Hello, friend! Welcome to a new post in The Creator’s Roulette! Do you like fairytales? Are there stories that you revisit from time to time, or whose retellings you want to read? I have poet, novelist and PhD Jennifer deBie with me today and she studied her PhD in fairytales. I enjoyed learning about these stories from her and I hope you will too. Let’s get started.
Fairytales: Stories to Come Home To
A guest post by Jennifer deBie
When I began studying fairytales as part of my doctoral research it was with a very specific objective in mind, namely cataloguing the effect that creating what we think of as “fairytale” by recording “folklore” in the 18th and 19th centuries had on British literature. New translations of Charles Perrault’s 1697 Histoires ou Contes du Temps passé (we know them today as the Tales of Mother Goose) were cycling through the British market, the Grimm brothers and contemporaries like von Arnim and Hoffmann were either outright recording and publishing folklore, or incorporating it into works that we recognize today as early horror, and the British publishing market was really kicking into high gear as printing became easier and easier, and the reading public became a wider and wider potential buying market. Not to say that the British didn’t have their own wealth of folklore and legends to draw from as well, it’s just that the French and German tales that were being published in this time period were new and exotic, exciting rather than familiar.
All of this made for fascinating doctoral research, but in the years since I have come to see fairytales everywhere. They pervade English language literature in ways that little else has, and by extension have reached the rest of the world. Yes, there is the Disney-shaped elephant in the room (we’ll get to it later), but let’s set that aside for a moment, because in the 18th and 19th centuries, when English language literature was being shaped into the forms and fables that we still use today, fairytale was what we used to do it.
It’s what we still use today.
In 1837, when Hans Christian Andersen needed to convey the depth of his doomed affections for Edvard Collin in a time when those affections could get them both ostracized, if not killed, he wrote a fairytale. Not a Petrarchan sonnet, the traditional declaration of love to an unattainable object. Not merely a letter to be quietly delivered and then discarded or preserved at the recipient’s discretion. He wrote one of the most beloved fairytales of all time, and published it for the world to read and cherish for centuries to come: Den lille havfrue, or The Little Mermaid.
In 1905, when little Sara Crew of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess needs to comfort herself following the death of her father and her own subsequent penury and indentured servitude, she imagines herself as a version of Cinderella. In her darkest hours, she comforts herself with fairytale.
Circling back to the Disney of it all, when Walt and his team were casting around for the story they would transform into the first, full-length, colour, animated feature film from that storied studio, they chose Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937). In a time when North America was still staggering under the weight of the Great Depression, in some of our darkest days, we all found comfort in fairytale.
Jean Cocteau’s 1947 masterpiece, La Belle et la Bête is arguably the best version of Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont’s 1757 fairytale of the same name. Certainly it captures the magic and the dreamy, sumptuous nature of that old, old story. You might recognize it better at Beauty and the Beast. Come at me, Disney stans.
The end of the 20th century brought us Paula Meehan’s beautiful prose poem, “Folktale”. A little story all her own that I’m sure rang true when she published it in her collection, Mysteries of the Home (1996), and sends chills through me every time I read it today, in our world of flexible truths and alternative facts, Meehan’s tale feels at once prescient, and ancient.
And now, in the 21st century, we are inundated with fairytale in all its glorious adaptation. There are songs like Chuck Wicks’ bittersweet “Stealing Cinderella” (2007), Harry Chapmin’s timeless cautionary tale “Cats in the Cradle” (1974), and the anthem to my angsty adolescence Avril Lavigne’s “My Happy Ending” (2004), among many, many others. Or films, like Jack et la Mécanique du Coeur (Jack and the Cuckoo-Clock Heart) (2013), 2001’s hysterical sendup of the entire genre, Shrek, comics like Bill Willingham’s ongoing Fables series (2002-present), the subsequent videogame adaptation of those comics, The Wolf Among Us (2013-2014), and the deliciously dark (if a little madcap) Siren TV series (2018-2020) just to name a few.
Then, of course, the books. Thousands of books, millions even, have been based on fairytale in come capacity, but some personal favourites of mine come from indie novelists, like the sexy, tongue-in-cheek retellings of Cassandra Gannon, the beautifully winding work of Carol Carman, and the cleverly, fairytale adjacent writing of M.L. Farb. Each of these women takes something intrinsic to the DNA of a fairytale, whether it’s the characters, the logic, or the kingdom far, far away, and adapts it into something of her own. She makes something new and exciting out of the inherently, intrinsically familiar.
Because fairytales have always been familiar to us. They are old forms. Call backs to a time when all we could do to pass the winter nights was tell ourselves stories, and retell them again. When forests were dark and terrible places where a child could be eaten by a wolf, wander off a cliff, or be stolen by bandits, we told stories to our children about witches and enchantments, and the things that go bump in the night outside the safety of our villages. When marriages were a matter of arrangement rather than love, we told our daughters stories about monstrous lovers who were not so monstrous once you got to know them. When we were figuring out beginnings of an international publishing industry, fairytales are what we imported, and exported again. When we want to tell stories of love, stories to comfort, stories to make us wonder, fairytales are what we return to.
They are, at the end of the day, our storytelling home.
Thank you for hanging out with us today. Connect with Jennifer on Twitter, Instagram and her website. Her latest novel, Heretic, was released by Wild Wolf Publishing in early 2022.
Jennifer mentions A Little Princess and it was one of my favorite books growing up. I would love to reread it in the future but there are also so many beautifully retellings coming out that it is hard for me at this time to revisit old favorites. 🙂 Just in the last few years Orbit has published retellings of Odyssey (Ithaca), Beowulf, Cinderella (Ten Thousand Stitches), and Rapunzel (The Book of Gothel).
What are some of your favorite fairytales?
Photo on Unsplash
I’d never thought of this in relation to fairy tales but it makes so much sense. “When marriages were a matter of arrangement rather than love, we told our daughters stories about monstrous lovers who were not so monstrous once you got to know them.” Thank you for the thought provoking article and I’m going to add some more books to my reading list.