A pretty girl sleeps on and on. We wonder if she dreams. An angry little man makes gold from straw. We wonder why he barters for a child. Seven dwarfs live in a cottage. We want to name them. A fish girl longs for a land man. We want her to land him. A vegetable touches the clouds. We want to climb it. A wheezing beast stares longingly at a beautiful girl who nervously tries to eat. We hope she will find a way to love him, tusks and all.
Images from classic fairy tales inspire and compel audiences the world over and have done so for centuries. “Sleeping Beauty,” “Rumpelstiltskin,” “Snow White,” “Jack and the Beanstalk,” “Beauty and the Beast”—all are integrated into our cultural DNA. We ramble on about rescue fantasies and evil stepmothers and five magic beans, because the twenty or so fairy tales that define the genre are so popular that they obscure the joys of the thousands of other fairy tales from across the world and time.
The allure of the major tales is pretty potent, and the supremacy of the big ones in popular culture is understandable. But serious fairy tale lovers know there is undiscovered treasure in the pokey corners of public libraries and on the internet, where hardcore fairy tale fans and dedicated scholars labor to unearth, read, and discuss neglected tales. Those of us who dig, discover that many fairy tales do not feature Princes Charming, that as many as half of fairy tales have male protagonists, that fairies don’t show up all that much in “fairy” tales, and that bad behavior is rewarded nearly as often as good behavior.
Although this book will deal with European fairy tales, fascinating fairy tales can be found the world over. The most popular fairy tales emerged from Western Europe, but their prevalence says more about market forces than about the diversity or even quality of fairy tales in general. Popular fairy tales are the result of demand by audiences. “The Little Mermaid” by Hans Christian Andersen, is not a more entertaining story than “The Girl Who Trod on the Loaf,” also by Andersen. Yet people who bought and read fairy tales, over time, clearly liked the story of a mermaid who yearns for a man and a soul more than the story of a vain little girl who spends countless years as a statue in the Devil’s waiting room. Both stories revel in horrible detail about the tortures the two young girls endure, and both reflect Andersen’s moral and spiritual beliefs. But the mermaid, who is a suicide for love in Andersen’s version, is one of the most famous fairy-tale heroines in the world, and has been for generations. The girl with the loaf is a curiosity that, in the United States, at least, is not well known outside of fairy tale circles. The public made the choice to love one more than the other.
Here’s the thing about the fairy tales we have made popular: we shape them at least as much as they shape us. No one made people flock to Disney’s Snow White in the 1930s or the 40s or the 90s and beyond. Disney did not lasso people into theaters to watch a film that in many ways is very different than the tale the Brothers Grimm set down. Disney did make a film that changed the dwarfs from very tidy men with no names to the famously-monikered gang that fears soap the way the Evil Queen fears laugh lines, but audiences endorsed it and cemented it into popular culture. Snow White as a housekeeping dynamo with a super-maternal spirit is a twentieth-century American creation, not a nineteenth-century German one.
More Is Better
We lament the messages fairy tales send, yet we lap them up. Feminist critics have found fairy tales to be a rich hunting ground for examining the truths and burdens placed on women by a patriarchal society. Who can blame them? Fairy tales do endorse patriarchy and retrograde notions about women and their behavior. In "Fairy Gifts," we see fairy tales that caution against women being too pretty, too witty, too talkative, and too flirty—in just one tale. We also see princesses married to men they do not know and who could not possibly truly care for them. In “The Dirty Shepherdess,” the heroine boldly and honestly proclaims her love for her father in a way that displeases him, yet she meekly leaves when he orders her to. In “The Loving Pair,” Ball (a toy), who is female, remains forever in a rain gutter because she is apparently too damaged to be of worth. The message in “The Loving Pair” is clear: when a woman is “ruined,” that’s the end.
