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31Olga Kulaga Minsk State Linguistic University, Belarus
The Role of Fairy Tale Motifs in the The Children’s Book
by A.S.Byatt
В статье рассматривается значимый для современной литературы феномен переработки и заимствования сказочных сюжетов и образов, а также дается анализ различных способов обработки заимствованных элементов и их функции в романе современной английской писательницы А. С. Байатт «Детская книга». Автор романа перерабатывает сказки Ш. Перро, Г.Х. Андерсена, братьев Гримм, Э.Т.А. Гофмана, а также использует мотивы произведений Дж. Барри, К. Грэхема, Л. Кэрролла, Р. Киплинга. Подчеркивается, что наиболее часто писательница применяет такие приемы переработки, как аллюзии и реминисценции, что позволяет А. С. Байатт создавать новые, уникальные персонажи на базе уже известных.
Literature has always been a medium for transformation of the cultural values preserved by the humankind during the previous epochs. Reworking of the world’s literary achievements is realized by means of intertextuality, i.e. interaction of texts.
Each author gives a new life to the borrowed ideas, plots and images by treating them from a different angle. Literary studies give us a ground to state that there exist a number of important sources of borrowings, with folklore works - fairy tales, songs, legends among them.
In this article we would like to concentrate on the reworking of fairy tale motifs and images, and on their function in the novel The Children’s Book by A.S.Byatt, which was shortlisted for the 2009 Man Booker prize and won the James Tait Black Memorial prize.
The novel begins in the late Victorian period, to be more precise - in 1895, and ends during the Great War. The author describes the whole epoch which is also called the age of children’s literature, because it was at this time that such writers as J.M.Barrie, Kenneth Grahame, Lewis Carroll, Oscar Wilde, Rudyard Kipling, and Edith Nesbit created their masterpieces for children. Readers have a chance to meet some of them in the novel.
The story centres on the relationship of two generations of several families:
...socialists, anarchists, Quakers, Fabians, artists, editors, freethinkers and writers, who lived, either all the time, or at weekends and on holidays in converted cottages and old farmhouses, Arts and Crafts homes and working-men’s terraces, in the villages, woods and meadows around the Kentish Weald and the North and South Downs. These were people who had evaded the Smoke, and looked forward to a Utopian world in which smoke would be no more... [Byatt 2009: 29].
This way of describing the epoch let us understand why one of the most significant sources of borrowings in The Children’s Book is fairy tale motifs - with their help A.S.Byatt created the idyllic atmosphere of lightness at the beginning of the book. We realize that the world described in the novel is utopian and full of phantasmagoric images; it resembles the world from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. (It’s not by chance that Shakespeare’s masterpiece is mentioned on the novel’s pages quite often). With the further development of the plot the atmosphere tenses as calm before the storm, and it is finally destroyed by the sudden eruption of the Great War.
In her novel A. S.Byatt employs a wide range of borrowings from English and European classical literature, ancient Scandinavian epos and so on, but fairy tale motifs are vital for plot and episode formation. The author reworks fairy tales by Charles Perrault, Hans Christian Andersen, Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, the Grimm Brothers; she also uses some elements of literary works by J.M.Barrie, Kenneth Grahame, Lewis Carroll, and Rudyard Kipling, resorting to allusions and reminiscences to create new original characters on the basis of well-known ones. The number of fairy tales utilized to create and describe this or that personage depends on the place occupied by them in the novel, on their inner world and life story. Sometimes the author employs one fairy tale, but reworks it thoroughly; in other cases she combines elements of several ones.
One of the main characters of The Children’s Book is a writer Olive Wellwood. Her prototype is E. Nesbit, a prominent children’s
writer. It is known that she lived in an open marriage with her husband, brought up his two children born by another woman, and wrote books dedicated to her own children.
So, Olive Wellwood is a mother of a big family, who writes books not only for the press, but also for her kids. The style of her fairy stories reminds us of frightening, filled with Gothic atmosphere, works of the Grimm Brothers and Hoffmann. Her writing determines the life and destiny of the kids. It is also a way to verbalize the sufferings she lived through in her childhood spent in poverty and misery and to escape from the real world into fairy tale reality. The personality of Olive Wellwood is that of a typical fairy tale writer. According to the opinion of A.S.Byatt herself:
most of the children's writers live in the world that they've created, and their children are like phantoms that wander around...actually the children's writers are the children [Byatt2009: 3].
