Hunger is the beginning of every story. It might not be the most literal sort of hunger, but there is always something wanted, what the folklorist Vladimir Propp summed up as “lack.” There is something missing–to get the shivers, to find a lost brother, to make a solemn princess laugh, to have a child– and by the end of the story, that absence is satisfied– the lack is “liquidated.”
If the story begins with the lack of a child, then hunger becomes central. Food often replaces sex in folktales, and witches with some rule-bound delicacy are the fertility specialists of choice, second only to daring the fairies to give you a baby hedgehog, a snow-child, or an infant the size of your thumb. The trouble starts when a childless queen is given specific instructions– eat the white rose for a boy or the red rose for a girl, but not both. Eat the fair flower and not the bitter, black one. Peel both onions before you eat them. Folklorists would group all of these motifs under the number “T511– conception from eating,” with increasingly specific Dewey-Decimal-style numbers for conception from a flower or a fish, from swallowing a pearl or a peppercorn. Inevitably, the queen fails the interdiction, because she forgets the warning, or because the first thing she eats is so delicious she just can’t help it. Without that failure, there would be no story. Interdiction, violation: a rule is broken and the world is changed.
Desire is transformative, and transgressive: whether it’s an unpeeled onion or a noble lover, to want something, especially for women, can never be entirely benign. A common consequence for careless appetite in fairy tales is monstrous birth– a child that is less, and more, than the mother bargained for. In the story Prince Lindworm (ATU 433B), a queen eats up one of her two allotted onions skin and all, and gives birth to a dragon-son, who demands and devours a series of brides before meeting his match. The queen’s unchecked appetite is finally redeemed by the restraint of the last bride, who comes to the marriage bed in seven shifts (like the seven veils of Salome or the clothing shed by Ishtar at each of the seven gates to the underworld). For each shift she sheds, she demands the lindworm give her a skin, until he lies naked and slimy-white and must be scrubbed clean with lye (or whipped with lye, bathed with milk, and held to the bride’s breast, as in Tam Lin).
Asbjornsen and Moe, Norwegian contemporaries of the Grimms, conclude their version by noting that she succeeded “by her sense and her calmness and her courage.” Her leisurely undressing is a foil for the queen-mother’s careless consumption. But ultimately the transformation takes place, not because she masters her own appetites, but because she follows the advice of a witch (which her mother-in-law could not), and requires reciprocity. When her new husband demands that she undress, she does not say “no”– she says, “you first.” The lindworm is surprised at the girl’s boldness. “None of the others bade me [to undress].” “But I bid you,” said she.
The lindworm’s twin brother, the perfect son of the carefully peeled onion, is not the hero of the story. Instead, the burden of breaking the curse falls to the queen’s daughter-in-law. Grimms scholar Maria Tatar has observed that it is fairy tale girls who fight witches, while boys are pitted against (male) giants, wizards, and evil kings– like and like. Longing for a child, desire for a lover, or hunger for a meal are a knife’s edge apart. Anne Sexton’s poetic adaptation of Hansel and Gretel begins: “Little plum/Said the mother to her son/I want to bite/I want to chew/I will eat you up.” Pyschoanalytic reads of fairy tales interpret witches as thwarted or rejected mothers, who want to keep their children safe inside of them, rather than let them grow up, become their parents, and take over.
Fairy tale conflicts hinge on the conservation of roles: as girls mature, they encroach on the role of the mother, pushing her to become the witch as she digs in and holds onto her status. So the onus for mastering the double-edged blades of hunger and desire is on the women, who save themselves and their sisters from traps set by their mothers’ mistakes.
This is the story in Tatterhood (ATU 733): when the queen eats two flowers instead of one, she has her gentle, obedient daughter only after she births a loud-mouthed, dirty wild-child, who is born riding a goat and waving a wooden spoon. But Tatterhood is the improbable heroine of the story– she is the bad, brave girl who, when a roving party of witches and trolls steal her sister’s lovely head and leave a calf’s head in its place, has a ship packed and readied, turns down the offer of a captain or sailors, and sets out “with her sister all alone. There was no holding her back, and at last they let her have her own way.”
