Fairy Tales

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Everyone Knows About Folklore! (except for when you don’t)

March 31, 2013 in Academia, Fairy Tales, Folklore | 5 comments

As promised, here’s my second post of the month. Hopefully I can continue to publish two posts per month, and perhaps even increase the number as time goes on.

Since I’ve spent the last few days revising a chapter of my dissertation into an article to submit for publication – which involved changing all the citations from MLA to Chicago style, and multiple other tedious rearrangements – I’m going to just write this pots in prose. No citations. Feel free to ask for them in comments if you’re curious.

While I was having a fabulous time at this year’s International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, I noticed a trend: people tend to discuss folklore (the topic) as though they know as much about it as someone who has academic training in folklore (the discipline). One of the most obvious manifestations of this was people who mixed up the names of folk narrative genres, like legend and fairy tale and myth, without regard to how they’re used in our discipline. And trust me, we use them quite precisely, distinguishing between their content, contexts, forms, and functions (among other characteristics).

I get that some of these genre terms have entered English vernacular with various meanings (“myth” being one of the most pernicious examples of this phenomenon), but I’d expect scholars to do a bit more research, and use their terminology with more intention and precision. And I get that folkloristics is a small, less-known discipline, so people don’t immediately think to look up our scholarship as examples of how to use genre terms with utmost precision. These are all factors, to be sure.

However, I think there’s something else going on too: I think that we folklorists, in our efforts to reach out to students and colleagues and the general public, have mistakenly placed an emphasis on how folklore is for everyone. If we all know folklore – which we all do, even if we don’t think of it in those terms – then we’re all, in some sense, folklore experts. We’re all the folk after all, right? (to quote my beloved mentor, Alan Dundes) So if we’re all the folk, we all know about folklore, and we all have the right to talk and write about it, right?

Sorta.

On the one hand, I’ve found emphasizing that everyone knows and performs folklore to be an incredibly useful strategy while  teaching folklore classes. Once my students know that folklore encompasses all the expressive culture and artistic communication of a given group, and that it’s not just myths and fairy tales, they respond enthusiastically to my in-class discussion prompts. They can rattle off jokes, folkspeech/slang, holiday customs, family stories, personal narratives, folk medicine, and more. All of which is wonderful to witness.

But on the other hand, perhaps we as professional folklorists are mistakenly giving the impression that once a person can identify folklore in her life, she automatically knows enough about it to present or publish about it. Perhaps this is related to the ethnographic impulse in our discipline, where we urge people to describe texts of folklore and  relate them to their life and cultural contexts. That’s definitely part of what we want out of folklore scholarship, and if laypeople can get that far, that’s worthwhile, right? But there’s a line between description and analysis, and perhaps that line is getting muddled somewhere.

I’m not sure how we can rectify this misunderstanding, and I suspect that there are deeper cultural forces at work here (such as the dichotomous relationship between orality and literacy and attendant values). I don’t know whether I’m willing to give up the powerful teaching tool that “everyone knows folklore!” has turned out to be, though I’m thoroughly annoyed by every instance where someone (whether a layperson or academic) doesn’t bother to look up our field’s research when referring to our field’s topics.

Suggestions or comments welcome, from folklorists as well as everyone else.

(for what it’s worth, I don’t intend this post to send a negative message to scholars who don’t have a folklore background but are actively interested in working on folklore topics… please just keep in mind that our discipline has a long history – the American Folklore Society was founded before the American Anthropological Association, for instance – and if you really want to do a good job of working with folklore materials, your research must include folkloristic approaches to the topic… and feel free to ask your local folklorist for research suggestions, most of us are happy to help!)

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Fairy Tale Story Time with Auntie Jeana

September 6, 2012 in Academia, Fairy Tales, Folklore | 5 comments

I am only okay at telling stories.

However, I’m actually really good at telling stories about stories.

Me dressed in traditional Manipuri clothing for the banquet at ICFA 2012.