Clearly, people who worry about the messages fairy tales send to women have good reason to think the way they do. But fairy tales that uphold old-fashioned gender roles can also send important messages about strong women. Women are the sole focus in “Fairy Gifts,” which is also in this volume. The Flower Fairy has the power. The princesses the heroine visits have their own royal courts, even if they also have some deplorable personal traits, like being too talkative. Women are what matters in this tale, and in many fairy tales, women may get burdensome messages, but they also get the lion’s share of attention. Men may have most of the power in life and in fairy tales, but women get a lot of attention and the word count in life and in fairy tales.
Take “Kisa the Cat,” an Icelandic fairy tale adapted by Andrew Lang in the late 1800s and featured here. Kisa is strong, wily, decisive, caring, and focused. She’s a human princess enchanted into cat form who takes on a giant and reattaches a princess’s chopped-off feet via magical surgery. She and the human princess she cares for, Ingibjorg, have a friendship that transcends species and Ingibjorg’s marriage. Sure, both women get married, but that was the career path open to royal women. What the two princesses have as friends is clearly what’s important in the story. Princes? They are an afterthought. A necessary, but trivial, detail.
Feminist criticism is only one exciting and vital area of fairy tale scholarship. Historical, science-based, sociological, and psychoanalytical criticism have all flourished or continue to. There’s room in fairy tale scholarship for myriad approaches and that’s what makes it fun and challenging. Beyond the Glass Slipper is not a scholarly work, so forms of criticism will not be in the spotlight. Yet, in nearly ten years of using fairy tales to teach college writing, I have found that male students love fairy tales, but don’t necessarily believe they have any stake in fairy tale study and culture.
That’s not the fault of any school of criticism. No area of fairy tale criticism I’ve encountered tries to marginalize any group of readers. That men don’t feel much connection with fairy tales may be the result of Disney princess culture, but it may also be the result of fairy tales being assigned to children’s literature. Almost all of my students are shocked to find that many fairy tales were not written specifically for children. They are appalled, both men and women, when I “ruin” decent, innocent children’s stories by discussing earlier texts of classic fairy tales. Shame on me! Yet, wrongly, I think, children’s literature and by extension, fairy tales, are considered less important than adult literature. And since women have traditionally raised children, fairy tales and children’s literature are thought to be solely women’s work by many students, male and female.
Why worry about men and fairy tales at all? After all, men have always been in fairy tale studies. Right at the forefront, and I don’t just mean the Brothers Grimm and Bruno Bettelheim. Men not only criticize and study fairy tales, they rewrite them and create new fairy tales, as do women. Yet my audience both in the classroom and at Enchanted Conversation, the online blogazine I publish, is largely female, and I don’t think it’s just because more college students are women and women read fiction more than men. The most famous fairy tales are women centered. There’s “Snow White,” “Sleeping Beauty,” “Rapunzel,” “The Little Mermaid,” and “Beauty and the Beast.” “Aladdin” is certainly famous, as is “Jack and the Beanstalk,” but the most popular and culturally influential tales are about girls. Even so, many young women avoid reading fairy tales because the most popular fairy tales carry a lot of baggage about the messages they send women
People want to read stories about people who are like them, with ideas about life that speak to them, specifically. People also get sick of reading the same stories over and over again. The great news is, many fairy tales aren’t just about princesses under the sea and in towers. Fairy tales take place in gloomy underground passages, people turn into animals and have adventures, ghosts show up in fairy tales, nasty people sometimes win in fairy tales. Soldiers are popular characters in fairy tales, as are millers’ sons. Kings get deposed and pigs get married and turn into gorgeous princes. And, while fairy tales appear to endorse business as usual in terms of power and social order, much sly subversiveness takes place before authority reassumes command—if it does.
Beyond the Glass Slipper features ten fairy tales that are largely invisible to fairy-tale lovers who are not deeply immersed in the field. Much of my professional life is focused on fairy tales, and yet, I was unfamiliar with some of the stories before starting this project. They are wildly different from many well-known tales, and because of their scope and unfamiliarity, give readers a solid view of the diversity of fairy tales (and these are only a few European ones).
