the symbols and allusions to myths also contribute to the cyclical narration. They create a recurrent effect, since they indicate that the same sequence of events will keep on repeating itself. In turn, the lack of resolution leads to a rich and complicated reading that is more in line with myths and fairytale retellings than with traditional fairy tales.
5.3 Concluding Remarks
To conclude this analysis, Joosen’s questions need to be brought to the foreground again. Her first question about the fluidity of the boundaries between traditional fairy tales, fairytale retellings and myths has in part been answered in her own doctoral dissertation. She reveals that there are few works which “disrupt[…] the traditional horizon of expectation in all the [six] aspects mentioned above. Most retellings affirm some of the traditional fairy-tale features, while significantly subverting others” (Joosen 26). True to Joosen’s statement, Edith Sitwell’s
The Sleeping Beauty (1924) combines characteristics of traditional fairy tales and fairytale retellings with one another. Though the tale deviates from traditional fairy tales in some respects, it never completely loses sight of its fairytale origins. The tale continues to affirm the Deceuninck 74 chronotope, attitude to the supernatural and characterisation typical of traditional fairy tales, even though the optimism, character development and narration all point at fairytale retelling features. Likewise, the use of myths and mythological features hints at the dubious nature of
Edith Sitwell’s tale. Rather than directly distorting or omitting traditional fairytale patterns, myths allowed Sitwell to once more affirm and subvert traditional fairytale features. The description of heaven in canto four is an affirmation of the optimism usually found in fairy tales, while the gardener’s introductory and final address in cantos one and twenty-six are a distortion of the tale’s usual narration. Ample examples were provided in the analysis, which all proved that Sitwell indeed succeeded in dismantling the boundaries between traditional fairy tales, fairytale retellings and myths. As to Joosen’s second question about the reasons why
Sitwell disrupted the readers’ expectations, Sonja Samberger’s study provides an answer.
According to Samberger, Sitwell purposely created a fairytale retelling that spoke “out against a one-sided view of the world, be it that of established and unquestioningly used optimistic
‘wisdom’, or that of a hopelessly pessimistic attitude towards life. Truth can rather be found somewhere in-between the two extremes” (186). By disrupting the readers’ expectations of traditional fairy tales, Edith Sitwell wanted to echo a way of living that was not always as black and white as in traditional fairy tales. Life was uncertain and ambiguous at times, an idea which found its reflection in the deliberate combination and disruption of the three literary genres.
Deceuninck 75
6 Prelude to a Fairy Tale (1927)
All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream (Poe 97)
Prelude to a Fairy Tale (1927) was the second fairytale poem Edith Sitwell wrote and received a lot less attention and admiration than her first fairytale poem. The poem consists of six hundred and one lines and combines the fairy tale of Cinderella with the myth of Cupid and
Psyche. The title of the poem indicates that the tale should be interpreted as a prelude rather than as a full-fletched variant of a known fairy tale. The entire tale is set by a lake, which
“reflected/not at all what [people] had expected” (PFT ll. 65-66). The lake is a place where boundaries between myths and fairy tales completely disappear, where fairytale witches and princesses are able to exist in the same universe as mythological sirens, deities and nymphs. It is should then be called no wonder that the entire tale reads more like a dreamy fantasy than like a simple fairy tale. In fact, were it not for the threefold appearance of Cinderella’s name, it is unlikely that anyone would have ever discovered the similarities with fairy tales. This dissertation is to date the only one that has tried to research the poem in light of fairytale features. Though the dream-like quality of the poem hides the fairytale features from view, there are nonetheless many indications as to the poem’s status as a fairytale retelling. As Bruno
Bettelheim notes, the poem emphasises “the similarities between the fantastic events in myths and fairy tales and those in adult dreams and daydreams, […only to express…] that which is normally prevented from coming to awareness” (35). His remark allows for an analysis of
Sitwell’s dream-like fairytale poem that is similar to the one that was done in the previous chapter. The next section will once again analyse the poem according to Joosen’s distinction between traditional fairy tales, fairytale retellings and myths. The questions posed on page 58 will also be used again to discover the disruptive qualities of Sitwell’s second fairytale poem. Deceuninck 76
6.1 Fairy Tale, Fairytale Retelling or Myth?
The moment Edith Sitwell wrote Prelude to a Fairy Tale (1927), she had already established her reputation as a poet of fairytale retellings. Her first fairytale poem had been met with enormous acclaim, a feat which she was unfortunately unable to repeat with her second fairytale poem. The poem went through several abbreviations and deviations, before eventually disappearing from sight in the 1940s (cf. chapter two). The result was that it became almost impossible to determine whether the poem was a fairy tale, a myth or something else altogether.