(seriously, ask any of my intro-to-folklore students: I try to tell jokes as examples of the genre, and usually muck up the punchline; really, ask any of my friends or family – I am not so good at telling jokes or stories, but I am fantastic at interpreting and analyzing them)

So there I was at the International Conference of the Fantastic in the Arts this past March. This is where, incidentally, I’d had a life-changing conversation with China Miéville, a writer I adore beyond words. It’s also where I presented on my dissertation on gender and the body in European fairy tales, focusing on monstrous masculinity within my subset of tales. Some of my favorite people in the whole world attend this conference, so I love catching up with them. But I also get to meet new people, which is quite awesome in its own right.

One evening, after panel sessions were over, I found myself at the poolside bar with two young conference attendees who were both studying some permutation of library science and/or children’s literature/YA. They were really interested in learning more about the connections between fairy tales and fantasy, and I was more than happy to oblige them. After a drink or three, I was telling them, basically, how to not screw up this kind of scholarship. I might’ve also been referring to myself in the third person as Auntie Jeana… I can rock a donor figure role, okay?

If you wanna know how to do good scholarship on fairy tales and fantasy, I figure it helps to know what bad scholarship looks like. And oh boy, do I have some gems for you!

Earlier at this conference, I was attending a panel on, you guessed it, fairy tales and fantasy. There were two solid papers, one on illustrations in children’s books based on fairy tales, and one on a certain rather violent tale type. The third paper was… well… when I was feeling charitable before the Q&A session, I decided that it was ill-informed and poorly executed.

Despite the paper being on a folkloric topic – Cinderella – it veered off and ignored all folklore scholarship on the tale type. It tried to prove the origin of motifs from a single version of the tale based on shared historical associations which was, hm, misguided at best. I mean, searching for origins is so nineteenth-century. Contemporary folklorists don’t bother much with the quest for origins since unless someone writes it down, oral tradition is, well, oral. You’re not going to find what’s never been documented. That way lies madness (or inaccurate assumptions, or poorly-done history). However, I was willing to give the author the benefit of the doubt.

But in the Q&A session, when I politely tried to point out that the author might want to read what some folklorists have to say on the matter, I was repeatedly cut off. I mean, the author got really defensive. And I even started my comment with a compliment on one connection she’d made that had caught my interest!

So, kids, before you present a paper at a conference (or encourage your students to do so), make sure you’ve done some basic reading in the discipline that whichever topic it is happens to fall in. Also? Be open to criticism, especially when it’s politely phrased and well-intentioned.

This paper wasn’t as bad as other stuff I’ve seen, though. And by other stuff, I mean the work of Jonathan Gottschall. He’s a literary Darwinist who thinks folktales provide wonderful grist for the mill of analysis. It’s so convenient that you don’t even have to read them in order to analyze them! The computer does all the work for you! So you can prove that tales from every culture reflect basic evolutionary mating patterns!

I cannot make this shit up (though I say so in more polite terms in my dissertation).

Donald Haase (an awesome-sauce folklorist) has already done a great job of debunking Gottschall’s work on fairy tales, so I needn’t repeat it here. Though you can bet I repeated it for the benefit of my young audience at ICFA on that balmy March evening at the pool bar.

Basically, if you are going to do research on a folklore topic (which includes folktales and fairy tales), do us all the favor of reading some up-to-date scholarship from our discipline. Also, read the texts themselves (which Gottschall apparently couldn’t be bothered to do). Also, make sure you’re working with a good translation. How do you know which translations are good? See our scholarship, as indicated above. If it’s older than 50-80 years, be skeptical, since people’s morals (especially during the Victorian era) prevented them from doing authentic translations especially if the material was sexual or scatalogical in nature. Which, ya know, happens a lot in folklore.

I believe I taught my young charges a lot that night by the poolside bar. Certainly, I taught them a lot about vodka shots. But I also think that in my rambling, tipsy state, I also delivered an impassioned address about how the discipline of folklore has much to offer the study of children’s literature, YA, and fantasy. We study people doing creative things. We study storytelling in all its forms. We’ve been doing it for centuries now. Why on earth would you ignore us?!

And that, my friends, is how fairy tale story time with Auntie Jeana goes.

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Living in the House of Cannibals

April 24, 2012 in Fairy Tales, Feminism | No comments

This weekend, some folklore colleagues and I watched an Estonian film titled “Nukitsamees” which translates to “Little Bumpy” (the title character is a little witch child with horns). The plot begins rather like the Western fairy tale “Hansel and Gretel” with a brother and sister lost in the woods, taken to the home of a witch where they live with the constant threat of being eaten. When they escape, they take the witch’s child with them, and though he is unruly, he eventually chooses to live a human life. There is much rejoicing, singing, dancing, and valorizing of the heteronormative family.