Readers will, perhaps, also see how flexible fairy tales are in terms of message and content, which in turn, will show them that fairy tales are for everyone. They are for little kids, old folks, teenagers, kids in the city, farmers, hipster dudes, college students, kids who love anime and people who just love fantasy. Fairy tales are magical and funny and beautiful. They are for everyone, but not everyone knows that.
Few fairy tales are love stories, but the point of Beyond the Glass Slipper is to make readers fall in love with obscure, strange, even twisted fairy tales. For those of us who passionately love these stories, fairy tales are not optional in life, because they are human life in its many crazy manifestations. I am evangelical on fairy tales because they continue to expand my view of how life may be lived. I read their messages, even the preachy, annoying ones, and develop my own ideas about love and power and money, and the way fairy tales mix things up gives me new perspective every time I read a new tale.
A Little Background
For the purposes of this book, a fairy tale is a story of wonder and transformation that flourishes through speaking, writing, and listening. While there are useful systems for categorizing fairy tales and folklore, they aren’t the focus of this book, although sources that feature these systems are listed in the annotated bibliography. Think of what makes a fairy tale this way: it’s hard to define, but you’ll know one when you read it.
The origins of fairy tales are murky. Like ancient Greek and Roman myths, the earliest fairy tales cannot be pinpointed. Hints and glimmers of what would become fairy tales can be found in a story called “Tale of Two Brothers.” It’s an Ancient Egyptian story from over a thousand years prior to the Common Era. In addition, Aesop’s Fables, probably written in Ancient Greece about 500 years before the Common Era, has a folktale sort of appeal as well as the sense of wonder we often feel when reading fairy tales, even if they aren’t the latter. The following information is a very small peek into what we may know about early fairy tales, in the West.
We do know that some ancient stories, like “Cupid and Psyche” seem to echo in fairy tales like the later Norwegian fairy tale, “East of the Sun, West of the Moon.” The formalized story of “Cupid and Psyche” is attributed to Lucius Apuleius, who wrote The Golden Ass in the second century. “Cupid and Psyche” is a tale within Apuleius’s greater work, The Golden Ass, and is a narrative filled with much complicated trouble for poor Psyche, whose travails begin when Venus becomes jealous of the heroine’s fabulous beauty. There’s a happily ever after for Cupid and Psyche, but the story contains the elements of trials and tribulations that many fairy tale protagonists will face in stories popularized hundreds of years later.
“East of the Sun, West of the Moon” is not the only fairy tale with echoes of “Cupid and Psyche,” but it’s one of the most famous. As in the earlier story, curiosity is punished, dangerous travel is necessary, supernatural events transpire frequently, and a joyful ending is achieved. Both stories also feature a very mysterious bridegroom, a detail found in numerous other stories, the most notable being “Beauty and the Beast.”
The Facetious Nights of Straparola, by Giovanni Francesco Straparola, was published in the early 1550s in Italy. (“Facetious” seems to mean “fun” or “enjoyable” in this case.) Structured like Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron, the collection features a variety of stories, including some fairy tales. “King Pig,” one of our stories, is from Straparola. “Puss in Boots” can be traced to it as well. The book helped pave the way for later fairy tale collections, like those of Charles Perrault.
Like The Decameron, which was written in the 1350s and is also Italian, love and humor and clever social commentary can be found in Straparola’s collection of tales told to amuse a sophisticated group of people in need of entertainment, who themselves are also storytellers. Like many “literary” fairy tales, heavy details about characters’ appearance, shortcomings and adventures are featured in stories like “King Pig.”
Since Straparola’s work is frequently thought of as one of the important works in early modern fairy tale history, this seems as good a place as any to discuss the difference between “literary” and “oral” fairy tales. There is, I think, not as much of a bright line between them as many fans often believe. However, here’s my own very rough way of thinking of the difference: fairy tales that seem to come from the oral tradition were initially popularized through old-fashioned word of mouth from the peasant or working classes. Literary fairy tales tend to have come from the upper classes and were popularized early on through writing and print. The important thing to remember is that fairy tales are living stories. It’s true that most fairy tales are now disseminated through print, so maybe fairy tales are all a bit literary nowadays. But we still tell fairy tales. We act them out. We add our own details when we read them aloud. Both kinds of fairy tales remain in the twenty-first century. Below is a brief list of some authors who had major influence on fairy tales over the last four hundred years or so. Perhaps reading about them will help readers of Beyond the Glass Slipper begin to form their own theories on fairy tale classification.
