English fairytale fiction story

Stories of Magic and Transformation

Some Notes on Fairy Tales

What is a fairy tale? What if I told you that there was no such thing as a “fairy tale?” That there are only “tales,” narrative stories that are set in a world that is clearly not our own, that have magic and talking animals. Sometimes we call them wonder tales, or magic tales, or just stories. There is no one definition of a fairy tale, because there cannot be - these stories go by different names in different cultures, and they have so many different characters that to try to codify them all into a specific list of traits would be impossible. There are only tales, tales that tell stories of the fantastic that we don’t really believe.

And yet, if I were to ask you to define a fairy tale, I bet you could. You could offer a pretty clear definition, and I bet that there would be a lot of similarity between your and your classmates’ definitions. Despite our emphasis on belief and narrative, thematic conventions have come to exist as markers of genre. It is difficult to tell a fairy tale in our culture that is recognizable as a fairy tale without a “once upon a time,” a damsel in distress, or a troll under a bridge. That is because folk narratives are communally interactive and reactive. Once the idea of a fairy tale came into existence, so did the naming of them as fairy tales.

So this is what we talk about when we talk about fairy tales. There are folk tales that exist(ed) in the oral tradition before they were collected, transcribed, and edited by folks like Charles Perrault and Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. These tales have existed long before they were in print, and there are innumerable variants. Then there are literary tales that were inspired by or created to resemble, at least in terms of plot and character type, tales told in folk tradition. Sometimes, these literary tales so captured the public’s attention that they entered into oral tradition.

I know I said that to codify fairy tales would be impossible, and it is, but as long as you know that this list is incomplete, debatable, and only true for a limited group of tales - those which you would recognize, perhaps, as a fairy tale, even if you’d never heard the story before. These stories speak to readers of every place and time. We will do well to listen seriously to what they tell us about the real world we live in. They present experiences in vivid symbolic form. Sometimes we need to the truth to be exaggerated and made more dramatic, even fantastic, in order to comprehend it.

The fairy tale has undergone a process of textual and social alteration in the course of the centuries. The fairy tale relies on various forms of cultural transmission and ever-changing ideological configuration for its very existence. Fairy tales, in particular, as part of contemporary culture, are constantly refashioned, restructured, and defamiliarized in modern times. Rewritings for both children and adults assume the readers’ knowledge of the original tales, thus encouraging the reader to take note of the formal changes which have led to an ideological reorientation of the tales. Fairy tales are elastic: they evolve revealing a process of organic reshaping around a set of core elements in response to historical and cultural influences. Writers like Angela Carter are responsible for this evolution.

Angela Carter

Although widely recognized as children’s stories, rooted in a distant world of magical realism, folk and fairy tales form a significant layer of both literary history and cultural consciousness. The realm of fairy tale, which was historically a tradition belonging to the matriarch in her role as storyteller, is in modern times dominated by the versions made popular by writers such as Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm. The archetypal role of women in these versions of the tales – as the vulnerable victim, damsel in distress, or the pretty prize for the male hero – is one that through the techniques of both Gothic subversion and postmodern carnivalesque, has been exposed, rewritten and ultimately reclaimed for women by Angela Carter, who herself explained that her intention was to “extract the latent content from the traditional stories.” The fairy tale form not only provides Carter with this radical and repressive source material, but also, as Patricia Brooke notes, allows her to “contest the authorial position, rejecting the romantic and modern authoritative voice in favour of the multiplicity of voices, often female, that have been repressed by the 'official' tellings of Perrault, Grimm, or Disney.” Carter’s feminist intention for her gothic reinventions is not so limited or distorted as to craft wholly heroic, virtuous, and triumphant female characters, for to do so would be to break free femininity from one set of social confinements, only to trap it within another. The women of her stories are not simple or idealized feminist restorations. Instead, each is crafted from a dark and intricate human framework *the same from which Carter creates her male characters* that allows them to transcend conventional gender roles. Across the collection, both female and male characters have been depicted as cruel or kind, passive or possessive, victimized or villainous.

“The Tiger’s Bride”

Carter subverts the traditional fairy tale stock characters, employing the excesses of the Gothic form in order to dissect, dismantle, and parody various aspects of the original tales: exposing their repressive absurdities and forming revised narratives within a framework of deconstructed gender identities. Carter’s narratives consistently expose, challenge, and abandon the conventional gender identities of traditional fairy tales: two-dimensional identities that dictate that women need be vulnerable and submissive, and men must be strong and dominant. Carter's "The Tiger's Bride" delves into the nature of men and women and the relationships between them by exploring and analyzing the motifs of wildness and civilization. In the traditional stories of "Beauty and the Beast," women are presented as the civilizing agent in the relationship with men, who succumb to their "beastliness," giving way to their animalistic, wild side, while in Carter’s “The Tiger’s Bride,” the reverse is true—women are the ones who open up to the beast within them in relationship with men, instead of being the civilizing agent. The original narrative of ‘The Tiger’s Bride” works to destabilize the artificially restrictive categories of “Beauty and the Beast.” The literal and figurative unmasking of each character – which signifies the deconstruction of both repressive gender constructs – permits the revelation of their true animal forms, which become a symbol of a nature that is liberated, pure and unified.

“The Snow Child”

This retelling of “Snow White” continues the tradition of using magic tales as a way of communicating through symbol and fiction what cannot be otherwise spoken. The confines and dangers of patriarchal society, most notably the fickle nature of power allotted to women and the resulting threats and acts of rape that cannot be countered, are brought forward through Carter’s carefully crafted language, and her effective inversion of a familiar narrative challenges the readers’ expectations as they are forced to confront the damage being done to women within this culture. In this story, Carter explores whether a woman can be both villain and victim. She presents a figure who is very aware of the instability of her status; Christina Bacchilega notes that “[a]ny shift in the Count’s affection is immediately reflected in the relationship of the two women, whose socio-economic fortunes mirror each other in reverse–as the one gains, the other loses–and depend entirely on the Count’s words.” This quickly shifting position that women must negotiate within a male-dominated society is a predominant focus of “The Snow Child”, expressed symbolically throughout the text. The Countess may be a villain, but she is also trapped within a social structure that affords her little autonomy, and as long as they are contained by this system she and the snow child are both fated victims.

Existing on two pages alone, this story of Carter’s is a condensed, tightened version of the tale that, in its brevity, denies the reader any space to look away from the horrors that unfold. Following in the magic tale tradition, “The Snow Child” contains only what is relevant to the narrative and drives the plot forward. Her symbols are presented in the same sophisticated layers expected in these tales; however, she continually subverts assumptions and destabilises the story. Such narrative decisions invite the audience to be co-creators in the experience and read their own meaning into the events they encounter while never allowing them to take their eyes off those trapped within these lines of text. In doing so, Carter demonstrates that there is still a need for folktales because women continue to suffer within patriarchal power systems as they face, on a daily basis, issues of rape, incest, and abuse that, even when overlooked and marginalised, continue to demand a voice.