Today many people think they know all about Pinocchio. They believe that he is a wooden marionette who becomes a human boy; that he was swallowed by a huge fish; and that whenever he told lies his nose grew longer. (As a result of this last occurrence, for over a hundred years politicians have been caricatured with a lengthened nose when they prevaricate in public—especially Richard Nixon, who already had a kind of Pinocchio nose.)
These people are right, but often only in a very limited way. They know Pinocchio only from the sentimentalized and simplified Disney cartoon, or the condensed versions of his story that are thought more suitable for children. The original novel by Carlo Collodi, which today survives mainly in scholarly editions, is much longer, far more complex and interesting, and also much darker. The critic Glauco Cambon has called it one of the three most influential works in Italian literature (the others, he claims, are Dante’s Divine Comedy and Manzoni’s The Betrothed). For him, and those who know the real version, The Adventures of Pinocchio is not an amusing, light-hearted fantasy, but a serious fable about art and life. It is a story about growing up—and it is also, in essential ways, a story about growing up poor and Italian.
Carlo Collodi, whose real name was Carlo Lorenzi, was born in Florence in 1826, the first of ten children of household servants. When he did well in the local school, his parents’ employer paid for his further education in the hope that he would become a priest. This did not happen. Instead, after graduation Lorenzi went to work for a bookseller, and eventually became a liberal journalist, skeptical of both education and the church. In Pinocchio, school is something that all boys dread, and religion is hardly mentioned.
Originally Pinocchio was published as a serial in the newspaper Il gionale per i bambini (The paper for children). It appeared in eight parts between July and October of 1881, and then in eleven more installments from February 1882 to January 1883. The form of the story was that of a picaresque novel, in which, perhaps because of the pressures of time, some of the chapters are more original and/or better integrated into the story than others. Several of these episodes—for example those in which Pinocchio meets a giant serpent, is caught in a trap and made to serve as a watchdog, rides on the back of a pigeon, and is mistaken for a fish by a monstrous green-haired fisherman—are often left out of the condensed English-language versions.
The Disney film omits even more of the story, and changes it drastically. Geppetto, Pinocchio’s foster father, appears to be a prosperous toy maker, and the town where he lives looks Swiss or Bavarian: his workshop is full of music boxes and cuckoo clocks. In the original story, however, Geppetto is a desperately poor Italian woodcarver. When the film begins, Pinocchio is merely a wooden toy; he comes to life only when a fairy grants Geppetto’s wish for a child. In the book, Pinocchio is alive from the start. Though he is only a nameless stick of firewood in the shop of the carpenter Master Anthony, he can already speak and move. When Master Anthony strikes the stick with his axe, it cries out “Ouch! You hurt me!” The carpenter is terrified, and offers the piece of wood to his friend Geppetto, who wants to make a marionette. It continues to act up, mocking Geppetto and striking Master Anthony, provoking two fistfights between the old friends.
When Geppetto gets home, he begins to carve the marionette. But as soon as Pinocchio’s mouth is finished he laughs at Geppetto and sticks out his tongue, and once he has arms, he snatches Geppetto’s wig off his head. When his legs and feet are finished, he runs away.
From the start, Collodi’s Pinocchio is not only more self-conscious but far less simple than the cute little toy boy of the cartoon. He is not only naïve, but impulsive, rude, selfish, and violent. In theological terms, he begins life in a state of original sin; while from a psychologist’s point of view, he represents the amoral, self-centered small child, all uncensored id.
Unable to control his own impulses, Pinocchio provokes external control. As he runs down the street, pursued by Geppetto, he is stopped by a policeman, who returns him to his foster father. Immediately, in a maneuver that will be familiar to many parents of small children, Pinocchio flings himself on the ground and declares that he won’t walk anymore. A crowd gathers and (like some modern experts on child development) begins to blame Geppetto for Pinocchio’s delinquency. Eventually they convince the policeman to put Geppetto in prison. In Collodi’s world, the law is always stupid and often corrupt. It is usually the victim of a crime, rather than the perpetrator, who is punished. (Later in the story, when Pinocchio goes to court to complain that he has been robbed, the judge, who is a gorilla, sends him rather than the robbers to jail. He is released only when he falsely admits that he is a criminal.)
