Robert Darnton-- week 3

I found Darnton’s article “Peasants Tell Tales: The Meaning of Mother Goose” to be incredibly interesting. Like most people I suppose, I have always liked fairy tales and folk stories. When I was a child I liked them because they were magical and usually involved fairies, and princesses, and true loves; just the sort of things I loved as a little girl. As I got older I realized that the Disneyfied versions of the fairy tales I was familiar with were a far cry from the originals, which were dark and cruel and violent. And so I read Grimm and other older versions. I remember the first time I read Grimm’s tales, I was probably ten or twelve, and was slightly disturbed by the violence of many of the lesser known tales. Imagine my surprise when I found out that even these stories were somewhat “cleaned up” from still earlier forms!

My interest in fairy tales has not waned as I’ve gotten older. I have read many recent “retellings” of these very old tales, and had mixed reactions to them. There seem to be two kinds of “retellings.” Some of them, like Louise Murphy’s The True Story of Hansel and Gretel only use the original tales as a sort of framework. I usually tend to like these books best, because they resonate with the older stories, without trying to actually be the older tale. You can’t really rewrite a fairy tale. Extremely old stories are connected to something very old, something that you can sense more than you can really grasp mentally. Capturing that old essence and complexity is near impossible in modern times, for the world is different now. But some author’s do try. Often they claim to be “liberating” fairy tales, with all their dark and violent glory, from the watered down Disney versions. Ellen Datlow and Teri Windling’s fairy tale anthologies for Avon Books are more representative of this latter attempt. I certainly have not read all of these anthologies, and I did like some of the stories in them, but I also found that the author’s in the series seemed to be cramming in violent and sexual themes, without really having a point. It was still watered down, just no longer suitable for children. Like a Disney film, with an R (or sometimes X) rating.

After reading Darnton’s article I think I am beginning to understand why I felt this way. Darnton claims that the psychoanalytic reading of Little Red Riding Hood is not particularly apt. Not only were many of the elements that fit this reading added in later versions of the story, but it was also not something that would have applied to people of early modern France. The folk tales that survive are relics of an earlier time, in a world that was very different from our own. Who can imagine living in a world where survival is such a struggle? Where no one has enough to eat? And where sickness and death are always just a heartbeat away? It makes sense that stories would warn against being too trusting of strangers. And it is not surprising that cunning and intelligence would be rewarded, instead of the tiresome purity and innocence of Disney films. In early modern France, the pure and naïve likely would die young. Rather than being viewed as a virtue, innocence was equated with stupidity and weakness.

This is a world that is parallel to the modern world, but also very different. And it makes sense that stories of that time would reflect such cruelties and harshness. If the greatest wish that a person can conjure is to not have to go hungry, there is not much room for grand moralizing, or for tales that always work out fairly. More than anything these tales are sad; they reflect a world that is narrow, and dark, and extremely limited. Though there are certainly many fanciful elements in folktales, when viewed in context of the world they arose in, these tales are actually heartbreakingly realistic. Tales of this kind could not be written now, and still be authentic in the same way. But we would do well to remember them, and understand them for what they really are.