Weekly Notification
Apr. 30th, 2004 10:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
liptonrm_backupIt feels like a million things have happened this week and absolutely nothing has occurred at the same, exact time. It's been cold and hot, sunny and overcast and I feel almost as if I'm in some sort of holding pattern, just waiting for life to happen. Now, of course, I sound like some sappy, oversentimental, depressed undergraduate and out of all of those adjectives only one of them is actually true (and that one for not much longer;-).
Because the term paper I wrote was such an interactive thing and because of the great help and support I received from so many people, I thought it would only be fit for me to share it with the lot of you. Plus, the fact that it turned out much better then I ever thought it would just spurs my raving egomania on;-). As many of you know, this paper deals with fairy tale and societal interpretations of magic. Disclaimer: This is a bit dry and pedantic and is more scholastic then entertaining. Without further ado...
The power of magic has been a constant through all the long years of human history. For millennia, many natural forces were attributed to magical causes, from the anger of jealous gods to the power of mortal magicians. There is a deep-seated need in the psyche of the human race to believe in something beyond its short existence, something grander and deeper that can give both meaning and purpose to the myriad lives and a belief in magical forces and magical beings calls to that fundamental requirement. Magic’s ability to survive as a human belief system is due not only to its inherent flexibility as a cause for most natural and human occurrences but also to the wide literature that has repeated and modified its scope and abilities to each succeeding generation, even to this science-influenced epoch of the early twenty-first century. The fairy tale has arisen in western culture as one of the primary literary forms through which a belief in the fantastical is transmitted and it is through a study of fairy tale (or, specifically, the classic tale of Sleeping Beauty) through which magic’s inherent flexibility and ubiquitous nature can be observed and its capacity for survival can be understood.
The earliest tale to be titled Sleeping Beauty can be found in Charles Perrault’s story collection Histories ou contes du temps passe published in 1697. Perrault’s Sleeping Beauty is based upon Giambattista Basile’s Italian tale “Sun, Moon, and Talia”, yet it is Perrault’s rendition that contains the basic structure of the tale that is still recognized today. Perrault’s tale begins with the desired birth of a child. It begins:
“There was formerly a kind and a queen, who were so sorry that they had no children; so sorry that it cannot be expressed. They went to all the waters in the world; vows, pilgrimages, all ways were triead, and all to no purpose. At last, however, the Queen had a daughter.”
The desire for children is a familiar theme to anyone familiar with the fairy tale format. What is significant about this opening is the varied means which the parents tried in order to engender their child. The “waters, vows and pilgrimages” are all religiously incorporated forms of magic, a kind of safe, white magic to which people could appeal in times of need. The fact that all of these religiously acceptable practices failed raises the question of how the eventual conception was explained by the parents. There is no mention of a miracle and though the baby was christened it was not priests or holy people that were invited to be godparents, but rather “all the fairies they could find in the whole kingdom”. These passages suggest that a magic unconnected with any sort of religious tradition was what finally brought about the desired birth and there doesn’t appear to be any textual recrimination for this reliance on mysterious magic. Indeed, the text states that the fairies were to give the princess a gift, “as was the custom of fairies in those days”. These allusions indicate that it is not magic itself that is dangerous; indeed, it is portrayed as a benign force and wholly acceptable when used with good intent. This interpretation ties in very well with the small white magics employed by many catholic practitioners and the benign manner in which Catholic leadership looked upon those practices. There is no real separation between the powers of the Church and the powers of the occult.
The danger did not lie in the source of power but rather in its practitioner. The evil fairy who curses Sleeping Beauty is not portrayed as evil because she is a fairy, but rather evil because she is malicious. She arrives uninvited and is offended because the gift the King has prepared for her is not as rich as the gift the other fairies receive. It is for that reason that she curses the child instead of blessing her. The malicious fairy is also of much greater age then the other, invited fairies. It is stated of her that: “As they were all sitting down at the table they saw come into the hall a very old fairy, whom they had not invited, because it was above fifty years since she had been out of a certain tower, and she was believed to be either dead or enchanted.” Her age is explicitly pointed out and it ties her to the prevailing image of the witch. She is malicious and like so many of the accused witches her crime was in believing she deserved more then she received and then taking revenge for that slight. Also, like the image of the evil female her crime is that of infanticide, her ‘blessing’ upon the infant is that of an early and inexplicable death (the pricking of her finger by the spindle). In the text she is contrasted with a good fairy who offers the counter-blessing and saves the infant from death. She is specifically called ‘the Young Fairy’ in the text and can be compared with the young, possessed girls who served their communities by accusing the witches, even though they often had much in common. Magic, in this passage, is shown to not be all powerful. The young could not fully undo what the old had done but she could change it, make it less painful and give the parents some kind of hope. Hence, magic is not the real danger; there is no reason to be afraid of the good fairies who give the blessings or of the magical way in which the child was conceived and it is the evil of an old woman that causes the truest fear.
