North American and Canadian fairy tales, 1900 to present. Even though it is often dismissed as infantile and non‐serious literature, the fairy tale pervades 20th‐century American culture in a variety of forms and media, operates in multiple contexts from education to therapy as well as entertainment, and performs contradictory but significant ideological functions. The following overview of fairy tales in 20th‐century North America and Canada seeks to provide an understanding of social dynamics affecting the national production and reception of fairy tales, the institutionalization of fairy tales both through the dominant role of fairy‐tale films and in the schools as children's literature, the rethinking of gender in fairy tales, the radical but marginal role of literary fairy tales for adults, and the relatively recent revival of storytelling. While the general parameters of this overview apply to all of North America, Canadian specifics will also be addressed.
‘When I first saw The Wizard of Oz’, writes Salman Rushdie, ‘it made a writer out of me.’ It may be inevitable that a presentation of the 20th‐century fairy tale in North America should begin with L. Frank Baum's 1900 The Wonderful Wizard of Oz novel, but Rushdie's tribute to its 1939 MGM screen adaptation—which he saw in Bombay in the 1950s—also underscores the radically foreign even though central character of fairy tales in modern and contemporary North America as well as the wide dissemination of American fairy‐tale films.
In the 19th century American publishers marketed translations or adaptations of European fairy tales for children with some caution, following a puritan and utilitarian suspicion of make‐believe. Such versions often emphasized the moralizing aspect of these tales and developed a contemporary setting for them. It is only in the 20th century that—through the effective combination of the genre's adaptation to American concerns and its other‐worldly vision—the fairy tale becomes an institution of American culture, playing significant and contradictory functions within it.
Commonly dubbed the first great American fairy tale, Oz exhibits the fairy tale's typical journey and initiation patterns in both its printed and its cinematic versions. Dorothy leaves her grey and threatening Kansas farm world to explore the colourful and wonderful world of Oz, where she discovers her own strengths, empowers others, and defeats the forces of evil. Transformed by this new understanding of herself and her possibilities, she clicks her ruby shoes three times and returns home. Baum also incorporated familiar details of American Midwestern agrarian life and focused on a resourceful and curious female protagonist whose common sense and frankness bear a distinctly American imprint. Clearly, Oz Americanized the fairy tale, but the continuing appeal of this narrative rests on its forceful commentary on America itself. Scholars disagree as to the interpretation of this meta‐national commentary. For Paul Nathanson in Over the Rainbow: The Wizard of Oz as a Secular Myth of America (1991), it is Dorothy who requires changing so as to appreciate the wonders of Kansas; thus, when reading Baum's novel and especially when watching the film on TV as it has been regularly offered starting in the 1950s, Americans participate in a collective initiation ritual confirming the value of ‘home’, their own nation. For others, including Selma Lanes (1971), Brian Attebery (1980), and Jack Zipes (1994), Baum's novel and its various sequels expose the failure of the American dream—Kansas is no land of milk and honey and, by the fifth volume of the Oz series written by Baum, Dorothy moves to Oz permanently—at a time when it was visible at the turn of the century, and the film in turn asserts the validity of hope and the possibility of social change in the continued pursuit of that dream precisely when the depression of the 1930s and the ideological rigidity of the 1950s seemed overpowering. Along the assertive lines suggested by the latter reading, gay male American audiences in the 1980s appropriated the 1939 film, particularly its representation of the Lion.
The fairy tale as genre has elsewhere served nation‐building projects because of its ethnically marked distribution and its culture‐specific values. In America, the genre's association with the nation as it develops in the 20th century is different: either America itself is glorified as the fairy‐tale realm where wishes come true, or the utopian project of the fairy tale works to remark on the failed American dream and at the same time rekindle hope for change. Thus, on the one hand, the glitter and happy ending of fairy tales promote an acritical consent to the ideological, economic, and social status quo; on the other hand, the transformative dynamics both within the tales and through their multiple tellings enable alternative visions.
