The literary fairy tale has been of scholarly interest since the 19th century and it has been discussed from a range of conceptual viewpoints using a variety of methodologies. Conceptual approaches to literary texts are always underpinned and shaped by ideological assumptions about relationships between language, meaning, narrative, literature, society, and literary audiences; and, to some extent, varying approaches to the fairy tale reflect the critical, cultural, and historical contexts in which they have been formulated. No single approach or methodology is able to arrive at a ‘correct’ interpretation of the fairy tale; instead, different methodologies suit different critical and ideological purposes. The main conceptual approaches to the literary fairy tale to have emerged in the 20th century are: folkloricist, structuralist, literary, psychoanalytic, historicist, marxist, and feminist approaches.
1. Folkloricist approaches
The literary fairy tale as it emerged in the 17th century constitutes a literary sub‐genre distinct from the oral folk tale, but the oral folk tale has had a formative influence on the fairy tale and on scholarship in both areas. The ‘Finnish’ (or historical‐geographic) method, developed by Thompson, Krohn, and Aarne, aims at reconstructing the history of particular tale types by collecting, indexing, and analysing all of their variants. There are two key underlying assumptions informing the work of folkloricists: that folk tales have their origins in oral traditions; and that a single definitive version of a particular tale type as it may have existed in the oral tradition might be reconstructed from its variants. The Finnish method was developed in an attempt to avoid reductive trajectories of folk‐tale history, but the assumption that in identifying the basic structure of a specific tale type an originary ‘ur‐text’ might be reconstructed is grounded in a romantic ideology which conceives of the folk‐tale tradition as pure and genuine, and the literary fairy tale as an impure, inauthentic derivative. Such an originary text could only ever be artificially constructed from existing known versions, and the task of collecting all variants defies completion. Furthermore, the traffic between oral and literary folk and fairy tales is not one‐way: literary variants have had a formative influence on subsequent oral versions of tales.
Despite such problematic ideological assumptions, a key principle of the historical‐geographic method, that a scholar must take all known versions of a story into consideration, has been enormously influential, and the folk‐tale indexes compiled by Thompson, Aarne, and Krohn are invaluable resources for scholars interested in a range of approaches to the folk and fairy tale. The approach enables identification of the basic structure of specific tales and it has been combined with other approaches (
2. Structuralism: Vladimir Propp
There are similarities between the methodologies and assumptions of folkloricist and structuralist approaches to the folk tale in that both are preoccupied with the stable underlying form of tales. However, whereas folklorists identified the basic ‘story’ components of particular tale types, structuralists are interested in the underlying structural components of the folk‐tale genre. A key aspect of Propp's methodology is the analysis of the structure of folk tales according to character functions or spheres of action. His analysis of Russian folk tales suggests the following principles: functions are stable, constant elements in a tale, independent of how and by whom they are fulfilled, so they constitute the fundamental components of a tale; the number of functions known to fairy tale is limited; the sequence of functions is always identical; and all fairy tales are of one type in regard to their structure.
The uniformity which Propp finds in fairy‐tale structure raises questions about the origins and meanings of tales. While structuralists typically evade questions of meaning and historicity, an implication of Propp's findings is that all folk tales express the same thing, opening the way for assertions of universal ahistorical meanings. However, a criticism of folkloricist and structuralist scholars alike is that they rarely interpret folk‐tale content. The conception of structuralism as a ‘science’ of narrative dictates a methodological rigour which excludes from analysis those narrative components, such as discourse and signification, which are variable, but which also shape form and meaning. Propp acknowledges the cultural context of the folk tale, but he is more concerned with its non‐variable structural elements and excludes social and historical aspects and variations of form and content from his analysis. However, in focusing exclusively on stable narrative components, structuralist analysis is frequently reduced to empirical description and observation of manifest content of tales.
