Once Upon a Time ...:
Maria Tatar's 'Annotated Classic Fairy Tales' offers new
insights on familiar old tales
By Beth Potier
Gazette Staff (http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2003/04.10/18-tatar.html)
Jack was a thief and Little Red Riding Hood a seductress.
Kids adore ogres and beheadings as much as princesses and obedient little
children.
The moral to the story might not be moral.
And perhaps not everyone lives happily ever after, but that's not a bad thing,
says Maria Tatar.
In many ways, Tatar, Harvard College Professor and John L. Loeb Professor of
Germanic Languages and Literatures, and a renowned authority on folklore and
fairy tales, has, through her study of the genre, turned familiar notions of fairy
tales on their heads.
Yet in her new book, "The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales" (W.W. Norton, 2002)
and her popular Core course "Fairy Tales, Children's Literature and the Culture of
Childhood," Tatar refuses to let her academic exploration of fairy tales
undermine their best-loved, most powerful quality: the ability to enchant children
and adults.
"I started this out as an academic project. I was interested in documenting how
the stories were first written down, what the cultural variants are, the ways in
which the texts reflect the historical realities of another time and place," says
Tatar of her book, which is indeed rich with such annotations to the texts. "And
then, in the middle of the project, I discovered that I was forgetting about what
I think my audience wanted: to really think about the magic and enchantment of
the stories."
That magic, says Tatar, has been the constant as the tales themselves have
shape-shifted across cultures and migrated from the hearth and tavern - where
they began as entertainment for adults, the "television and pornography of ...
preliterate peoples," says John Updike - to the nursery.
While the escapades of the beanstalk-climbing Jack, Cinderella, and Hansel and
Gretel have charmed and entertained children for centuries, they've also served
as a window into the world of grown-ups, providing a safe perch from which to
explore childhood anxieties.
"Fairy tales connect with all kinds of adult secrets," says Tatar. "They tell children
about death, which is something that adults talk about in hushed tones. They tell
them about romance and marriage and in some cases, they'll tell them about sex
and violence."
Witches and monsters and wolves,
oh my!
Sex and violence? In those innocent children's
stories of sweetness and good? Indeed, says
Tatar, fairy tales are often brutally violent,
gushing over with bloodthirsty monsters, girleating wolves, wicked stepmothers, and wifekilling barons.
What's more, kids love 'em that way.
Kay Nielsen, 'Hansel and Gretel,' 1925.
(Typ 905.25.4365F, Department of
Printing and Graphic Arts, Houghton
Library, Harvard College Library)
"The real magic of the fairy tale lies in its
ability to extract pleasure from pain," Tatar
writes in the introduction to "The Annotated
Classic Fairy Tales." It's this complex duality
that fascinates her and, she says, that imbues
fairy tales with powers therapeutic as well as
entertaining.
In "The Juniper Tree," for instance - a popular tale in Europe and one of Tatar's
favorites - a story of breathtaking beauty and poetry is shot through with
bloodcurdling violence. A stepmother beheads her stepson, leaves the grisly
discovery to her daughter, serves the boy in a stew to his father, then meets her
just desserts under the fatal crush of a millstone. In a movie or video game, such
lurid stuff might not pass parental censure, but in a fairy tale, it delights.
"Children think it's hilarious when the millstone comes down and kills the
stepmother," says Tatar. Such violence in fairy tales helps children come to
terms with fears for which they don't yet have language.
"Something complicated is happening when those children are laughing,
something that has to do with the fact that they are weak and vulnerable and
that they have a lot of anxieties which they don't have the words to talk about,"
she says.
The interactive delivery of fairy tales - a trusted adult usually reads them aloud
to a child, fostering improvisation and discussion that's absent in passive
entertainment like videos - further enhances their therapeutic qualities. Parents
or adults provide their own cultural translations and reassuring explanations that
can help allay childhood fears.
The moral of the story ...
What fairy tales don't do, says Tatar, is provide tidy moral lessons for young
learners.
"Our culture has this profound belief in literature as conveying lessons to
children," she says.
She is a vocal critic of this notion. Tatar notes that morals were often added or
appended to fairy tales when they were rewritten for children. In many cases,
they have nothing to do with the story. Little Red Riding Hood would have
encountered the wolf en route to Grandma's whether or not she dallied to pick
flowers.
"Does keeping to the path really help you avoid wolves in the forest? Unlikely, I
think," says Tatar.
She notes other tales in which the stated morals run counter to the stories'
messages.
"Bluebeard," the story of a murderous lord and the young wife who outwits him,
concludes with the maxim "Curiosity, with its many charms, can stir up serious
regrets." The young wife meets Bluebeard's wrath when she opens a forbidden
room and discovers the corpses of his previous wives. But rather than stirring up
regrets, the wife's inquisitiveness saves her from a similar fate.
"Clearly her curiosity was very important there, because she discovered that her
husband was a serial killer," says Tatar.
In addition, moral ambiguity abounds in some of children's favorite fairy tale
characters - the trickster children who overcome their much larger foes through
wit and cunning. Although he's considered the hero, Jack is a thief, climbing the
beanstalk to rob the giant of his gold. And in a French oral version of Little Red
Riding Hood, no hunter saves the young girl and her granny; instead, Little Red
Riding Hood hoodwinks the wolf by performing a striptease for him.
Challenged by students
Tatar gives much of the credit for her book to the students who have taken her
Core course, which explores fairy tales as a point of departure for considering
broader cultural issues of childhood.
"There's nothing like a group of Harvard students to get you to rise to the
challenge of finding answers to questions both large and small about these
stories," she says.
The course syllabus includes grown-up readings by Locke, Rousseau, Nabokov,
and Angela Carter as well as Maurice Sendak's "Where the Wild Things Are,"
Roald Dahl's "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" and, of course, lots of fairy
tales. Its complexity and rigor catch some students off guard.
"It is less daunting than Milton or Shakespeare ... but one of the surprises they
get is that the stories are not as simple as they think," says Tatar. The study of
fairy tales and childhood demands skills of literary criticism and psychology, as
well as anthropology, history, and folklore.
Tatar revels in the collaborative nature of teaching, her own discoveries enriched
by her students' questions and insights. Yet she parts company with many of her
students on one of today's most prominent icons of the culture of childhood:
Although charmed by the grip they have on readers' imaginations, she can't slog
through the "Harry Potter" books.
"I have enough trouble with the real world, and suddenly there's this other
world, where everything has a new name," she says of J.K. Rowling's wildly
popular fantasy series. "I have trouble mastering the rules of soccer. I don't
want to have to learn about Quidditch."