Lit Assignment
Oct. 9th, 2010 09:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
The question is:
"The fairy tale has become totally institutionalized in Western Society" - Investigate and evaluate this claim with particular reference to Little Red Riding Hood.
Jack Zipes, in his article, ‘Origins: Fairy Tales and Folk Tales,’ (Zipes, 2006) claims that fairy tales have become “totally institutionalized in Western society.” This essay investigates that claim by assessing how fairy tales, once considered “trite and irrelevant” (Zipes p. 26) have grown to become the genre “most dominant in the field of children’s literature” (Zipes, p.38). It will examine the adaptations and modifications which have enabled ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ to conform to varying cultural and counter-cultural ideologies and thus become “institutionalized”. In his article Zipes does not define “institutionalization” or make a value judgement on whether this is a positive or negative development. By contrasting ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ with ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ and ‘The Little Mermaid’ this essay will consider both the potential for institutionalization as an embedding with the cultural fabric, to be endlessly retold and reinvented, or the alternative meaning, that of being straitjacketed into conforming to the existing social structures.
Fairy tales have a long history in Western society, beginning in the oral storytelling traditions of peasant folktales, but it is only in the last few centuries that these traditional stories were written down for consumption by other classes. The first printed version of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ is that by Charles Perrault who was writing as part of the French salon culture which refashioned existing peasant stories for the elegant participants. We find with Perrault’s version the first definitive sign of the story being adapted to suit a particular segment of society. According to the SurLaLune website, Perrault’s version was the first to use the famous red cloak or hood which, the website claims, was not a colour worn “by morally upright women” (http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/ridinghood/notes.html). The red hood is one of many symbols and metaphors in the play suggesting sexuality and sexual impropriety; others include Red Riding Hood jumping into bed with the wolf, and the wolf himself which the SurLaLune website tells us is “often a metaphor for a sexually predatory man.” Perrault, in writing for an audience of sophisticated French adults, adapts the story into an allegory on the dangers of “gentle wolves” or young men who are not quite what they purport themselves to be. Perrault’s version of the story was suited to his intended audience, but for fairy tales to become institutionalised, as Zipes claims, they would have to reflect social changes. Was this the case with ‘Little Red Riding Hood’?
The Brothers Grimm version of the tale, ‘Little Red Cap’ can certainly be claimed to do this. It embraces and reflects the more overtly patriarchal and moralistic ideology of the time in which it was written. This version introduces the huntsman, a symbol of apparently benign male power conspicuously absent in Perrault’s version of the story. The wolf and huntsman are figures of violence and power, both denizens of the forest surviving by predating on others, and can be viewed as two aspects of the same pervasive patriarchy within which the Grimm’s wrote. The huntsman can be seen as representing the apparently benign adult, male, power which rescues errant children and punishes evil-doers, while the wolf can be seen as a symbol of male retribution for female disobedience. It is with this version that Little Red Riding Hood’s agency is stripped away, whereas in some earlier version from the fourteenth century she escapes by tricking the wolf, in both the Grimm Brother’s versions of the story she is reduced to passive victim who must meekly accept her fate: either to be die in the belly of the wolf or to be rescued by the huntsman. She is also reduced in age, from girl apparently on the cusp of puberty, to a child. This enables the tone and of the fairy tale to be changed from the Perrault’s sophisticated metaphor on loss of virtue and male sexual predation to a simpler tale warning of the consequences of disobedience to parents. So why this “dumbing down”? Perhaps because the perception of fairy tales was changing and the implied audience had already changed. Charles Perrault’s version of the tale was written for the amusement of the visitors of elegant French salons but just over a hundred years later the Grimm’s published their first version of the story in Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children's and Household Tales), suggesting that fairy tales had already been handed down from the fashionable and elegant party goers to their children. This is not to say that children historically would not have heard fairy tales before. Francis Kirkman, born in 1632, quoted in the essay ‘Children’s Literature: Birth, Infancy, Maturity,’ lists a number of books which had enjoyed reading as a child, none of them ‘intended especially for children’ as the essay states (Grenby p. 42) but evidently enjoyed by them. Precisely when literature designed specifically for children began being published is subject to debate, but clearly children were reading books for a considerable length of time before anything was marketed directly to them. One of the reasons that it is difficult to determine an exact starting date for the genre of “Children’s Literature” is that the nature of the genre changed radically over time and continues to do so. The fourteenth and fifteenth century tales, including those that would become ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ were primarily entertainment, but by the time Perrault wrote his version it seems that an overt moral was required. This tension between instruction and delight in fiction generally is particularly noticeable in children’s literature where views of children and childhood are continually changing and developing. Childhood, the study guide tells us, is a social construct, meaning that society, adult society specifically, decide on what childhood is, represents, and crucially, what is appropriate for children to be exposed to. This social construct has changed hugely over the past few hundred years almost in concert with the adaptations of fairy tales. The blood, violence, and lack of an upbeat ending of early versions of Red Riding Hood have been modified as attitudes to appropriate children’s literature have changed. These attitudes have continued to change up to the present day while fairy tales have continued to be adapted.