Structuralist analysis, however, is not an end in itself and need not ignore either the variable narrative components or the cultural contexts of folk tale. Propp's work, like that of Stith Thompson, has had, despite its shortcomings, a formative influence on the methodologies used in fairy‐tale research. His methodology enables discrimination of key structural elements and can be usefully combined with other literary approaches which seek to analyse the possible ways in which texts construct meaning, and with more ideologically oriented forms of analysis which seek to study the formative influence of social, historical, and cultural contexts on folk‐tale variants and reversions (for example,
3. Literary approaches: Max Lüthi
Whereas structuralist and folkloricist approaches tend to disregard meaning in an attempt to examine form and structure, Lüthi combines stylistic analysis of fairy‐tale texts and an interest in their significance. Using the methodologies of new criticism, he analyses the stylistic features and thematic significance of the fairy‐tale genre and its historical development. A key assumption informing Lüthi's work is that fairy tales contain essential underlying meanings which, in so far as form and meaning are thought of as integral, are manifest in the basic style of the fairy tale. Thus, like his structuralist colleagues, Lüthi focuses on those formal stylistic features which characterize the genre and which, according to Lüthi, function thematically. For Lüthi, the ‘common style underlying all European fairy tales’ points to common significances for the genre. His assertions are supported by close textual analysis of particular tales and their variants, but he largely ignores the social and cultural contexts of particular retellings, focusing instead on those story elements and motifs which remain stable despite progressive retellings. His analyses tend to proceed from the particular to the general. Specific features are discussed in so far as they are typical of the genre and can be used to assert abstract general ideas. The methodology thus avoids imposing specific meanings on individual tales, and Lüthi is able to make assertions about the ‘timeless validity’ of the essential image of ‘man’ in fairy tales.
4. Psychoanalysis: Jungian and Freudian approaches
Psychoanalytic approaches to the fairy tale are preoccupied with their symbolism. Although Jungian and Freudian interpretations of tales differ, they share key assumptions about language, narrative, and the universality of meaning and utilize similar methodologies. For Jungians, such as Maria Luise von Franz, folk and fairy stories represent archetypal psychological phenomena and are an expression of ‘collective unconscious psychic processes’. For Freudians, such as Bruno Bettelheim, they are expressions of individual psychological development, and they deal with universal human problems. Thus both make universal claims for the relevance of the fairy‐tale genre for human beings which ignore differences produced by age, gender, race, social class, and education. According to Bettelheim, fairy tales communicate with the uneducated, preconscious, and unconscious minds of children and adults. He thus assumes that meaning exists independent of form and structure and can be directly apprehended, regardless of the linguistic, narrative, and cultural structures and conventions used to encode it. He also assumes a fundamental link between childhood and the fairy‐tale genre, the logic of which is circular: fairy tales contain symbolic images which reflect inner psychic processes and which, in so far as these processes are common to all children, enable children to externalize and work through their psychological problems.
Bettelheim and von Franz's methodologies are also similar in so far as both proceed via content analysis of story motifs and the imposition of an, albeit different, interpretative paradigm. Von Franz acknowledges that her ‘task of translating the amplified story into psychological language’ might perhaps be seen as ‘replac[ing] one myth with another’, indicating that she is at least aware of the hermeneutic circle in which interpretation is enclosed. Bettelheim evades such methodological questions, however, by contextualizing his Freudian analyses of fairy tale within an ideology of childhood and human existence which sees the Oedipal myth as paramount. This myth functions in Bettelheim's work as a metanarrative which structures both child development and the fairy tale. However, the Oedipal myth, as it has been appropriated by modern psychoanalysis and by Bettelheim in particular, is a patriarchal metanarrative which, when applied to theories of child development, constructs the child as disturbed and in need of therapeutic instruction, conceives of female sexuality as deviant, and imposes a universal theory of sexual and psychological maturation which ignores the historicity of notions of sexuality, subjectivity, childhood, and the family (