This is a theme that would be repeated in the second half of Perrault’s story wherein the mother-in-law is portrayed as a child-killing ogress who wants an unnatural control over her son and his kingdom. Both the Ogress Queen and the Young Queen have mystical heritages, yet the difference between age and youth and ugliness and beauty make abundantly clear the problems between the two women. This part also portrays the problems between a young wife and a reining matriarch, one attempting to solidify her place in the family and the other trying to hold onto the power and influence she has accumulated. The Ogress Queen desires to kill the young usurper and her children and causes a large tub to be filled with “toads, vipers, and all sorts of serpents in order to have thrown into it the Queen and her children”. However, the Ogress Queen is her own undoing and becomes the victim of hideous tub which she had prepared. The use of magical creatures only highlights the very real social struggles present between the divergent generations of women in a family. These social tensions were very real and not without cause, for, as the last line of the story states: “The King could not but be very sorry, for she was his mother; but he soon comforted himself with his beautiful wife and his pretty children.”
The version of Sleeping Beauty that is best well-known and most beloved is that which was transmitted by the Brothers Grimm. They published the first volume of Kinder-und Hausmarchen (Children’s and Household Tales) in 1812 and would continue to revise the three volumes of that publication until 1857. Sleeping Beauty is named Briar Rose in their anthology and while the foundation of the story remains the same, many significant details had been changed in the intervening centuries. Perhaps the greatest change came in the form of the tale itself. As the title of the anthology suggests, the Grimm tales were intended to be children’s stories and hence much of the brutality and social commentary of the Perrault version is missing in its nineteenth century incarnation. The last half of the story which tells of the cannibalistic Ogress who desires to kill and devour her grandchildren is no longer included. Instead the story ends with the awakening of Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty) and her marriage to the Prince. As magic switches from an adult to a child audience one can see the effect of the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution on society. Magic has become the pervue of the nursery and now holds moral and lessons that focus primarily on the virtues that are deemed important for children to retain, indeed, it is in this era and with the help of the fairy tale that childhood begins to be defined and understood as an era completely separate from adulthood.
The birth of the child Briar Rose is still magical, but the King and the Queen no longer sought out the magic, it simply appeared to them. “And then one day, as the Queen was bathing, a frog crept out of the water on to the land and said to her: ‘Your wish shall be fulfilled”. The fairies are still invited but they are invited “in order that they might be favourably and kindly disposed towards the child.” There is no benignity in this type of magic and the non-magic users in the story are obviously afraid of angering that magic in any way. It is a valid fear as the thirteenth fairy (rather then the eight in the Perrault tale) is not invited and so she curses Briar Rose. Magic is ambiguous and unpredictable and from that it gains its most dangerous aspect. The parents attempted to protect their child from the evil in the world but they were inherently powerless, as was demonstrated by the thirteenth fairy. That shift in basic understanding of the world is interesting and parents are portrayed to have even less control in the Grimm version then they had in the Perrault version. Indeed, in Perrault’s tale Sleeping Beauty’s parents were personally involved in everything that happened and were the ones who decided that the whole castle should sleep so that their daughter would not have to awaken alone in one hundred years. The Grimm tale communicates to its audience that parents are as helpless as children and that there is no way to overcome the greater forces that effect individual lives. There is more helplessness inherent in the tale and parents no longer choose to put the rest of the castle asleep but rather instantly fall asleep the moment the step into the castle; trees no longer magically grow in order to protect the sleeping princess but rather a briar patch grows to keep the princess in and all of her potential suitors out.