Once he is free again, Pinocchio returns home, where he meets what many readers have recognized as his conscience, or external superego, in the form of a Talking Cricket. The Cricket scolds Pinocchio for running away, and warns him about the dangers of idleness: if he quits school, he will grow up to be a perfect jackass. But Pinocchio refuses to listen. The only trade in the world that will suit him, he says, is that of “eating, drinking, sleeping, having fun, and living the life of a vagabond from morning to night.” When the Cricket remarks that “everyone who follows that trade is bound to end up in the poorhouse or in prison,” Pinocchio becomes angry and throws a wooden mallet at the Cricket, killing it. It will appear in the story again, however, first as a mysterious black-clad doctor and finally as a ghost.
Pinocchio’s external conscience also appears in the Disney cartoon, but there it has been turned into a comic figure, and rechristened “Jiminy Cricket” (the phrase is, very aptly, an old-fashioned American euphemism for “Jesus Christ”). Jiminy Cricket wears the top hat and tails of a vaudeville performer, he sings and dances, and most of the time his admonitions are amusing but ineffective. Pinocchio only half listens to him, but does him no harm.
Disney’s Pinocchio is portrayed as about five or six years old, and throughout the story he remains innocent and simple, like the ideal child of romantic literature. He is without rudeness or malice: what gets him into trouble is curiosity and boredom. Collodi’s hero is clearly several years older, and full of aggressive and rebellious impulses which are only tamed at the end of the story. Here he recalls a classic character in American children’s fiction of the late nineteenth century, the Good Bad Boy.
This figure made his first important appearance in Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s Story of a Bad Boy (1869). Aldrich was born and largely grew up in Portsmouth, New Hampshire; he became a popular journalist, poet, and novelist, and later the editor of the Atlantic Monthly. His hero, Tom Bailey, who was based on his own childhood self, is “bad” only in contrast to the almost unbelievably pious, obedient, and self-sacrificing little boys and girls who were the protagonists of so many contemporary “moral tales” for children. Tom Bailey has a sense of enterprise and fun. He and his friends occasionally skip school, but they do not become juvenile delinquents. They stage elaborate snowball fights and beat up a local bully. The worst thing they do is to burn an old stagecoach and fire some cannon balls left over from the Civil War. Aldrich’s book became very popular, and many imitations followed, including James Otis’s Toby Tyler (1881), George Wilbur’s Peck’s Bad Boy and his Pa (1883), and eventually Booth Tarkington’s Penrod (1914). But though Toby Tyler runs away from home to join the circus, and the other protagonists are occasionally disobedient or naughty, they are essentially good boys.
The most famous descendant of Aldrich’s Tom Bailey, however, is seriously delinquent. This is the eponymous hero of Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer, first published in 1876. Tom’s boyhood home, Hannibal, Missouri, is closely based on Twain’s own hometown of St. Petersburg, and his well-behaved brother and worried mother reappear as Sid and Aunt Polly. Tom is not just adventurous and occasionally naughty. He lies, steals, smokes, skips school, causes an uproar in church, runs away from home, and associates with dubious companions. He loves freedom and pleasure and craves adventure. He is impulsive, thoughtless, and mischievous. At the same time Tom is basically good at heart. He learns from his mistakes, and at the end of the book he is forgiven and reconciled with his family and society. The same thing, of course, happens in Twain’s later masterpiece, Huckleberry Finn (1884).