What really struck me about the film, however, was the grim terror that the children experienced while living in the witch’s house. While it was quite graphically depicted in the film, this is a feature of many related stories as well: the despondence and despair of the children upon discovering what they’ve stumbled into. The tale plot about children living in the house of cannibals – be they giants or witches – is quite widespread throughout Europe and Asia (I could go into specifics if I wanted to nerd out about the international transmission of folklore, but I’ll spare you that rant unless someone specifically asks about it).

These tales address very real fears of abandonment and child abuse, but more than that, I believe they deal with the experience of living in an environment that is experienced as harsh, hostile, and dangerous. The children are forced to work all day and night; they know that they could be punished or killed for any arbitrary reason; they know that their bodies will sustain the bodies of their captors, giving the captors life built on death.

What is this really about? I think these stories are about patriarchy, or, more broadly, a hierarchically stratified society that thrives upon the labor of the disenfranchised, literally building the lives of the empowered upon the bodies of the disempowered. In the case of women’s experiences of patriarchy, everything I wrote in the above paragraph applies: women’s labor in the domestic sphere is endless, filling each day and night; women (and men too) are policed and punished for any number of arbitrary transgressions when they step outside their gender roles; and women’s reproductive labor is the foundation of society’s continuation. Sexual assault remains astoundingly prevalent and functions as a powerful threat to keep women in their places, while cultural rhetoric places the blame on women who are raped as though they somehow asked for it.

Much of the same could be said for the working class in a capitalist society; for people of color in a racist society; for the urban poor in a classist society; for the untouchables in a caste society; and so on. These are the people whose bodies bear the brunt of mainstream society’s desires and needs. Those who live more comfortable lives are unaware that they are simply being fattened by the witch before being shoved into the oven.

Stories like “Hansel and Gretel” and “Nukitsamees” give us an emotional vocabulary with which to articulate experiences of fear, complicity, and hostility. Those of us who study culture know that most people can’t articulate the basic principles of the culture they live in, just like they can’t articulate all of the principles of the language they speak. We’re like fish who can’t tell that we’re swimming in water. Our culture is so infused with power relations that we can’t even begin to say where they begin and end.

The setting – a terrifying house that is not a home – intensifies the cultural conflicts we all experience. The hostility is coming from inside the house (sorry, couldn’t resist the temptation to make a BSG reference) when that is the very last place that should be experienced as hostile. Fairy tales as a genre make these artistic distortions, playing with significant themes like home and family, in order to critique these very institutions.

The imagery of terror in stories holds up a mirror so that we can see what our lives are like. Some of us are living comfortably in cages or cradles; some of us are breaking our backs stoking the fire; too many of us have already been eaten, rent limb from limb, or know people who have suffered terribly.

We are all living in the house of cannibals.

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Fairy Tales and #TwitterTypes

January 10, 2012 in Digital Humanities, Fairy Tales | 3 comments

For the non-folklorists out there, we use the term “tale type” to refer to a folktale or fairy tale plot that has shown stability throughout time and space. “Cinderella” and “Little Red Riding Hood” are great examples of tale plots that are transmitted in different languages, countries, and time periods. But here you run into the problem of tale title; “Cinderella” doesn’t bear that name in every telling, so how are we scholars supposed to keep track of them all?

The tale type system, pioneered by Finn Antti Aarne in the early 1900s and revised by American Stith Thompson in the mid-20th century and updated by German Hans-Jorg Uther in 2004, assigns numbers to tale plots. So “Cinderella” is Aarne-Thompson-Uther (ATU) 510A, “Little Red Riding Hood” is ATU 333, and so on.