The Grimm tale is very explicit in the way in which it describes its young protagonists. Briar Rose is incapable of escaping her destiny and truly has no agency of her own in the entire story. She exists in order to fulfill her destiny. It is the Prince who is courageous, who is unafraid and determined and to reward the courage the briars flower and open for him and he passes through unharmed. It is in the Grimm tale where the Prince first kisses the Sleeping Beauty in order to wake her. The overriding emphasis, or moral, of the story is one of conformity by any means necessary. The King and Queen are not able to invite all of the fairies and so their child suffers because of it, Briar Rose is a sweet and modest girl who is cloistered until her husband finds her and she is able to become a part of a socially acceptable union. Those deeper feelings and needs, as expressed by magic, are seen to be strange and ambiguous and inherently dangerous and as having no place in the “happily till the end of their days” promised at its end.
The greatest message of the Grimm tale, however, is that there is no place for magic in the adult world, it is only appropriate in the realm of the child and once that child has grown up and left his/her castle tower then the story is over, the magic is over. Looked at in that way the moral of the story is rather cold and comfortless and it is no wonder that L. Frank Baum rebelled against this ‘traditional’ form of the fairy tale when writing his Wizard of Oz series or children’s novels. He states in his 1900 introduction to the Wonderful Wizard of Oz that:
“Modern education includes morality; therefore the modern child seeks only entertainment in its wonder tales and gladly dispenses with all disagreeable incident. Having this thought in mind the story … was written solely to please children. It inspires to be a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heartaches and nightmares are left out.”
With this new interpretation the fairy tale remains in the care of writers of children’s fiction yet the pressuring morality of the tale is diminished and the innate power of magic and the fantastical is once again highlighted. These are children who will not be constrained to give up magic once they have grown and will not feel compelled to discount that sense of the whimsical as something wholly childish and inappropriate. It is these adults who will spur the restoration of the fairy tale to its original, adult format.
The new evolution of non-moralistic children’s stories leads directly to the trend in fantasy literature that can be viewed as a type of magical renaissance. Adults are no longer content to put away magic as they enter adulthood, but rather embrace it, as is shown in the overwhelming popularity of recent award winning fantasy movies and the continuing trend in modern adult fiction to retell the fairy tales of childhood for an ever-broadening adult audience. The authors of these tales are frequently consciously aware of the historical roots of the tales they are telling and deliberately cite and reference the ancient tales they are reworking for a twentieth century audience (as are, for example, the many authors included in the popular volumes of adult fairy tale reimaginings edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling). One of the most compelling retellings of the Sleeping Beauty format, however, is not to be found written by one of those talented and referential authors. It can be found in a story collection written by Charles DeLint, a man often cited with developing what has come to be known as urban fantasy. His stories weave the magical into the daily lives of seemingly ordinary denizens of a metropolis, he transports fairies and ogres and elves into the modern landscape and instead of being whimsical forces for good these magical beings are returned to the ambiguity and capriciousness for which they were once famous. In one of his early story collections, Dreams Underfoot, DeLint provides an evocative story entitled “In the House of my Enemy” which deals with issues ranging from child abuse to motherhood to the presence of and necessity for magic in the world.
The story is told through the eyes of an artist who goes by the name of Jilly Coppercorn, a character who is recovering in her own way from a brutal and abusive childhood. The evil that is described in the text of the story is not derived from any sort of magical background yet to many readers the evil of the human perpetrators of such abuse carry a seemingly unrealistic and overwhelming evil with them. The modern ogres do not have the justification of a magical heritage to fall back on to explain their evil and that innate reality makes the very human perpetrators of such crimes an even more chilling kind of evil.
It is in magic where the character Jilly finds much of the power she needs to discover the good in the world. At one point as she is discussing her belief in magic with Annie, a young, pregnant girl she has helped to save in much the same way Jilly herself was saved she states:
“ ‘If there’s no magic, there’s no meaning.’ Without magic-or call it wonder, mystery, natural wisdom-nothing has any depth. It’s all just surface. I honestly believe there’s more to everything then that, whether it’s a Monet hanging in a
gallery or some old vagrant sleeping in the alley.”
Magic is no longer a reason for the personal and natural disasters that afflict one’s life, rather it has become a way to understand both one’s own self and the surrounding humanity. Through understanding the deeper forces in people’s lives one can come to understand what Beauty truly is and learn how to create it for one’s self, independent of the destruction rampaging in the outer world. In order to catch magic and magical creatures the advice is given that “You just have to pay attention. If you don’t you’ll miss them, or see something else-something you expected to see rather then what was really there.” This advice can apply just as strongly to understanding other people as it can to catching a glimpse of Faerie.