Psychoanalytic approaches are problematic when applied to the fairy tale in so far as they often involve mechanically imposing an interpretative paradigm upon select tales without taking into account the oral and literary history which produces diverse variants, the discursive and narratological aspects of literary versions, the audiences for tales, or the cultural and social context in which tales are produced and reproduced. In adopting them scholars assume an opacity of narrative and language; that is, meaning is directly apprehensible independent of its discursive, textual, narrative, cultural, and ideological contexts. They thus assume that meanings are universal and ahistorical, hence presupposing the validity of the interpretative paradigms they utilize. However, psychoanalytic approaches have been highly influential in shaping critical discourse about fairy tale. Bettelheim's Uses of Enchantment has provoked fierce opposition and hostility, but few scholars since have failed to acknowledge its influence and to enter into dialogue with Bettelheim. Recent scholarship has tended to be eclectic in its use of myth and psychoanalysis (for example,
5. Historicist, sociological, and ideological approaches
Whereas psychoanalytic theorists see fairy and folk tales as mirroring collective and individual psychic development, historical and sociological theorists see such tales as reflecting social and historical conditions. Any approach which attempts to extrapolate social conditions and values from literary texts runs the risk of assuming a one‐to‐one relationship between literature and reality. However, contemporary historicist and sociological theorists typically avoid such conceptual problems through an eclectic, but highly theorized, combination of a range of methodologies (for example,
There are two main historical approaches to the fairy tale. The first, associated with Nitschke, Kahlo, and Scherf, stresses the social and cultural purposes such narratives served within the particular communities from which they emerged. Nitschke and Kahlo trace many folk‐tale motifs back to rituals, habits, customs, and laws of pre‐capitalist societies and thus see the folk tales as reflecting the social order of a given historical epoch. The assumption that individual tales ‘developed at specific moments and passed unchanged through subsequent eras’ implicitly denies the historicity of the genre (Bottigheimer, 1986). Zipes, however, adapts Nitschke's method for defining the socio‐historical context of folk tales to the study of the literary fairy tale, arguing that fairy tales ‘preserve traces of vanished forms of social life’ even though tales are progressively modified ideologically.
A second approach stresses the historical relativity of meaning: textual variants of tales reflect the particular cultural and historical contexts in which they are produced. Bottig‐heimer's work is concerned with the complex relation between the collections by the Brothers Grimm and 19th‐century German society, the role played by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in shaping the fairy‐tale genre, and the ideological implications of the tales, especially their reflection of social constructions of gender. Zipes focuses on the relations between fairy tales and historical, cultural, and ideological change, especially how the meanings of fairy tales have been progressively re‐shaped as they have been appropriated by various cultural and social institutions through history. Zipes's studies of the fairy tale seek to relocate the historical origins of folk and fairy tales in politics and class struggle and thus fill a gap in literary histories of folk and fairy tales. His use of marxist paradigms presupposes an instrumental link between literary texts and social institutions and ideologies. Whereas psycho‐analytic theorists see fairy tales as reflecting child development, Zipes sees them as having a formative socializing function. He adapts early marxist and cultural historicist approaches, which stressed emancipatory, subversive, and utopian elements in folk and fairy tales, arguing instead that, as folk tales were appropriated by and institutionalized within capitalist bourgeois societies, the emergent culture industry sought to contain, regulate, and instrumentalize such elements, but with limited success. Thus contemporary fairy tales are neither inherently subversive nor inherently conservative; instead, they have a subversive potential which the culture industry both exploits and contains in an effort to regulate social behaviour.
Socio‐historicist, marxist and other culturally oriented approaches to literary texts have in part developed as a response to textualist modes of criticism which tend to ignore the impact of social and cultural contexts on significance in their almost exclusive focus on textually produced meanings. However, a common criticism of culturally oriented approaches is that in stressing the socio‐historical context of texts, stylistic and formal textual features are ignored and textual analysis is thereby limited to descriptive discussions of thematic and ideological content. A key feature and strength of Zipes's approach is his utilization of a range of critical material relating to literary, social, and historical theory to elaborate on the place and function of the fairy tale within literary and social history. Both Zipes and Bottig‐heimer extend structuralist methods of analysis and, like other socially oriented researchers, see a link between structural components and socio‐historical conditions.