(Please note that not everyone would agree with my ideas about oral versus literary tales. I ask readers to see my ideas as theories designed to spur them onto their own research, and, in turn, their own theories on this topic.)
Giambattista Basile wrote Il Pentamerone; The Tale of Tales in the 1630s. Like Straparola, he was Italian, and he also had great influence on later, more famous fairy tale collectors, for example, the Grimms. Among his notable fairy tales is “Sun, Moon, and Talia,” an early, shocking, and not-to-be-missed version of “Sleeping Beauty.” His version of the snoozing princess includes cannibalistic plans from her kingly lover’s evil stepmother, who also tries to burn Talia alive. All ends well, but only after Talia might be wishing she had never woken up.
French literary fairy tales were popular in the seventeenth century. The best-known author of that time is Charles Perrault, whose versions of tales like “Cinderella” and “Bluebeard,” are well-loved today. French literary fairy tales were popular with its upper classes, and women were notable writers of these tales. Madame D’Aulnoy wrote “The White Cat,” among a number of terrific tales like “The Yellow Dwarf” and “Green Serpent.” These were published in the late seventeenth century.
Both Perrault and D’Aulnoy, like Basile and Straparola, had insider knowledge of how life worked at court and among the nobility. What’s notable about many of their stories is how filled with detailed descriptions of beauty and clothes and jewels and people their stories are—at least relative to the spare description found in tales with more oral traditions, such as “Little Red Riding Hood.” (“Little Red Riding Hood” did get the literary treatment by Perrault, however.) Writers such as D’Aulnoy and Perrault either came from noble roots or lived their lives among the ruling classes. They were cultured and literate. And, it should be noted, both lived in Paris during the time of Louis XIV, the “Sun King.” The art of conversation and enchanted storytelling were highly prized by the lucky sophisticates who participated in the salons of Paris during this time.
“Beauty and the Beast” was published in the eighteenth century, first by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve, and then by Jeanne-Marie Le Prince de Beaumont, whose version is still popular today. Madame de Beaumont spent time as a governess, and had some bad luck in marriage before a third one, that seems to have taken. Perhaps her unhappy early marriages informed her version of “Beauty and the Beast,” as a willingness to endure uncertainty and submit to the will of other people are hallmarks of Beauty’s story.
The Brothers Grimm landed in the early nineteenth century, and changed folklore and fairy tales forever. Though not the only German folk and fairy tale collectors of their time, they remain the most famous and influential. The first volume of Nursery and Household Tales came out in 1812, and it’s safe to say that fairy tales were forever changed. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were scholars and linguists who were passionate about German culture and history. Collecting fairy tales was an exercise in inspiring their fellow Germans to be proud of their past and culture.
To this day, many fairy tale fans believe that the Brothers Grimm transcribed their tales after hearing them directly from illiterate peasants. However, it seems pretty clear that the Grimms edited and finessed their stories quite a bit, and, the majority of their tales came from middle-class to upper-class young women. Wilhelm even married one of their sources.
Many of the stories the Brothers Grimm included in their published collections of “German” stories were popular all over Europe long before they started their work, and, as is clear in the paragraphs above, some seemingly “oral” tales like “Cinderella,” had literary roots, or at least, strong influences. Even so, without the Brothers Grimm, the world of fairy tales would most likely be far poorer than it is today.
Hans Christian Andersen published his first fairy tale book in the 1830s. Eventually, his stories like “The Little Mermaid,” “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” and “The Ugly Duckling” would become classics of children’s literature. Born in Odense, Denmark, Hans was from a poor family, as his father was a shoemaker. Hans’s father died while his son was quite young, so the talented youngster was forced to work and obtaining an education was difficult for him. Hans faced many obstacles and endured abuse at the hands of a cruel schoolmaster.
