
Do fairy tales and social class have much to do with one another, beyond the obvious connection, which is that marriage and money provide destitute but very special people with a shot at upward mobility?
Yes, they do. Social class is at the heart of fairy tales, but not, perhaps for the reasons we are taught to think about fairy tales and their origins. The commonly accepted wisdom on fairy tales is that they emerged from the bubbling stew of the peasantry, when, after a long day slogging in the fields, they huddled around the hearth, telling tales as old as time, with universal appeal to the hearts and minds of the young at heart all around the globe.
This version of the origin of fairy tales is enchanting not just because we all want to believe that human society has universal longings (and it probably does), but because, I think, the notion that fairy tales bubbled forth from the earthy masses allows middle-class 21st century types to enjoy the violence and cruelty in fairy tales and blame the origins of them on penniless dead people who didn't know better. The accepted truths on the origin of fairy tales allow educated,"civilized" people to enjoy them while still distancing themselves from responsibility for fairy tales.
Scholars have never fully swallowed the notion that fairy tales banged around in peasant versions for the last 2,000 years. Indeed, Ruth Bottigheimer, a fairy tale scholar at Stony Brook, created quite a stir last year with
Fairy Tales: A New History, which questions the notion that the Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault ( among others) more or less plopped fairy tales down on paper after gathering them from peasants. The Grimms clearly edited many stories. Charles Perrault, who wrote "Cinderella" and "Puss in Boots," and a host of other "ancient" fairy tales, was an educated man and a careful writer who lived in the 17th century. That's a long time ago -- but not that long.
I've summed the argument up far too quickly, and I urge reading the book, but based on what I've read in the last few years, the origin of fairy tales remains murky. In academic circles, the argument on fairy tales and their history remains lively, with Bottigheimer and many others dubious about the stories and their peasant origins.
It seems to me that many fairy tales celebrate values that remain enshrined in the middle classes, the most vital of which is that wealth should be derived from "merit," i.e., beauty, capitalistic risk taking, and more hard work than we usually acknowledge. After all, Jack does have to climb the bean stalk three times, he has to steal from the ogre and he's got to make it back alive. Cinderella serves a sort of apprenticeship before having to dress up, dance and risk the roof over her head to win her man. Beauty, from "Beauty and the Beast" also has to win her man, this time through patience and self knowledge. These are virtues that hearken back to the beginning of the European mass middle class. The aristocracy believed in inherited privilege, no matter how stupid and ugly their progeny might be, and the very poor probably didn't go much beyond wishing for unlimited food.
You can easily prove my assertions wrong. That's what makes fairy tales so interesting. But I would assert that in a lot of fairy tales, the heroines and heroines are people who have fallen on hard times, and are merely working to regain their past riches, with a whole lot of interest. The violence and terror are the price to be paid by anyone who is foolish enough to have parents who have fallen out of the middle class.
Image by Arthur Rackham.