Film has been the most powerful medium for the mythifying workings of the American fairy tale. As we have already seen with The Wizard of Oz, and as other film‐makers have proven, the fairy‐tale film can make different uses of its magic. Nevertheless, it is abundantly clear that, as Donald Haase states, the ‘normative influence of Disney's animated fairy tales has been so enormous, that the Disney spirit … [has] become the standard against which fairy tale films are created and received.’ State‐of‐the‐art animation, fireworks displays of ever‐improving technology, aggressive marketing and distribution, and the double‐voicing strategy that allows for spellbinding children while entertaining adults with off‐colour or political jokes are the not so magic ingredients that have ensured the success of Disney movies all over the world. Disney's celebrated and money‐making animated films, from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) to Beauty and the Beast (1991), are an institution and one that has not only dominated the fairy‐tale film, but also influenced fairy tales on television, on video, in print through the Disney Books series, on audiotape, etc. These films have consistently promoted a certain ‘Disneyfied’ image of the fairy tale, specific social values, and definite gender roles.
Drawing from diverse sources such as Charles Perrault's and Hans Christian Andersen's literary tales, Carlo Collodi's 19th‐century fairy‐tale novel Pinocchio, and The Arabian Nights (and consistently avoiding the Grimms' texts), Disney's films have clearly privileged the fairy‐tale genre. If metaphor, as the magically immediate verbal expression of an image, is the core of classic European fairy tales, in the Disney ‘classics’ the image dominates the word and the song subordinates narrative. Furthermore, even though films are the product of teamwork, each Disney fairy‐tale film contributes to and confirms its own image, naturalizing its particular brand of fairy tale: minimal character development, humour and cuteness to fill in the storyline, an unequivocal happy ending, no ties to the historicity or cultural specificity of the chosen tales. Overall, the strategies and effects of Disney's industry have been to enforce sameness on fairy‐tale diversity and to put storytelling at the service of spectacle or passive entertainment.
Disney films have also explicitly intervened in the socialization at first of American children, but increasingly—given the globalization of the market in the second half of the 20th century—all children. One can say that these films' values are morally good (truthfulness, courage, love, and loyalty) and as such these successful films are a significant communal reference point for 20th‐century generations. One can also say that Disney films have celebrated American individualism and enterprise as universally normative behaviour, have stereotyped other cultures (even in Disney's apparently multicultural projects such as Aladdin 1992 and Mulan 1998 which are as basically ahistorical as the 1940 Pinocchio was), and have blatantly promoted consumerism through the association of fairy‐tale films with brand products for children and, of course, the Disneyland or Disneyworld theme parks.
It is perhaps on matters of gender, however, that Disney fairy‐tale films have attracted the strongest criticism and at the same time exerted the greatest influence. Between the late 1930s and the early 1950s, Disney canonized a few fairy tales which glamorized anachronistic gender roles. The passive heroines of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Cinderella, and The Sleeping Beauty simply wished for love and found in the prince a solution to all their problems; in turn the prince was one‐dimensional (either a status symbol or a man of action) and attracted to the heroine's beauty. Fairy‐tale heroines and heroes were reduced to this simplistic formula. In response to feminist criticism in the 1970s and a growing gender awareness in the 1980s, Disney presented more assertive and active heroines (Ariel in The Little Mermaid, Beauty in Beauty and the Beast, and Jasmine in Aladdin), but the romance plot has continued to submerge that of personal development and to assert a visible uniformity of desirability.
Rather than imitate the Disney look (as in the Cannon Group movies from the late 1980s and the 1998 Quest for Camelot) or reproduce the ‘my prince will come’ mentality in fairy‐tale films for adults (as in Gary Marshall's romanticized Pretty Woman), a few American films have employed diverse strategies to break the Disney monopoly on fairy tales. Unlike Disney, first of all, these film‐makers have drawn on the Grimms' texts or on modern fairy‐tale novels, and have also incorporated storytelling to encourage a more interactive response on the part of the audience. Second, their use of humour is often pointed at outdated social arrangements or questionable values within the tales instead of acting as a simple diversion. Third, rather than creating a fantasy world which implicitly advertises American values and products, these films Americanize the fairy tale explicitly either by featuring well‐known actors, or by adapting North American folk versions, or by setting the action in a recognizably specific time of American history. In practice, these strategies have not been uniformly successful, but beginning with the iconoclastic and often repeated Fractured Fairy Tales series that was part of the 1960s Rocky and his Friends and The Bullwinkle Show on American television, there is an identifiable counter‐tradition that includes Jim Henson's various Muppet fairy‐tale films and The Storyteller (1987), Shelley Duvall's live‐action Faerie Tale Theatre episodes aired in the 1980s, the strikingly historicising work of Tom Davenport (from Hansel and Gretel in 1975 to The Step Child in 1997), and a few other films like The Neverending Story (1984), The Princess Bride (1987), and the 1997 Snow White featuring Sigourney Weaver and Sam Neill.