Whether or not Collodi read Tom Sawyer, there are similarities between the two stories. But Pinocchio’s world is much bleaker than Tom’s. Tom’s Aunt Polly is by no means rich, but she owns a house with a fenced garden. Pinocchio’s foster father, the carpenter Geppetto, is old and seriously poor and must worry constantly about where his next meal is coming from. He lives in a small room under the front steps of a building, with one tiny window, and all he has for furniture is “an old chair, a rickety old bed, and a tumble-down table. A fireplace full of burning logs was painted on the wall opposite the door. Over the fireplace there was painted a pot full of something which kept boiling happily away and sending up clouds of what looked like real steam.”
In Geppetto’s room, warmth and hot food are mocking two-dimensional illusions.
The St. Petersburg of Mark Twain’s childhood was a sometimes violent frontier town. As a boy, Twain saw a man stabbed to death, just as Tom Sawyer does. But Pinocchio’s world is even more dangerous; it is full of people who want to exploit and rob and even kill the hero. When Tom and Huck run away from home, they meet both good and bad characters. Pinocchio encounters only hostile humans, and for him even the animal kingdom is dangerous. Though he is helped by a bird and a fish, his most important opponents are animals, two of whom also have parallels in Twain’s work. These are the Fox and the Cat, shabby but pretentious con men very reminiscent of the King and the Duke in Huckleberry Finn (1884). (Since Pinocchio was not translated into English until 1892, it seems likely that this is just an instance of types familiar since Aesop’s Fables reappearing in fiction.) The King and the Duke spend most of their energy on robbing and defrauding strangers, and they do not commit murder. The Fox and the Cat, however, plot to kill Pinocchio for his gold pieces and almost succeed. In both books the con men come to a bad end, but only Huck Finn feels pity for them. When Huck sees the King and the Duke tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail, he remarks:
Well, it made me sick to see it; and I was sorry for them poor pitiful rascals, it seemed like I couldn’t ever feel any hardness against them any more in the world. It was a dreadful thing to see.
At the end of Pinocchio, the hero and his father come across the Fox and the Cat, who once pretended to be blind and lame. Now the Cat is really blind and the Fox sick and almost hairless, and they have become beggars.
“Oh, Pinocchio,” the Fox cried in a tearful voice. “Give us some alms, we beg of you! We are old, tired, and sick.”
“Sick,” repeated the Cat.
“If you are poor, you deserve it! Remember the old proverb which says: Stolen money never bears fruit.”
And though the Fox and the Cat beg for mercy, all they get from Pinocchio is two more proverbs, after which Pinocchio and Geppetto “calmly went on their way.’” This ending may strike us as harsh, but it is also closer to the pattern of the classic European folk tale, in which villains seldom reform and do not need to be forgiven.
At one point in Tom Sawyer, Tom runs away from home to Jackson’s Island in the Mississippi, where he and his friends Huck and Joe can enjoy themselves without interference from adults. They fish, smoke, and pretend to be pirates. But both Tom and Joe are troubled by thoughts of the families they have left behind. They are away only a few days, however, and when they become homesick and return to Hannibal, they are greeted as heroes. The moral seems to be that you can skip school, have a wonderful time camping out, worry and frighten your relatives, and get away with it. When Pinocchio leaves home, on the other hand, he encounters a series of dangers and enemies. A giant snake blocks his path, and when he enters a field to steal grapes, he is caught in a mantrap by a farmer, who uses him as a watchdog to guard his chicken coop.
Pinocchio also travels with other boys to a kind of children’s paradise called Funland, where there is no school and “the days go by in play and good times from morning till night.” But his holiday lasts far longer than Tom’s. He lives in Funland for five months without tiring of it or missing Geppetto. Unlike Tom, he is not troubled by his conscience, or by thoughts of anyone from his former life. Then, as the Talking Cricket has predicted, Pinocchio and his best friend Lampwick gradually turn into jackasses. The first sign of this is that he wakes up one morning with ass’s ears. His reaction is violent: “He began to cry, to scream, to knock his head against the wall, but the more he shrieked, the longer and more hairy grew his ears.”