Olive calls herself Mother Goose which is an allusion to the popular collection of children’s poems Mother Goose’s Melody. It is also the title of Charles Perrot’s fairy tale collection Tales of My Mother Goose. In one of her stories ‘The Shrubbery’ Olive says that Mother Goose rears not only her own, but also foster children; later readers find out that out of seven children in Olive’s family only five are hers, the other two are her sister’s.
Rather frequently occur in the novel variations on the theme of Cinderella. One of the first researchers of folklore motifs about Cinderella was M.R.Cox, who published her theoretical book which contained analyses of 345 variants of such fairy tales right during the Victorian Age, in 1893. M. R.Cox divided the fairy stories into three groups:
The first group contains only two features: an ill-treated heroine and her recognition by means of slipper...
Cox’s second main group contains more essential features: what Cox in her Victorian manner calls an “unnatural father” - that is, a father who wants to marry
his daughter - and another feature ...the heroine’s flight...In Cox’s third large grouping, the two additional features of the second are replaced by what Cox calls a “King Lear Judgment”: a father’s extracting from his daughter a declaration of love which he deems insufficient, so that she is therefore banished, which forces her into the “Cinderella” position [See: Bettelheim 2010 : 245].
In the Wellwood family this fairy tale character is associated with the daughter Phyllis. After the death of her mother the young woman decides to take charge of the household, to clean and cook on her own because she wants to be loved and appreciated at least for her work. In this story line we may notice some elements from the third group of stories about Cinderella.
The same fairy tale is used to create the image of Elsie Warren, an orphan, who becomes a servant in the house of the potter Benedict Fludd, in order to give her brother a chance to study and develop his talent. Elsie is an example of the first group of stories about Cinderella. The episode with the purchase of new shoes is a turning point in Elsie’s life.
In this scene A.S.Byatt demonstrates to us a contrast between an ideal fairy tale image of Cinderella and a modern pragmatic variant: Elsie has a dream to buy a pair of new shoes for every day usage. For her they are a symbol of a happy, self- sufficient and independent life.
Olive’s daughter Dorothy is a Cinderella from the second group: Olive’s husband, whom Dorothy considered to be her father, tries to rape her. The event becomes an incentive for the girl to find her real father.
Dorothy’s fate and the truth about her origin (she is the daughter of Olive and Anselm Stern, a German puppet master) are also connected with a fairy tale written by Olive. The story treats of halfpeople among whom lives a girl-hedgehog. Dorothy’s nickname is Hedgehog but she understands its real meaning only after the meeting with her father, when he tells her the fairy tale ‘Hans - my hedgehog’. This story line is a revision of the German fairy tale by the Grimm
Brothers.
The image of Olive’s favourite son Tom is a reminiscence of Markus Potter, a young man too much involved in his own inner world, from A.S.Byatt’s tetralogy about Frederic Potter. The fairy tale Olive wrote for her son is the longest and, accordingly, its influence on Tom’s life is the strongest. The main character of the fairy tale goes into the underground world to find his shadow. Olive composes the story during Tom’s whole life and, by finishing it, she somehow urges Tom to commit a suicide. Like his fairy tale twin Tom is in search of his own self, his destiny and vocation, and the result is sad and tragic. The grown-ups - his parents, sisters and brothers - do not understand him and his vision of the world - childish and carefree: he sees himself a boy living in a wooden house in a tree. This sort of behaviour makes him similar to Peter Pan. Olive’s decision to turn the fairy tale into a theatrical performance makes Tom realize that his childhood has passed; so he decides to leave the world he doesn’t accept.
One more component of Tom’s character is the image of elf Puck from ancient English legends and A Midsummer Night’s Dream and also a character from Puck of Pook's HilF by Kipling. Tom is given this role by his parents in his childhood when they prepared a performance of Shakespeare’s play for one of their family holidays and since then Tom has never changed the role, never grows out of it, though his sisters and brothers always take different roles as they grow up. Like Puck Tom loves his native region, its nature and poetry; he takes interest in the life of common people, makes friends with foresters and loggers, but, unfortunately, cannot find any support and understanding within his own family.
