Fairy Tales and Fantasy in literature

Introduction

The genres of fairy tales and fantasy have always been and continue to be closely related. Many fairy tales include adventure and fantastic elements, such as talking animals, castles, kingdoms, and people transformed into beasts, but distinguish themselves from fantasy because of the historical tradition associated with the fairy-tale genre. The fantasy genre is primarily known for its emphasis on magic and other supernatural elements. The fairy-tale and fantasy genres are some of the most popular, proving that readers not only hunger for the fantastic but also that writers consider these genres fertile ground for writing short fiction.

Fairy Tales: Background

The notable participants in the fairy-tale tradition include Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, and Hans Christian Andersen. Scholars consider Perrault, a Frenchman, the founder of the fairy-tale genre. He published Histoires ou contes du temps passéavec des moralités (1697; Stories or Tales of Past Times, with Morals), and in this collection he included the tales now so beloved, including “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Sleeping Beauty,” “Bluebeard,” and “Cinderella,” among others. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, according to numerous scholars, serve as another major force in the fairy-tale genre. Though the German brothers were linguists, they are best known for Kinder-und Hausmärchen (1812, 1815; revised 1819-1822; German Popular Stories, 1823-1826; better known as Grimm’s Fairy Tales), a collection of fairy tales published in 1812; a second volume of stories followed a few years later. In 1835 and elsewhere in Europe, Hans Christian Andersen in Denmark also significantly contributed to the fairy-tale genre when he published Eventyr (1835-1872; The Complete Andersen, 1949; also Fairy Tales, 1950-1958). His stories, like those of Perrault and the Grimm brothers, remain staples in a child’s library. These fairy tales all share a common purpose: to mold the behavior of the reader. In many cases, the fairy tales (like those of “Little Red Riding Hood” and “Cinderella”) were specifically aimed at shaping the attitudes and behaviors of girls. Many writers who use fairy tales as a foundation for their own short fiction revise the didactic approach used by Perrault, the Grimms, and Andersen; instead of portraying female characters in subservient roles, contemporary authors—such as Angela Carter and Donald Barthelme—often create subversive situations in which female characters are empowered. Each of the writers discussed participates in the didactic tradition of the fairy-tale genre but does so by encouraging adults (their primary audience) to be subversive.

James Thurber

While many writers use fairy tales as the basis of their short fiction, James Thurber created a collection of his own fairy tales in Further Fables for Our Time (1956). Thurber was associated with The New Yorker and regularly contributed cartoons and short fiction to the popular magazine. His biting sense of satire popular and appreciated, Thurber compiled thirty-seven of his fables, which first appeared in The New Yorker, wrote ten new fables, and produced his well-known collection. Each of Thurber’s tales ends with an explicit moral which, when combined with the story’s content, provides subversive commentary on social issues of the day. For instance, in “The Peacelike Mongoose,” a mongoose decides not to fight cobras and instead seeks peace. Other mongooses soon accuse the peaceable one of being ill and unstable. Eventually the mongoose community puts him on trial, condemns him, and exiles him. Thurber’s moral for readers in this tale reminds his audience that if one is not attacked by the enemy, one may very well be attacked by one’s own people. Thurber’s tale obviously comments on societal issues such as peace and refusing to fight and, most obviously, McCarthyism (attacks on people considered to be subversive because of their involvement in the Communist Party), since the peacelike mongoose is singled out without valid reason and is targeted by her fellow creatures.

Angela Carter

Angela Carter was a diverse writer, tackling nonfiction, novels, drama, poetry, and, notably, short stories. Her collection The Bloody Chamber (1979), one of her most beloved works, includes short fiction based on the fairy tales “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Beauty and the Beast,” and “Bluebeard,” among others. Readers and scholars alike praise Carter’s approach in The Bloody Chamber since her tales focus on the roles and perspectives of female characters who, in their original fairy tales, may have held central character positions but about whose feelings and thoughts little, if anything, was written.

In “The Courtship of Mr. Lyon” and “The Tiger’s Bride,” Carter revises the tale of “Beauty and the Beast.” While “The Courtship of Mr. Lyon” roughly follows the tale of a woman who falls in love with a beast and they eventually live happily ever after, “The Tiger’s Bride” turns the ending of the traditional fairy tale on its head. Carter’s tale closes with the woman transforming into a beast—a tiger—in which she celebrates and revels in her raw animal power. With The Bloody Chamber, Carter lays the groundwork for a tradition in which writers retell and revise fairy tales to highlight the roles and voices of those on the margins (which almost always happen to be female characters) or by giving an in-depth look into leading females characters and their thoughts on the situations.