There is no handsome prince in DeLint’s tale but there are compassionate people who strive to help others. ‘Sleeping Beauty’ can’t rely on anyone else to decide her fate and she can accept the help of the princes who have come into her life or not, there is no firm destiny, and the curses of the ‘evil fairies’ in her life can only be lessened when she herself acts as her own fairy godmother. The tragedy of the story comes when Annie is unable to play that role for herself, she is unable to diminish the curse her parents left upon her and it is because of the great fear she has that she will leave the same curse upon her own child that the full curse of Sleeping Beauty is enacted and Annie dies. While Annie was not able to be her own fairy godmother, her daughter is, at one point blessed by a woman with fairy blood and in reference to that blessing Sophie states, “I gave her the gift of a happy life. I never dreamed it wouldn’t include Annie.” Magic is then unpredictable and personal and only a force in one’s life if it is allowed to be one.
The fairy tale format has never been more popular then it is now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The extreme monetary achievements and critical acclaim of such works as JK Rowlings’s Harry Potter series of books and movie adaptations as well as the intense reaction to the recent cinematic interpretation of JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (a book which was first imagined as a sequel to Tolkien’s successful children’s story The Hobbit) prove that the power and necessity for magic has not diminished in the modern world, but rather has increased. The modern concept of the fairy tale has combined both the whimsical, light hearted children’s tale and the darker, more disturbing precursors to those tales to tell stories that transmit both the dark and the light, the painful and the beautiful to readers of any age. The dark, potent magics that inspire powerful blessings and evil ogresses have come to be understood in a new way within the ever-changing framework of human society, just as the whimsical power of Faerie has also been modified to have a place not only in the nursery but also in the dangerous, adult world. Magic, by its very flexibility, will adapt to however cultural voices change and will continue to aid in human understanding of the incomprehensibility of both the external and internal worlds.
There it is, for better or worse. I will now return to my regularly scheduled life of lurking in fandom and breaking in my new strappy sandles.
Because the term paper I wrote was such an interactive thing and because of the great help and support I received from so many people, I thought it would only be fit for me to share it with the lot of you. Plus, the fact that it turned out much better then I ever thought it would just spurs my raving egomania on;-). As many of you know, this paper deals with fairy tale and societal interpretations of magic. Disclaimer: This is a bit dry and pedantic and is more scholastic then entertaining. Without further ado...
The power of magic has been a constant through all the long years of human history. For millennia, many natural forces were attributed to magical causes, from the anger of jealous gods to the power of mortal magicians. There is a deep-seated need in the psyche of the human race to believe in something beyond its short existence, something grander and deeper that can give both meaning and purpose to the myriad lives and a belief in magical forces and magical beings calls to that fundamental requirement. Magic’s ability to survive as a human belief system is due not only to its inherent flexibility as a cause for most natural and human occurrences but also to the wide literature that has repeated and modified its scope and abilities to each succeeding generation, even to this science-influenced epoch of the early twenty-first century. The fairy tale has arisen in western culture as one of the primary literary forms through which a belief in the fantastical is transmitted and it is through a study of fairy tale (or, specifically, the classic tale of Sleeping Beauty) through which magic’s inherent flexibility and ubiquitous nature can be observed and its capacity for survival can be understood.
The earliest tale to be titled Sleeping Beauty can be found in Charles Perrault’s story collection Histories ou contes du temps passe published in 1697. Perrault’s Sleeping Beauty is based upon Giambattista Basile’s Italian tale “Sun, Moon, and Talia”, yet it is Perrault’s rendition that contains the basic structure of the tale that is still recognized today. Perrault’s tale begins with the desired birth of a child. It begins:
“There was formerly a kind and a queen, who were so sorry that they had no children; so sorry that it cannot be expressed. They went to all the waters in the world; vows, pilgrimages, all ways were triead, and all to no purpose. At last, however, the Queen had a daughter.”
