If before this class I had thought fairy tales synonymous with children, I slowly am finding disillusionment, at best, when it comes to this matter. C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Angela Carter have seen to the task this past week. There seems to be a snickering among these renowned authors towards the author that writes for the child only. Two quotes in particular bring me to this conclusion in the literal sense. Lewis asserts in his “On Stories and Other Essays on Literature,” “I never wrote down to anyone; and whether the opinion condemns or acquits my own work, it certainly is my opinion that a book worth reading only in childhood is not worth reading even then. The inhibitions which I hoped my stories would overcome in a child's mind may exist in a grown-ups mind too, and may perhaps be overcome by the same means” (48). Here Lewis fixes together the imagination of child and grown folk, creating a bond between the two that perhaps holds in its grasp the true magic behind the fairy tale, the connection between childhood and adulthood that is often lost somewhere in the brambles of growing up. In “On Fairy Stories,” Tolkien similarly complains, “It is usually assumed that children are the natural or specifically appropriate audience for fairy stories..Is there any essential connexion between children and fairy stories? Is there any call for comment, if an adult reads them for himself? Reads them as tales, that is, not studies them as curios. Adults are allowed to collect and study anything...” (11). Angela Carter is one such adult. I have thoroughly enjoyed her twisting retellings of traditional lore. This week’s Carter study is “The Erl-King.” The Sir Walter Scott version tells of a parent’s worst nightmare—the abduction of a child. The Erl-King is like a modern day trafficker pedophile luring children from his unmarked van:
“O come and go with me, no longer delay,
Or else, silly child, I will drag thee away.”—
“O father! O father! Now, now keep your hold,
The Erl-King has seized me – his grasp is so cold!”
Scott’s words send a chill. But Carter creates a blizzard. She sexualizes and adultifies (yes, I just made that a word) the ballad into a riveting tale of “A cold day of late October, when the withered blackberries dangled like their own dour spooks on the discoloured brambles…Only, there is a haunting sense of the imminent cessation of being; the year, in turning, turns in on itself. Introspective weather, a sickroom hush” (84). The metaphor, the imagery, the detail, the foreshadowing…all serve to introduce the nightmare that becomes some third person’s (the reader’s) journey toward the forest and the Erl-King, who “will do you grievous harm” (85). At this point, the narrator becomes first person and “I” dominates. And the “I” gets to know the Erl-King in a very personal light and even humanizes him in a positive light, juxtaposed to the darkness which begins the story.
It is a coming-of-age story. The Erl-King is the personification of that which robs us of our childhood innocence:
“How sweet I roamed, or, rather, used to roam; once I was the perfect child of the meadows of summer, but then as the year turned, the light clarified and I saw the gaunt Erl-King, tall as a tree with birds in its branches, and he drew me towards him on his magic lasso of inhuman music” (89). What abducts us from our childhood?, she seems to makes us ponder.
The end of her tale turns cold and dark again, like the beginning. The birds which served as her main symbolism throughout turn to crows, dark and ominous. She is beginning to draw from her lover, the Erl-King, seeing him as dangerous, saying, “Your green eye is a reducing chamber. If I look into it long enough, I will become as small as my own reflection, I will diminish to a point and vanish. I will be drawn down into that black whirlpool and be consumed by you. I shall become so small you can keep me in one of your osier cages and mock my loss of liberty” (90). He wishes to make her one of his winged, caged friends. And she won’t have it. The “I” dreams of killing her captor, now the violent one. Then it is back to “she.” “SHE will open the cages and let the birds free…” as though Carter reminds us we are all victim to adulthood. We are all the young girl lured into the forest of heartache and responsibility. But Carter does not leave her victim a victim. Sir Walter Scott’s monster kills the child he abducts. Carter’s victim kills her abductor, refusing to be a prisoner to the adulthood that perhaps Lewis and Tolkien were saying need fairy tales more than any child, because of the need for a roadmap back to childhood and the innocence we all need to be reminded of from time to time.
The traditional fairy tale focus for this week is Cinderella. Prince Charming and glass slippers. My eyes have been opened to many versions, but the Disney retelling is still what reigns supreme in the parts of me that remember being a little girl. It is perhaps the quintessential tale of hope for the hopeless (romantic). I think it goes without saying that we all feel like the girl sweeping the cinders, wishing for a fairy godmother to wave her wand and make it better, for a prince with whom to run away with. These wishes are more powerful for the adult than they ever were for us as children. And I think that in itself is enough example that what Lewis, Tolkien, and Carter argue is true—the story for the child must also be written for the adult, for adults is what they become and childhood is the hope they must be reminded of.
Works Cited
Carter, Angela. The bloody chamber and other stories. New York, Penguin Books, 2015.
Lewis, C. S., and Walter Hooper. On stories and other essays on literature. New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982.
Tolkien, J. R. R., et al. Tolkien on fairy-Stories. London, HarperCollinsPublishers, 2014.