Donald Barthelme

A writer who produced novels and scores of short stories, Donald Barthelme based some of his writings on well-known fairy tales. His most popular fairy-tale retelling occurs in his novel-length Snow White (1967), but Barthelme also uses fairy tales and folktales as a basis for some of his short stories, the most famous of which, “Bluebeard,” appears in the collection Forty Stories (1987). Like Carter before him, Barthelme retells the fairy tale with emphasis on, and from the perspective of, Bluebeard’s wife. The wife, who, as in Perrault’s tale, remains nameless, is a saucy woman having affairs with several men. Bluebeard constantly attempts to provoke his wife into opening the door to the forbidden room. Barthelme’s Bluebeard finally insists that his wife open the door, telling her that even he enjoys being disobeyed occasionally. Before opening the door, the wife becomes frantic because she receives a secret message from her financial adviser, about which she can do nothing until she is in private. Worried that she may lose her private fortune, she opens the forbidden door. The wife expects to find the corpses of her predecessors, but instead she discovers seven zebras hanging in Chanel gowns. Barthelme recasts Bluebeard’s wife as a woman concerned with her own pleasure and well-being, turning the premise of the Bluebeard tale on its head and suggesting that women should not fear their husbands but the loss of their own passion and self-sufficiency.

Margaret Atwood

Celebrated primarily for her speculative and science-fiction writing, and novels such as The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Cat’s Eye (1988), and The Blind Assassin (2000), Margaret Atwood also uses fairy tales as the foundation of some of her short stories. The collections Good Bones and Simple Murders (1994) and The Tent (2006) both include stories with fairy tales as their base. Good Bones and Simple Murders includes a short story titled “The Little Red Hen Tells All.” Atwood’s transformation of the tale focuses on how the hen feels used; Atwood’s hen explains how no creature would help her when she called for assistance, but that they flocked desperately to her once she had her loaf of bread. The animals even used the hen’s loaf of bread against her and some even turned suicidal because they did not have bread of their own. The story concludes with the hen apologizing profusely for her idea to bake bread and even for being a hen. She gives the bread away and leaves none for herself. By focusing on the perspective of the hen, Atwood draws attention to the hen’s status and implicitly questions that status of females in general. Atwood focusing on the hen in her apron with her freshly baked loaf of bread emphasizes a female’s domestic role and how a woman often is asked to sacrifice her own needs in order to satisfy those of others. The hen’s profuse apologies also serves as commentary on how females constantly apologize for their actions or decisions. Like Carter’s collection The Bloody Chamber and Barthelme’s retelling of “Bluebeard,” Atwood’s tale, then, raises awareness about the plight of many women through a fairy tale focused on the domestic sphere retold.

Atwood appears to have an affinity for fairy tales, including those involving birds, since in The Tent Atwood revises a classic fairy tale in “Chicken Little Goes Too Far.” Atwood’s Chicken Little claims that the sky is falling and, as in the original fairytale, Henny Penny, Turkey Lurkey, and Goosey Loosey ignore his warnings. Chicken Little feels inspired to create an advocate group, TSIF (The Sky Is Falling), and gains some devoted followers. When Hoggy Groggy (who sells real estate in the sky) hears about Chicken Little’s crusade, the hog enlists Foxy Loxy to kill Chicken Little. Atwood’s modern spin on the classic tale emphasizes the lengths to which corporations will go to silence minorities and the truth. Like those in the fairy-tale tradition before her, Atwood aims to impart a moral to her readers.

Fantasy: Background

The genre of fantasy distinguishes itself primarily with the presence of the magical and supernatural. Since the fantasy genre is enormous, critics and scholars have developed useful subgenres, including high fantasy and sword-and-sorcery fantasy. The most popular and beloved fantasy can be classified in these two primary subcategories. High fantasy models itself after the great epics, and thus J. R. R. Tolkien, an Old English scholar, mimicked the scale and elements of pieces such as Beowulf (c. 1000) to create his world of Middle Earth. The other popular category of fantasy, sword and sorcery, occurs on a much smaller scale and highlights the King Arthur myth cycle (the sword aspect) and magicians, wizards, and supernatural beings (the sorcery aspect).