The desire for children is a familiar theme to anyone familiar with the fairy tale format. What is significant about this opening is the varied means which the parents tried in order to engender their child. The “waters, vows and pilgrimages” are all religiously incorporated forms of magic, a kind of safe, white magic to which people could appeal in times of need. The fact that all of these religiously acceptable practices failed raises the question of how the eventual conception was explained by the parents. There is no mention of a miracle and though the baby was christened it was not priests or holy people that were invited to be godparents, but rather “all the fairies they could find in the whole kingdom”. These passages suggest that a magic unconnected with any sort of religious tradition was what finally brought about the desired birth and there doesn’t appear to be any textual recrimination for this reliance on mysterious magic. Indeed, the text states that the fairies were to give the princess a gift, “as was the custom of fairies in those days”. These allusions indicate that it is not magic itself that is dangerous; indeed, it is portrayed as a benign force and wholly acceptable when used with good intent. This interpretation ties in very well with the small white magics employed by many catholic practitioners and the benign manner in which Catholic leadership looked upon those practices. There is no real separation between the powers of the Church and the powers of the occult.
The danger did not lie in the source of power but rather in its practitioner. The evil fairy who curses Sleeping Beauty is not portrayed as evil because she is a fairy, but rather evil because she is malicious. She arrives uninvited and is offended because the gift the King has prepared for her is not as rich as the gift the other fairies receive. It is for that reason that she curses the child instead of blessing her. The malicious fairy is also of much greater age then the other, invited fairies. It is stated of her that: “As they were all sitting down at the table they saw come into the hall a very old fairy, whom they had not invited, because it was above fifty years since she had been out of a certain tower, and she was believed to be either dead or enchanted.” Her age is explicitly pointed out and it ties her to the prevailing image of the witch. She is malicious and like so many of the accused witches her crime was in believing she deserved more then she received and then taking revenge for that slight. Also, like the image of the evil female her crime is that of infanticide, her ‘blessing’ upon the infant is that of an early and inexplicable death (the pricking of her finger by the spindle). In the text she is contrasted with a good fairy who offers the counter-blessing and saves the infant from death. She is specifically called ‘the Young Fairy’ in the text and can be compared with the young, possessed girls who served their communities by accusing the witches, even though they often had much in common. Magic, in this passage, is shown to not be all powerful. The young could not fully undo what the old had done but she could change it, make it less painful and give the parents some kind of hope. Hence, magic is not the real danger; there is no reason to be afraid of the good fairies who give the blessings or of the magical way in which the child was conceived and it is the evil of an old woman that causes the truest fear.
This is a theme that would be repeated in the second half of Perrault’s story wherein the mother-in-law is portrayed as a child-killing ogress who wants an unnatural control over her son and his kingdom. Both the Ogress Queen and the Young Queen have mystical heritages, yet the difference between age and youth and ugliness and beauty make abundantly clear the problems between the two women. This part also portrays the problems between a young wife and a reining matriarch, one attempting to solidify her place in the family and the other trying to hold onto the power and influence she has accumulated. The Ogress Queen desires to kill the young usurper and her children and causes a large tub to be filled with “toads, vipers, and all sorts of serpents in order to have thrown into it the Queen and her children”. However, the Ogress Queen is her own undoing and becomes the victim of hideous tub which she had prepared. The use of magical creatures only highlights the very real social struggles present between the divergent generations of women in a family. These social tensions were very real and not without cause, for, as the last line of the story states: “The King could not but be very sorry, for she was his mother; but he soon comforted himself with his beautiful wife and his pretty children.”
The version of Sleeping Beauty that is best well-known and most beloved is that which was transmitted by the Brothers Grimm. They published the first volume of Kinder-und Hausmarchen (Children’s and Household Tales) in 1812 and would continue to revise the three volumes of that publication until 1857. Sleeping Beauty is named Briar Rose in their anthology and while the foundation of the story remains the same, many significant details had been changed in the intervening centuries. Perhaps the greatest change came in the form of the tale itself. As the title of the anthology suggests, the Grimm tales were intended to be children’s stories and hence much of the brutality and social commentary of the Perrault version is missing in its nineteenth century incarnation. The last half of the story which tells of the cannibalistic Ogress who desires to kill and devour her grandchildren is no longer included. Instead the story ends with the awakening of Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty) and her marriage to the Prince. As magic switches from an adult to a child audience one can see the effect of the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution on society. Magic has become the pervue of the nursery and now holds moral and lessons that focus primarily on the virtues that are deemed important for children to retain, indeed, it is in this era and with the help of the fairy tale that childhood begins to be defined and understood as an era completely separate from adulthood.
