Fairy tales exercise a draw, a drag, a gravitational pull upon the minds of children and adults alike. Like old alchemical treatises, they seem to offer a way to turn lead to gold, to make one's own life as magical as that to be found between the lines of their favorite tales. However, much like those old alchemical treatises, these require translation. Fairy tales and folklore, legends and myths, tales of wonder of every sort and type, these are written not only in the languages of the mundane world — French, German, Italian, English — but also in the language of symbols.
It's said that a rose by any other name should be as sweet — in a number of stories, such roses symbolize innocence (i.e., the roses that wreath Sleeping Beauty's kingdom, the rose brought to Beauty by her father from the castle of the Beast). The themes of these stories frequently demonstrate the values of the culture that tells the tales. They are mirrors helping to emphasize the true ideals of their societies — tellingly, symbols of truth in tales such as Snow White. For example, a society that emphasizes the worth of virginity produces tales with a preponderance of such symbols of chastity, not only roses, but also blood red cloaks, and fragile, transparent, membranous slippers.
Some symbols, however, seem to cross the cultural divide, appearing and reappearing in folk stories across the globe, as the issues which they represent are more or less of universal relevance. Journeys across water and through the woods — transitions, examinations of the unknown — these can be found in the folk stories of various Native American tribes, in European fairy tales, in Greek myths and Chinese legends. The details may change. The gender of the traveling protagonist, the terrain that they journey through, the perils which stay their steps, and their reasons for doing it all — riches, familial loyalty, true love — these things are subject to change, but the acknowledgment that change itself is inevitable, in the recurring symbols of the journey.
Case in point: my adolescence. As you could probably tell from my current persona, I was never very good at being a child. For one thing, I expected more out of life than life is willing to grant most nine–year–olds — dignity is a quality that is rarely accorded on the playground. That's from my perspective. When considering the positions that those around me were put into, all I can feel is sympathy. I was more or less the same person at nine that I am a twenty–two, and I can be fairly difficult to brook, even today, even with the justification of a college education, an English major, and a cynical pedigree that would be envied by Ambrose Bierce — a New Yawk upbringing. As a child, I must have seemed like some overly verbose gnome sent to torment those around me.
Adolescence was both easier to stomach than childhood, and more difficult. I'd already accepted that as a child, I wouldn't be able to achieve everything I wanted. If I couldn't stay up past the witching hour whenever I wanted, or have a kitten, or convince my mother to give me access to whatever age–inappropriate literature interested me (fer Crissakes), then, well, somehow, the fact that I couldn't have what the fairy tale folk had was par for the course. Disappointing, but not truly and honestly surprising.
As my exterior caught up to my interior, I began to acquire the privileges that had seemed so important to me — but everything still seemed drab, unmagical. Teenagers have never been noted for their subtlety; the symbolism was something that I was quite capable of understanding, yet didn't want to accept, living proof of that old adage that a pleasant untruth is preferable to a harsh reality. If you had been witness to the trek to maturity which I had to make through the symbolic forest — or Central Park, which is as close as we, as city–dwellers, ever seem to get — you would have seen something like this. . .
Seated on a bench beneath a tree, viewing the hustle and hurry of the human river, is a girl. She is approximately fifteen — an age when everything changes. You can see that she is artfully pale, perhaps powdered to enhance her natural coloring. Her hair is long and dark and patently unnatural. Every aspect of her manner and dress is intended, consciously or unconsciously, to evoke the archetype that she wishes to subsume — the Queen of Air and Darkness in all of her glory, attempted perhaps a few years too early, eliciting a different impression altogether.
Instead, she is a creature of rags and patches, her attire artfully tattered and torn. Her posture reflects an attitude of dejection which elicits an echo of Romanticism in a manner that would surely be appreciated by Byron or Shelly, were they but there to witness it — as they are not, it serves only to arouse your sympathy. Her hands echo her monochromatic color scheme. They are long and pale and narrow, bedecked and bedizened with a dozen tarnished silver rings, each of which holds some meaning, some memory, some momentous import on her existence. One needs no background in palmistry to read these hands, or their bitten fingernails, ragged to the quick, thinly disguised with chipped dark lacquer, belying the quick, confident fingers. From her satchel, which is decorated with various arcane and artful symbols — the crooked ideogram of anarchy, a carefully traced pentagram, a patched dragon and a half–obscured band name, among others — we can see a messy pile of literature protruding, consisting mainly of comics and novels that feature characters who are much, in their own fantastic and fictional manner, as she would like to be, all concerned with how the world should be, and not, unfortunately, how it is.
She searches the crowd for one final moment, not seeing whatever it is that she wishes to, before rising in a swirl of myrrh and frankincense. She, and her angst, moves further into the park, continuing the search. What seems to be escapism, pure and simple, for one moment can be seen for what it is in the turn of her shoulder, the lift of her chin — a quest, a search, a journey, looking for something that even she has trouble putting into words.
I wonder. . .can you still see traces of her in me?
