When I ask new classes of students, what they think makes a fairy tale, as opposed
to some other story, one of the things that almost always gets suggested. Is that
fairy tales have morals? People sort of have the idea that we have fairy tales for
training the young. And I suppose, there are instances of that. For instance in
Aesop's fables, which are kind of like fairy tales, we saw that there was an
explicit moral. For the man and the serpent the moral was, injuries may be
forgiven but not forgotten. In Grimm's tales, the tales we associate with the
Brothers Grimm, we have a story like Cinderella which could have the moral,
obedience is rewarded. And that seems like the kind of message a parent might want to
convey to a child and get the child to grow up with a good attitude you know, the
kind that's easy for the parent to control. In fact, that's not what Grimm's
fairy tales typically do, as I am sure you were aware having read so many of them.
Before the Grimm brothers wrote down the fairy tales we have read, in the beginning
of the nineteenth century, other people have begun to write them down earlier.
Charles Perrault, at the end of the seventeenth century, gave us the first
written versions of some of the stories that we now associate with Grimm's
Fairytales, like Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty. In fact, he gave us more than
that. His actual title was, Histoires ou contes du temps passe. Stories or tales of
past time. Avec des moralites, with morals. And the subtitle was, Contes de ma
mère l'Oye, Tales of mother goose. And that's where the idea of mother goose
comes from. No one knows who mother goose was. It was just Charles Perrault
subtitle. We think he was probably trying to do something that would tickle the
fancy of children. Perrault himself was a member of the prestigious French Academy
and so when he published this, he published it under his son's name, not his
own. But we know better. It's a very highly literate work. In the Sleeping
Beauty in the wood, we have the story much as you know it from Grimm's tal es, but at
the end there's an explicit moral. And that moral is in seventeenth century
French which probably wouldn't be very useful for me to read aloud to you. So
instead, I'd like us to take a look at Angela Carter's modern translation which
is not in poetry, but it is, nonetheless close to what it is that Perrault himself
wrote at the end of the seventeenth century. The moral of Sleeping Beauty. A
brave, rich, handsome husband is a prize well worth waiting for, but no modern
woman, I love this, modern woman in 1697, no modern woman would think it was worth
waiting for a hundred years. The tale of the Sleeping Beauty shows how long
engagements make for happy marriages, but young girls these days want so much to
married, I do not have the heart to press the moral. In other words, even giving a
moral, to what we think of as Grimm's Fairytale, the moral is given only half
heartedly. If you think about the stories that we find in Grimm's fairy tales,
usually the protagonist is actually disobedient. Little Red Cap got absolutely
clear instructions to go from her mother, right to her grandmother, right through
the forest. Did she do that? Heck, no. The wolf asked her to smell the flowers and
she got off the straight and narrow path and gathered the flowers. How many flowers
did she gather? According to the Grimm brothers, she gathered them until her arms
were so full that she could hold no more. In other words, when little Red went on to
grandma's house, she didn't do it because she suddenly a recollection of her errand,
she didn't do it because conscience told her she should go back to the straight and
narrow, she did it because it was impossible to do anything more with being
attracted by the beauty of her senses. Little Red Cap is disobedient. When it
comes to morals in the Grimm's fairly tales, the story I think I like best is
the Three Spinsters. Now, you remember that story. There is a lovely young girl
who's mother is yelling at her at the beginning of the story because the girl,
though attractive, will do no housework wh at so ever. The Queen passes by and
wonders what the problem is. The mother quickly realizes that she should not
report her daughter to the queen as lazy and so says just the opposite, that her
daughter is so industrious, that she is always spinning and doing one thing or
other around the house and she was yelling at her to get her to stop. The queen says,
well, if she is a girl such as you describe, I want her for my son. Let me
take her away to the castle. And in the castle, she puts her in a room that's half
filled with flax. Tells her that by the morning, she has to spin it to linen. The
girl does no such thing. She puts her head out the window and she bemoans her fate.
And down on the street, along come three spinsters. The women of the title. They
are ugly. One has a big lip, one has a splayed finger, one has a splayed foot.
But they say, when she explains the problem to them, that they can spin it for
her. They can do her work with the understanding that when they're done and
she marries the prince, they will be invited to her wedding as cousins. She
says, yes, and they do it. She asks them why do they look the way they look. Well,
the one with the big lip, has the big lip, from drawing out the flax. The one with
the big thumb, has the big thumb, for pulling out the thread. The one with the
splay foot, has the splay foot, from working the treadle. The next morning, the
queen sees that everything has been spun. She is delighted but leery. So she three
quarters fills the room with flax, and again the three spinsters come and again
they do their work, and again the queen comes, and again she is delighted but
leery and so she completely fills the room with flax. And again they come and having
done this three times. The queen says, you can marry my son. At the wedding,
everything is going along just wonderfully when along come the three spinsters,
asking to be brought in. Who are they? The prince asks. Well, the heroine says, these
are my cousins. Why are they so ugly, he asks. Well, one of them has a big lip from
drawing out the thread. One of them has a big thumb from pulling on the thread and
one of them has a splayed foot from working the treadle. Well, the prince
says, if it is as you say, you shall never spin again. So what's the moral of the
story? Oh, yeah. It's much better to be a lazy beautiful liar than to be industrious
and honest. Just the moral every parent wants his or her children to hear, right?
