Fairy tale

• 1. Defining The Genre

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  A fairy tale is a short story that belongs to the folklore genre. Such stories typically feature magic, enchantments, and mythical or fanciful beings. In most cultures, there is no clear line separating myth from folk or fairy tale. All these together form the literature of preliterate societies. Fairy tales may be distinguished from other folk narratives such as legends which generally involve belief in the veracity of the events described. They also differ from explicit moral tales including beast fables. Prevalent elements include dragons, dwarfs, elves, fairies, giants, gnomes, goblins, griffins, merfolk, monsters, monarchy, pixies, talking animals, trolls, unicorns, witches, wizards, woodwoses, magic, and enchantments. The term itself comes from the translation of Madame D'Aulnoy's Conte de fées first used in her collection in 1697. Common parlance conflates fairy tales with beast fables and other folktales. Scholars differ on the degree to which the presence of fairies and similarly mythical beings should be taken as a differentiator. Vladimir Propp criticized the common distinction between fairy tales and animal tales on the grounds that many tales contained both fantastic elements and animals. Nevertheless to select works for his analysis Propp used all Russian folktales classified as folklore Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index 300-749. His own analysis identified fairy tales by their plot elements but that in itself has been criticized. As Stith Thompson points out talking animals and the presence of magic seem to be more common to the fairy tale than fairies themselves. However the mere presence of animals that talk does not make a tale a fairy tale especially when the animal is clearly a mask on a human face as in fables. In his essay On Fairy-Stories J.R.R.Tolkien agreed with the exclusion of fairies from the definition defining fairy tales as stories about the adventures of men in Faërie the land of fairies fairytale princes and princesses dwarves elves and not only other magical species but many other marvels. Steven Swann Jones identified the presence of magic as the feature by which fairy tales can be distinguished from other sorts of folktales. Davidson and Chaudri identify transformation as the key feature of the genre. From a psychological point of view Jean Chiriac argued for the necessity of the fantastic in these narratives. In terms of aesthetic values Italo Calvino cited the fairy tale as a prime example of quickness in literature because of the economy and concision of the tales.

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• 2. Ancient Oral Roots

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  The oral tradition of the fairy tale came long before the written page. Tales were told or enacted dramatically rather than written down and handed down from generation to generation. Because of this the history of their development is necessarily obscure and blurred. Fairy tales appear now and again in written literature throughout literate cultures as in The Golden Ass which includes Cupid and Psyche Roman 100-200 AD or the Panchatantra India 3rd century BC. But it is unknown to what extent these reflect the actual folk tales even of their own time. The stylistic evidence indicates that these and many later collections reworked folk tales into literary forms. What they do show is that the fairy tale has ancient roots older than the Arabian Nights collection of magical tales compiled circa 1500 AD such as Vikram and the Vampire and Bel and the Dragon. Besides such collections and individual tales in China Taoist philosophers such as Liezi and Zhuangzi recounted fairy tales in their philosophical works. In the broader definition of the genre the first famous Western fairy tales are those of Aesop 6th century BC in ancient Greece. Scholarship points out that Medieval literature contains early versions or predecessors of later known tales and motifs such as the grateful dead The Bird Lover or the quest for the lost wife. Recognizable folktales have also been reworked as the plot of folk literature and oral epics. Jack Zipes writes in When Dreams Came True There are fairy tale elements in Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene and in many of William Shakespeare plays. King Lear can be considered a literary variant of fairy tales such as Water and Salt and Cap O' Rushes. The tale itself resurfaced in Western literature in the 16th and 17th centuries with The Facetious Nights of Straparola by Giovanni Francesco Straparola Italy 1550 and 1553 which contains many fairy tales in its inset tales and the Neapolitan tales of Giambattista Basile Naples 1634-36 which are all fairy tales. Carlo Gozzi made use of many fairy tale motifs among his Commedia dell'Arte scenarios including among them one based on The Love For Three Oranges 1761. Simultaneously Pu Songling in China included many fairy tales in his collection Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio published posthumously 1766 which has been described by Yuken Fujita of Keio University as having a reputation as the most outstanding short story collection.