Sometimes, the mortal followers of fairy tales never make their own transitions to the point of being able to see that the magic that they seek isn't in a past that they can never reach. Sometimes, they never discover that the external symbols of change — the glass slippers, and the dresses shining as the sun, and the kisses bestowed by princes various and sundry, and all the rest of that claptrap — are exactly that: external symbols which merely serve to reflect internal changes. Sometimes, disillusionment and disappointment that the magic is not, in a mundane sense, real, can sour a reader's enjoyment of one of the most valid forms of art to have been produced in our collective civilization.
Fairy tales give voice to unspecifiable longings for happiness, growth, success, justice. They reflect deeply rooted psychological aspects of existence, such as the attitudes that many have towards their parents and siblings, such as the relations between men and women (i.e., who is the rescuer, and who is rescued), such as the place of humans within their environments, within those selfsame woods. They have served as a medium for some of the greatest creative endeavors of the human imagination: in literature, art, music, dance, and other forms. Yet they have stood the risk of being abandoned not only because Disney and others pushed them into the nursery, but because a facile examination of them will not, cannot satisfy the longings that they evoke.
The irony is that the immediate gratification of the longings evoked by a surface understanding of a form is rarely asked of fields that are less (for lack of a better word) magical. It seems as though the magical contents of the stories within the fantasy form encourage readers to expect no less than magic from fantasy's effects upon them. That's simply unrealistic — proponents of the hard sciences don't seem to expect that a love of calculus will make the world less illogical; they understand that the study of science will help them to see whatever elements of it might be present in the larger world, enabling them to complete the circle, and add to their understanding of the form to the collective pool of knowledge. Similarly, scholars specializing in fairy tale literature contribute to the collective understanding of what it is that that human beings wish for that can be fulfilled through the medium of fantasy — a field of study that combines elements of literary criticism and psychoanalysis.
Fantasy is a form of creative endeavor that isn't acknowledged or respected as often as it should be, as I know from personal experience. My own transition helped me to change from being a fan of fairy tales, to being an appreciative, if amateur scholar of them, and it occurred not through the wave of a magic wand, not through a kiss, not through any overtly "magical" transformation, but simply through the mundane process of my education. Every characteristic that made me a less than successful child — my wordiness, my introspection, my inquisitiveness — makes me a fairly successful adult. Every quality that made my adolescence a sham — most notably, my complete and total lack of skill at self–deception — makes me a decent potential academic. I wouldn't have found any of that without a subject that inspired my interest — the one that lies at the heart of this essay, the study of marchen.
However, this fairy tale has yet to come to its conclusion, for while I may have stumbled onto a field of study which suits me, the field itself — not the area of study, but the literal grounds upon which that study would be conducted, the campuses and libraries, the offices and academic journals — have yet to be breached. Graduate school, and the possibility of a career in academia, still lie tantalizingly before me, singing their siren song. The study of a subject for the pure love of knowledge is apparently no longer considered to be a valid justification for an education by the general society, regardless of the fact that such a love of knowledge is the only real reason that could drive a person to pursue the study of literary fairy tales. . .we're none of us in it for the money, after all. The question is, will I be able to succeed without it?
I, and others like me, will have to try to patch and gerrymander whatever programs of education we can, taking a Comparative Literature course here, an English seminar there, and a Classics colloquia there, following the same pattern of behavior as professionals in the field, teaching a survey course here, submitting an article there. . .creating a niche in the world for the study of fairy tales and fantasy literature. Ideally, our makeshift educations will serve as the basis for a resurgence of study in the field, not only at the level of the popular culture, and not only at the rarefied heights of the elite world of scholarship, but in such a way as to benefit all those who might care to study them, as other fields are available to all parties interested and sundry.
Five years from now, or ten, in the distant future which is my then, I hope that you'll be able to look at a professor, standing before a lectern, clad in the uniform of academicians everywhere — tweed, elbow patches, and all — expostulating passionately about the relevance of fantasy. Everything about her will seem faintly outsized — her long nose, her horn–rimmed glasses, her furiously furrowed brow, and her wide eyes. The only glamour that will hang about her will be one of honest conviction. Before her will sit a sea of students, raptly fascinated. . .some clad in the gorgeous raiment of creatures out of legend, some satisfied with the corresponding images which will germinate in their imaginations as a result of what they will learn in classes like hers. The cycle will continue.
. . . and we'll all live happily ever after.
About the Author: Helen Pilinovsky writes on fairy tales, feminism, and the fantastic. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University, where her topic was the birth of the genre of fantasy in the 19th century. She has guest-edited issues of The Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts and Extrapolation, and is co-editor of the fairy tale journal Cabinet des Fées. She lives in New York City, where she teaches at Barnard College.
About the artist:
Adrienne Ségur (1901 – ?) was a French illustrator of fairy tale books from the 1930s to the 1960s. Her work was published in America in The Golden Book of Fairy Tales, The Snow Queen and Other Stories, and The Big Book of Cats.
Copyright ©2001 by Helen Pilinovsky. It may not be reproduced without the express written permission of the author.