The next section tries to reveal the true nature of the poem by looking at it from a modernist fairytale point of view. The theories of Joosen and Bettelheim are used once more, with the difference that they are now combined within one subsection instead of two. There is too little evidence and scholarly research on the fairytale poem to warrant and extensive analysis and the results therefore remain limited to the broader overlap between fairy tales and myths.
6.1.1 Chronotope
The chronotope was the first domain where Sitwell started to blur the lines between myths and fairy tales. The narrative starts “by the lake’s clear temple and great domes/In Venus’ park where little Psyche roams” (PFT ll. 17-18) and then seemingly seems to shift between different time zones and places. However, close inspection of the tale reveals that the characters merely see reflections of other times and places. The narrative remains mainly situated within Venus’ park, which is described in lavish terms that enable readers to envision every small detail. The lake and the forests surrounding it are taken directly from myths, since the goddess Venus is the one who owns it. Other place names such as “Quebec or Carolina, Greece/Windsor Castle,
Cannes, or Nice” (PFT ll. 147-148) also occur as locations in the poem. Since they were mere reflections or wishes, they can be interpreted as a means to emphasise the vastness of the world rather than as an indication of different space continuums. In contrast, the time of the fairy tale Deceuninck 77 never becomes specified. Though there are numerous allusions to historical figures, events and places, it is almost impossible to determine a time frame. The inclusion of “palace stables/Of
Georgian architecture, steeple, gables” (PFT ll. 31-32) hints at a time close to Sitwell’s own post-Georgian time, but the presence of the mythological and fairytale characters seem to rule out such a definite time frame. Names waltz by one another in an endless succession, but never allow for the determination of an exact temporal chronotope. In that respect, the chronotope seems to correspond with myths in terms of spatial setting and with traditional fairy tales in terms of temporal setting. As for the nature of the events, the tone becomes so excessively unique and majestic that it even exceeds that of normal myths. Too many places, events, characters, dances and songs are mentioned at the same time, thereby turning Venus’s park into a fantastical place that deviates from the usual descriptions within the mythological tales.
6.1.2 Attitude to the supernatural
Slight deviations can also be found when it comes to the tale’s attitude to the supernatural.
There are some instances where magic is brought to the foreground, such as in the tale of Anne.
Anne is a woman “as white as snow/Or flowers that on dark branches grow” (PFT ll. 342-342) who encounters an old witch when she tries to rescue a bird from the winter’s cold. The witch grants Anne “two apples harsh and cold…/They were glittering like the air,/They were like the crowns of gold/Cannibal kings do wear” (PFT ll. 394-397). The witch places a curse on them, reminiscent of the curse that the evil stepmother put on Snow White in the traditional tale. The apples are Anne’s undoing, since she literally melts away after eating them. Like in traditional fairy tales, the seriousness of the curse determines the fate of the fairytale heroine. However, most of the tale is not driven by serious magic curses but by ridiculous actions of divine forces.
Centaurs and centauresses perform a jodelling song from line 256 onwards, Neptune starts to dance a polka in line 183, the airy sylphs waltz with one another from line 451 onwards and
Proserpine carries on a dramatic monologue about the wonder of hell starting from line 322. Deceuninck 78
The characters are ridiculed to an almost alarming extent, a definite contrast from the serious nature of myths. Divine and spiritual forces become the comic relief in the tale, whereas the fairytale magic becomes the serious force. It is likely that Sitwell did this to disrupt the readers’ traditional horizon of expectation even further. The seriousness of myths was transferred to fairy tales, whereas the somewhat unbelievable character of fairy tales was transferred to myths.