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• 3. The Salon Era Revolution

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  In the mid-17th century a vogue for magical tales emerged among the intellectuals who frequented the salons of Paris. These salons were regular gatherings hosted by prominent aristocratic women where women and men could gather together to discuss the issues of the day. In the 1630s aristocratic women began to gather in their own living rooms salons to discuss the topics of their choice: arts and letters politics and social matters of immediate concern to the women of their class: marriage love financial and physical independence and access to education. This was a time when women were barred from receiving a formal education. Some of the most gifted women writers of the period came out of these early salons such as Madeleine de Scudéry and Madame de Lafayette which encouraged women's independence and pushed against the gender barriers that defined their lives. The salonnières argued particularly for love and intellectual compatibility between the sexes opposing the system of arranged marriages. Sometime in the middle of the 17th century a passion for the conversational parlour game based on the plots of old folk tales swept through the salons. Each salonnière was called upon to retell an old tale or rework an old theme spinning clever new stories that not only showcased verbal agility and imagination but also slyly commented on the conditions of aristocratic life. Great emphasis was placed on a mode of delivery that seemed natural and spontaneous. The decorative language of the fairy tales served an important function: disguising the rebellious subtext of the stories and sliding them past the court censors. Critiques of court life and even of the king were embedded in extravagant tales and in dark sharply dystopian ones. Not surprisingly the tales by women often featured young but clever aristocratic girls whose lives were controlled by the arbitrary whims of fathers kings and elderly wicked fairies as well as tales in which groups of wise fairies i.e. intelligent independent women stepped in and put all to rights. The salon tales as they were originally written and published have been preserved in a monumental work called Le Cabinet des Fées an enormous collection of stories from the 17th and 18th centuries.

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• 4. Scholarly Classification Systems

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  Folklorists have classified fairy tales in various ways. The Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index and the morphological analysis of Vladimir Propp are among the most notable. This system groups fairy and folk tales according to their overall plot. Common identifying features are picked out to decide which tales are grouped together. Much therefore depends on what features are regarded as decisive. For instance tales like Cinderella in which a persecuted heroine with the help of the fairy godmother or similar magical helper attends an event or three in which she wins the love of a prince and is identified as his true bride are classified as type 510 the persecuted heroine. Some such tales are The Wonderful Birch Aschenputtel Katie Woodencloak The Story of Tam and Cam Ye Xian Cap O' Rushes Catskin Fair Brown and Trembling Finette Cendron Allerleirauh. Further analysis of the tales shows that in Cinderella The Wonderful Birch The Story of Tam and Cam Ye Xian and Aschenputtel the heroine is persecuted by her stepmother and refused permission to go to the ball or other event and in Fair Brown and Trembling and Finette Cendron by her sisters and other female figures and these are grouped as 510A; while in Cap O' Rushes Catskin and Allerleirauh the heroine is driven from home by her father's persecutions and must take work in a kitchen elsewhere and these are grouped as 510B. But in Katie Woodencloak she is driven from home by her stepmother's persecutions and must take service in a kitchen elsewhere and in Tattercoats she is refused permission to go to the ball by her grandfather. Given these features common with both types of 510 Katie Woodencloak is classified as 510A because the villain is the stepmother and Tattercoats as 510B because the grandfather fills the father's role. Vladimir Propp specifically studied a collection of Russian fairy tales but his analysis has been found useful for the tales of other countries. Having criticized Aarne-Thompson type analysis for ignoring what motifs did in stories and because the motifs used were not clearly distinct he analyzed the tales for the function each character and action fulfilled and concluded that a tale was composed of thirty-one elements functions and seven characters or spheres of action the princess and her father are a single sphere. While the elements were not all required for all tales when they appeared they did so in an invariant order except that each individual element might be negated twice so that it would appear three times as when in Brother and Sister the brother resists drinking from enchanted streams twice so that it is the third that enchants him. Propp's 31 functions also fall within six stages preparation complication transference struggle return recognition and a stage can also be repeated which can affect the perceived order of elements.

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• 5. Psychological Interpretations