Hans’ life as a youth and a mature man was filled (maybe even more than most people’s) with emotional peaks and valleys, particularly in regard to his love life. Perhaps that’s why stories such as “The Little Mermaid” (Andersen’s version), break our hearts to this day. A literary success in his own day, Andersen was lauded and applauded the world over during his lifetime. Perhaps he didn’t find love, but he did find immortality.
That’s a pretty short review of fairy tale highlights, and it doesn’t even begin to cover later achievements in the field, like The Wizard of Oz books. The annotated bibliography for Beyond the Glass Slipper features a number of books and other sources addressing the history and development of fairy tales, including their popularity in film and television, and discussions of literary fairy tales and oral fairy tales, including their histories, differences and similarities.
Moving Beyond the Glass Slipper
Beyond the Glass Slipper is an outgrowth of Enchanted Conversation: A Fairy Tale Magazine (fairytalemagazine.com), which debuted in January of 2009. A blogazine that publishes stories and poems with a fairy tale focus, EC is also a place for information and posts about fairy tales. Some of the most popular pieces are those about fairy tales—their meaning, popularity, and social significance. Whether I have written a post or a guest writer has, it’s clear that people don’t just want to read fairy tales; they want to think about them and discuss them.
People also want to move beyond “Cinderella,” “Snow White” “Beauty and the Beast,” etc. It’s not that fairy tale fans don’t love the most popular stories. They definitely do. But fans of any genre want to dig both deeply and widely into their subject. Yet, because there are so many fairy tales, it’s hard to know where to begin when exploring beyond the canon.
It’s funny, but many fairy tale readers want to move beyond the best-known stories yet don’t because the sheer volume of fairy tales available these days can be overwhelming. It’s easy to think, well, I’ll just load up electronically on every color of Andrew Lang’s fairy tale books and start reading. Then they pop up on the reader and suddenly, they just seem like too much of a good thing. I’ve talked to many people who collect physical and electronic editions of fairy tales, because they love fairy stories and because they want to explore their variety. But a lot of people, genuine fairy tale fans, often end up not reading the tales. Maybe this comes from too much choice. The ten stories I’ve chosen represent a variety of types of tales, are packed with all kinds of enchantment to ponder, and lend themselves to thoughtful discussion.
Since Enchanted Conversation is focused on making fairy tales something to discuss, Beyond the Glass Slipper is designed to inspire talking and writing about the tales. That doesn’t mean that readers need to go out and discuss the stories with people—obviously not. Yet fairy tales themselves are inherently gossipy. They have a chatty, intimate quality that just begs to be talked and written about. To read a fairy tale is to be inspired and to want to share the story and the ideas it generates.
Perhaps one of the reasons fairy tales became so popular for children is that they lend themselves to reading aloud. In turn, reading aloud leads to delightful questions and interruptions, and not just from children. I like to read passages out loud when I teach. The discussions with students that follow are often the liveliest and most intriguing ones of the semester.
The advent of the internet, and for me, blogging, has given fairy-tale discourse a brand-new life. Through commenting and rating systems, it’s easy to find out what excites and intrigues visitors about fairy tales. As it turns out, many things about fairy tales set people’s minds in a whirl. Certainly, retellings of old tales are at the top the list, and that’s a good thing, as that is one of EC’s main focal points. But even more than retellings, posts that center on presenting fairy tales complete with some ideas and perspective about them are the most popular. I started writing posts fairly recently about the major fairy tales like “Beauty and the Beast,” and was delighted by how well-received they were. The perspective provided about the stories seemed to be what drove the traffic, and when I realized that, the idea for this book was born.
My posts that served as the inspiration for this volume consisted of nothing more than presenting the tales in a blog post, but with introductions about what I thought about the motivations of characters like Rumpelstiltskin or the messages I thought the tales contained about power and love and parents and children. For example, I began the “Rumpelstiltskin” post like this: “Poor old Rumpelstiltskin. In my book, he was more sinned against than sinning. He always just seemed like a lonely guy who wanted a child—and really, how great would the greedy king and thoughtless miller’s daughter be as parents? And the miller? A dolt. Everyone knows that you do not, do not, try to gain the attention of the greedy and powerful—unless you are attempting a palace coup.”
