Tonight's
post be Lit Crit, if quasi-so (don't look for any old footnotes or
other socks under the bed): my take on some of our classic folk-tales
and fables. Starting out with the shortest of them all, complete in
just four lines,
Jack
and Jill went up the hill
To fetch a pail of water,
Jack fell down and broke his crown
And Jill came tumbling after.
To fetch a pail of water,
Jack fell down and broke his crown
And Jill came tumbling after.
Built-in
metaphors underscore this cautionary tale, the mother of all
sexploitation: the hill, the pail, the fall, the broken crown and all
the tumbling after. The verb “to jack off” (personally, I don't
bag “jilling off”) suggests a tract against self abuse.
Alliteration of the names hints at sibling love in the couple's list
of follies. And that the kids are immature is all in their pail, a
fire bucket too heavy for one child to carry. The well, located
uphill and above any water table, must needs be deep; hence the
struggle to get into position and the effort to dangle the old rope.
Jack's fall is head over heels - downhill rather than into the well -
for should he fall in, the breaking of his crown would pale against
him drowning. Likewise, for Jill to come tumbling after seems wrong
if it is into the pit that she rolls, rather than downside. Despite
these, the danger of the well's deep stays menacing in the
background. A further slant on Jill's “tumbling after” is sheer
fun, coming on top of Jack's mischance. Well children do love a
tumble (see below, when she laughs at his broken crown). The idea of
a condom breaking after “Jack fell down” presages an era somewhat
later than the original, which wasn't published until 1765. Although
Shakespeare, writing a century earlier in LLL and AMND, cites Jack
and Jill as archetypal sweethearts. One reason for the poem's
survival into the modern age is its continuous adaptation to the new.
For example, when King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette are
guillotined during the French Revolution, the poem is used to explain
The Terror to British children. Supplementary verses added from the
early nineteenth century onwards, attempt to play up the narrative as
idyllic-pastoral and play down the metaphoric. In one popular
version, a second verse runs,
Up
Jack got and home did trot
As fast as he could caper
To old Dame Dob who patched his nob
With vinegar and brown paper
As fast as he could caper
To old Dame Dob who patched his nob
With vinegar and brown paper
Appended
quatrains, too often taken for originals, lack the simplicity and
oomph of the single stanza. Despite themselves, they prolong the
exploitation. Nob, in the above, is slang both for human head and
male member; moreover, old Dame Dob is as dubious a character as ever
there was. Adding more verses has Jack and Jill endure a daisy-chain
of pricks and kicks: she is whipped by her mother for laughing at his
broken head, he is knocked down by a goat for laughing at her
whipping – until the happy ending where they ride the see-saw
together: a plank laid across a gate.
Jack
and Jill are characters of fun that sport a hint of social
aspiration. Their difficulties belie them as true bumpkins; at least,
these kids are no farm workers' brats. The offspring of hireling
swain and shepherdess, themselves archetypes of pastoral love, would
not struggle with pails from wells.
Repetition
of the single verse ”Jack and Jill”, to a long preserved folk
tune, emphasises the pair's inseparability. Their names are synonyms
for Everyman and Everywoman. Come what may, they endure. Sexual love
may be a folly, a hole sunk into a bulge. The Fall it leads to, from
Eden, ascribes religious significance to the narrative. Yet love,
even in its crudest sense, always prevails.
In
one of the story's many codas, Jack appears again on the see-saw,
See-saw,
Margery Daw
Jack shall have a new master
He shall have but a penny a day
Because he can't work any faster
Jack shall have a new master
He shall have but a penny a day
Because he can't work any faster
Condemned
to do poorly paid, sawyer's work for a new master and now bound to
Margery, a slovenly or “sluttish” woman (see “Cinderslut” and
other anti-woman tropes below). Marriage transforms Jill into a lazy
drudge, and leaves Jack fit only for the lowest paid manual labour. A
great fall, indeed.
*
Referencing
Jack and Jill's roll down the hill to the Fall of Adam and Eve is one
example of how folk tales are Christianised and bathed in morality as
a consequence of their writing down and publishing. In contrast, more
overtly sexual episodes of the non-Christian Thousand And One
Nights provide us with side-glances into a less censored
tradition. To return to the oral core of European fable is to strip
out the interpolations of moralising parsers such as the Grimms. In
their Hansel & Gretel, the background to the story is a
famine. This natural calamity morphs the tale away from the holocaust
these particular children face: that is, betrayal by their parents.
The image of parenthood gone wrong is further ameliorated in later
editions by presenting the demented mother as a second wife. To
understand how a mother, natural or surrogate, can be driven to such
an abhorrent expediency as abandoning children to die in a forest –
twice – we focus on the psychological as well as the
socio-economic drives behind such a pathology.
