THE FAIRY TALE MOTIF (FAILED OR SUCCEEDED) IN MODERN SHORT NOVEL
The world of literature is a very fluid world. Few literary motifs, themes and genres ever stay constant in it for very long. Rather, they evolve into something new, getting assimilated into this newness, or disappear almost completely. The genre of the `classical' fairy tales, such as "Sleeping Beauty" or "Snow White", is a typical example of such a situation. This essay will examine three of the twentieth century's short novels and see how the fairy tale has been adapted in them, with a successful result or not.
(To make things clearer, here is what is going to be meant by the term `fairy tale' in this essay: any classical fairy tale contains the following characteristic: a magical element, especially in the background; a certain set of main characters, namely a hero, a heroine, and a villain; a troubled start but a happy ending. This essay will examine The Fox, Ethan Frome and The Sad and Incredible Tale... to see if it features these elements, and to what extent.)
Published in the 1923, D.H. Lawrence's short novel The Fox is a well-known in the literary world for its fairy tale elements. This situation, actually, starts with the setting, which is quite magical to begin with.
The trees on the wood-edge were a darkish, brownish green in the full light--for it was the end of August. Beyond, the naked, copper-like shafts and limbs of the pine-trees shone in the air. Nearer, the rough grass, with its long brownish stalks all agleam, was full of light. The fowls were round about--the ducks were still swimming on the pond under the pine-trees. March looked at it all, saw it all, and did not see it. What was she thinking about? Heaven knows. Her consciousness was, as it were, held back.
She lowered her eyes, and suddenly saw the fox. He was looking up at her. His chin was pressed down, and his eyes were looking up. They met her eyes. And he knew her. She was spell-bound--she knew he knew her. So he looked into her eyes, and her soul failed her. He knew her, he was not daunted.
(Lawrence, pg 301)
By this time it becomes obvious to the readership that March and Banford are living in some sort of a magical, fairy tale world, inhabited by at least one magical creature - the titular fox. This also shows that the two women, living without a man, are helpless before such beings, as March is quite ineffective against the fox - and then along comes Henry with his manliness and promptly kills the fox... and it raises a question: if the fox is dead, does that mean that Henry is now the fairy-tale hero instead? Moreover, if it is so, what else has been done to the fairy-tale element?
Due primarily to the movie version of the short novel released in the 1967, The Fox in modern times is seen as a feminist novel with latent (but very potent) homosexual undertones, something that did not feature at all in the original fairy tales, and, admittedly, without these undertones, The Fox does become harder to understand as well as less interesting.
That Jill and March seemed to have reached, thanks to Paul's unknowing help, a happy stability in their life is confirmed by the scene immediately preceding Paul's return. In it we see them playfully joking with each other as March is trying to cut down the all too symbolical (yes! But Lawrence's nevertheless) phallic tree. The scene immediately reminds one of the Eurydice scene yet now there is no holding back any more. The repression has been overcome.
(Urbano, pg 258)
This quotation, as an example, focuses on Banford-March relationship, rather than the March-Henry one (in the film, Henry was renamed Paul for some reason). However, it is from a review of the movie, not the original short novel, where such scenes are, essentially, absent. The development of the Banford-March relationship is a result of the later film, not the initial novella, and it demonstrates the increasing departure from the `classical' fairy tale motif in the later twentieth century, something that will be noticeable once again in The Sad and Incredible Tale...
In any case, the reviews and articles that are centered on Henry-March relationship rather than the Banford-March one are pieces of work that focus on the short novel, rather than the movie. The reason for that is simple - in the original short novel, the levels of homosexuality are far lower than in the novel, and in some cases, such as in the beginning, it is possible to read The Fox without requiring any subtext, relying easily on the fairy tale tropes alone instead.
[...] One heifer, unfortunately, refused absolutely to stay in the Bailey Farm closes. No matter how March made up the fences, the heifer was out, wild in the woods, or trespassing on the neighbouring pasture, and March and Banford were away, flying after her, with more haste than success. So this heifer they sold in despair. And just before the other beast was expecting her first calf, the old man died, and the girls, afraid of the coming event, sold her in a panic, and limited their attention to fowls and ducks.
(Lawrence, pg 299)
This is where imagination's role becomes important. With it, the reader can look back at this later and say that this is the indication that something is wrong at the Bailey Farm, not just literally, but spiritually. Without it, a reader will just see a pair of young women (not quite yet thirty), who are struggling to keep their farm afloat after their aged caretaker has died - less homoerotic, more anecdotal perhaps, even by the standards of the time when The Fox had been originally written.
However, what happens literature-wise if the homoerotic angle is left out of The Fox? Essentially, it becomes a sort of a modern fairy tale, where the hero (Henry, or Paul in the movie version) rescues the heroine (March) from the villain (Banford). In fact, their last names are sort-of metaphoric: Banford is derived from the word "ban", i.e. "oppose", March is the transitory month from the frigid winter to spring, and Grenfel's last name is in direct connection to greenery of the bountiful summer.