While it did not explicitly replicate Disney patterns, the popular 1980s CBS television series Beauty and the Beast belongs only marginally to the counter‐tradition outlined above. Set in a violent New York City, the series portrays the strong tie between Vincent—a vaguely leonine Beast who lives in the uncorrupted under world of ‘Father’ Jacob's community of outcasts—and Catherine, a rich lawyer who after being kidnapped and raped becomes committed to fighting for social justice. Catherine is brave, and Vincent has depth, but the series participates in the romance replotting of fairy tales and reproduces the violent solutions of most crime shows.
In the more traditional media of storytelling and print, schools and libraries constitute another significant context for the institutionalization of fairy tales in 20th‐century North America. From the beginning of the century, children were reading fairy tales at school; and in the 1990s it is still through fairy tales that American children, both as listeners/readers and tellers/writers, are often first encouraged to achieve an understanding of narrative within the educational system. Overall, in terms of the 19th‐century debate over the value of fairy tales for children, one can say that fairy tales in North America have done well for a variety of reasons. The European fairy tale has been Americanized through books like the Oz series, Eva Katharine Gibson's Zauberlinda the Wise Witch (1901), Carl Sandburg's Rootabaga Stories (1922), James Thurber's tales in the 1940s and 1950s, as well as the popular novels for girls with a fairy‐tale plot such as Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1903), Daddy Long‐Legs (1912), and, later, literary adaptations of the fairy tale's magic for younger children such as the extremely popular Dr Seuss's The Cat in the Hat (1957) and Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are (1984). Other factors working to promote fairy tales with North American children in the 20th century include a consistent emphasis on storytelling as part of the training of children's librarians; the increasingly aggressive marketing of quality picture books illustrated by American artists; the bowdlerization and simplification of tales; and, in more recent years, thanks to the proliferation of ‘new’ fairy tales in response to multicultural critiques of the curriculum, the recognition that folk and fairy tales are powerful points of entry into other cultures and not exclusively into the lofty realm of the imagination.
In approaching the fairy tale as children's literature more broadly, several trends are especially notable. First, some adults select fairy tales for their children because they are classics, in a nostalgic reaction against the perceived shallowness of the present; for many others, fairy‐tale books are the extension of Disney and its glamorous world. In either case, the fairy tale is still a measure of ‘cultural literacy’ and is most in demand because of its socializing functions. It is also important to note in this context that, perhaps paradoxically, it is through the simplified Disney fairy‐tale books, as well as the popular Sesame Street TV series, that many American children in the latter part of the century learned to read before attending school. Secondly, modern American illustrators—such as Nancy Ekholm Burkert, Tomie De Paola, Michael Hague, Trina S. Hyman, Gerald McDermott, and Maurice Sendak—have played a crucial role in both the marketing and aesthetic success of fairy tales. Thirdly, the representation of gender in fairy tales has been the foremost challenge to this genre in the 20th century, and it has profoundly affected the production and consumption of fairy tales for both children and adults.
In her 1949 ground‐breaking study The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir had already identified passive and docile fairy‐tale heroines as pernicious role models for women. In North America the discussion of acculturation in fairy tales began in the 1970s as part of the growing feminist movement, and was initially (with, for instance, Andrea Dworkin's influential study Woman Hating) a blanket rejection of fairy tales as narratives that promote rigid, hierarchical, and limiting gender roles (the helpless princess and the heroic prince). The debate has developed since then along the lines of the larger feminist frameworks and as enhanced by various complementary feminist projects: consciously expanding the repertoire of fairy tales for children to include stories with clever and resourceful heroines; editing traditional fairy tales so as to de‐emphasize beauty and marriage; writing new fairy tales which question conventional gender roles and other social conventions; and providing scholarly critiques of gender politics and representation in fairy tales.