The birth of the child Briar Rose is still magical, but the King and the Queen no longer sought out the magic, it simply appeared to them. “And then one day, as the Queen was bathing, a frog crept out of the water on to the land and said to her: ‘Your wish shall be fulfilled”. The fairies are still invited but they are invited “in order that they might be favourably and kindly disposed towards the child.” There is no benignity in this type of magic and the non-magic users in the story are obviously afraid of angering that magic in any way. It is a valid fear as the thirteenth fairy (rather then the eight in the Perrault tale) is not invited and so she curses Briar Rose. Magic is ambiguous and unpredictable and from that it gains its most dangerous aspect. The parents attempted to protect their child from the evil in the world but they were inherently powerless, as was demonstrated by the thirteenth fairy. That shift in basic understanding of the world is interesting and parents are portrayed to have even less control in the Grimm version then they had in the Perrault version. Indeed, in Perrault’s tale Sleeping Beauty’s parents were personally involved in everything that happened and were the ones who decided that the whole castle should sleep so that their daughter would not have to awaken alone in one hundred years. The Grimm tale communicates to its audience that parents are as helpless as children and that there is no way to overcome the greater forces that effect individual lives. There is more helplessness inherent in the tale and parents no longer choose to put the rest of the castle asleep but rather instantly fall asleep the moment the step into the castle; trees no longer magically grow in order to protect the sleeping princess but rather a briar patch grows to keep the princess in and all of her potential suitors out.
The Grimm tale is very explicit in the way in which it describes its young protagonists. Briar Rose is incapable of escaping her destiny and truly has no agency of her own in the entire story. She exists in order to fulfill her destiny. It is the Prince who is courageous, who is unafraid and determined and to reward the courage the briars flower and open for him and he passes through unharmed. It is in the Grimm tale where the Prince first kisses the Sleeping Beauty in order to wake her. The overriding emphasis, or moral, of the story is one of conformity by any means necessary. The King and Queen are not able to invite all of the fairies and so their child suffers because of it, Briar Rose is a sweet and modest girl who is cloistered until her husband finds her and she is able to become a part of a socially acceptable union. Those deeper feelings and needs, as expressed by magic, are seen to be strange and ambiguous and inherently dangerous and as having no place in the “happily till the end of their days” promised at its end.
The greatest message of the Grimm tale, however, is that there is no place for magic in the adult world, it is only appropriate in the realm of the child and once that child has grown up and left his/her castle tower then the story is over, the magic is over. Looked at in that way the moral of the story is rather cold and comfortless and it is no wonder that L. Frank Baum rebelled against this ‘traditional’ form of the fairy tale when writing his Wizard of Oz series or children’s novels. He states in his 1900 introduction to the Wonderful Wizard of Oz that:
“Modern education includes morality; therefore the modern child seeks only entertainment in its wonder tales and gladly dispenses with all disagreeable incident. Having this thought in mind the story … was written solely to please children. It inspires to be a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heartaches and nightmares are left out.”
With this new interpretation the fairy tale remains in the care of writers of children’s fiction yet the pressuring morality of the tale is diminished and the innate power of magic and the fantastical is once again highlighted. These are children who will not be constrained to give up magic once they have grown and will not feel compelled to discount that sense of the whimsical as something wholly childish and inappropriate. It is these adults who will spur the restoration of the fairy tale to its original, adult format.
The new evolution of non-moralistic children’s stories leads directly to the trend in fantasy literature that can be viewed as a type of magical renaissance. Adults are no longer content to put away magic as they enter adulthood, but rather embrace it, as is shown in the overwhelming popularity of recent award winning fantasy movies and the continuing trend in modern adult fiction to retell the fairy tales of childhood for an ever-broadening adult audience. The authors of these tales are frequently consciously aware of the historical roots of the tales they are telling and deliberately cite and reference the ancient tales they are reworking for a twentieth century audience (as are, for example, the many authors included in the popular volumes of adult fairy tale reimaginings edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling). One of the most compelling retellings of the Sleeping Beauty format, however, is not to be found written by one of those talented and referential authors. It can be found in a story collection written by Charles DeLint, a man often cited with developing what has come to be known as urban fantasy. His stories weave the magical into the daily lives of seemingly ordinary denizens of a metropolis, he transports fairies and ogres and elves into the modern landscape and instead of being whimsical forces for good these magical beings are returned to the ambiguity and capriciousness for which they were once famous. In one of his early story collections, Dreams Underfoot, DeLint provides an evocative story entitled “In the House of my Enemy” which deals with issues ranging from child abuse to motherhood to the presence of and necessity for magic in the world.