Though
the children's father is said to be a poor wood cutter, a wood
gatherer is more likely his calling. Conjure the poor man King
Wenceslas sees, gathering winter fuel while the snow lies thick and
even. Such a varlet sets up home in the poor lands where the town
ends and the forest begins. He even finds a wife to join him; and at
first life is bearable, even idyllic. The forest is plenty stocked
with food and fuel, while they are content together in the hut he
builds with the free lumber. They sell bundles of firewood, and with
their pennies buy furniture, cloth and - most importantly - bread,
the manna of daily life. His wife, who comes with a modest dowry of
bedding, cooking pots and the like, believes her choice of man is
good. For he is strong, faithful, loves her dearly; even his dull wit
is charming, at first. Time is their Eden, which only ends as the
children come along. Whereupon, with four mouths to feed, the family
gradually slips into poverty. There is no longer any surplus income
from collecting wood, demand is seasonal and payment too dependent on
the town's prosperity. For weeks on end they live from hand-to-mouth,
surviving as hunter-gatherers. It is all they can do to feed and
clothe little Hansel and Gretel to the very lowest standard.
Meantime, town folks may be suffering, too. If famine does ensue, the
wood gatherer's family are left with less than most. The husband
carries on regardless, dully building up their wood stocks. The wife,
possessed of imagination, frets herself into a state. A general
famine, though, need not be the cause of her mad scheme. Just as
likely is the poisoning of their bread with ergotamine. A natural
hallucinogenic fungus, it grows on the local wheat and induces mania
in those whose diet is mostly bread.
Unlike
Jack and Jill, whose love for each other is the source of their
predicament, Hansel and Gretel are saved by love. In later versions
of Jack and Jill, the kids make fun of each other, worsening their
plight. They are only permitted to play on the see-saw to stop their
mutual taunts. Hansel and Gretel, by contrast, save each other by
loyalty and filial love. This is why their affection must be asexual;
they cannot be corrupted, as Jack and Jill are. However, the plot of
their story is still driven by sex, or at least by sex-distinction.
In the first half of the tale, their mother wishes to stay with her
husband at the expense of sacrificing the children. In the second
half, the Gingerbread Woman must fatten up a boy – a male – to
eat. Gretel is only of use to help feed up her brother.
What
makes Hansel & Gretel universal and appealing, especially for
children, is that all young people must eventually leave home and
learn to fend for themselves. The forest, then, represents the big
bad world of adulthood. This brother and sister already live on the
borderline between safety of town, and dangers of the forest. They
have survival skills, Hansel is able to lead them out the first time
they are abandoned. He is thwarted the second time and bread plays a
cruel trick. The trail of crumbs they leave, to be followed the next
morning, is eaten up by birds.
It
is sometimes suggested that the Gingerbread Woman is the
mother/stepmother in another guise, and her death at Gretel's hands
explains why their father is alone when the children return. Such a
piece of magic ascribes an Oedipal thrust to the tale, albeit where a
daughter commits matricide. But where does this anti-woman or
woman-blame trope come from? One answer is that tales such as Hansel
and Gretel, Snow White, and Cinderella, nearly always contain child
abandonment. Mother death in childbirth features prominently in the
pre-modern era, leaving many children to be brought up by surrogates
or siblings. The horror is that even good parents cannot be relied
on. So who can? A parallel between the wife's selfish need of the
husband and the Gingerbread Woman's sick need for Hansel strongly
contrasts with Gretel and Hansel's pure and selfless reliance on each
other. Although it is Hansel who saves them in the first part of the
story by leading them home from the forest, it is Gretel who saves
Hansel from being eaten. First the girl uses cunning to prolong
fattening her brother up; fooling the Gingerbread Woman, who is
half-blind, with a bone in place of his finger. Gretel shows physical
as well as mental strength, pushing their tormentor into the oven. In
the Grimms' version, Gretel's early tears give way to a steely
determination to save their lives. Her heroic fidelity makes up for
their betrayal.
Overcoming
the Gingerbread Woman, the children's bond matures and they are
rewarded with fabulous riches. Their love is mutual as well as
filial, and their partnership is ideal. Gretel, eschewing the
opportunity to escape from the visually-impaired Gingerbread Woman,
bides her time to save Hansel. Thus again the couple must be brother
and sister; for if they weren't, the bond between them would become
sexual. The incest taboo keeps their relationship pure in a Christian
sense; while the captivity theme appeals strongly to children, and
survives into adulthood as less innocent forms of role-play.
In
Little Red Riding Hood the forest setting remains similar; but
here the supernatural element, which is all but absent from the
above, plays a significant part. Another important factor is how this
centuries-old story continues to evolve. There follows a typical,
non-Disney summary of the plot:
Little
Red is a town girl, sent by her parents to take food to Grandma.