Fairy‐tale anthologies—which together with expensively illustrated single fairy‐tale books are most prevalent in the contemporary market for children—played a particularly significant role in the context of the first two overlapping feminist projects outlined above. Rosemary Minard's Womenfolk and Fairy Tales (1975), Ethel Johnston Phelps's Tatterhood and Other Tales (1978), Alison Lurie's Clever Gretchen and Other Tales (1980), and Jack Zipes's Don't Bet on the Prince: Contemporary Feminist Fairy Tales in North America and England (1986) are just a few of the collections that exemplified the wits of fairy‐tale heroines not as well known as Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty. As editor, Phelps went further to launder the traditional tales of undesirable or anachronistic character features. A similar spirit of feminist revisionism animated writers for children in North America, especially from the 1970s on, to promote the values of gender equality and women's assertiveness in contrast to the dominant pattern of women's oppression as seen in the Perrault or Disney fairy‐tale classics. In particular, several writers chose to rework well‐known fairy tales; role reversal, humour, and a new ending are some of the most common strategies in adaptations such as Jane Yolen's Sleeping Ugly (1981) or Harriet Herman's The Forest Princess (1974). Others (e.g. Jay Williams with ‘Petronella’ in 1979, Jeanne Desy with ‘The Princess who Stood on Her Own Two Feet’ in 1982, and Wendy Walker with her psychological probing of fairy‐tale characters in the 1988 collection The Sea‐Rabbit, or The Artist of Life) sought to transform the genre by writing new stories which imitate general fairy‐tale patterns and themes, but promote innovative gender and other social arrangements. Jane Yolen's contribution in particular stands out. Though her lyricism at times seems to counter the project of unmasking women's oppression, Yolen has widely experimented with adapting the fairy tale to feminist uses (see her 1983 collected Tales of Wonder), published an impressive fairy‐tale novel Briar Rose in 1993 for young adults, and written a study of fairy tales, Touch Magic (1986).
As the presence of women's studies, feminist theory, and children's literature became stronger in academia in the 1980s, American feminist research on fairy tales also continued in interdisciplinary ways to question the genre's magic spell, but in historically framed projects such as Ruth B. Bottigheimer's and Maria Tatar's various studies of the Grimms' tales, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's influential analysis of 19th‐century British literature as re‐enacting the innocent child/manipulating woman conflict in ‘Snow White’, and Jack Zipes's extensive œuvre on the changing ideological functions of the genre both in Europe and the United States. These critics have recontextualized the analysis of gender within the tales by asking other important questions: who is telling or publishing the story? when? and for whom? The folklorist Kay Stone in particular has contributed to a specific understanding of gender and fairy tales in a North American context. She observed early on that North American folk‐tale heroines were not as passive as their European counterparts but, owing to the Disney influence, these heroines have remained largely unknown within modern American popular or mass culture. Through extensive interviewing, she also noted how North American women often reinterpreted seemingly victimizing plots to emphasize and identify with the female protagonist's heroics.