6.1.3 Characterisation
The characterisation also combines myths and fairy tales with one another. The characters mentioned within the fairytale subplots are flat one-dimensional characters, characters who never move beyond their original state. The beautiful sleeping princess remains beautiful,
Cinderella remains a kitchen servant and even Anne remains a woman “white as snow”, even though only in the imagination of others. Even the characters within the mythological subplots are one-dimensional and flat characters. They never undergo the same progression as they do in myths and they are destined to remain ridiculous caricatural versions of their prosaic counterparts. Unlike fairy tales and myths, there is no clash of any kind. There is no main conflict that drives the entire tale forward, though there are a few minor conflicts that always end with evil succeeding. The only feature that Sitwell does seem to adapt from myths and fairy tales in its entirety is the use of names. Most characters are given unique names, ranging from
Mrs. Cow in line 268 and Miss Marigold in line 203 to literary figures such as William Tell and
Robinson Crusoe, mythological figures such as Venus, Mars and Psyche and historical figures such as Horatio Nelson and Prince Albert. Generic names are more often given to groups of beings such as the sylphs, the forgotten beauties, the daughters of Boreas, the centaurs and the centauresses. The division between unique and generic names does therefore not have the same effect as in the first fairytale poem, but nevertheless remains noticeable enough to point out.
Though this domain has the least noticeable fairytale and mythological features, instances such as the names nevertheless hint at hidden aspects, be it that of myths or traditional fairy tales. Deceuninck 79
6.1.4 Optimism
The odd combination of mythological and fairytale features continued within this domain.
Traditional fairy tales addressed in the tale end on a pessimistic note, similar to the one that
Sitwell used in her first fairytale poem. The cursed Anne does not have the chance to live happily ever after with a husband in a castle but is instead melted on the spot, “a princess with her long black hair” (PFT l. 310) is forced to remain asleep forever and Cinderella is destined to live as a kitchen maid who continuously hears “life’s serenade/There in the […] gilded glade”
(PFT ll. 598-599). These characters do not receive the happy end customary in traditional fairy tales and are instead doomed to live cursed lives. In contrast, the mythological characters do not receive an end at all. They merely pass by in the narrative and the readers have to determine for themselves whether characters such as Proserpine or Pluto get to have a happy end. Though knowledge of myths can help to determine what happens to the characters, readers are nevertheless free to think of their own end for the mythological characters. Even the entire fairy tale ends without an end, since “this old world’s black renown/ [continues to keep] shouted in all the gutters of the town” (PFT ll. 600-601). The entire tale keeps repeating itself in the echoes of the town and the never-ending dance of mythological and fairytale characters alike never seems to stop. This was especially odd, since it was usually the other way around in traditional tales. Also odd in this respect is the lack of a clear-cut protagonist within the tale. Both traditional fairy tales and myths usually have an obvious protagonist, either a superhuman one or an ordinary one. The poem, however, seems to have multiple protagonists who are all responsible for telling their own tale. They are a peculiar mixture of superhuman and ordinary characters, ranging from gods and goddesses to witches, princes, princesses and even a fish who “came like a little merry boy, --/He envied Master Cupid and his toy,--/He envied Master
Cupid and his game” (PFT ll. 45-47). Based on this evidence, it is possible to claim that Edith
Sitwell incorporated more features of fairytale retellings than features of the other two genres. Deceuninck 80
6.1.5 Action versus character development
Though a lot happens in the tale, the focus lies more on character development than on action- driven narration. Long descriptions and expressions of feelings are once more preferred, as is evidenced from the description of the lake. Sitwell starts her narrative with a wistful description:
Clear as wisteria branches, waterfalls
Droop by the lake; each flashing bright bird calls
The name of beauties that have long passed by, --
Still mirrored in that lake… a long drawn sigh…
Alas that Tamburini, Malibran, forsake
These waterfalls… the serres-chaudes of the lake (PFT ll.1-6)
Her description recalls a lost world, a world where everything was serene and everyone enjoyed a peaceful existence. The entire narrative in fact reminds of such a peaceful existence, where merriment seems to be the main concern of the mythological characters. There are more serious and pessimistic scenes in the poem, but they serve to emphasise the silliness of the overall tale.
This is also one of the reasons why there are no complex symbols in the poem. Not only would complex symbols have taken away attention from the ridiculous tone of the events, it would also have been difficult to use one (or several) symbols consistently in a tale with so many different plots. As for the order of the events, the tale does prefer the unpredictable order of fairytale retellings over the predictable order of traditional fairy tales. Fairytale and mythical events follow each other in rapid succession. For instance, Proserpine’s monologue about
“hell’s flames [that] seem flowering rows of beans/As red as petticoats of queans” (PFT ll. 322-
323) is followed immediately afterwards by an adaptation of the fairy tale of Snow White.