The story is told through the eyes of an artist who goes by the name of Jilly Coppercorn, a character who is recovering in her own way from a brutal and abusive childhood. The evil that is described in the text of the story is not derived from any sort of magical background yet to many readers the evil of the human perpetrators of such abuse carry a seemingly unrealistic and overwhelming evil with them. The modern ogres do not have the justification of a magical heritage to fall back on to explain their evil and that innate reality makes the very human perpetrators of such crimes an even more chilling kind of evil.
It is in magic where the character Jilly finds much of the power she needs to discover the good in the world. At one point as she is discussing her belief in magic with Annie, a young, pregnant girl she has helped to save in much the same way Jilly herself was saved she states:
“ ‘If there’s no magic, there’s no meaning.’ Without magic-or call it wonder, mystery, natural wisdom-nothing has any depth. It’s all just surface. I honestly believe there’s more to everything then that, whether it’s a Monet hanging in a
gallery or some old vagrant sleeping in the alley.”
Magic is no longer a reason for the personal and natural disasters that afflict one’s life, rather it has become a way to understand both one’s own self and the surrounding humanity. Through understanding the deeper forces in people’s lives one can come to understand what Beauty truly is and learn how to create it for one’s self, independent of the destruction rampaging in the outer world. In order to catch magic and magical creatures the advice is given that “You just have to pay attention. If you don’t you’ll miss them, or see something else-something you expected to see rather then what was really there.” This advice can apply just as strongly to understanding other people as it can to catching a glimpse of Faerie.
There is no handsome prince in DeLint’s tale but there are compassionate people who strive to help others. ‘Sleeping Beauty’ can’t rely on anyone else to decide her fate and she can accept the help of the princes who have come into her life or not, there is no firm destiny, and the curses of the ‘evil fairies’ in her life can only be lessened when she herself acts as her own fairy godmother. The tragedy of the story comes when Annie is unable to play that role for herself, she is unable to diminish the curse her parents left upon her and it is because of the great fear she has that she will leave the same curse upon her own child that the full curse of Sleeping Beauty is enacted and Annie dies. While Annie was not able to be her own fairy godmother, her daughter is, at one point blessed by a woman with fairy blood and in reference to that blessing Sophie states, “I gave her the gift of a happy life. I never dreamed it wouldn’t include Annie.” Magic is then unpredictable and personal and only a force in one’s life if it is allowed to be one.
The fairy tale format has never been more popular then it is now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The extreme monetary achievements and critical acclaim of such works as JK Rowlings’s Harry Potter series of books and movie adaptations as well as the intense reaction to the recent cinematic interpretation of JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (a book which was first imagined as a sequel to Tolkien’s successful children’s story The Hobbit) prove that the power and necessity for magic has not diminished in the modern world, but rather has increased. The modern concept of the fairy tale has combined both the whimsical, light hearted children’s tale and the darker, more disturbing precursors to those tales to tell stories that transmit both the dark and the light, the painful and the beautiful to readers of any age. The dark, potent magics that inspire powerful blessings and evil ogresses have come to be understood in a new way within the ever-changing framework of human society, just as the whimsical power of Faerie has also been modified to have a place not only in the nursery but also in the dangerous, adult world. Magic, by its very flexibility, will adapt to however cultural voices change and will continue to aid in human understanding of the incomprehensibility of both the external and internal worlds.
There it is, for better or worse. I will now return to my regularly scheduled life of lurking in fandom and breaking in my new strappy sandles.
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A most excellent post...
Date: 2004-04-30 04:21 pm (UTC)I think most most fantasy or genre authors (i.e., those who get paid) do write fairytales, but I think most of them won't admit to it. (DeLint, Gaimen, even Stephen King, seem to be exceptions).