Consequently, it can be said that the fairy tale motif is quite strong in the novella version of The Fox, without any overt homosexual tones per se (covert are another matter), as opposed to the film version. The world in the 1967 (when the movie was released) was quite different and more modern from our point of view than in 1923 (when the original short novel was published), and thus the movie became somewhat "updated" in the process via the attitudes and goals of the movie-makers. In 1923, when The Fox was published, the world was still "old" enough for fairy tale elements to be recognizable in that short novel, and so they were in 1911, when Edith Wharton had published her own short novel, Ethan Frome.
Straight away, there are similarities between the two short novels - both have love triangles composed of two women and a man, for example. In both cases there are the settings that possess a distinctly otherworldly element; however, this is where the differences begin. In The Fox, the setting is vibrant and alive, as it was shown in a quotation above; in Ethan Frome the setting appears sterile and dead.
[...]During the early part of my stay I had been struck by the contrast between the vitality of the climate and the deadness of the community. Day by day, after the December snows were over, a blazing blue sky poured down torrents of light and air on the white landscape, which gave them back in an intenser glitter. One would have supposed that such an atmosphere must quicken the emotions as well as the blood; but it seemed to produce no change except that of retarding still more the sluggish pulse of Starkfield. When I had been there a little longer, and had seen this phase of crystal clearness followed by long stretches of sunless cold; when the storms of February had pitched their white tents about the devoted village and the wild cavalry of March winds had charged down to their support, I began to understand why Starkfield emerged from its six months' siege like a starved garrison capitulating without quarter.
(Wharton, pg. 182)
The first thing that captures the reader's attention is this apparent animosity between the nature and the people, something that is rarely seen in more traditional fairy tales, where nature is more of a background setting than an active participant. Similarly, the movie version of The Fox also has certain natural elements playing a role, albeit largely by accident, than on purpose.
[...] Rather, the emphasis on the ice and the stillness of the place, together with an ominous musical theme, suggest that there is something off-balance from the beginning, and that the worst is yet to come. In such a reading, the text has been made to say quite the opposite of what it actually says, due to a superficial and heavy association of certain formal aspects with the thematic meaning they are believed to be bound to unequivocally convey.
(Urbano, pg 254)
The elements seem to imply that there is no hope in the village of Starkfield; the very name itself is derived directly from sterile, implacable starkness of the landscape. The people too are sterile, at least metaphorically: in all of fifty-one pages of the short novel there is no mention of children or child birth; certainly, there is the transition of generations, from Ethan Frome's father to Ethan Frome himself, as an example, but even that shift seems to be oriented towards death: "[...] I don't see's there's much difference between the Fromes up at the farm and the Fromes down in the graveyard; `cept that down there they're all quiet, and the women have got to hold their tongues." (Wharton, 229)
As the nature, so is the society; the people of Starkfield are not only metaphorically sterile, they are sterile socially, they often have trouble expressing themselves, regardless of how they feel. In The Fox, the characters are not very talkative either and are irrational, except for Banford, but in Ethan Frome, this irrationality seems to be going nowhere, as opposed to The Fox.
Put otherwise, love and emotions are irrational; Zeena of Ethan Frome is extremely rational and emotionless, at least in the eyes of Ethan (and she also has less trouble getting her message across with words); Banford, her letter notwithstanding (you can hear her telling March what to write to Henry in the short novel), does have her moments of irrationality, one of which gets her killed by the tree. There is movement and progression in The Fox, including that of the seasons; in Ethan Frome, there is nothing.
In a life overcome by a treacherous, frozen environment and hard labor, awareness of the body's needs supercedes that of the mind. Ethan's physical deformity, Zeena's ill health, and Mattie's physical demise frame the text as focused, almost elementally, on bodily survival in an unforgiving setting. Going beyond the narrative device of having the characters' bodies relay their thoughts (such as a blush expressing embarrassment or desire), Wharton instead applies the language of the body to reflection. Wharton is not using a physical reaction to express an underlying emotion but reversing the directional and recasting the mental/emotional within physical terms to narrow her characters' psychological parameters. Wharton's hidden rhetorical strategy thus creates a new, subversive example of "environmental discourse." At the expense of limiting Ethan's "sentiments" to the only metaphor he's experienced, Wharton creates a character whose contemplative simplicity portrays the complex repercussions of a harsh, isolated atmosphere.
()
Zeena (Zeenobia) in many ways is very similar to Banford, and in terms of fairy tale lingo, she plays the same role, that of a witch that obstructs the happiness of Ethan and Mattie (Zeena's cousin). Sadly, unlike the case of March and Henry, Ethan and Mattie are perfectly incapable of achieving any happiness without Zeena being around:
As he stood there he heard a step behind him and she entered.
"Oh, Ethan--were you here all night?"
[...]
All his tenderness rushed to his lips. He looked at her and said: "I'll come right along and make up the kitchen fire."