However, there are problems with the system. As fairy-tale scholar Donald Haase writes on his Facebook:

I am happy to announce a new project for folk-narrative and fairy-tale scholars. For decades we have relied on the Aarne-Thompson tale-type index to understand the essence of a tale, but its skeletal description of each type’s essential plot prevents us from seeing other possibilities. The recent revision of the AaTh index was an important first step in rethinking and revising those descriptions. The Internet, however, now makes possible a new way of thinking. Devoted to breaking the magic spell of Aarne-Thompson, I propose a communal catalog of #TwitterTypes. What are #TwitterTypes? Posted on Twitter, #TwitterTypes are new summaries of traditional tales in 140 characters or less (including some version of the tale’s title). Why Twitter? Because the discipline of 140 characters composed on a computer or smartphone forces creative choices about a tale’s “essence,” and those choices reveal, to the Tweeter, the alternatives — the “Tweets-not-taken.”

 

The cool thing is that Haase basically wants to crowd-source this, a technique noted by digital humanities scholars and which I’m really curious about for fairy-tale studies:

Why a communal catalog? Imagine not a SINGLE effort to capture the SINGLE essence a tale but MANY efforts to express its MANY possibilities. Besides, I don’t want to do this all myself. So this is a CFT — a Call for #TwitterTypes. A call for contributions to the omnipresent, cloud-based #TwitterType Catalog, an endless project that exists everywhere and nowhere, a catalog that grows every time a fairy-tale scholar tweets. The first two #TwitterTypes–for “Little Red Riding Hood” and “The Frog King or Iron Henry”–follow soon on Twitter, with simultaneous postings on my Facebook page. (Thanks, Gary, for having inspired this project.)

 

Examples of Haase’s include Blue Beard: (he-said-she-said) I do.–DON’T!–I won’t.–YOU DID!–I didn’t.–YOU’RE DONE FOR!–DON’T THINK SO!! (He didn’t; done in.)

I’m going to start posting some of my own, and I encourage fairy-tale enthusiasts to do the same, and please share this link! In an update, Haase announced that we’ll go with the hashtag #TwTy since it’s shorter, allowing for more creativity within Twitter’s character limits (though I think starting with the #TwitterTypes hashtag to let searchers know that you’re participating might be helpful). Looking for inspiration? Folklorist D. L. Ashliman runs a great site of electronic folklore & mythology texts, many of which include tale type numbers. His Grimms’ tale listing is here. Another great fairy-tale site online is Sur La Lune. If you can’t find the tale type numbers, that’s fine, I think using the title will work too.

So, have at, and pass it on!

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Proposal for the Young Folklorists Conference in Vilnius, Lithuania

January 7, 2012 in Fairy Tales | No comments

Here is the CFP for the International Conference of Young Folklorists, “Theoretical Frames and Empirical Research,” that will take place in Vilnius, April 15-17, 2012. I’ll still be a visiting Ph.D. student in Tartu, Estonia at that time, and it’s only, hm, an 8-hour bus ride or so, so I’m in!

I’m really excited about the topic, because it’s something I tackle in my dissertation. To that end, I came up with a paper proposal (with an unwieldy but descriptive title, sigh) that I’d like to share:

Where the Empirical Meets the Theoretical: Merging Quantitative and Qualitative Approaches to Fairy Tales

Culture is patterned—so numbers and relationships between them matter—but culture is also multilayered, complex, symbolic, and subjectively experienced. Because culture, and especially expressive culture, can both be measured and felt, our research needs to incorporate both. In this paper, I explore how quantitative and qualitative approaches to fairy tales best help illuminate their various meanings. Drawing examples from my doctoral work on gender and the body in classical European fairy tales, I demonstrate how shifting between theoretical and empirical lenses enhances the research process.

The international tale type ATU 516, “Faithful John,” provides an excellent case study for an analysis that utilizes the intersection of empirical and theoretical frames. “Faithful John” is a highly canonical fairy tale with a male protagonist, appearing in classical collections such as Basile and the Grimms as well as ethnographic collections from various Indo-European-speaking regions and beyond. By counting the body nouns and adjectives that appeared in four versions of the tale, I was able to empirically ground an interpretation that was also theoretically informed by feminist theory, masculinity studies, and folkloristics. Additionally, I moved between close and distant readings of the texts, drawing insights from a broad study of men’s bodies in 233 tales, and then applying those findings to the narrower sample of ATU 516 texts discussed in this case study. Ultimately, my goal is to show how folklorists can benefit from combining quantitative and qualitative interpretive methods, fusing the empirical and the theoretical in our research regardless of the topic.

Thoughts?