The Grimm Brothers fairytales do not teach us morals in the sense of, how do we raise
our children? They do something else, and I think they do something deeper. The word
spinster comes to mean an unmarried woman, as early as the fourteen century, long
before the Grimm brothers write this down. The word means legally an unmarried woman
by the seventeenth century, long before the Grimm brothers write this down. But
long before that word spinster, a woman who spins takes on these meanings having
to do with class, relationship and economics, we have three other spinsters
from ancient Greek mythology. The three fates, sisters. Clotho, who pulls out the
thread, Lachesis, who measures the thread and Atropos, who cut it. The thread of our
life. All along we've called women the distaff side of the human race. The
distaff is the spindle on which the, the fiber is put to be drawn out. We see women
as involved in life giving, and involved in life-taking. Those three spinsters
facilitate the marriage of the girl to the prince. And someday, when the thread runs
out, their lives will end. I think that. The three spinsters resonate with a myth
that's much older. The difference however is, that the audience of the fairy tale is
at the beginning of the marriage. It's for the youth. The audience of the story of
the three fates is much older, contemplating a mortal condition. If we
understand, that fairy tales, are simply a version of these oldest stories, we can
agree will Valter Benyamin, a very famous culture critic, who says, and they lived
happily ever after, says the fairy tale. The fairy tale, which to this day, is the
first tutor of mankind, secretly lives on in the story. The first true storyteller
is and will continue to be. The teller of fairytales. I think in this sense of the
mythic significance, and resonance of fairy tales, Benyamin is right. But I also
find something a bit odd in his formulation. He identifies the fairy tale,
with the phrase, and they lived happily ever after. And we all recognize that as a
fairytale phrase, but if you ask yourself, how do you know you're reading a fairy
tale? I think most of us would say, well it begins with, once upon a time. In other
words, we look at the beginning. In fact, in German the beginning is, Es war einmal
and once upon a time. But the Grimm brothers don't use that formulation very
often. In fact, the formulation they tend to use is, In den alten Zeiten, wo das
wünschen noch geholfen hat which means, in the olden times, when wishes still
helped. You see that formulation, for example, in the beginning of The Frog
Prince. In the old times, when it was still of some use, to wish for the thing
one wanted, there lived a king, and so on, and so forth. Those olden times are not
yesterday or the day before yesterday. Those olden times are a discontinuous
past. If you ask me, what did I have for breakfast yesterday? Or, what was life
like before I started taping this course? That's, part of my continuous history. But
if you ask me, what was life like before I became a parent? That's somehow a
different time. That's personal, discontinuous past. If you ask people,
well, what was it like in America during World War II? Those who are old enough
will, oh, yes. Well, we did this, and then of course this developed and then that
developed. But if you watch Happy Days on television in the 1970s, and see it's
reference to the 1950s, they treat the 1950s as if it were a discontinuous past.
I was alive in the '50s and I know they were not all milk shops. In fact, there
was the Korean War. There was fear of the bomb. There was the Suez Crisis. There
was, what we need to do is get these eggheads out of g overnment. There was the
oppressiveness of so called conformity. But if you make that a discontinuous past,
somehow from the'70s, the'50s look like a fantasy that's desirable. The term for
this discontinuous past, whether it's personal or cultural, is Atavism. An
atavism in biology, is a throwback to a condition that the animal might have had
in an earlier instance. So for instance, if a human being is born with a small
tail, as occasionally happens, usually they're clipped off in a hospital these
days in the United States. That tail is called an atavism. Many, many fantasies
are atavistic. They ask us to go back to a discontinuously past time of ourselves or
of our culture because in fact, those are times we know we've survived. The desire
to return to Eden. To that, discontinuous past before the fall and the start-up of
history is an atavistic fantasy. When Benyamin says, and they lived happily ever
after, he is in a sense suggesting they have reached a time where there will no
longer be any changes to diminish their happiness. But to get there, you have to
go to once upon a time. That time, in the Grimm's formulation, is the alten Zeiten
when it helped to wish for something. Were the wishes really for morality? No. That's
not what fairy tales mainly do. They're for something else. What, we should ask
what the Grimm brothers wishing for, when they decided to make their collection?
We'll see. Soon.