J. R. R. Tolkien

Considered by many as the most prolific fantasy writer, J. R. R. Tolkien created the world of Middle Earth, arguably the best-known fantasy realm in the genre. His novels The Hobbit (1937) and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, including The Fellowship of the Ring (1954), The Two Towers (1954), and The Return of the King (1955), are his most famous works and have even inspired a cult following. Tolkien’s Middle Earth, a place inhabited by orcs, humans, dwarves, elves, wizards, hobbits, and scores of other species, classifies as “high fantasy,” a genre of fantasy in which the story transpires in a parallel world and is of epic proportion. Indeed, the battle over the One Ring concerns the fate of all in Middle Earth. Conversely, Tolkien’s short fiction focuses on stories with both quaint settings and plots.

In his famous essay “On Fairy Stories” (originally published in the 1964 book Tree and Leaf), Tolkien uses the phrase “perilous realm” to refer to the world of the fantastic. Hence the title for the book Tales from the Perilous Realm (2008), published long after Tolkien’s death. The collection includes many of Tolkien’s shorter fantasy works, such as “Roverandom” (first published in 1998), “Farmer Giles of Ham” (originally published in 1949), “The Adventures of Tom Bombadil” (a series of poems published in 1962), “Smith of Wootton Major” (1967), and “Leaf by Niggle” (1947). While none of these shorter works achieve the epic scope of Tolkien’s novels, they nonetheless illustrate this master of the genre’s talent toward the fantastic and, in some cases, his use of satire. “Roverandom” follows the story of a puppy turned into a toy by a dark wizard. The toy dog meets a good wizard who sends the dog on quests on the moon and under the sea, fighting dragons and interacting with mer-people, and after completing the quests the good wizard turns the toy into a real dog. “Smith of Wootton Major” tells of the lead character Smith’s experiences in the fairy world (the perilous realm). “Farmer Giles of Ham” is a tale complete with castles, kings, and dragon battles; Tolkien wrote the piece to satirize the Old and Middle English epics he studied and loved so dearly. The most famous of his short fiction, “Leaf and Niggle,” tells the story of Niggle, an artist whose painting of a leaf spirals out of control into an ever-enlarging tree; Niggle goes on a mysterious journey before returning home and ultimately his incredible painting is forgotten. The setting of this story, more than any other, is reminiscent of the Shire in Middle Earth. His short fiction treats readers to glimpses of the fantasy elements Tolkien championed in his writing. Tolkien’s works undoubtedly influenced all other major fantasy writers of the twentieth and twenty-first century, including Neil Gaiman, who lists Tolkien as a specific influence on his own canon of work.

Marion Zimmer Bradley

Marion Zimmer Bradley is widely known in both fantasy and science-fiction circles. She is praised for her unceasing encouragement of female writers, and she made strong efforts to get them published in the collections she edited as well as the magazine she both founded and edited, Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine. Her novels and short stories concerning her fictional world of Darkover remain beloved by the science-fiction community, but it is her novels about Avalon—The Mists of Avalon (1983), The Forest House (1993), Lady of Avalon (1997), and others—that catapulted her to status of one of the great fantasy writers. Her Avalon books focused on the world of King Arthur and provided the perspective of females to whom, in traditional Arthur mythology, authors do not assign much power or voice. After the success of her first Avalon novel, Bradley created the first Sword and Sorceress anthology in 1984. Bradley believed the purpose of this anthology was to publish fantasy short stories in which authors portrayed women as strong, vibrant, and independent, compared to the stereotype often associated with female fantasy characters as weak and dependent. The Sword and Sorceress anthologies continue are published annually. Collections such as The Best of Marion Zimmer Bradley (1985) provides readers with a host of stories that, like her other fantasy work, continues to draw significant attention to sex roles in fantasy.

Tanith Lee

Like many of the other authors of fantasy short stories, Tanith Lee built a career based on her successful and popular novels, such as the Tales from the Flat Earth series, the Unicorn series, and the Lionwolf series. Though Lee remains known for her novels, collections such as Red as Blood: Or, Tales from the Sisters Grimmer (1983), Dreams of Dark and Light: The Great Short Fiction of Tanith Lee (1986), Women as Demons: The Male Perception of Women Through Space and Time (1989), and Nightshades: Thirteen Journeys into Shadow (1993), showcase the writer’s fantasy short fiction. Though collections such as Red as Blood might appear to be an obvious fit in the fairy-tale genre, Lee’s work qualifies more directly as fantasy because the stories (loosely based on variants of fairy tales) instead include the essential elements of fantasy, such as magic and the presence of the supernatural. Specifically, Lee’s Red as Blood classifies as sword-and-sorcery fantasy, a subcategory of the fantasy genre. In the short story “Thorns,” for instance, a supernatural female being is able to deduce a man’s true identity immediately upon seeing him (a prince dressed in rags). “When the Clock Strikes” chronicles the story of a corrupt duke whose victims wreak vengeance by means of dark, satanic magic. Lee’s collection includes tales that occur around the world, from Asia to Scandinavia to Earth in general, and range in time periods from the last century B.C.E. to the future.

Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman won international acclaim for his fantasy comic-book series The Sandman (1988-1996), which chronicles the story of Dream, ruler of all dreams. While many readers consider comic books fluff reading, critics agree that Gaiman’s Sandman series proves the opposite and challenges readers to question the notions of dreams and reality. Critics and readers also champion Gaiman’s novels, such as Good Omens (1990, cowritten with Terry Pratchett) and American Gods (2001). Like his comic-book series and novels, Gaiman’s short fiction earned the respect of readers because it urges them to consider important issues, even though his stories remain rich in fantasy elements. The three collections that showcase Gaiman’s short fiction include Angels and Visitations (1993), Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fictions and Illusions (1998), and Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders (2006). Though each of these collections contains fan favorites, such as like Smoke and Mirrors’s “Snow, Glass, Apples,” a retelling of “Snow White” (once again demonstrating the inextricable link between the genres of fairy tales and fantasy) and Fragile Things’s “The Monarch of Glen,” a sequel to American Gods.

Gaiman’s most famous fantasy short story, though, remains “We Can Get Them for You Wholesale,” published first in Knave magazine and subsequently in Angels and Visitations and Smoke and Mirrors. In the story, Peter Pinter hires a company assassin to kill his girlfriend, who has been unfaithful. The company soon pitches special offers to Pinter, explaining that the more people he wants assassinated, the better deal he will receive. Ultimately, Pinter asks the assassin to kill everyone in the world, and the story ends with Gaiman’s description of something terrifying entering Pinter’s home. This story resonates in reality, reminding readers that events one might consider impossible can indeed be rendered possible; one person’s greed and gullibility can lead to the destruction of humankind.

Bibliography

Ashliman, D. L. Folk and Fairy Tales: A Handbook. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2004. Ashliman provides readers with a history of fairy tales and folktales, examines the definitions of these genres, and explores some examples of each type of tale.

Attebery, Brian. Strategies of Fantasy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. Attebery examines the historic tradition of fantasy literature, analyzes the conventions of story and character, and discusses the roles of women in the genre and how they have changed the landscape of fantasy literature.

Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977. This book discusses the tradition of and patterns present in fairy tales, then gives extensive analyses of well-known fairy tales, including “Hansel and Gretel,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Snow White,” “Goldilocks and the Three Bears,” “The Sleeping Beauty,” and “Cinderella.”

Bottigheimer, Ruth B. Grimms’ Bad Girls and Bold Boys: The Moral and Social Vision of the Tales. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987. Bottigheimer discusses the fairy-tale tradition; specific patterns involving the way in which characters speak, endure punishment, and struggle for power; and the value systems implicit in the tales.

Jones, Steven Swann. The Fairy Tale: The Magic Mirror of the Imagination. New York: Routledge, 2002. This book gives a history of the fairy-tale genre, awards special attention to the roles of men and women in fairy tales of the past, and describes how those figures influenced more contemporary stories.

Mendlesohn, Farah. Rhetorics of Fantasy. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2008. Mendlesohn wrestles with the definition of “fantasy” and suggests that four main categories exist in studying fantasy: the portal-quest, the immersive, the intrusive, and the liminal. Each category, Mendlesohn argues, employs different rhetorical techniques.

Tatar, Maria. Off With Their Heads: Fairy Tales and the Culture of Childhood. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992. Tatar examines how important writers in the fairy-tale tradition (Perrault, the Brothers Grimm) revised fairy tales to be more didactic for children. In her examination of fairy tales, Tatar finds the typical portrayal of children problematic, especially since the contemporary target audience of fairy tales is children.

Warner, Marina. From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994. Warner studies the characters whose role is the telling of fairy tales and analyzes gender roles, specifically those of women, including the typical portrayals of daughters, mothers, stepmothers, brides, and even runaway girls.

Zipes, Jack. Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion: The Classical Genre for Children and the Process of Civilization. New York: Routledge, 1991. Zipes focuses on the didactic function of fairy tales, ranging from the work of the Grimm brothers to later fairy tales. Zipes argues that the primary function of fairy tales is to instill morals and lessons in their child readers.