More recently, we see in the late seventies and early eighties an ongoing battle between the rising counter-cultural movements; feminism, gay and lesbian rights, the liberal left, and the evolving face of the dominant cultural ideology which was already turning from cosy patriarchy to hardnosed capitalism. A series of cultural skirmishes began and literature; popular and prestigious, adult and children’s alike, found itself pressed into service. From books of criticism to newspapers and novels, literature was being used to explore and define new ideologies. It might seem as if fairy tales, with their passive princesses, moralistic messages, and enmeshed elitism would be abandoned as hopelessly outdated or simply ignored for being the trite and irrelevant pieces of fiction they had been previously considered. However it is clear from the surge of alternative and adapted fairy tales that emanated from this clash of creeds that fairy tales were an important weapon. The fact that they had, by this time, become institutionalised made them an irresistible target for the counter-cultural forces to revolutionise. Feminist fairy tales, politically correct fairy tales, and more began to make inroads into what had been for some time the largely conservative and stolid genre. Red Riding Hood was again adapted to reflect the changing social situation and mores. Two particularly revealing adaptations are Angela Carter’s short story ‘The Company of Wolves’ (published in Chamber of Blood, 1979) and Roald Dahl’s poem ‘Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf’ (published in Revolting Rhymes, 1983). Although using the same basic source material the two fashion radically different versions: Dahl’s poem is comic, dialogue-led, and overtly aimed at children while Carter’s version is filled with lushly sensuous imagery and with its metaphors of sexual awakening appears aimed at adults. However the two versions share certain similarities that reflect the social values of the time: neither version features the huntsman, Red Riding Hood saves herself in both instances, and Granny is not rescued alongside her. It is also telling that in neither case is the wolf’s, or werewolf’s, attentions due to Red Riding Hood’s failure to comply with parental instruction or social rules. The heavy moralising of earlier versions has been removed and with it the sense of the wolf as an instrument of patriarchal or social oppression. This reflects the changing environment of the UK in the late seventies/early eighties when both versions were produced, a period in which individual achievement was being lauded socially and in the press while communal responsibility was being downgraded, Margaret Thatcher’s famous comment “there’s no such thing as society” was made just a few years after Dahl’s poem was published. Dahl, a writer always ready to challenge existing power structures, gives Red Riding Hood outright victory over the wolf and by allowing her entry into a traditionally male preserve; that of gunslinger. She doesn’t use her wits to defeat the wolf, as in pre-Perrault versions of the story, but by pulling a pistol “from her knickers.”Carter’s version of Red Riding Hood picks up Perrault’s thread of sexuality and uses it to weave a different pattern, almost a riposte to Perrault’s conflation of sexuality and death. While in his version of the story Red Riding Hood is punished for her dalliance with the wolf, Carter’s Red is confident in her sexuality and uses it as she sees fit, in this case to save her life. However, despite Carter’s short story being adapted into a film of the same name, and Dahl’s popularity as an author, neither version is considered as definitive, and although both are striking in how they have been modified to reflect society they are only two versions among hundreds of novels, stories, films, cartoons, picture books, and even musicals. There are adult versions, children’s versions, versions where the “wolf’ is a serial killer or even the victim of Red’s psychosis. Therefore, if we take Jack Zipes basic argument that multiple versions existing in all layers of Western society to be evidence of “institutionalisation” we can agree that in the case of Red Riding Hood this is correct.
However, there are other fairy tales which have not been so successfully integrated into society. Jack and The Beanstalk, for example, has a number of versions but as early as 1807 there were concerns over the morality of a story in which the protagonist trespasses, steals, and either cold bloodedly murders or accidentally manslaughters the giant against who he committed his crimes. A 2001 mini-series of Jack and The Beanstalk has as its plot the attempt to find justice for the unwarranted murder of the giant.
Alternatively there is “The Little Mermaid” which, when adapted into a Disney film was arguably subjected to the other kind of institutionalisation; that of being straitjacketed, or “[m]aimed, altered and distorted...” (Study Guide p. 52) as George Laurence Gomme of the Folklore society warned could happen when folk tales become literature. Hans Christian Anderson’s original story is a tragic one in which the little mermaid gives up her voice and ultimately her life, suffering agonies, in the pursuit of an unobtainable man and an immortal soul. The coda in which the daughters of the air tell her that she will gain an immortal soul by doing good deeds remains controversial among critics. No such debate is possible with the Disney adaptation which takes out any mention of the physical pain the Little Mermaid suffers and changes the innately tragic story into one with an upbeat, happy ending in which love conquers all.
It would appear then that fairy tales have indeed become institutionalised, both in the sense of becoming a part of the literary fabric of Western society, and also, to some extent, in the sense of being forced into conformity. Whether this institutionalisation will lead to flourishing retellings which explore original ideas and more, as with Red Riding Hood, or will lead to the unique features being distorted and destroyed, as with ‘The Little Mermaid’ remains to be seen.