6. Feminist approaches
Studies which examine the social conditions within which folk and fairy tales are produced also reveal the extent to which such tales both reflect and reproduce gender differences and inequalities within the societies which produce them. Such studies also reveal how interpretative traditions which assume universal meanings and/or forms for fairy tale and ignore their socio‐historical contexts can obscure the extent to which the genre is shaped by and reproduces patriarchal constructions of gender.
Feminist fairy‐tale criticism is more explicit about its political and ideological agenda than most other approaches; it aims to raise awareness of how fairy tales function to maintain traditional gender constructions and differences and how they might be reutilized to counter the destructive tendencies of patriarchal values. However, feminist research has produced diverse interpretations of fairy tales. All theoretical approaches are selective. Feminist approaches which are critical of fairy tales tend to focus on those tales which evince ‘negative’ female role models; that is, heroines who are passive, submissive, and helpless. Less critical approaches tend to select tales which portray ‘positive’ female characters; that is, heroines who are strong, resourceful, and aggressive. Obviously, such evaluative responses also reflect contemporary social values and reveal a second methodological problem, namely a tendency to ignore the historical development of the genre in relation to social and cultural institutions. Feminist researchers also tend to focus primarily on ‘story’ elements, such as character traits and plot devices; as with much cultural analysis of literary forms, there is a tendency, in relying too heavily on theme and content analysis, to ignore the discursive, narratival, and ideological construction of literary texts. Finally, concerns with the socializing function of fairy tales are often informed by simplistic assumptions about the effects of literary texts, especially an assumption that tales are automatically subject to fixed interpretations.
These methodological problems are avoided by various contemporary researchers, such as Warner (1994), Tatar (1987, 1992), and Bottigheimer (1987), through the combination of feminist concerns with the interrelation between gender and genre and other conceptual approaches and methodologies, such as psychoanalysis, structuralist analysis, and discourse and cultural analysis (
7. Conclusion
For some time now socio‐historians and folkloricists have maintained that each variant of a particular story will have its own meaning, within a given cultural context. An important implication of this argument is that interpretations of texts are also determined by the cultural context in which they are formulated. As Tatar points out, ‘every rewriting of a tale is an interpretation; and every interpretation is a rewriting’. Any given tale will accrue a range of interpretations, as it is interpreted and reinterpreted. The possibility of arriving at a definitive textually grounded interpretation is infinitely deferred partly because of the nature of folkloric material and the impossibility of collecting every version and variant, and partly because any interpretation is in part the product of the culture in which it is produced. Hence there are various approaches to the fairy tale and many diverse interpretations, but no single ‘correct’ interpretation. On the other hand, however, progressive critical and creative interpretations reveal a history of ideology as well as a history of adaptation, interpretation, and reception.
Bibliography
- Bettelheim, Bruno, The Uses of Enchantment (1976).
- Bottigheimer, Ruth (ed.), Fairy Tales and Society: Illusion, Allusion and Paradigm (1986).
- ——Grimms' Bad Girls and Bold Boys: The Moral and Social Vision of the Tales (1987).
- Franz, Marie Luise von, An Introduction to the Interpretation of Fairy Tales (1970).
- Lüthi, Max, Once upon a Time: On the Nature of Fairy Tales (1970).
- McGlathery, James, The Brothers Grimm and Folktale (1988).
- Propp, Vladimir, Morphology of the Folktale (1968).
- Tatar, Maria, The Hard Facts of the Grimm's Fairy Tales (1987).
- ——Off with Their Heads! Fairy Tales and the Culture of Childhood (1992).
- Warner, Marina, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and their Tellers (1994).
- Zipes, Jack, Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales (1979).
- Zipes, Jack, Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion: The Classical Genre for Children and the Process of Civilization (1983).
- ——Don't Bet on the Prince: Contemporary Feminist Fairy Tales in North America and England (1986).
- ——Fairy Tale as Myth/Myth as Fairy Tale (1994).
— Robyn McCallum