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  Many fairy tales have been interpreted for their purported significance. One mythological interpretation saw many fairy tales including Hansel and Gretel Sleeping Beauty and The Frog King as solar myths; this mode of interpretation subsequently became rather less popular. Freudian Jungian and other psychological analyses have also explicated many tales but no mode of interpretation has established itself definitively. Specific analyses have often been criticized for lending great importance to motifs that are not in fact integral to the tale; this has often stemmed from treating one instance of a fairy tale as the definitive text where the tale has been told and retold in many variations. In variants of Bluebeard the wife's curiosity is betrayed by a blood-stained key by an egg's breaking or by the singing of a rose she wore without affecting the tale but interpretations of specific variants have claimed that the precise object is integral to the tale. Other folklorists have explained the figure of the wicked stepmother in a historical/sociological context: many women did die in childbirth their husbands remarried and the new stepmothers competed with the children of the first marriage for resources. Psychoanalysts such as Bruno Bettelheim who regarded the cruelty of older fairy tales as indicative of psychological conflicts strongly criticized this expurgation because it weakened their usefulness to both children and adults as ways of symbolically resolving issues. Fairy tales do teach children how to deal with difficult times. To quote Rebecca Walters 2017 Fairytales and folktales are part of the cultural conserve that can be used to address children's fears…. and give them some role training in an approach that honors the children's window of tolerance. These fairy tales teach children how to deal with certain social situations and helps them to find their place in society. Jungian Analyst and fairy tale scholar Marie Louise Von Franz interprets fairy tales based on Jung's view of fairy tales as a spontaneous and naive product of soul which can only express what soul is. That means she looks at fairy tales as images of different phases of experiencing the reality of the soul. They are the purest and simplest expression of collective unconscious psychic processes and they represent the archetypes in their simplest barest and most concise form because they are less overlaid with conscious material than myths and legends. In this pure form the archetypal images afford us the best clues to the understanding of the processes going on in the collective psyche. The fairy tale itself is its own best explanation; that is its meaning is contained in the totality of its motifs connected by the thread of the story. [...] Every fairy tale is a relatively closed system compounding one essential psychological meaning which is expressed in a series of symbolical pictures and events and is discoverable in these. I have come to the conclusion that all fairy tales endeavour to describe one and the same psychic fact but a fact so complex and far-reaching and so difficult for us to realize in all its different aspects that hundreds of tales and thousands of repetitions with a musician's variation are needed until this unknown fact is delivered into consciousness; and even then the theme is not exhausted. This unknown fact is what Jung calls the Self which is the psychic reality of the collective unconscious. [...] Every archetype is in its essence only one aspect of the collective unconscious as well as always representing also the whole collective unconscious.

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• 6. Disneyfication And Adaptation

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  Originally adults were the audience of a fairy tale just as often as children. Literary fairy tales appeared in works intended for adults but in the 19th and 20th centuries the fairy tale became associated with children's literature. The précieuses including Madame d'Aulnoy intended their works for adults but regarded their source as the tales that servants or other women of lower class would tell to children. Indeed a novel of that time depicting a countess's suitor offering to tell such a tale has the countess exclaim that she loves fairy tales as if she were still a child. Among the late précieuses Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont redacted a version of Beauty and the Beast for children and it is her tale that is best known today. The Brothers Grimm titled their collection Children's and Household Tales and rewrote their tales after complaints that they were not suitable for children. In the modern era fairy tales were altered so that they could be read to children. The Brothers Grimm concentrated mostly on sexual references; Rapunzel in the first edition revealed the prince's visits by asking why her clothing had grown tight thus letting the witch deduce that she was pregnant but in subsequent editions carelessly revealed that it was easier to pull up the prince than the witch. On the other hand in many respects violence particularly when punishing villains was increased. Other later revisions cut out violence; J.R.R.Tolkien noted that The Juniper Tree often had its cannibalistic stew cut out in a version intended for children. The moralizing strain in the Victorian era altered the classical tales to teach lessons as when George Cruikshank rewrote Cinderella in 1854 to contain temperance themes. His acquaintance Charles Dickens protested In an utilitarian age of all other times it is a matter of grave importance that fairy tales should be respected. Walt Disney's influential Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was largely although certainly not solely intended for the children's market. With the cost of over 400 percent of the budget and more than 300 artists assistants and animators Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was arguably one of the highest work force demanded film at that time. The studio even hired Don Graham to open animation training programs for more than 700 staff. As for the motion capture and personality expression the studio used a dancer Marjorie Celeste from the beginning to the end for the best results. Disney and his creative successors have returned to traditional and literary fairy tales numerous times with films such as Cinderella 1950 Sleeping Beauty 1959 The Little Mermaid 1989 and Beauty and the Beast 1991. Disney's influence helped establish the fairy tale genre as a genre for children and has been accused by some of bowdlerizing the gritty naturalism and sometimes unhappy endings of many folk fairy tales. However others note that the softening of fairy tales occurred long before Disney some of which was even done by the Grimm brothers themselves.

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