Like the Lindworm, Tatterhood is the reckless hunger of her mother embodied, but she is also the family’s salvation, rather than the punishment she first appears. Tatterhood finds a king to marry her sister, but keeps the king’s son for herself. When the prince is less than thrilled with his ragged bride, she prompts him to ask her why she rides a goat, why her hood is so tattered, why she carries a wooden spoon. With every question she prods him to repeat, she contradicts him, and her words transform reality like any good storyteller:
So his bride asked him again why he didn’t talk, and told him to ask now why her face was so ugly and gray?
“Yes,” asked the prince, “why is your face so ugly and gray?”
“Am I ugly? You think my sister beautiful, but I am ten times more beautiful,” said the bride, and when the prince looked at her, she was so beautiful, he thought that she was the most beautiful woman in the world.
Tatterhood’s transformation is not dependent on a magical kiss (or any outside intervention), but on the power of her own language. Fairy tale solutions are not a simple matter of redeeming transgressive hunger with restraint and obedience to the rules. Contrary to expectations, fairy tale rules are not universally agreed upon.
Burning the animal bridegroom’s discarded skin sometimes frees him, and sometimes only drags you into a long quest to find your vanished lover. Today, popular opinion finds that you should kiss frogs, but the Grimms’ princess broke her amphibious suitor’s curse by picking him up by one twiddly leg and dashing him against her bedroom wall. Sometimes mysterious old women give you enchanted nuts to crack in a moment of urgent need, or a silver mirror that will tarnish if your brother is ill, and sometimes they give you poisoned combs and apples, or a piece of rotten thread to tie around your husband’s ankle that worsens the curse instead of breaking it.
In fact, in the bones of the story, the interdiction that must not be broken is indistinguishable from a command to rush right out and do the forbidden thing, since the story would happen just the same in either case. A rule that must be broken is just a rule. Fairy tale heroines navigate worlds that darkly mirror our own, in which appetite is a slippery set of contradictions. Food, sex, and power are wrapped up in conflicting rules, like the beautiful and the ugly twins, the mother and the witch, the prince and the dragon, two edges of the same knife, cutting both ways.
Tags: fairy tales, folklore, kristiana willsey, stories
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So…Tatterhood is the patron saint of the Toast, clearly? How shall we go about erecting our altars to her name?
Perhaps we form a fanclub instead! Every member gets an authoritative wooden spoon?
Tatterhood was my absolute favourite as a child!
I really like this. More scholarly examinations of folk tales, please?
Yes please
Ditto!
godddddd I really want to pitch something on this but I can never think of anything because I have spent the last four hundred years writing about fairy tales in re: Hannibal and I’m stuck. GET UNSTUCK, BRAIN.
Howdy!
HEY BUDDY
I KNEW I WOULD FIND YOU HERE!!!!!!!!!
WE ARE BOTH SO PREDICTABLE
Obviously, I am a huge fan of Tales and Oh My God I could read about fairy/folktales ALL DAY.
My fellow fairytale-loving Toasties know about Sur La Lune, yes? And for fellow Aslan-hating fans of Narnia, there’s also this woman’s glorious journey of deconstruction. Anyone have other, similar websites to recommend? Please?
I don’t have a website to recommend, but if you haven’t read In the Night Garden by Catherynne Valente, you might like* it. Not old tales, but new (fiction) ones.
*Or devour it over the course of two days, like I did.
Oh, thank you! I read The Girl Who Circumnavigated and enjoyed it very much.
Re: new, fictional fairy tales, EVERYONE READ PLAIN KATE OH MY GOD.
I cannot overstate how wonderful that book is. I’ve reread it about once a year since it’s come out and I cry every time.
I haunted the SurLaLune discussion board in high school (it’s kind of absurd to me that I exchanged words with Jane Yolen as an infant) but it got a lot more “students looking for help with paper” heavy over the years and I felt like a lot of the writers and artists found other venues. I don’t know about similar websites, but there are several fairly active Facebook groups– there is the American Folklore Society’s Folk Narrative section, and Fairy Tale Films Research (devoted to screen adaptations).
The journal Marvels and Tales also puts their most recent issue online: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/marvels/
it got a lot more “students looking for help with paper” heavy over the years
Oh, that’s too bad. I should have looked it over before I recommended it since it’s been a couple years before I even glanced at it. Thank you for the link to that journal!
I feel like I should clarify that, as a student who did occasionally talk about papers I was researching, I was part of the problem and pretty unjustified in my cooler-than-thou attitude.
(Hipsters: complaining about gentrification while being largely responsible for it.)