When he discovers that the same thing has happened to Lampwick, they begin to laugh, but soon they are fully transformed and can only bray. Then they, with all their comrades, are taken to market and sold by the wicked wagon driver who has lured them to Funland in order to make a profit on their inevitable transformation. Pinocchio goes first to a circus, where he is forced to perform tricks, and is beaten and starved; when he becomes lame, he is sold to a dealer in hides who tries to drown him in order to peddle his skin.
These events are both a metaphor and a warning, one that Collodi reinforces by remarking that “by virtue of playing all the time and never studying, those poor gullible boys turned into so many donkeys.” The harsh moral (as true today as it was in Collodi’s time) is that poor boys who quit school and hang about doing nothing, playing and enjoying themselves, are likely to end up as exploited and overworked laborers—or possibly dead.
Pinocchio’s metamorphoses are frightening, but thematically interesting. During the book he moves from the vegetable to the animal kingdom, rising gradually within each class. His name, which in Tuscany at the time meant “pine nut” or “pine seed”—the contemporary term is pignolo—associates him with a plant. He begins life as a featureless stick of firewood (possibly pine wood), which is then transformed into a wooden puppet. Next he moves through animal identities (watchdog and donkey), and finally achieves full human status. Metaphorically, it is the same progression that we see in children, who start out as more or less inert matter, then become ignorant if lovable bundles of need and greed, with short attention spans and a wish to explore the world without regard for its dangers. Like animals, they resist confinement, live in the present, and continually seek food and amusement.
Apart from this possible parallel, why did Collodi chose a marionette for his hero instead of just a naughty boy? Possibly because in the theater what scholars call “performing objects”—puppets, marionettes, automatons, shadow figures, animated props—have advantages denied to human actors. Actors are never the same as the parts they play, and however skilled they may be, we are always aware that there is a real person beneath the disguise. Performing objects, on the other hand, can appear as pure representations of some individual type or character. (For this reason, the British stage designer Gordon Craig once expressed the hope that in the future all actors would be replaced by puppets.)
Pinocchio has sometimes been seen, especially by readers who think first of the Disney version, as a classic fairy tale. If so, it is a tale of a special type. In most fairy stories with a male protagonist, the young hero leaves his original family, has adventures, and ends up marrying a princess and starting a new family. Folklorists refer to such tales as Stories of Adolescence. Pinocchio, by contrast, is what is called a Story of Childhood, like “Jack and the Beanstalk” or “Hansel and Gretel.” Here the hero does not start a new family; instead he ends up back home with a beloved and loving parent. The same pattern occurs in another well-known Italian children’s classic, Dino Buzzati’s The Bears’ Famous Invasion of Sicily, where the central relationship is also between a father and a son, and one important motive behind King Leander’s invasion is to find his lost child, Tony. (Interestingly, when Tony is discovered, he is working for humans as an entertainer—a kind of puppet.)
In folktales the young hero or heroine is often aided by a supernatural figure: a dwarf, a talking animal, a wise woman, or a fairy godmother. In Pinocchio this role is played by the Blue Fairy, whose most distinctive feature is the color of her hair. Blue or green hair is a traditional attribute of supernatural beings; sometimes good or neutral, like the Green Man and Green Children of British folklore, and at other times evil like Bluebeard. In Pinocchio the Blue Fairy appears in many guises. At first she is a white-faced little girl who declares that she is dead, but she soon proves able to save Pinocchio from near-death, summoning three doctors to cure him. When they part, she claims to be his older sister. Next she appears as a young working woman who takes Pinocchio home, feeds him cauliflower and cake, and declares that she will be his Mama. Later he sees her as a little she-goat with indigo hair, on a rock in the middle of the sea. Finally, at the end of the story, she appears in a dream as a beautiful fairy who changes him into a real boy.
Collodi, however, seems to refuse the idea that Pinocchio is a romantic fairy tale at the very start of his book.
Once upon a time, there was …
“A king!” my little readers will say right away. “No, children, you are mistaken. Once upon a time there was a piece of wood.
