Fairy Tale and Film
a young girl, Catherine, relates Perrault’s story to her squeamish older
sister, Marie-Anne, in a loft-room. Her version reiterates the idea of the
wife marrying for money, and makes her a ‘virgin princess’, while evinc-
ing a bloodthirsty imagination. Dispensing with the brothers, Catherine
allows the wife to decapitate her murderous husband herself, yet
although this suggests a bold revisionism at work, Breillart adds a dis-
turbing end to the tale-within-a-tale. Marie-Anne fearfully backs away
from her sister at hearing the final scene. Begging her sister to stop, she
loses her footing and falls to her death. As Zipes notes, ‘their mother
arrives and seems strangely unaware of her older daughter’s death, even
though she stands directly above the girl’s body’ (2011: 168), suggest-
ing that this death may not truly have happened. Perhaps Marie-Anne’s
fall symbolises the fate of females who allow fear to get the better of
them, or maybe it is indicative of the degree to which Catherine has
imaginatively allowed herself to be carried away with her fantasy. There
is also another, more disturbing reading: the idea that one sister has
truly killed her sibling, perhaps even deliberately. The possibility that
such a tragedy could really occur, and the mother’s apparent heedless-
ness, is reminiscent of the disconcerting way that fairy tales often
present familial ruptures and tragedies as the norm. Just as ‘Bluebeard’
de-romanticises the prospect of marriage to a stranger, many fairy tales
undermine familial ideals, including the idea that parents will serve as
protectors, or that children are necessarily all that innocent. It is this
theme of the home as a place of danger, rather than safety, and the sug-
gestion that blood ties may simply put individuals at odds, rather than
bind them closer together, that is the next chapter’s central concern.
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5
Houses of Horror: Domestic
Dangers and Man-made Monsters
The scary side of fairy tales is often obscured, yet far from being con-
ceived as cosy bedtime reading for children, they originally aimed to
entertain listeners of all ages, and a number of gory and gruesome fea-
tures remain. Monsters may take various forms, but are perhaps most
frightening when presumed care-givers are shown to deviate from their
role. Child abuse, cannibalism, murder and incest are but some of the
crimes that feature in these tales: terrors conspicuously located in the
family home – making them veritable houses of horror for imperilled
protagonists. The frequent appearance of familial foes has prompted
folklorists and psychoanalysts to offer various explanations. Why make
mothers and fathers into threatening figures, and turn a place usu-
ally associated with security into a dangerous realm protagonists must
escape? Do such narratives exaggerate common childhood fears as a
means of voicing repressed anxieties, perhaps hoping to incite a level
of maturity via characters who are forced to leave their homes and fend
for themselves? Or do they voice other (often unspoken) ideas via their
manifestly unhappy families? As Angela Carter notes in her introduction
to
The
Virago Book of Fairy Tales
:
Fairy-tale families are, in the main, dysfunctional units in which
parents and step-parents are neglectful to the point of murder and
sibling rivalry to the point of murder is the norm. A profile of the
typical European fairy tale family reads like that of a ‘family at risk’
in a present-day inner city social worker’s casebook, and the African
and Asian families represented here offer evidence that even widely
different types of family structures still create unforgivable crimes
between human beings too close together. (1990: xix)
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