Because, on the one hand, the fairy tale continues to provide a convenient repertoire of stock characters and plots as well as a short cut to presumably shared cultural knowledge if not values, and because, on the other hand, the revision of fairy tales in both the individual's mind and historically framed ideologies is an ongoing and unpredictable practice, the influence of fairy tales on 20th‐century North American literature for adults is considerable and remarkably diversified, extending to the use of fairy tale as structuring frame for novels such as William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! (1936), and to writers occasionally experimenting with the genre, as E. E. Cummings did with poems for his young daughter. But this influence has also developed in clearly recognizable directions. As Brian Attebery has argued, the strong 20th‐century fantasy tradition in America has stretched fairy‐tale magic into the creation of a whole world which can stand in different relations to the contemporary social world. For instance, out of an intense disappointment in the American dream, James Branch Cabell's Jurgen (1919) offered an alternative world of bookish origins to the exploration of a witty, excessively ironic, and hollow hero. James Thurber, who highly praised L. Frank Baum's Oz and strongly politicized the fairy tale, composed a playfully self‐reflective world in his The White Deer in which words themselves weave a spell and rather complex heroes reach only tentatively happy endings. And after World War II and the publication of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, we see the explosion of disturbing and radical fantasies by writers such as Philip K. Dick and Ursula Le Guin. Another recent development of the fairy‐tale fantasy not ‘for children only’ combines elements of fantasy and gender politics to address young adults, especially adolescent girls, as their select audience. The novel Beauty (1978) by Robin McKinley, the imaginative Ohio‐born fantasist, and the 1993 Snow White, Blood Red anthology edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling have been particularly popular within this genre. Fantasy, like fairy tales, then, is rarely a simple escape in this tradition; rather it holds an unflattering mirror up to our own world and at the same time envisions possibilities for change.
Extending the fairy tale in a different direction, postmodern literary texts from the late 1960s to the 1990s hold a mirror up to the foundational narratives of Western literature and culture, those fictions that, like the fairy tale, have framed and naturalized the social arrangements of the contemporary Western world. Beginning with John Barth's ‘Once upon a time’ Möbius‐strip frame for the experimental Lost in the Funhouse, these highly self‐reflexive fictions have sought to question and unmake the rules of narrative itself while paradoxically exploiting, in an anti‐modernist move, the wonders of folk narrative and pre‐modern traditions. While Barth remained tied to The Arabian Nights, which he has appropriated throughout his career in sophisticated but self‐indulgent novelistic tours de force, Donald Barthelme in Snow White (1967) and ‘The Glass Mountain’ (1970) experimented with parodying the Western tale of magic. Some of Robert Coover's most successful fictions also use the fairy tale as their point of departure. Humorous, disruptive of expectations, intensely political, and persistently confronting the entanglements of sexuality and power in fairy tales, Coover's work from Pricksongs & Descants (1969) to ‘The Dead Queen’ (1973), Pinocchio in Venice (1991), and Briar Rose (1996) unmakes and remakes the fairy tale within the framework of a rigorous critique of American mainstream politics and consumeristic mentality.
From a feminist perspective, Anne Sexton's collection of poems, Transformations (1971), stands out as a violent and modern revision of the Grimms' tales; Olga Broumas's haunting woman‐centred poems in Beginning with O (1977) foreshadow the experimental vitality of Kissing the Witch, the 1997 lesbian collection by the Irish writer Emma Donoghue; Ursule Molinaro's ‘The Contest Winner’ (1990) exposes the ‘void’ of Snow White's ‘helpless purity’; and Karen Elizabeth Gordon plays with the fabric of tales by Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm in her witty The Red Shoes and Other Tattered Tales (1996). But, overall, in the United States there is no 20th‐century sorceress or white witch of the literary acclaim or popularity of, for instance, the British Angela Carter or the Canadian Margaret Atwood.
Turning back to the larger picture, it is important to underline that both postmodern and feminist literary experimentations with the fairy tale play only a marginal role in the production and reception of fairy tales for adults in late 20th‐century North America, where humorously benevolent parodies and conservative updates of classic fairy tales are far more popular in the entertainment industry, whether it be literature (e.g. The Frog Prince Continued and the 1994 Politically Correct Bedtime Stories) or the performance arts (e.g. the 1987 Broadway musical Into the Woods). Furthermore, as the British author Angela Carter noted, it is as joke—especially the dirty joke—that the fairy tale ironically flourishes as we move into the 21st century; and it is in association, not only with Disney, but with television soap operas and royalty tabloid stories that the fairy‐tale stereotype continues to gain credence.