Likewise, Cinderella is forced to work for as a servant only minutes after Mars has left for war.
These examples are proof of Sitwell’s ability to blend different literary genres with one another and further confirm the belief that the fairytale poem can be interpreted as a fairytale retelling. Deceuninck 81
6.1.6 Narratological features
In terms of narration, there is little to be said. There is no clear narrator as was the case for the first fairytale poem. Everyone seems to share responsibility for the tale and the poem is as such a strange mixture of songs, dances, reflections and tales. Everyone is responsible for his or her own tale, which makes the overall narrative ambiguous at best and completely unreliable at worst. The characters keep appearing in an endless loop, which enforces the idea of a cyclical narration. The demands made on the readers are in that respect enormous, since readers have to figure out how to place the several subplots within the overall tale. Unlike in The Sleeping
Beauty (1924) with its embedded tale and frame tale, Edith Sitwell never gives any clues as to how to interpret the poem. It is perhaps possible to claim that the lack of a clear narrator was meant to accentuate the dream-like quality of the narrative. Like in a dream, control is missing and readers are expected to follow the unpredictable sequence of events without asking too many questions. This too was a deviation from the standard norm prescribed by myths and fairy tales and is once again more in line with the ambiguity typical of fairytale retellings.
6.2 Concluding Remarks
To conclude this analysis, it is necessary to refer to Joosen’s questions that were mentioned in the previous chapter (cf. page 58). The question as to how Edith Sitwell disrupted fairy tales is more obvious within her second fairytale poem than within her first fairytale poem. Deliberately blurring the lines between myths, fairy tales and dreams, Sitwell created a universe wherein fairytale and mythological characters could co-exist. Rather than the subtle affirmation of traditional fairrytale feattures that was present in the first fairytale poem, this poem actually completely disrupts both fairytale and mythological characteristics. They are always implemented with such a huge twist that it becomes difficult to determine their meaning and their relevance. Only close inspection of these features enables readers to trace back the origins Deceuninck 82 of myths and fairy tales within the poem. Based on the evidence, it is in fact possible to claim that the boundaries between myths and traditional fairy tales cease to exist within the tale. They become intertwined with one another and thus provide Joosen with an extreme answer to her question about the fluidity of the different literary genres. As to the answer to Joosen’s second question, Sitwell likely disrupted the readers’ expectations for reasons similar to the ones that were already mentioned in the previous chapter. As Samberger indicated, the fairytale poems were “not restricted to the poet’s relationship to her lost childhood […,but could more] be seen as referring to the modern world in general” (186). Even more so than Sitwell’s first fairytale poem, Prelude to a Fairy Tale (1927) referred to the uncertainty of the modern(ist) world.
Deceuninck 83
7 Conclusion
The end is where we start from (Eliot)
By the beginning of the twentieth century, traditional fairy tales held an ambiguous position within the literary landscape. Often used by authors as a source of inspiration, fairy tales were nonetheless mostly associated with popular children’s culture. Though fairytale collections had been huge bestselling successes in the decennia preceding the twentieth century, adults had lost interest in them and the collections were banned to nurseries and schoolrooms. Both authors and readers felt as if they could no longer afford to cling to the child-like innocence of fairy tales. In a world torn apart by violence and destruction, fairy tales offered a too optimistic view of life. It soon became clear that authors had to swim against the tide if they wanted to make their fairytale endeavours a remote success. Traditional conventions needed to be turned upside down to reflect the uncertainty of the time. Edith Sitwell was one of the first authors who took on the challenge to create a full-fletched fairytale retelling. She wrote The Sleeping Beauty
(1924) and Prelude to a Fairy Tale (1927) in such a manner that they both affirmed and distorted traditional fairy tales. They became quintessential examples of the modernist view on fairy tales and provided unique research material for both modernist and fairytale researchers.
This dissertation approached Edith Sitwell’s fairy tales as a part of modernist fairytale studies.
A relatively new research area, modernist fairytale studies have yet to offer theoretical frameworks that are 100% inclusive. None of the existing frameworks are able to address all features of modernism and fairy tales, which is why researchers have to determine for themselves which features they like to stress and which features they like to forego for the time being. Choices need to be made, since each analysis can only hope to contribute a possible correct interpretation instead of the correct interpretation (McCallum 22). For this dissertation, Deceuninck 84 these choices included a combination of fairytale and mythological features. Theories from
Bruno Bettelheim and Vanessa Joosen were combined with modernist notions of tradition, intertextuality and defamiliarisation to analyse the fairytale poems by Edith Sitwell in an entirely new manner. The starting premise was that the poems’ combination of fairytale and mythological features warranted a unique position within both modernist and fairytale history.
