13th Congress of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research

Presentation Abstracts

NEEMANN, Harold

The History of the Fairy Tale: three hundred years of recontextualization, recuperation and ambiguous valorisation

In late seventeenth-century France, the contes merveilleux, i.e., fairy tales, constituted a complex literary and socio-cultural phenomenon that has subsequently informed the genre as we have inherited it. While drawing on folklore so as to provide their narratives with a specifically national origin and resonance, the seventeenth-century French authors of contes merveilleux were indeed well-versed in the art of making their readers believe that their narratives were actual folktales. Charles Perrault, in particular, demonstrated great skill in imitating and recreating an ingenuousness and rustic simplicity, thus succeeding in concealing his literary influences. Yet, in so doing, he constructed his own version of such naïve and simple fairy tales as Tales of Mother Goose. By a strange irony, he thus unwittingly contributed greatly to instituting his own concept of fairy tales as folk narratives and creating an idealized image of folktales and the folk.

While the literary fairy tales published during the 1690s served to exemplify the modernist conception of literature, the demonstration of modern literature's merit was predicated on a reductive recuperation and an ambiguous valorization of folkloric tradition. Composing literary fairy tales under the pretext of reproducing so-called ‘authentic’ folk narratives actually amounts to recontextualizing oral tradition by separating speech and writing. Hence, much of what we know today as ‘folklore’ has come to us mediated by the work of seventeenth-century authors such as Perrault, Mme d'Aulnoy, Mlle Lhéritier, and others.

Several seventeenth-century French literary fairy tales subsequently found their way into other cultures by means of written and oral transmission. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the German Romantics eagerly embraced the fairy tale since it corresponded to their notion of a product of the soul of the people. With the advent of Romanticism, the genre experienced a complex shift in perspective. Unlike the late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century French authors of contes merveilleux, the early nineteenth-century German Romantics considered the fairy tale as a folkloric form capable of serving as a counter model to official culture. Ironically, the cultural models that the presumably German folk literature was supposed to subvert pertained to the same Frenchified ‘classical’ culture from which the so-called folktales actually derived.

In this context, the dissemination and reception of fairy tales is closely linked to the work of the Brothers Grimm. While the Brothers Grimm, admittedly, were well aware of the French origin of many Märchen, their Romantic idea of fairy tales as authentic folk literature, simple and naïve in tenor, has enjoyed a long period of currency. This very notion of the fairy tale, however, originated with the late seventeenth-century Modernist conception of literature and is the result of deliberate manipulation of orally-transmitted peasant tales by Perrault and his contemporaries. The literary transformations they effected have both marked the genre of the fairy tale as such and constituted it as an object of extensive theoretical investigation.