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A Bit about Dualism

January 5, 2012 in Fairy Tales, Gender & Sexuality | 4 comments

Now that I’ve finished my dissertation, I feel that I can begin to blog in earnest.

Yes, it’s only a first draft, and yes, no doubt there’ll be revisions, but getting all those words down on the page was an important step in ushering in the beginning of the end. And even though I have academic papers to be writing for conferences and publications, having a first draft done frees up a lot of mental and creative energy for this kind of writing.

I’ve always loved writing. Yet I find myself strangely hesitant to commit words to paper in this blog. It’s taken a bit of pushing to get myself to make this first post-dissertation post. Reminding myself that writing is something I do whether I’m publishing it or not has helped. Reminding myself that this isn’t writing for a grade or for an editor has also helped – this blog is my venue to share my thoughts (scholarly for the most part) with the rest of the world. Reading this irreverently funny blog post 25 Things Writers Should Stop Doing has also helped give me the kick in the pants I need to start committing words to the screen NOW instead of the day after tomorrow.

So, since I mentioned finishing my dissertation at the outset of this post, I wanted to briefly discuss one of the issues to which I devote a full chapter of my diss: dualism. I explain what dualism is over at MySexProfessor.com, linking it to gender identity and sexual stereotypes, but there’s a lot more to be said about dualism.

In particular, I’m really fascinated by mind-body dualism, especially its gendered dimensions (in most  Western philosophical constructions, men=mind while women=body). I found evidence for this in my study of classical fairy tales, in which women were more likely to be linked with body description adjectives, particularly those evaluating beauty and those having to do with skin, while men are more likely to shed their bodies through physical transformations in the tales I evaluated. It seems clear to me that fairy tales contain elements of gendered mind-body dualism, and this is possibly one reason for the enduring popularity of fairy tales in the West: they reinforce existing cultural paradigms, and are thus perceived as important and pleasing.

There’s probably more I could’ve done with dualism in my dissertation, but I really had to wrap the thing up at some point. I would, however, like to see more research done on gendered dimensions of dualism in the future. For example, @kinseyinstitute linked to this article on placebos, which gives a number of instances in which the “mind over matter” attitude works wonders. Some of these cases studies were gender-specific, as when “Fertility rates have been found to improve in women getting a placebo, perhaps because they experience a decrease in stress.” I would be really curious to know how placebos hold up when filtered by gender, since they represent such an interesting aspect of the mind-body relationship; do placebos tend to work better for men or women under certain circumstances? Does it matter whether women perceived themselves as more embodied than men do, according to dualistic doctrine? Or is gender not even a factor in the effectiveness of placebos? Perhaps dualisms are prevalent in some elements of our lives, but not others?

Anyway, hopefully this is the first of many blog posts to come. We’ll see if I can maintain momentum!

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Hello Blog! Let’s Talk about Fairy Tales!

October 19, 2011 in Fairy Tales | 7 comments

I’ve been meaning to start and maintain my own blog for, hm, a year and a half now, but I’ve been busy writing my dissertation, moving to Estonia, and the like. Better late than never, eh? Since I write specifically about sex and gender over at MySexProfessor.com I thought I’d go for more folklore content here, though I’ll also discuss feminist issues when the mood strikes me. Same goes for topics related to the digital humanities, food, travel, dancing, and all those other things that have captured my interest.

For this post, I thought I’d revisit a lengthy answer I wrote up to a query: Where are today’s fairy tales? I composed this response while on a two-hour run (I think I was training for a marathon at the time?), and it’s meant for a popular audience rather than a folkloristic audience, but I think folklorists might find it interesting too.

What are today’s fairy tales? The short answer is that they’re much like fairy tales from earlier times–fictional, formulaic narratives concerned with magic objects, quests, and happily ever afters. However, today’s fairy tales differ largely in the forms they take, ranging from filmic and literary versions to the hypertextual and intertextual variants found on the internet.

The longer answer is that it depends on how one defines fairy tales. If you take “fairy tale” to mean a falsehood or lie (“oh, that’s just a fairy tale”), as the term is often used in vernacular English, then yeah, fairy tales are everywhere today. Or even if you take “fairy tale” to mean some sort of diverting narrative, or any kind of story, you could also make a case that they’re all over the place. However, folklorists prefer a narrower definition of the genre of fairy tales, which I’ll explain briefly, using some of the main criteria of genre definitions: content, structure, context, style, and function.