A different non‐literary medium that has also become central to adult consciousness of fairy tales during the last 30 years of the century is storytelling in non‐traditional contexts. Rooted in the training of librarians and teachers from the early 20th century on and exploding in the 1970s with the popularity of storytelling festivals and the rise of professional organizations, the revival of storytelling has attracted a large number of adults seeking cultural roots, forgotten values, community interaction, therapy, stage experience, and entertainment. Folk and fairy tales from all over the world constitute a large part of these storytellers' repertoires. Kay Stone's Burning Brightly: New Light on Old Tales Told Today (1998) describes four storytelling approaches—the traditional, the dramatic, the educational, and the therapeutic—as streams that have contributed to the energy of organized contemporary storytelling communities in North America, including the two largest ones: the National Association of Storytelling, which held its first festival in 1973 in Tennessee; and the Storytellers' School of Toronto, first established in 1979. According to Stone's statistics, by 1995 over 800 individuals and approximately 300 groups were listed in the National Storytelling Association.
Within this context, the therapeutic uses of professional storytelling have been particularly controversial. Bruno Bettelheim's influential Freudian analysis The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (1976), and more recently two Jungian best‐sellers, providing gendered readings of fairy tales to heal contemporary American men and women—Robert Bly's
Other complicated matters evolving from the professional dimension of this storytelling revival include the role of the storyteller as stage performer rather than as member of a community, as well as questions of cultural appropriation, and increasingly of copyright. Internet discussion groups and fairy‐tale web pages simply multiply the possibilities of exchange and exploitation of sources. Nevertheless, more traditional storytellers have also been featured at organized festivals, and—because many professional tellers work from printed sources—the revival process has put into wider circulation regional and ethnic collections of North American narratives, such as Vance Randolph's Ozark tales, the many Jack tales, Native American tales, and recent immigrants' adapted traditions.
Stone argues that in Canada this organized storytelling revival has been less commercialized and more community‐oriented than in the United States. Perhaps the shape of this recent development can be related to the diversified fairy‐tale tradition for children that developed in Canada: from Howard Kennedy's 1904 The New World Fairy Book, which wove materials from various indigenous and immigrant traditions together, to Cyrus Macmillan's important Canadian Wonder Tales, a 1918 collection of tales recorded just before World War I and edited to conform to a European fairy‐tale style; from French‐Canadian tales as collected most notably by Marius Barbeau in The Golden Phoenix and Other French‐Canadian Fairy Tales (1958), to Celtic fairy beliefs. This is not to say that The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, for instance, was not influential—Baum's successful formula has been adapted to a northern Canadian setting—or that the orphan‐heroine novel for girls modelled on ‘Cinderella’ and Jane Eyre was not also produced in Canada, as proven by the well‐known 1908 Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery. But, perhaps because of the different kinds of magic alive in Canadian traditions and the patchwork Canadian approach to immigrant cultures as distinctive from the American melting pot, Disney has not had as domineering an effect on the perception of what a fairy tale is or does.
However, the ‘Rapunzel syndrome’, as Margaret Atwood called it, has imprisoned many Canadian heroines in a tower from which no hero can liberate them. In this sense, the fairy tale has mythified the image of Canada itself as the great and threatening unknown. In more experimental fairy tales, whether for children or adults, feminism and metanarrative are as strongly at work in Canada as in the United States, while fantasy is not as strong a tradition. The following stand out: The Paper Bag Princess by Robert Munsch, a tongue‐in‐cheek 1980 fairy tale for children; the hauntingly meta‐fictional Truly Grim Tales by Priscilla Galloway (1995); and Margaret Atwood's many acclaimed revisions of the Grimms' tales, in which disturbing fairy‐tale themes become tools for demanding change in gender and social dynamics. The Hungarian‐born Canadian illustrator Laszlo Gal is also notable.
At the close of the 20th century in North America, the fairy tale has found a new operative context in the internet—where parodies and jokes are often exchanged and multiple versions of a tale are made instantly available on web pages. The question of whether the normative and commodified uses of the fairy tale or its ‘antimythic’ and transformative powers will prevail can only be addressed within a broadly political and social framework of analysis; given the increasing power of technology and of a global culture industry, however, the multifarious permutations of the fairy tale in the 20th century offer some hope that the fairy tale's wonderful diversity will survive and thrive.
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— Cristina Bacchilega