The thing is, fairytales seem to have all the archetypes we work with, ranging from "the hero" all the way down to "the bystanders who won't do anything to stop it." Those archetypes even hold true today, although we may play around the edges to alter them (i.e., sexual identity, sex of the character in the archetype role, race, religion, etc.), but the core of that archetype seems to remain sacrosanct. We can play with the surface, but not the unique fingerprint at the center.
I remember there was one Halloween, a bunch of us college kids were in a car tooling around Salem in the rain. We decided to play "the game," which was, someone had to drive until we were well and truly lost, and then someone took over the wheel to try and get us back to familiar territory. While playing "the game" we started talking about, of all things, fairytale archetypes.
To our surprise, we were actually filling those roles unconciously in the car. We were on a quest (we were lost and had to find our way home); we had the hero (someone was in a Joan of Arc costume); we needed otherworldly creatures (someone was dressed as the Goblin King from "Labyrinth"), we needed a witch (that would be me!) and we needed a damsel in distress, and lo, we had a princess in the car.
I should point out that all four of us were women.
It's a fightening thing to consider: that fairytales subconciously affect everything we do. Now, is it because we grew up with the stories? Or, is it because the stories talk about a deeper truth about the roles people play in our lives? It's a tough call.
And very Jungian.
Sorry. Geek girl will shut the hell up now.
Re: A most excellent post...
Date: 2004-05-03 10:38 am (UTC)There is a reason why fairy tales still effect us so strongly and that reason seems strangely undefinable, it's more of an emotional reaction then a logical understanding. And, it raises the question of how often we embraceand embody fairy tale archetypes in our outer lives.
Wow, I wish I knew. And people call psychology and history the 'soft' sciences. Bah;-).
no subject
Date: 2004-05-09 10:00 am (UTC)Wow, what an impressive paper! I had a few little side notes to add.
1) My government prof told us that Wizard of Oz was actually written as a huge metaphor. It was a silent plea for the government to use silver as well as the gold standard, aiding poor impoverished farmers in the time of depression. (There were two great depressions... I think this might have been the first, in the 1890's, but I could be wrong.) Dorothy represented farmers, the yellow brick road represented gold, Emerald City represented Washington D.C., the scarecrow also represented farmers, the tin man represented industry, the lion represented the continually running democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryant, and the slippers (actually silver in the original tale) represented silver. President McKinley was the wicked witch of the East. There's apparently books written on this, but if you think about it, you have to admit there may be a grain of truth to this idea! Of course, it makes a great children's story as well, probably serving as more than just entertainment.
2) On my Voodoo/Witchcraft tour in New Orleans, we learned a lot about voodoo. It's really not evil, black magic as everyone presumes it to be, but one of the oldest religions in the world. Naturally, this would have a lot to do with people's belief in magic. Many of those who sought out the church would also seek out a voodoo priestess or priest. In fact, even modern Catholic priests, Buddhist monks, and police officers seek assistance from voodoo, or so says the practicing shop-owner we visited. I found all of what she said pretty enlightening. Including the fact that it really does overlap a lot with Catholicism, different deities being compared to saints or angels, but naturally one god prevails over all. People rely on magic a lot more than we realize, they just like to keep it quiet.
3) Finally, my last two visits to the book store I've seen that there's a new version of Strewwelpeter out. Have you ever read this book? It's similar to fairy tales, only way more extreme. Germans used to read the stories to their children to frighten them into correct behavior. The tales are absolutely horrifying! That's part of the reason you have to love it. My mom got a copy of it once when my sister was young, and read it to her and I listened in, and read some of it as well. Ghastly! One of the stories is about a boy who starves himself to death because he refuses to eat his soup. Another is about a girl who burns herself to ash playing with fire. Yet another is about a boy won't stop sucking his thumbs, even when threatened, and ends up getting them cut off. If you've never heard of this, you should definitely sit yourself down in the bookstore someday and look it up. At B&N in Ann Arbor, it's right in front of the Fantasy/Sci Fi books. Looks like they've added some new tales. I keep debating buying it.
no subject
Date: 2004-05-10 04:55 am (UTC)I actually never even thought of Voudoun when writing my paper, my brain was so focused on European depictions of witchcraft and the like. It's connection with Catholicism is very interesting, however.
I'll have to check out those German fairy-tales. Put a whole new spin on the subject for me, probably.