In terms of content, fairy tales are filled with encounters with the magical, the marvelous, and the numinous; characters encounter fairy godmothers and dragons, magic rings and flying horses. Yet fairy tales also partake of human society, since characters are situated in kinship networks and kingdoms with rulers. In the encounters between the otherworldly and the mundane, fairy-tale characters grow and transform, metamorphosing from youth to adult, from low-status to high-status, and from single to married.

This point leads me to structure: almost all fairy tales have the same patterns in plot, the same way of stringing together sequences of action in the narrative. Most tales begin with a disturbance that leads to the fracturing of the nuclear family, an evil act or villainy, or alternately a wish or lack that must be fulfilled. Through encounters with helper figures, journeys to other places, tasks completed, obstacles navigated, and villains defeated, the protagonists emerge as competent adults who marry and rule. Plot episodes may be repeated, usually three times, as three is the “magic number” in Indo-European culture groups.

The contexts in which fairy tales are transmitted occupy a spectrum from oral performance to literature. Fairy tales are generally considered more literary in nature, while folktales are more oral and traditional (other genres of folktale include animal tales, fables, and jokes). Folktales were just as often intended for adults as for children in European tale-telling traditions, though this trend is only recently reemerging in English-speaking countries, with the numerous “fairy tales for adults” collections (some of which deal with mature content, drawing out the sex and violence implicit in so many sanitized fairy tales, others of which are explicitly erotic).

Fairy tales have a distinctive style that tends toward simplicity and abstraction (Swiss folklorist Max Luthi has written extensively on this topic). In English we recognize many linguistic markers of fairy tales: once upon a time, happily ever after, as golden as the sun, and so on. Fairy tales speak in metaphors, and as such, their language tends to favor extremes (not just black, but black as a raven’s feather), symmetry, and synecdoche.

Finally, we get to function. As marvelously entertaining as fairy tales are–think of Scheherezade, spinning tales to save her life for one thousand and one nights–they are not mere entertainment. No item of folklore, however amusing, fun, or pretty to look at or listen to, is just that. Fairy tales not only entertain, they also educate about and inculcate social values (for instance, in many of the “classical” fairy tales, girls are rewarded for being passive, pretty, and domestic, while boys win kingdoms through violence and warfare). Fairy tales provide a release, an outlet, a means of critiquing the dominant power structures, but at the same time, they provide escapism and wish fulfillment. They reflect the values of whatever culture they are adapted to, and can be regarded as documents that always partake of the sociohistorical as well as the symbolic. Fairy tales, like all folklore genres, are at once cultural and individual: the traditional plots, themes, and motifs are resources that individual narrators can utilize and manipulate to voice their own concerns, questions, criticisms. As such, fairy tales, like all art, can be therapeutic, and can reach and resonate with almost anyone.

So, where are today’s fairy tales? In some sense, where they’ve always been: in printed collections, but also circulating in oral tradition through variants. Folklorists are still recording the tales told by traditional narrators in cultures with a thriving oral tradition, in the Ozarks, in Palestine, in Greece; and then there’s the storytelling revival, with professional storytelling workshops, festivals, and conferences all around Northern America. Today’s fairy tales are also increasingly commodified by the mass media, though I think that films like Shrek 2 and Enchanted tell us more about the capitalist worldview than about the paradigms of the individuals who make them. Whether you call them postmodern fairy tales, fairy tale pastiches, or contemporary fairy tales, there is a thriving literary tradition, led by writers and editors such as Jane Yolen, Teri Windling, Ellen Kushner, and so on, with other important contributors like Angela Carter, Anne Sexton, and A. S. Byatt stretching back for decades.

Ultimately, I do not mean to disparage anyone’s definition of fairy tales; rather, my point is that those of us in fairy tale studies have a fairly nuanced perspective to contribute to the discussion. We in folklore trace our intellectual heritage back to the Grimm brothers and earlier. We’ve had this long to develop terms, tools, and theories for the study of folk narrative, always having to account for cultural change and the effects of new technology, so I think we can and should fruitfully converse with others who are interested in fairy tales. What do you think?

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