This is so interesting. I had no idea that folklorists had this sort of concordance-style catalogue system, though of course it makes sense that they would.
I’ve always been really interested in the rule-bending survival tactics of fairytale heroines. I’ve definitely heard/read some things about the ways fairytales sometimes reinforce social expectations of women in a way that can seem pretty antifeminist, but I had never thought before about how that works if the command that a female character disobeys is issued by a woman, especially an older/wiser/more powerful woman, like a witch. Thanks for sharing this; I’d love to read more like it.
This is somewhat related to the idea of fairytales reinforcing vs. subverting social expectations toward women–I wrote a paper once contrasting early Christian (4th, 5th century) female saints’ legends with later medieval ones (11th century on). Since they follow the structure of fairy tales and folklore pretty similarly, they reflect changing societal values in the same way. The later saints’ legends emphasized chastity, wifeliness, quiet piety, and other qualities associated with upper-class women. But the early ones are KICK-ASS–the heroines coolly debate and win against all the world’s greatest philosophers and turn down marriage offers from emperors (St. Catherine of Alexandria, my patron saint), fight dragons (St. Margaret), and in my favorite example, beat up, cuss out, and literally tell the Literal Capital-D Devil to “cry uncle.” That was St. Juliana of Nicomedia in the version I read.
Unfortunately a lot of these early female saints have been stripped of their official feast days because the Church has decided that their stories can’t be historically validated (let that sink in for a second)–but male saints from the same period are still official. Patriarchy.
That sounds like a pretty excellent paper. I’ve spent some time studying female medieval saints and other holy women (anchoresses, mystics), but so far, only the later ones. It sounds like I should look into some pre-11th century saints, especially since that’s more in line with my period, anyway.
On the other hand, there’s absolutely something to be said for the kinds of (brilliant, I think) psychological gymnastics holy women in the High Middle Ages engage in in order to carve out spaces for themselves in the Church. Even the writings of saints who are more focused on qualities cultivated in/by the upper class sometimes feature these surprising twists that wrest agency and importance out of disempowering situations. Come to think of it, I wonder whether you’ve read Caroline Walker Bynum’s Holy Feast and Holy Fast? It’s specifically about the relationship between women and food in the Middle Ages, but much of it focuses on female saints and the ways they thought and wrote about nourishment, their own bodies, and the body and blood of Christ. I’d highly recommend it to anyone who’s remotely interested in this sort of thing.
I HAVE read Caroline Walker Bynum, in fact that book was a major citation in my master’s thesis (which was on souvenir pamphlets for reliquary collections-tourist attractions). Medievalist high-five!
As for psychological gymnastics and women’s spaces, I presented a paper on 11th century women in Cairo, who were forbidden to worship in the mosques, so they created their own worship spaces in the huge necropolis outside the city. Their spaces were usually in the tombs of prominent, often female Fatimid saints, and it was AWESOME (the topic, not my presentation, let’s not get carried away with the bragging). Lady-church! In graveyards! It is one of my favorite papers I’ve ever worked on.
Medievalist high-five indeed! Do you mean pamphlets from the Middle Ages, or for present-day tourists?
Also, your paper on lady-graveyard-church sounds fascinating. I totally understand if you’d prefer not to, but if you’d be comfortable showing that paper to an internet stranger, I would love to read it. (Alternatively, I would also welcome reading recommendations on the topic, if you have any titles/authors readily at hand!)
Pamphlets from the Middle Ages! Specifically I was looking at how image replication (and thus the advent of printing [in Europe]) was associated with the same kind of religious power/value as relics, where you can have first-class relics, secondary-class relics, etc. So printed devotional materials basically became relics for the poor. I’d LOVE to write a book on modern-day pilgrimage but haven’t gotten around to it yet.
I would totally send you my paper BUT it’s on an external hard drive that I need a Mac to get into, and I don’t currently own a Mac since mine died last year, so my whole life pre-2013 is locked in this treasure box. Do you have twitter or similar? Or if you’d give me your email I can make a note to send it to you when I get the opportunity to unlock it (I could probably get to it this Saturday). Same deal with my bibliography for it–it’s been so long and it’s so not my area I can’t remember any sources off the top of my head. I’m @whittingly on twitter and burkhalterwj at gmail.
Um, do I sense a Misandrist Saints to Add to Your Devotional Toast Post coming on? (please say yes)
If no one else wants to pitch it, I totally will.
please do it!