To prove the truth of that statement, both The Sleeping Beauty (1924) and Prelude to a Fairy
Tale (1927) were contextualised and analysed as examples of modernist fairytale retellings.
Both poems were written in the modernist era, at a time when traditional fairy tales ceased to be and fairytale retellings became the norm. Chapter two revealed that the time in which these fairytale retellings were written hid them from view in most modernist studies, since fairy tales were often deemed too insignificant to be dealt with in scholarly research. High cultural works were the standard, popular cultural works were of less importance. Luckily, contemporary research by Ann Martin and Laura Martin has done much to alter this misconception and modernist fairytale retellings are now more frequently brought to the foreground. Chapter two also showed that Edith Sitwell herself was mainly responsible for the lack of fairytale studies in connection to her poems. The personal nature of The Sleeping Beauty
(1924) and the obvious admiration by the readers caused scholars to focus more on the symbolic features of the poem and less on the fairytale features. The abbreviations and corrections of
Prelude to a Fairy Tale (1927) on the other hand caused scholars to dismiss the poem in its entirety and almost no studies, fairytale or otherwise, were published on the poem. Chapters three until five nevertheless revealed that there were many features in both poems that could be directly translated to modernist fairytale studies. In terms of fairy tales, Edith Sitwell closely followed the example of the seventeenth-century conteuse Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy and thereby established herself as someone who fit in a long line of fairytale authors. The techniques in terms of characterisation, narration, intertextuality and style created a fairytale pattern that Deceuninck 85 deviated from the prosaic tales of the Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella. In terms of modernism,
Edith Sitwell used references to modernist ballet and musical performances as well as defamiliarisation techniques to further enforce the fairytale deviations. The third chapter indicated that modernist fairytale studies could lead to a better understanding of the poems’ presence within history, when both fairytale and modernist features were accentuated. It underlined Sitwell’s intent to create something that could hold its place within tradition and modernism. The fourth and fifth chapter analysed each poem separately, though the analysis of
The Sleeping Beauty (1924) was far more extensive than that of Prelude to a Fairy Tale (1927).
Other scholars will hopefully extend this analysis in future research, either by focussing on other fairytale features or by focussing on the poem in its entirety. This dissertation has, however, laid the groundwork for such analyses, since it was proven that both poems indeed combined fairytale and mythological features with one another. Edith Sitwell followed and disrupted the conventions of modernism and fairy tales to such an extent in her modernist fairytale poems that she ensured its survival and appreciation to well in the twenty-first century.
As for the best possible way of analysing modernist fairytale texts, there seem to be no conclusive answers. There is no single advisable method or technique that leads to definite results. The best a researcher can do is look for “progressive, critical and creative interpretations
[that] reveal a history of ideology as well as history of adaptation, interpretation, and reception”
(McCallum 22). The theories of Vanessa Joosen seem to be a good starting point for all modernist fairytale research, provided that the researcher links it to exclusively modernist techniques. If he or she fails to do so, the danger arises that modernist studies and fairytale studies continue to remain separate research fields. Possible future domains for cross- fertilisation can range from stylistic features to intertextual features or can build on the theoretical framework provided in this dissertation. Ultimately, the method only seems to be of secondary importance. It is more important to brush off the dust from modernist fairytale Deceuninck 86 studies, to make them a part of literary studies within universities’ literary programs. In that respect, T.S. Eliot’s quote at the start of this chapter makes sense. This dissertation should not be the last word that is said on Edith Sitwell’s fairytale poems, nor should it be the last word that is said on modernist fairytale studies. It should instead mark the start of modernist fairytale studies, both inside and outside Flanders. Only then can modernist fairy tales truly enjoy the happy end that was so long denied to them.
Deceuninck 87
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9 List of Abbreviations
NC Nouveaux Contes de Fées (1719) – MC d’Aulnoy
PFT Prelude to a Fairy Tale (1927) – Edith Sitwell
SB The Sleeping Beauty (1924) – Edith Sitwell
TCO Taken Care Of (1965) – Edith Sitwell
CDF Le Cabinet des Fées (1785) – MC d’Aulnoy