Criticism in the Woods: Fairy Tales as Poetry

Abstract

Criticism in the Woods:Fairy Tales as Poetry Roderick McGillis Perseus turned to Fable and gave her the spindle. "In your hands this spindle will delight us forever and out of yourself you will spin for us an unbreakable thread." Novalis The fairy tale, a short epic form, tends to embrace the entire world. Max Lüthi I give you the end of a golden string, Only wind it into a ball,It will lead you in at Heaven's gate Built in Jerusalem's wall. William Blake The fairy tale and the riddle are essentially related. Max Lüthi [End Page 2] I offer a formidable list of epigraphs, but they structure my theme: the world of the fairy tale.1 This world is essentially metaphoric, and therefore it invites literary critics to examine it. Since the critic cannot locate all tales in time or establish an author for each, he ought to prefer a synchronic approach to the diachrony of late nineteenth century folklore or to the extra-literary synchrony of many psychological approaches. To speak of synchrony, however, is misleading. We find ourselves in a structuralist cell inside the prison-house of language, chained to the same pillar with Vladimir Propp, Claude Levi-Strauss, Michel Butor, and Eleazar Meletinsky.2 This is impressive company, but the hermeneutic models it represents—for example, the Proppian functions of dramatis personae in fairy tales—are as reductive as most models so far advanced as interpretive keys to traditional tales. Propp himself had a diachronic intention; he sought a historical explanation for the structures he perceived in fairy tales as his The Historical Roots of the Fairy Tale (1946) reveals. Literary critics know that the origin of the fairy tale is Fable, and it is her "unbreakable thread" I hope to follow. My epigraphs plot both sections of this essay. The first section is a brief review of recent criticism of fairy tales. What I hope to suggest is the inadequacy, from a literary perspective, of this criticism. Currently, criticism of fairy tales is in the woods. Section two argues for the phenomenological unity of the tales and explains their liberating potential. In this section I provide readings of "Hans in Luck," and "The Fisherman and his Wife." What I wish to establish is the validity of a "poetic" reading of fairy tales. As poetry, the tales are closer to riddle than they are to charm, two other forms of oral literature. I Anglo-American literary criticism has been unkind to the fairy tale. Traditionally, this unkindness has consisted either in an insistence on the unsuitability of the tales for children or in an insistence on their suitability for children and hence their unsuitability for serious literary criticism. We all know the irritation "that cursed Barbauld Crew" caused Charles Lamb one hundred and eighty years ago. Mrs. Barbauld and Mrs. Trimmer failed to see much of value in fairy tales. In the Barbauld Trimmer tradition, defenders of the child's right to tedium, literal-minded readers, continue to disparage the fairy tale, and in a spirit similar to Lamb's, although from a dramatically different standpoint, Bruno Bettelheim has felt the impetus to defend the child's right to enchantment.3 But perhaps more regrettable is the tacit assumption by literary criticism, at least until recently, that the traditional fairy tale is too simple to deserve scrutiny. The fairy tale formed no tradition great or small. New Criticism, strangely, ignored it; archetypal criticism nodded in its direction, but turned quickly to the pursuit of fairy tale motifs in Dickens and other mainstream writers; structuralist criticism acknowledges the importance of Propp and turns, as usual, to more important texts; and post-structuralist criticism (deconstructionism) has so far shown little interest in approaching the abyss that awaits the attentive reader of fairy tales. That there is an "abyssing"4 for the interpreter of fairy tales was clear to those nineteenth century writers closest to the spirit of the fairy tale. In Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1801), Novalis articulates something of the deconstructionist enterprise: "You meditate and meditate and guess at a meaning now and then and get all the more eager to unravel the...