(Wharton, pg. 217)
This is essentially Mattie's last day on the farm, time is running out, and all of Ethan's tenderness amounts to household chores, as does Mattie's. The two would-be fairy tale lovers are apparently no better at it than Zeena is, there is no movement that characterizes the fairy tales (even such modernized ones as The Fox), and as such, Ethan Frome ends at it had started - in impotence, without a happy ending, in winter, rather than in summer. Ethan Frome has fairy tale elements, but it refuses to follow and evolve them, as The Fox did; instead, the lovers' progress is aborted at every turn, starting with their own natures, and ending as it began, in a sterile, wintry limbo of either evil or callousness.
If Ethan Frome is a short novel where little to no activity takes place, then Gabriel Garcia Marquez's The Incredible and Sad Tale... (Published in 1972) is a short novel that is all about movement and activity...and it has fairy tale elements in it as well. Erendira, her "heartless grandmother" and Ulises make yet another typical triangle of the princess/damsel in distress, her handsome hero, and the villain, the wicked witch, in the question - "the flowing metal-colored hair, and the powerful shoulders which were so mercilessly tattooed as to put sailors to shame." (Marquez, 647) Erendira too, is a "proper" fairy tale princess at the beginning of the short novel, properly cowed and submissive to her oppressor.
And then... the author abruptly augments the fairy tale elements in his novel with realism and surrealism. The mansion of Erendira and her grandmother burns down is acceptable both by fairy tale and real life standards, but the widower's non-consensual sex with Erendira can be considered only as one of the darkest aspects of real life, and his bartering with Erendira's grandmother is decisively surreal. As the 1967 movie version of The Fox has amplified the lesser elements of the 1923 short novel by a sort of modernization process, so Gabriel Garcia Marquez has done the same thing to the usual fairy tale trope in general, and then the literary critics of this short novel continued that tendency, as the quotation below can demonstrate:
In Diaz's interpretation of Hegel's master/slave theory, Erendira finds herself as an extension of her grandmother (toward the end of both texts Erendira behaves very much as the grandmother did in her youth), yet tries to win freedom from this dependency by having the grandmother killed. The master/slave dialectic is first seen at the beginning of the texts when Erendira's actions are more like those of a servant than of a granddaughter. Because the grandmother dispatched, presumably after her husband's and son's deaths, "the fourteen barefoot servant girls" (13) from the household, the only person left to fulfill all these girls' duties is Erendira, "reared since birth" by her grandmother. Because the dismissed servant girls are not referred to in the film, the readers of the novella can better understand why the grandmother makes so many demands on Erendira. Erendira subjects herself to her grandmother's decisions because tradition requires her to do so, thus giving the grandmother the right to ask of her anything the grandmother desires.
(Santos-Philips, pg. 118)
It is arguable just how much Hegel's master/slave theory is important to The Incredible and Sad Tale... when the fairy tale tropes can be used to explain the short novel's plot, the heroine's plight and her grandmother's ruthlessness just as easily. The end of The Incredible and Sad Tale... is no fairy tale, however, than the ending of Ethan Frome: Erendira abandons Ulises after her grandmother is dead, and vanishes with her grandmother's fortune instead.
The differences, then, as well as similarities, are completely circular in Ethan Frome and The Incredible and Sad Tale... In the first short novel, the lovers are tongue-tied and stilted both in language and in life. In the second, the lovers simply don't have enough opportunity to talk to each other without getting interrupted. In Ethan Frome, Mattie the heroine fails to become a heroine, and instead becomes another villain (in a matter of speaking). In The Incredible and Sad Tale... Erendira also fails, but possibly consciously, deliberately choosing her grandmother's fortune over Ulises. It is only in The Fox that the original fairy tale elements endure... until 1967, when that short novel is made into a movie, a more modern version of itself, and the fairy tale elements get overshadowed by homosexual ones.
In the course of this essay, we have overseen three short novels - The Fox, Ethan Frome and The Incredible and Sad Tale... Each one had fairy tale elements in it, but only The Fox had adhered to them to any extent - the other two had merely assimilated the fairy tales' elements into themselves. That said, all three short novels are very successful pieces of fiction (The Incredible and Sad Tale... was released in a movie version, just as The Fox), and are popular reading materials even in modern day and age. Is that not a true measure of successful literature?
End
Works Cited:
Lawrence, D.H. "The Fox." The Short Novel. Ed. Jerome Beaty, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999.
Marquez, Gabriel Garcia. "Innocent Erendira." The Short Novel. Ed. Jerome Beaty, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999.
Philips-Santos, Eva: "Power of the body in the novella The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Erendira And of Her Heartless Grandmother and the film Erendira", Literature/Film Quarterly: 31:2 (2003): 118
Urbano, Cosimo: "The Evil That Men Do: Mark Rydell's Adaptation of D.H. Lawrence's "The Fox"", Literature/Film Quarterly: 23:4 (1995): 22
Wendt, Tracy. "Body as mentality in Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome." Atenea 25.2 (2005): 155+
Wharton, Edith. "Ethan Frome." The Short Novel. Ed. Jerome Beaty, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999.