Describing the life of Tom and the other children of this family A.S.Byatt raises a very crucial question of mutual understanding between parents - children’s writers - and their children. People usually think that such parents must be very efficient at handling their kids, but it often turns out that their own infantilism and narcissism prevent them from loving and caring for their own children. In one of her interviews A.S.Byatt tells us the following:
...there's a high rate of suicide among the children of children's book writers. One of the things that really distressed me was Kenneth Grahame... And he had this child called Mouse, who had something wrong with his eyes and was purblind, but Grahame and his extremely silly wife refused to acknowledge that he was purblind, they refused to acknowledge that he was disturbed, they sent him to various schools where he was very violent... they got him into Oxford, he had dinner in his college one night and drank two glasses of port... and walked out and laid himself neatly on the railway line and let the train go over him. And Grahame and his wife managed to believe that this was an accident. But that poor kid had had no life at all, and a lot of the stories that were written for him were actually sent to him in letters while his parents were away somewhere else on a grownup holiday
[5].
Even the fact that Olive self-forgetfully sends Tom, suffering at his hateful boarding school, fairy tales, not a letter of support and comfort, shows us some similarities in the fate of the two children. The boarding school where Tom was bullied made him search for an escape in his inner world; it also made the boy lose his faith in family ties and people’s kindness. That was the crucial moment when Tom made up his mind to become a “lost boy” and to live that way forever.
A lot of attention is devoted to Olive’s niece, Griselda. The author uses elements of the fairy tale, ‘The Sandman’, by Hoffmann to create this personage. Griselda is described as a true German «m^dchen» in appearance and character - so calm and imperturbable that sometimes people consider her to be insensible. She is also very beautiful and graceful that makes her look like an ideal marionette Olympia from Hoffmann’s story.
The girl’s name is an allusion to the fairy tale ‘Griselda’ by Perrot where a beautiful shepherdess overcomes all the obstacles created by her jealous husband, with patience and respect. This is the way A.S.Byatt stresses the peculiarities of the girl’s character.
Griselda’s image also contains an allusion to the Grimm Brothers fairy tale ‘Rapunzel’. The girl lives and studies at Newham College with such a devotion that she forgets about the world around. Her friends compare this way of life to that in the witch’s tower from the German fairy tale.
The image of Olympia from ‘The Sandman’ by Hoffmann is also used to describe the character of Seraphita, Benedict Fludd’s wife and to emphasize such features of her character as taciturnity and apathy. These features are intensified by the elements borrowed from such fairy tales as ‘Cinderella’ and ‘The Sleeping Beauty’ by Perrot, ‘The Snow Queen’ by Hans Andersen. With the help of the same fairy tale images A.S. Byatt creates the characters of Seraphita’s and Benedict’s daughters, suffering from somnambulism and sleepwalking at night, and living as if daydreaming.
The father of the family - a genius with a violent and gloomy character is compared to ‘Bluebeard’ from Perrot’s fairy tale; and his prototype is Eric Gill - a British sculptor, stonecutter and printmaker, ‘whose personal diaries describe his sexual activity in great detail including the fact that Gill sexually abused his own children...’[6]. Benedict Fludd works in the pottery with his apprentice, but his short visits home tense the depressive atmosphere and moral pressure in his family. He also possesses a secret room, where he keeps his genius erotic sculptures, for which he probably made his daughters sit, but the key is hidden. His masterpieces are gorgeous, they seem to be filled with emotions and life, as opposed to his wife and daughters.
Hereby, we may come to the conclusion that in her novel The Children’s Book A.S.Byatt uses various methods of intertextuality, allusions, reminiscences and unmarked quotations being most frequent. The novel is structured on pastiche as it combines motifs and images that belong to different literary works. She perfectly combines elements of diverse well-known fairy tales to create new characters, to make them bright and catching for the audience, to show the continuity of folklore plots and motifs as well as real life situations.
References
1. Byatt A.S. The Children’s Book. London: Chatto & Windus, 2009.
2. URL:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/5291596/The-
Childrens-Book-by-A. S .Byatt-review.html
3. URL:http://www.abc.net.au/m/bookshow/stories/2009/2544347.htm
4. Bettelheim B.The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. New York: Vintage Books, 2010.
5. URL : http ://www. chaskor.ru/article/antoniva bai ettzachemnamnuzhnoi skusstvol 4098
6. URL : http ://en .wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric Gill