Bringing up their daughter in town, Mother and Father are struggling
to improve their lot; the “riding hood” she wears is a hooded
cloak normally worn on horseback, but Little Red goes off into the
forest on foot. Children want to know why Grandma lives so deep in
the forest. We say, her cottage is the old family homestead. But
Grandma's seclusion is a metaphor for the pre-nuptial world of
danger, opportunity and choice.
The
girl is not afraid of walking alone into the dark forest, straying
off the main path to gather wild flowers and take short cuts; nor is
she shy of talking to strangers. This is both her undoing and her
salvation. Along the way she stops and chats to the Woodsman, a man
with a keen axe and a wary eye. He tells Little Red to greet Grandma
for him, and to be careful how she goes. He always looks out for the
girl on her way back. One day, in disguise, the big bad wolf walks
along the path with Little Red and engages her in conversation. He
learns her business and takes his leave, running ahead and beating
the girl to Grandma's cottage. The wolf breaks into the house and
swallows the helpless old lady in one gulp.
Now
disguised as Grandma, the wolf awaits Little Red's arrival. The
cottage door is on the latch, so she lets herself in as usual and
comes up to the bedroom. The wolf tricks her into approaching the bed
where he lies. The scene that follows amounts to a rape of the
innocent. Little Red can see some of the wolf's features in Grandma's
demeanour, “Grandma, what big eyes you've got!” - “All the
better to see you with, my child!” etc. There is playfulness in
these repeated phrases, so when we come to the final lines “What
big teeth you've got!” - “All the better to eat you!” Little
Red's gullibility shows she is complicit in her own doom.
She
and Grandma are saved by the arrival of the Woodsman, with night
having fallen and the girl not gone by on her way home. He knocks the
wolf out with the butt of his axe, then uses the blade to slice open
its belly. Grandma and Little Red emerge still alive. With the wolf
still unconscious, Little Red fills its belly with stones and sews
them in. When the wolf awakes and tries to escape, it can only crawl
off and die in agony.
In
Jack and Jill, boys and girls are warned against falling in love too
young. Hansel & Gretel's tale cautions the young about whom they
can trust, warning that even their own parents may abandon them.
While Jack and Jill show the consequences of growing up, Hansel &
Gretel explore the need to make your own way in the world. Little Red
Riding Hood, while functioning as a cautionary tale, poses more
questions than it answers. It shows a girl on the brink of puberty,
town-bred but in contact with her origins in the forest. There is
danger there and the first part of the story sets up great tensions.
Why does Grandma live in a lonely cottage, its door on the latch,
surrounded by wild animals? Why do Little Red's parents send her on
such a perlious task? Why does she stray from the path? After all the
warnings she is given, why does she remain so gullible?
Many
sanitised versions of this story exist, being one of the most
developed of all fairy tales. There are extreme accounts, in which
Little Red is simply eaten at the end; and even those in which the
roles are reversed and the wolf makes hero. This plethora of
re-workings returns the tale to its oral traditions, a mode of story
telling where there is a constant dialogue between teller and
audience. Everyone retells stories in their own way and each
generation of tellers tailors them to their audience. Children change
things by asking questions, the answers to which add details that go
beyond the original. Everyone probes the depths of the forest after
their own fashion, posing the questions and solving the mysteries to
suit themselves.
*
Cinderella
Back
in the seventeenth century, she is Cinderslut; the very lowest of
servants, employed to clean the grates of merchants' homes. No longer
her father's child, she is treated by step-mother and step-sisters as
orphan or foundling; like some fallen girl taken in by a well-meaning
family lest she die of cold and hunger on the streets. Buttons, the
courier-boy, pledges to take her as wife – if and when he finds the
means. The promise is in vain, though, for the chaste maid already
aspires to the rank of pro-queen.
Cinderella
is the orphan of urban folklore, of a Ruritanian city-state with no
wild forest within its walls. The trees have become ashes; at home,
there is only the filthy fireplace in which to skulk. For companions,
she has lizards and mice; for toys, the pumpkin seeds of dreams. Even
beneath her ashen pall, such natural beauty can scarce be concealed
that her overweight and gaudy step-sisters forbid the maid to stray
beyond the scullery door. No suitor shall see her and nor shall their
step-father recall that mirror-image of his first wife. Meanwhile,
Cordelia (by another name) is free to day-dream of her French
Dauphin; so long as she sweep the grate, wash the plate and darn the
underskirt and hose. Witness the power of prayer.
Faith
and justice transform Cinderslut's prospects from meek drudge to
Queen of Hearts. The fairy godmother grants her wish, and does so
with the classic test of faith. To inherit the earth, she must remain
meek to the sweet end. Her glass slipper becomes the Holy Grail of
beauty's invisible essence; the prince himself progressing from house
to house to bathe the feet of all the maids in town.