In one of Karen Armstrong’s many books, I think its The Gospel According to Woman, she discusses one of the differences between early and later female martyrs and their stories, particularly how in the early accounts, the focus of the telling is on the sainthood of the martyr, who is basically almost in heaven already at the point of death through religious ecstacy, but in the later accounts we see a creepy (my words) focus on the torture, suffering and humiliation of the martyrs, particularly the women.
My (amateur but fairly well-informed) opinion re: fairy tales and feminism is that they’re not, as a whole, oppressive to women nor are they liberatory. They are, however, very often built around women (far more often than most people think), and I think they reflect women’s experiences. They’re essentially horror stories–think about all the body horror, the time displacement, the monsters, the emphasis on what you do or do not do with your body, what you do or do not put into it–reflecting, in many cases, the female experience, which is a subset of the basic fact that certain aspects of being human are fundamentally horrific. So in some you have a heroine who “wins,” and sometimes you have heroines who don’t (this is all highly subjective, of course, depending on what you think winning looks like), and sometimes you have stories where you almost feel as though nothing has really happened–there was a rupture, some strangenesses occurred, and then things went back to normal–but usually in a way that feels true. We don’t, actually, always have agency over ourselves, as people and especially as women, and sometimes I’m okay with stories that reflect that in all its surreality and terror. What I don’t like is stories that normalize that and treat it as the proper order; luckily, fairy tales are generally about the proper order breaking down, so it doesn’t come up too terribly often.
As a card-carrying, doctorate-bearing folklorist currently going through a phase of “everything I hold dear is despised by the world around me,” all I can say is YAYYYYYYYYYY! To both Kristiana for writing this and the Toast for running it.
WHO IS RAGGING ON FOLKLORE TO YOU I’LL FIGHT ‘EM
Well, the whole University of California, for starters.
okay tell ’em to form a queue and i’ll be right over
I heard 🙁
I recently started thinking of the Frog Prince as a story about dealing with a sexual predator.
The frog finds the princess weeping and comforts her. He makes her promise to care for him in exchange for favors, and then holds up his end of the bargain. When she leaves him in the garden, he goes and shames her in front of her father and family, and her family holds her to her promise. She has to share her food with him, she has to share her bed with him.
When he tries to get her to share her body with him, she picks him up and throws him against a wall, promise or no, and that is the thing that make him human.
I love this. Much better than the “why don’t you just give kissing the frog a CHANCE?” narrative.
I always try to convince my students that this is the proper way to read it! The whole Beauty & the Beast tale type encourages women to enter relationships with men that they find physically repulsive, and as someone who briefly went down that road herself as a young adult, I REALLY don’t want my female students to internalize that lesson.
Bookmarked for reference because this is a super important piece of mechanical information in the creation of stories that are believably fables and this is remarkably fucking rare on the internet generally, it is EXTREMELY HARD to find information on the bones of stories that aren’t:
a) Stories themselves, but never thorough ones
b) Some nonsense about Mister Campbell.
Thank you! Also please maybe add some … I don’t know, we get Amazon references for Jaya Catches Up and the book clubs, could we have some references at the bottom of this for the dewey decimal system of folklore? I would very much appreciate it.
I originally had links to google books and things (as an alternative to footnoting everything) but it was pretty cumbersome and perhaps distracting to read? But here is a web-version of Stith Thompson’s motif index: http://www.ualberta.ca/~urban/Projects/English/Mo…
And here is the Aarne-Thompson-Uther tale type index: http://oaks.nvg.org/folktale-types.html
Wikipedia is not bad for a general overview of its history and use 😉 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aarne%E2%80%93Thomps…
Edited to add: that site also breaks down how the numbers are used http://www.ualberta.ca/~urban/Projects/English/Co…
you are the wind beneath my entirely metaphorical wings, which almost certainly have a terrifying implication in folklore!
Glad to help! You could also do a little google-research on the “historic-geographic method” (also known as the “Finnish method” and the “comparative method”). Early on it was used to try to find the earliest versions of stories, with the general assumption that stories “devolved” or broke up as they spread– but since this doesn’t really hold water, some of the shine of this method wore off over the years. It’s still really handy for being able to compare different texts to each other, as long as one isn’t making any claims about which version is closer to an imaginary “Ur” form.