Visitors commented, sometimes at length, on that post, as well as others with a similar structure. It dawned on me that people want to read classic tales with a bit of informal, not-too-academic commentary. Since I was already posting about the most famous fairy tales, a book of lesser-known tales, with detailed perspective, plus some provocative questioning, seemed like a project worth pursuing. And here we are.
Asking Questions, One Fairy Tale at a Time
Reader, you don’t need me to tell you how to read, so I won’t. But the introductions to the stories and the annotations have been designed with very specific goals in mind, so here are some important points to bear in mind when reading Beyond the Glass Slipper:
• Everything I have written about every tale is meant to engender thought and discussion. That’s because the book is an outgrowth of the blog, Enchanted Conversation. Blogging and commenting are about dialogue. As a discussion leader, if you will, I am designing the introductions, questions and annotations to provoke readers. As a result, “Hey, I never thought of that!” “Are you kidding?” “I don’t think that’s what the story meant.” “Huh?”—are all great responses to the ideas provided in this book. The comments, questions and notes are not meant to provide definitive answers. In fairy tales, there are surprisingly few definite answers. Nearly everything can be negotiated.
• While some references to scholarly sources can be found in comments and notes, this is not a scholarly work. The tone and style in Beyond the Glass Slipper are deliberately casual.
• As noted above, the solitary reader just looking to be entertained will likely be the main audience for Beyond the Glass Slipper. Yet the book is also designed for classroom use, even though it is not a deliberately scholarly work, in the sense that it contains no academic theory or extensive research of the same kind. That’s a big reason why there are so many questions in the “Consider” section. I teach first-year college writing and use fairy tales as a focal point for one of my courses. (Enchanted Conversation has also been used for class work.) The curriculum we use demands a thesis statement grounded in evidence that comes from the synthesis of sources, but the students’ own ideas are essential, paramount, even. Assignments require the use of fairy tales as primary texts and scholarly essays about fairy tales as secondary sources. Evidence has to be commented on and connected to other ideas in student essays. (We work students very hard indeed.)
Because fairy tales and teaching have been closely connected in my life, many of the questions you’ll see in the “Consider” section can easily be translated into essay assignments for short papers (about three to four pages) with a few sources. For every tale, you’ll see questions with suggestions for connecting other tales to the one featured. Also, the many questions sprinkled throughout the book are designed specifically to foster classroom discussion. Most importantly, every question has an implied, “Why?” That means, why do you think the way you do? Answering why is one of my favorite parts of writing.
• Book clubs will also benefit from all the questions in the “Consider” section. The sections are set up in a way that groups can start at any of the bulleted points and get a discussion going. Provocative questions about sins like greed or vanity are meant to make people put down the wineglass and start saying, “Hey, wait a minute.” Or, take a big, fortifying gulp of pinot grigio after holding forth on the silliness of including a vampire story in a book about fairy tales. Beyond the Glass Slipper will get a club through a lively meeting with enough time for slices of decadent chocolate cake for all.
• Because Enchanted Conversation regularly publishes stories and poems, writers were very much on my mind during this project. If you are intrigued by the notion of writing a story or poem based on a specific fairy tale or creating a new work that is influenced by fairy tales in general, you’ll find plenty of useful ideas here. The annotations and questions are designed to help writers interrogate the story for ideas on how to create new characters, details, and perspective. Sideways retellings (ones that do not just recount a classic story with some fun new details) often make the best fairy-tale-inspired new stories and poems.
• Enchanted Conversation will have a special section dedicated to Beyond the Glass Slipper, where readers of every kind can go to raise questions, share ideas and learn more about these ten fabulous stories.
• Finally, small adjustments in punctuation, etc., have been made to the tales to make them more readable. Changes have been minor and infrequent.