Crime and Punishment, or Development, in Fairy Tales

Abstract

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, OR DEVELOPMENT, IN FAIRY TALES When I was a small girl in rural Mississippi, my grandmother often sat by the fire in the evenings telling stories that she had heard in her own childhood. She told traditional folk tales and ghost stories (all supposedly true), which sent me to bed with tingling, thrilling terror, but her specialty was the fantastic moral tale; these terrified me beyond all hope, leaving me lying rigid, sleepless, and sweating under the covers. The most vivid of these was the well-known poem, James Whitcomb Riley's "Little Orphant Annie," who "comes to our house to stay/Wash the cups and saucers up and sweep the crumbs away." In one of Annie's tales, a wicked little girl is carried away by evil spirits: "Her mama heard her holler, /Her papa heard her squall, /And when they turned the covers back, she wasn't there at all !/And the goblins will get you if you don't watch out." I also carry in my consciousness even now an image of a grinning, insinuating boogie man, hiding out behind the lilac bush, waiting and watching to see if I cried; whereupon, no doubt, he would fetch me away and perform unspeakable acts of torture upon my sin-ridden person. There were other Awful Warnings too. Once as I sat innocently sewing doll clothes on a Sunday afternoon, Grandma shrieked in horror that the Devil would bore holes in my tongue for sewing on the Sabbath. I need hardly elaborate on the horrific images suggested by this information. I know now from the relatively safe and analytical perspective of the adult student of children's literature, that these fantastic moral tales undoubtedly descended from what I term the didactic fairy tale (and ultimately , of course, from the medieval exemplum) . These didactic fairy tales were popular in the 1830' s and 1840' s in England. Such stories as "Uncle David's Story about Giants and Fairies," an interpolated fairy tale in Catherine Sinclair's realistic novel, Holiday House (1839); Francis Edward Paget' s The Hope of the Katzekopfs (1844); Mark Lemon's The Enchanted Doll, as well as the later works; Christina Rossetti's Speaking Likenesses (1873); and George MacDonald1 s The Wise Woman (1875) all incorporate the archetype of departure and return and the conventions of fairy tale, as well as terrifying effects, in order to teach children, as Gillian Avery notes, "quite ordinary moral lessons." The stories I heard in my own childhood and even Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) are clearly descendants of the British didactic fairy tale. These writers employ the fantastic journey in the service of a narrowly focused and unpleasant didacticism. Frequently in traditional folk tales and in many excellent fantasies from both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, the archetype of departure and return reveals that the child protagonist is spirited into fairy land where he or she receives genuine spiritual or emotional insight, acquires a more profound sense of identity and the nature of things, and, like the Ancient Mariner, returns to the ordinary world a sadder but wiser child. In such stories fantastic journeys also serve a moral function, but it is an enlarged, mythic truth, not a simplistic lesson in moral conduct. Today, then, I would like to discuss the practices of writers of didactic fairy tales and to contrast them to fantasies which also incorporate the archetypal fantastic journey in the interest of expressing complex spiritual, ethical, or emotional truths: the Grimms' story, "Hansel and Gretel," Andrew Lang's The Gold of Fairnilee , and Natalie Babbitt's Tuck Everlasting. Most of the earliest literary fairy tales and fantasies written from 1840 to 1850 in England were concerned with diagnosing, treating, and curing the moral ailments of children, as were writers of explicitly Moral and Matter-of-Fact tales. The attitude of most writers and adult readers of fairy tales at mid-century is represented by an anonymous review of Uncle Peter's Chair (a work which has apparently suffered oblivion) in The Atheneum , 1845; the reviewer describes the volume as "... intended for little boys and girls from 8 to 14...