The Intersection of Animalism and Gender in European Fairy Tales
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Connecticut College Digital Commons @ Connecticut College English Honors Papers English Department 2016 Beasts, Brides, and Brutality: The nI tersection of Animalism and Gender in European Fairy Tales Rachel Matson Connecticut College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.conncoll.edu/enghp Part of the Children's and Young Adult Literature Commons, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, French and Francophone Language and Literature Commons, and the German Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Matson, Rachel, "Beasts, Brides, and Brutality: The nI tersection of Animalism and Gender in European Fairy Tales" (2016). English Honors Papers. 25. http://digitalcommons.conncoll.edu/enghp/25 This Honors Paper is brought to you for free and open access by the English Department at Digital Commons @ Connecticut College. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Honors Papers by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ Connecticut College. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The views expressed in this paper are solely those of the author. Beasts, Brides, and Brutality: The Intersection of Animalism and Gender in European Fairy Tales An Honors Thesis presented by Rachel Elizabeth Matson to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for Honors in the Major Field Connecticut College New London, Connecticut May 2016 Acknowledgments -First- To my readers, Courtney Baker and Michelle Neely: for their wisdom and support, and to the English Department: for being my home. -Then- To Debra and to David: for reading since the beginning, and listening until the end. -Finally- To my advisor, Jeff Strabone: for helping me realize all the things I have been waiting to say. 2 Abstract This thesis, a comparative study of published fairy tale collections across three nations and three centuries, argues that fairy tales were, in their time, highly charged ideological interventions in period debates about gender, class, and nation. In this thesis I recover not just the historical context of each collection but also the circumstances of production for their print publication. The variables that form the basis of this comparison include: whether stories in a given volume were collected from informants or invented by a single author; the level of attachment of the collector to nationalist movements; and the layers of editorial mediation between informants/writers and the printed editions made from their work. The primary cases are stories of animal transformation, in which the strict boundaries of human and animal are effaced, and the rules of gender are exaggerated or reimagined. The collections compared in this thesis come from three nations between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries: the Brothers Grimm in Germany; Laura Gonzenbach, a German in Sicily; and Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy in France. I analyze gender and class themes in the tales, such as the treatment of the female body, the aging of women, the depiction of subaltern creatures, and animal transformations, in light of contemporaneous political and social changes affecting the status of women in Germany, Italy, and France. By combining paradigms from three fields—fairy tale studies, animal studies, and gender studies—this thesis offers several findings about the relationship between gender and animalism that were previously unknown to the scholarship. First, when the printed tale is substantially edited or polished for print, or when collectors acted to advance nationalist movements, the following properties are more likely to occur: stricter policing of female propriety; greater restrictions on female agency in the narratives; and harsher punishments for transgressive women. Second, when collections are produced by women, relatively free of masculine intervention, we can expect greater freedom of female character action, even when produced in a less female-friendly early period. Although they originated as politically charged texts, fairy tales today are typically read ahistorically and therefore lose their original moral and political investments that they held in their time. By examining the burden that nationalist agendas put on women by limiting female characters’ agency within fairy tales, I am able to recover the original engagements of published fairy tale collections, offering an argument about the period-specific ideological work done by fairy tales that we do not find in the scholarship. 3 Contents Chapter One: Introduction ............................................................................................................ 5 Chapter Two: Girls Gone Mild Women’s Place in the Nationalist Imagination .................................................. 21 Chapter Three: Girls Just Wanna Have Fun—Not Get Abducted Female Empowerement Within Patriarchial Structures ...................................... 56 Chapter Four: Girls Who Run the World Imagined Societies ................................................................................................ 93 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 138 Appendix ..................................................................................................................................... 142 References ................................................................................................................................... 143 4 Chapter One: Introduction Fairy tales are not just for children—in fact, in centuries past, children were not even their intended audience. In their time, printed fairy tale collections were highly charged contributions to ideological debates about gender, class, and nation. When we treat them as children’s literature we decontextualize and depoliticize them, robbing the stories of their original commitments and functions. This thesis is an effort to recover the original power of fairy tales. Fairy tale collections reveal the political ideals, expectations, and fears of their collectors and times, while the message of each collection is in large part a function of the circumstances of its production. These collections prescribe parameters for the differently gendered behavior of men and women. By setting clear expectations of who lives and who dies, who marries and who ends up alone, who is cast as a villain and who gets to be a hero, and who gets to rescue whom, fairy tales show readers which behaviors are punished and which are rewarded. Although we typically read fairy tales outside of their historical context, fairy tale collections are, in fact, deeply embedded in the times in which they were published. At times when the laws of marriage or the rights of women were being reformed, in either direction, fairy tales were likely to take position on those changes. At other times, when the state of marriage is settled, then the underlying message of a fairy tale might express a desire for progress. Similarly, if the collector is highly committed to a nationalist agenda, then the collection will prescribe roles for men and women in the developing nation, while if the author has no commitment to nationalist projects, she may take creative license to imagine fantastical societies that do not exist. No matter the time period, one thing is clear: the gendered messages of fairy tale 5 collections are inseparable both from their historical period and from the layers of editorial mediation involved in their production. This thesis examines three fairy tale collections from three different locations and periods—from Germany, the Grimms’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen, first published in 1812 and 1815; from Sicily, Laura Gonzenbach’s Sicilianische Märchen, 1870; and from France, Madame d’Aulnoy’s Les Contes des Fées and Les Contes Nouveaux, ou les Fées à la mode, 1697 and 1698—to determine how the relationship between gender and animalism relates to the rise of nationalist projects and the empowerment—and disempowerment—of women.1 The object of analysis in this thesis is not the oral tale as studied by ethnographers or anthropologists; my study focuses exclusively on print editions, which may or may not be derived from the mouths of the folk. Although I refer to all three of my collections as fairy tales, only the Grimm and Gonzenbach collections qualify as folk tales, as their volumes are the only ones collected from a geographically bounded and culturally homogenous set of informants. I analyze how the gendered messages of each collection relate to the historical context in which they were published, ultimately arguing that the degree of editorial mediation (usually conducted by men) and the attachment to agendas of nationalism affects the degree to which a collection advances proto-feminist ideals. The Grimms’ project, I argue, is a supreme example of the influence of nationalist agendas of the modern era, while both Gonzenbach and Aulnoy vary from such an extreme reference point: Gonzenbach because she was a geographical and cultural outsider talking to rural women, and Aulnoy because she predates the modern nationalist period. I also examine the differences between works that are collected—texts like those of the Grimms and Gonzenbach, who gathered their stories from real people—and those that are invented— 1 Although English scholarship refers to Aulnoy as d’Aulnoy, I follow French style in dropping the “de” when referring to her only by her surname, and will therefore usually