Fairy Tales Author(S): Roger Sale Source: the Hudson Review, Vol

The Hudson Review, Inc. Fairy Tales Author(s): Roger Sale Source: The Hudson Review, Vol. 30, No. 3 (Autumn, 1977), pp. 372-394 Published by: The Hudson Review, Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3850269 Accessed: 19/05/2010 19:16 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=thr. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. The Hudson Review, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Hudson Review. http://www.jstor.org ROGER SALE Fairy Tales FAIRY TALE LITERATURE IS ONE OF THE GREAT KINDS, a body of stories that do, and can do, what no other kind of literature does. They reach back into a dateless time, speak with grave assurance of wishes and fears, harbor no moralizing, no sense of "art," because their ways and means are so varied and so consoling in their knowledge that there are many stories to tell, many ways to tell the "same" story. The term "fairy tale" is of course only a convenience since only a few stories we call by that name contain fairies or elves or leprechauns or similar creatures. It would be a misleading term except that everyone seems instinctively agreed on what a fairy tale is, even though fairy tales blend easily into related kinds, like myths, legends, romances, realistic folk fables, and cautionary tales. "Cinderella," "Sindbad the Sailor," and "Hansel and Gretel" are fairy tales, while the stories of King Arthur, Pandora, Patient Griselda, and The Ancient Mariner are not. There is a Neapolitan tale that is very much like many versions of "The Sleeping Beauty," but the king in this story, when he comes to the empty castle, rapes the sleeping princess. This is not a fairy tale, even though the princess then conceives and bears two children and eventually comes back to life, even though other events as horrible as rape take place in many fairy tales. The existence of fairy tales is evidence of a cultural oneness throughout the Eurasian continent. Comparative folklorists occu- pied themselves for years uncovering the characters, events, and motifs that appear, often with only slight changes, in tales told in India, Japan, France, Germany, and Ireland. Of course each people gave the stories different twists and emphases, and most also developed distinctively native or local tales. One of the books on which I was raised contains a Japanese story, "The Tongue-Cut Sparrow," which is similar to the Grimm Brothers' "The Fish- erman and His Wife," and another, "The Accomplished and Lucky Teakettle," which is like no other story I am aware of. The various stories about Jack as the killer of giants belong distinctly to the British Isles, while the English "Goldilocks and the Three ROGER SALE 373 Bears" resembles the Grimms' "Snow White" in its central epi- sode. On the other hand the African and native American stories I have seen belong to other families altogether from the fairy tales of Europe and Asia. The stories we know are derived from a relatively late period just before they began to be written down and collected, but are descen- dants of versions that go back into the mists of time, through centuries we somewhat plumply sum up with the term "oral tradition." Furthermore, they reach back still further, to a time once upon a time; two thousand years ago, says the beginning of "The Juniper Tree," or when wishing still did some good, says the beginning of "The Frog Prince." The versions we know were collected, written, and re-written primarily in the two hundred years between Charles Perrault's Contesdu TempsPasse at the end of the seventeenth century and the Fairy Bookscompiled by Andrew Lang at the end of the nineteenth. But all take us back to a world when only a handful of people outside the church were literate; what came before fairy tales, or before the worlds imagined in them, the tellers knoweth not. The ancientness of the tales, their curious persistence in so many different countries, their testimony to the strength of an oral tradition now all but gone, all serve to make them a literature that latter- day people need to treat with great care and respect, if they are going to know it at all. Perrault himself was just such a latter-day person, given to making the tales wittier and more courtly than he found them. But clearly, the earlier the writer, or the closer the writer to the oral traditions, the better or less bruising is the result. The piercingly beautiful tales of Madame D'Aulnoy and Madame de Beaumont, who lived in Perrault's time and shortly thereafter, are distinctly written tales, but they so closely resemble and so fully respect other, older, told tales that few people now know or care that "Green Snake" or "Beauty and the Beast" have actual au- thors. By comparison Hans Christian Andersen, writing more than a hundred years later, had a more difficult time. He was raised in a village where the tales were still told, but he spent his adult life in Copenhagen were he was often humiliated in ways that not only led to bitterness about people of higher rank and pretension but that distorted some of his best stories into satire and moralizing; even "The Snow Queen," which I take to be his masterpiece is marred by nagging preachiness around its edges. But Andersen, troubled 374 THE HUDSON REVIEW and vain though he was, was always an oral teller, and when we come down yet another century, to something like the fairy tales of C. S. Lewis, we see the damage caused when fairy tales are stories to be read from books; Lewis had a true and catholic love of older things, and a great longing to be part of their world, but the ear and the instinct just were not there, and his Narnia stories, popular though they are for latter-day audiences, are brittle and mechanical and subtly preachy in ways older fairy stories never are. Many of us grew up with fairy stories, reading them and having them read to us, and this gave a latter-day inheritance that must be treasured. Many others learned the stories shallowly, either by knowing only a few stories or by learning them through contempo- rary versions like Walt Disney's. Many such people end up think- ing of fairy tales as romances for children and misread the ancientness of the tales into fantasies of some paradise. My students, for instance, tend to be unhappy when they read in Perrault's "Sleep- ing Beauty" the light, witty dialogue of European royalty; they are unhappier still when they read in the Grimms' "Sleeping Beauty" about horses and scullery boys and even flies going to sleep and waking up after a hundred years. That is not like Disney, nor, should they know it, Tchaikovsky's ballet. Finally there is perhaps the majority of the population, people who have no fairy tale inheritance and see no particular need for one. Fairy tales are important because they are irreplaceable, but when a tradition fades until it can be recovered only imperfectly, and by isolated individuals, damage is inevitable, to the reader and to the tale. When many people shared the tradition, even in the latter days when it was more a written than an oral tradition, the sharing could help free the literature from being a matter of individ- ual taste; it led to enough stories being familiar so that the intent and impact of each could be felt and understood; it discouraged the distortion caused when fairy tale literature became thought of as children's literature. Most important-since fairy tales are about the mysterious relations of wishes to fears-when isolated readers cannot share the tales with others, then the delicate balance between the wishes and the fears is easily tipped and the result is a reader who thinks fairy tales are daydream wishes or nightmare fears when in fact they are neither. Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment,which carries as its subtitle "The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales" is an ROGER SALE 375 important book in this context for a number of reasons.' First, the stature of its author is sufficiently great that it is bound to gain a larger audience than perhaps any book about fairy tales has ever had. Second, Bettelheim is very clear that fairy tales do what no other literature does, and wants very much to show how they can be thought of so as best to become again the inheritance of many people.

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