freaking Fake News: edited 4/3/19

My co-worker shared this article with me because she knows I will be doing a one-hour presentation on Fairy-Tales for Adults for our all staff day conference this May. And because she knows I love fairy-tales! I'll be sure to share the presentation with you when I'm done: I'm planning on recording myself do a practice run and I'll upload it. Anyway, she sent me an article today that infuriated me. It's from a site called Book Riot, and here's the hyperlink: 

Fairy Tale Facts and Faux Pas

Here is my response - it's funny that the site makes it a little difficult to comment - you have to sign up for something to be able to do so. I was pissed off by the article and this is what I came up with when I wrote back. I'm hoping it sounds legit. I feel that it is. 

Hello. I'm a fairy-tale *lover*. I have studied a bit as well (two classes during graduate school at Dominican University and also during my own personal time after graduating in 2017).

To your first point - "You Know It When You See It": with fables, that's actually true. Almost all fables have animals as characters (there are rarely humans in older fables: see the French fables from the 17th century by Jean De La Fontaine from France or going back much further, the classic Aesop's Fables) so you literally can see the difference there. You know a fable because of the animals: The Tortoise & The Hare, for example. Or, The Fox & the Grapes. Fables usually, if not always, have a "point" or moral. This indeed does make them distinctive from other types of stories, particularly folklore and fairy-tales. Aesop made sure to include the point, or lesson, from the stories at the very end. And even with newer fables, such as W.S. Merwin's "The Book of Fables", the conclusion is still to an end. In each passage of the book, there is a finishing gloss over it, entire, that aims to say something to the reader, to have the reader contemplate a certain specific truth particular to that passage only, that story, that fable.

Though you say miscellaneous morals were "tacked" onto fairy-tales during the 17th century, and I'm guessing your talking about those tales written down in Italy and France? I would argue that these fairy-tales, which were literary, were not pointing to a lesson or moral. They were supposed to be, indeed intended to be, understood as a satirical and ironic abstraction of social reality under largely oppressive societies. The 17th century literary salons of France, for example, where groups of mostly women shared their constructed fairy-tales, were a subversive form of critique against the kings and royal etiquettes that they found confining. Men were drawn to these salons, too, but they were mostly comprised of women. So it is not the fairy-tale that asked for a moral to be "tacked" on to it, fairy-tales are usually finished with a pretty open-ended conclusion (despite the "happily ever after" misconception), a cyclical conclusion I might add. But surely, people will interpret how they will. 

Some things need to be clarified here. The difference between genre and form, for one. Is the fairy-tale a genre? Some say yes. A form? Some say yes. I think it is both and I can back this up with arguments for both, but let me me say this: I am very disheartened that you liken a fairy-tale to an internet meme. An internet meme is like mimicry, an imitation, an echo of the same. The whole difference between folktale and fairy-tale is that the literary fairy tale is known to be authored by a single individual, one who creatively "re-writes" a story from a previous form (in this case, from folklore) and completely changes its guise into something unique and new for the time that it emerges. Far from being a reproduction, it is a borrowing and an adaptation, and indeed a new interpretation to shed light on a grain of truth that was with it all along. 

And you say "Many of our favorite works were in print first" - but if you are to understand the fairy-tale you must understand that the nature of the literary fairy-tale is that it was collected by people from an oral tradition of tales from the lower classes and then written down. The written down version is not really "first": it is in actuality a folktale with a different kind of sensibility - a sensibility for those who had more money, and therefore more literacy. 

The Brothers Grimm were the first fairy-tale collectors to create their stories *explicitly* for children. Kindermarchen, Children's Household Tales, had the word "Children" in the title, whereas the literary fairy-tales from Italy and France before them never addressed children at all. Perhaps because there really wasn't a concept for the idea of a child. But also, the Grimms made sure Sleeping Beauty did not become pregnant while she was asleep and then awake by the suckling of her baby twins (see the original literary fairy tale from Italy). The creative liberties the Grimms took was in part to develop tales that reflected their country and nationhood at a time when Germany was struggling to identify its society. While France and Italy, and even England, had rich cultural histories, Germany did not. The Brothers Grimm wanted to create a new type of canon for their country - one that deviated from the traditional academic canon, and focused more on the peasantry.

Conte de Fees was coined by a French woman, true. I think it should be mentioned that the term fairy was important because many of the French tales included an actual fairy that helped the main character of the story surpass their struggle with the help of some wisdom and magic. The name stuck, though many fairy-tales after that ended up not having a fairy at all.

You cannot find an "original" version of the fairy-tale. It is a futile effort, I agree. However, if you look instead to collections of fables and folktales, and even mythologies from certain regions, you'll get a source of beginning. For example, Aesop, of Aesop's Fables, though only a man of myth, has a very specific story attached to him as a Greek slave who began telling stories orally to whomever he encountered. Whoever decided to keep sharing his stories, and finally to write them down, is a mystery. Look at other collections and anthologies and you will find that many times the they are attributed to one's nursemaid, guardian, servant, or great-grandmother. Where their storytellers received the tales is also a mystery. 

On the psychoanalysts thing... don't you think everyone is entitled to their own interpretation of art? Have you ever heard of "the death of the author"? Look it up - it's a book by Roland Barthes that explains that however we may wish to understand a work in it's proper historical context, as I try to do, there are always interpretations that run alongside this yet completely unconnected to it. Honestly, I think you'd be better off understanding the fairy-tale form as an anthropological perspective rather than finding an excuse to critique psychoanalysis. To look at fairy-tales through the anthropological lens is to understand these types of stories of as inherently and essentially about the study of human nature. What it is we do what we do and why we do it. Why we act how we act in certain situations.

Moving on, literary fairy-tales simply were not made for kids. The folktales that many fairy-tales began from were forms of gossip and rumor that spread throughout towns. When talking about hearsay on a daily basis, the act of sharing stories became an art form between adults who were basically sharing news. These were then formulated into the stories we know today.

I think you're right, in some respects, about censorship. When Hans Christian Andersen told the children his story about the little mermaid in Denmark, he made sure to tell them that she sold her soul and had to walk on legs that were in massive amounts of pain, and that in the end she did not get her prince but ended up having to watch him fall in love with another woman and ultimately become a fallen angel, with a soul, sure, but not with her true love.

Fairy-tales, I reiterate, can be understood as both a genre and form. I don't know how understanding them as a meme will help anyone. I highly doubt the wikipedia pages of today could be fairy-tales of tomorrow. Science/technology and magic/enchantment are two very different things, and I think it might do you well to begin from there. 

Much of your analysis can be stamped onto horror, say, or thrillers. But I'll leave you with this quote: The literary fairy story involved the fantastic, a supernatural that is neither eerie or horrific, but rather is whimsical, playful, or invitingly strange.

That is not to say whimsy without madness, playful without darkness, strange without the uncanny. But all those nonetheless, with no bloodletting and ghost tremor chills, just plain enchantment. 

Please let me know if you have any questions or you need references for what I've stated here.

Sincerely,

Felicia Edens

Librarian