And if you read German, the Enzyklopaedie des Maerchens (http://wwwuser.gwdg.de/~enzmaer/) has tons of this kind of analysis.
AAAAAAH YES! THANK YOU!
(I am presently _learning_ german, _slowly_.)
So it’s super old and full of weird racist framing (i.e. the whole advanced vs. backward peoples thing), but honestly, The Golden Bough is kind of a treasure trove if you can deal with that part. If you can’t, that’s totally understandable, but the sheer volume of information about folkloric ideas and practices, and the interrogation thereof, is pretty great. (It’s also long as hell. I’ve been reading it off and on for years, actual years.)
Sounds like you need some Vladimir Propp in your life: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Propp
(Campbell ripped off Propp shamelessly.)
Fascinating, and beautifully written. I love this examination of stories; folktales are how we pass down knowledge from generation to generation – they’re literally the most important things we thought we could say to the children, and I think we forget that in the Disneyfied versions we so often see and hear.
Can I please request a breakdown of the various fairytale types and how they get catalogued and, um, various geekery? I would be so interested.
See above!
Thank you!
THIS WAS SO GOOD.
this is an absolutely tremendous title.
Yes thank you this was great! I was obsessed with fairytales of all kinds as a kid. Even now I will ready almost any novel that is a fairytale adaptation/twist/myth-based. Bonus for creepyness.
So rich and heady, it almost made me dizzy.
This is a great article. Thank you, Kristiana Willsey. Thank you, Toast.
For anyone after a not-especially-academic-but-has-footnotes exploration of folktale, look no further than Angela Carter’s Book of Fairy Tales, illustrated by Corinna Sargood.
This calls to my mind one of the most wonderful genres of Indian film, the naga movie. Nagas are snakes that practice yogic devotions for years and years until they gain the ability to shape shift into human form. They also mate for life. What’s fascinating about them is that, depending on the POV of the main character, it can be either a devotional story about a downtrodden woman who is harassed physically, emotionally, financially, and any other way you can image by her family, but because she worships the naga faithfully, the naga takes on human form and comes to her assistance and, in the climax, beats the bejesus out of the villains and facilitates the marriage of the heroine (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0313965/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1); OR, it’s a horror story in which a man kills the naga’s mate and the naga takes on human form and hunts him down and kills him horribly. In the best ones (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074949/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_42), there’s a whole bunch of men responsible for the killing and the naga takes on one form after another to hunt them down. The naga often has to face off against an evil Tantrik priest, which is always the occasion for some great dancing (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091601/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_74). I just love how the basic story becomes a love story or a horror story depending on whether it’s told from the female or the male POV.
Here’s another link to the whole Motif Index online: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Motif-Index_of_Folk…
This was as brilliant and engaging and lovely as you are. Wonderful writing!
The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland is such a great book! I haven’t made it to the sequels yet, have you?
(meant as a reply to CleverManka)
Sorry for the delayed response. I was out of town w/o access to much internet stuff. But no, I haven’t read the others. I’m SO LEERY of sequels…
The concept of lack comes from the Russian Vladimir Propp, not Dundes. When Dundes used it, it was as a translation of Propp’s concept (and as the translator of Propp).
Also, Levi-Strauss used it in French before Dundes used it in English.
Shoot, I knew that, but I read Dundes first and forgot. I knew someone was going to find something wrong with this! Thanks for the correction, it’s weirdly a relief.
I did have a colleague vet this, but it slipped by us both… I’d ask for an edit, but I’m not sure my contributor status gives me that power?
I guess for the weird relief–you’re welcome?
I used to work for a Russian folklorist, so there are things I’m not allowed to forget.
And thanks for the piece, I’ve been thinking about lack a lot recently.
There are two sequels, which are absolutely great, but there's also a short prequel free on Tor, which is about how Mallow became Queen and it's brilliant!
http://www.tor.com/stories/2011/07/the-girl-who-r…
Angela Carter forever.
I KNEW I WOULD FIND YOU HERE!!!!!!!!!
This is so amazing, thank you!
This is so amazing, thank you!
Hey, that’s my Persephone art up there, taken from the cover of my book PERSEPHONE AND THE POMEGRANATE (published by Dial/Penguin Books in 1992). Love your site—and would love the copyright notice. It should be as follows: Persephone and the Pomegranate art © 1992 Kris Waldherr. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Thank you!
Thank you in return! It’s nice to see my art on your site. 🙂