It wasn’t expensive wood, just the ordinary kind that we take from a woodpile in the winter and put in the stove …”
In other words, his story will be grounded not in a world of high-flown fantasy but in the harsh economic realities of working-class life in Italy in the late nineteenth century. It is a place of constant, grinding poverty, eased only by love and self-sacrifice. Pinocchio begins life as a rebellious, inconsiderate, self-centered little boy who disobeys adults and disregards rules, always with dangerous results. Instead of going to school, for instance, he sells the schoolbook Geppetto has bought him and buys a ticket to the puppet theater. There he is entrapped by the terrifying Puppet-Master and nearly burned alive on a kitchen fire.
Willingness to work and sacrifice himself for others is Pinocchio’s eventual salvation. At the theater he escapes death when he impulsively offers himself as a substitute for another doomed puppet, briefly touching the Puppet-Master’s heart. His final transformation is the result of his willingness to work long hours at an exhausting job to earn money for his ailing foster father, Geppetto, and then for his supernatural mother, the Blue Fairy.
In the Disney film it is inexperience and bad advice rather than selfishness and disobedience that get Pinocchio into trouble. He is led to the puppet theater by two villains, the Cat and the Fox, who—in a very Hollywood touch—promise him fame and money in a song whose refrain is “It’s great to be a celebrity.” Of course, in Disney’s hands Pinocchio did become a kind of celebrity; he also, in the film version, becomes prosperous. In the original novel this does not happen: Pinocchio merely manages, through hard work, to support his foster father—though in the end the Blue Fairy does transform their shabby room into a comfortable cottage and give him forty golden coins. But the important thing is that he becomes “a proper boy,” un ragazzino per bene” which in Italian, as the critic Ann Lawson Lucas points out, has a double meaning: Pinocchio is now both a real boy and a good boy.
Will Pinocchio remain a good boy? And, if he does, will readers continue to care about him? The book is thirty-six chapters long, and only in the last two does he consistently behave well. Delinquency and rebellion are more interesting and more fun to read about than moral perfection. As the critic Lois Kuznets says, “Pinocchio is loved the better for his misdemeanors.” In this, he may remind us of other Good Bad Boy heroes, both in fiction and in real life. It is perhaps an especially popular type in Italy, where a grown man with a warm heart, a love of escapades, and impatience with social rules and restrictions is often seen as charming and seductive. If someone like this appears truly (though sometimes only temporarily) sorry for his transgressions, he may be forgiven again and again by his friends and relatives, as repentant sinners are by the Catholic Church.
Pinocchio is an Italian story in several other ways. It is full of Northern Italian landscapes and dishes, such as the red mullet with tomato sauce and tripe à la Parmesan that the Fox and the Cat dine on at the hero’s expense. It also embodies the traditional Italian belief that the family is of central importance. You can have a good time with your friends, but you can only really trust your kin. Good parents will sacrifice themselves for their children without a murmur, as Geppetto does when there is nothing to eat in the house but three pears, and he allows Pinocchio thoughtlessly and greedily to devour them all. (This episode, like many others, was eliminated from the Disney film.) Good children will also sacrifice themselves for their parents in a real crisis, as Pinocchio does when he and his father, like Jonah in the Bible, escape from the belly of the Great Shark, and he carries Geppetto out of the sea on his back.
Some critics have noted other parallels between Pinocchio and Christian legend. They have remarked that the hero is the foster son of a carpenter, and that he dies and is resurrected at least three times. (In one of these deaths, he is hung on a tree.) They have also suggested that the Blue Fairy is a version of the Virgin, who in art often wears a blue robe—though Mary’s robe is usually sky-blue, while Collodi describes the Fairy’s hair as indigo.
To some readers, Pinocchio is a sacrificial victim; others have imagined him as a hero of the rebellious working class, whose escapades defy social rules. Psychologists have seen his escape from the Great Shark as a kind of rebirth, and suggested that his expanding nose tells us that lies are virile. Like most great works of children’s literature, Pinocchio lends itself to many and varied interpretations, and it will surely continue to do so in the future.