*
While
many tales start with town folk venturing in the forest, Jack
and The Beanstalk (also known as Jack the Giant-Slayer)
bucks convention by opening with a country lad taking a cow to
market. Only this Jack – yes, Jack the lad is back - doesn't get
too far before he's diddled out the beast for a hat-full of beans.
This be a lesson to him, but he is a smart lad; Oedipus by another
name.
Hard
times for him and his widowed mother bottom-out when Jack skips in
through the kitchen door, convinced the beans are worth their weight.
What does his mother expect of the boy, new cows for old? For his
pains, he is sent up to bed without any supper, and the beans are
defenestrated into where they belong - the garden. As we know, beans,
like the gold or silver coins they stand for, are magic indeed.
Overnight, they can transform into extraordinary things; and one of
these beans is as supernatural as that lottery ticket with the magic
number, 666.
An
equivalent of the forest grows in the garden. Atop the beanstalk is a
magic land with a giant's castle as centrepiece. Jack the lad has the
gall to climb up and explore, entering the castle and beguiling the
owner's wife into feeding him. He filches bags of golden eggs, laid
by the eponymous hen (or goose), and returns three times before he is
rumbled. The Giant's bywords for betrayal, “Fee, Fie, Fo, Fum”
which were known by Shakespeare and sound like a Latin declension;
and their rhyme, “I smell the blood of an Englishman!” should be
Protestant in origin.
Jack,
knowing the true value of the beans, is no less a figure than Oedipus
for solving the riddle of the sphinx. But then again Jack, who has
the blood of an Englishman, goes one further than killing his father
(who is already dead) or sleeping with his mother (who, like the cow,
is dried up). The giant, a powerful being who lives in the sky, has
already killed his father and stolen the hen which lays the golden
egg. We can take this to mean that his father has been gathered back
into God's fold. So what does Jack do? He steals back the hen, and
when the giant follows him down to earth, he sunders the stalk with
an axe and brings the monster to his death. Can it be true that an
Englishman has the gall to kill God Himself? 'Fraid so. The English
Oedipus is not content to bring his father's house into disrepute, he
must bring the phooey Catholic Church tumbling down. We can almost
hear his hum of Lillibullero (or a young George Washington whistling
Yankee Doodle?) as he swings the axe.
*
Could
it be that by telling stories to our children, we are extending our
own imaginations? Goldilocks and The Three Bears takes us back
to the primeval forest of the unconscious. In relatively modern
times, it has gone through a remarkable transformation; and most
recently, as “the Goldilocks principle” become a way for
scientists to distinguish between worlds - ie, exo-planets, orbiting
distant stars – which may or may not be able to support life.
First
the transformation. The original story is written down by Keat's
friend, the poet Southey, who has it from his nanny. An old hag
intrudes on the bears' cottage, stealing their porridge and defiling
their beds. As a result, they kill and eat her. It's a cautionary
tale with brute nature, i.e. the bears, playing revenger against a
social transgressor. When the thief and usurper is a beautiful little
girl, however, she must needs be deserving. How? Well, she is lost
and has no Mummy or Daddy, brothers or sisters. And her crimes? Well,
she is cold and hungry, tired and... at least she knocks on doors
before entering. And the doors do creak open after she taps on them.
The bears are charmed and take her in, to live with them “happily
ever after”. Children love this tale and will demand to hear it
over and over again without the least variation. They will even
consent to eat the dreaded porridge because of it! And the
blooming cheek of that golden-haired girl, putting her life in
extreme peril - only to be embraced by the wild creatures as one of
their own!
Scientists
have taken to Goldilocks. That Daddy-Bear's porridge is too hot to
eat and Baby-Bear's too cold, while Mummy-Bear's proves “just
right” - illustrates the law of entropy. For example, how huge
stars stay hot for billions of years, while the tiny masses of
planets soon cool off. The Earth, then, has just the right balance of
hot and cold, wet and dry, stability and variation to support life.
Psychologists, too, point to the way children learn by experiment; in
Goldilock's case, trying out and rejecting two sizes of bed before
settling on the one that is “just right”. Also of note is
Goldilocks rejecting Daddy and Baby roles before settling on Mummy's.
Testing the waters before settling on motherhood as her life's role.
Also remarkable is how she lives happily ever after with the bears in
the woods, suggesting a “just-right” blend of domesticity and
life on the wild side.
*
A
story is a story is a story, wherein the magic
of writing is to uphold belief while suspending disbelief. Our
children, with deconstruction built-into their world-view, demand to
be told one as a prelude to their sweet dreams. What they
don't see as humorous, terrifying or just plain logical, they
challenge directly and state which changes are to be made forthwith.
To a child, moreover, a story is every bit as real as a dish of
chocolate ice cream or the spectacles that sit on the end of your
nose. And what a big nose we have!
These insights are keen.
ReplyDeleteI'm working on fairy tale story boards now.
HanselandGretelStudio.com or Facebook.