The Fairy Tale Heroine: Live and Create Her Journey
Chapter One: Part II
What is the American Fairy Tale? We are a country born of First Nation people, British colonialists, immigrants, indentured servants, slaves, displaced people, refugees, migrants, asylum seekers—from every corner of the globe. Each of us inherited a family narrative as Americans that tells our journey to or in this great, expansive land from sea to sea. Some of our American stories reinforce one another; some are in conflict and compete in a cacophony of overriding narratives, talking over one another in louder and louder voices. Is there one American story?
When the 19th century folklorists traveled around their European countryside, listening to tales from the common folk in villages and towns, in cottages and town squares, they transcribed the stories in copious anthologies that reflected age-old tales with deep-rooted cultural values. In America, our folktales originate from countries around the world and from our native cultures. Which ones are our national stories—all or none? Where do we find the American “folk” stories today?
Fairy tales transcend traditional folktales from disparate societies with heightened symbology, archetypes, magical forces—the biggest stories ever told. In our American pop culture, they are found on the big screen. Blockbuster movies make up our common lore. Across all groups of people, fabled films penetrate our consciousness with indelible patterns of plot, characters, and outcomes. They endure over generations, even over a century, and live in our imaginations, making meaning of everyday life.
One such American fairytale is The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, a 1900 children's novel written by author L. Frank Baum, the first in the Oz series. The Wizard of Oz, a 1925 American silent fantasy-adventure comedy was followed by the 1939 adaptation produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. According to the U.S. Library of Congress, it is the most seen film in movie history; the Wonderful Wizard of Oz is America's greatest and best-loved home-grown fairytale. Its themes continue to captivate us with the release of Wicked: Part I this week (Nov. 22, 2024), a film loosely based on the novel Wicked by Gregory Maguire (1995).
The original story is both a hero’s and a heroine’s journey with Dorothy central to the quest: In Kansas, Dorothy lives on a farm owned by her Uncle Henry and Aunt Em. When Dorothy and her little dog, Toto, take cover from a tornado in the farmhouse, she is knocked unconscious as a tornado lifts the house and drops into the unknown land of Oz. On the Yellow Brick Road, Dorothy is joined by three unlikely heroes, a Scarecrow who needs a brain, a Tin Man missing a heart, and a Lion who wants courage.
These “folk” engage in a fight against the Wicked Witch of the West to gain a boon from the powerful wizard. But when Toto pulls back a curtain, the "Wizard" is revealed to be an ordinary man operating machinery that projects a ghostly image of his face, a charlatan.
It’s amazing how relevant this national fairy tale is to the present conflicts in America.
There are deeper archetypal layers in the Wizard of Oz’ basic plot, such as the opposing sides of the feminine psyche in the characters of the Wicked Witch of the West and Glinda the Good Witch. These enduring, supernatural American witches act out female aspects found in ancient matriarchal tales as old as the Sumerian epic of Inanna and her older sister, Ereshkigal, written on clay tablets in the third millennium BCE—told in the oral tradition centuries before.
These and more archetypes we’ll discover in this chapter as the suppressed stories of the heroine’s journey come to light.
Chapter One, Part II
Tale Types and Motifs: The Index
In the 20th century, folklorists analyzed, interpreted, and described the traditional elements found in the folklore of particular groups and compared the folklore of various regions based on motif patterns. They established the motif as the smallest element of a folktale that persisted in the oral tradition. Examples of common motifs include: journeys through dark forests, enchanted transformations, magical cures or other spells, encounters with helpful animals or mysterious creatures, foolish bargains, impossible tasks, clever deceptions, and many more. Some of the repeated, memorable images are: a lost shoe, a rapidly growing stalk, a spinning wheel, a poisoned fruit, a magic lamp.
Motifs were defined as the building blocks within the plot-patterns of folk and fairy tales, myths, and legends.
To support the ongoing comparison of international folklore, European and American folklorists created catalogues. The most well-known folktale classification system is Aarne and Thompson’s The Types of the Folktale, originally published by Antti Aarne in 1910, revised in 1928 and 1961 by Stith Thompson, and in 2004 by Uther.
This, together with the Motif Index of Folk-Literature, the Aarne-Thompson-Uther tale-type index (ATU index) classifies story plots into seven broad categories, in a complete reference of six volumes, each motif with the designation ATU plus motif number in the index.
In this classification scheme and generally acknowledged overall, a fairy tale is defined as a subgenre or sub category of the folktale. It is a tale with magic, in a realm of the unexplained, with a heightened sense of the marvelous, but not necessarily with fairies in it. A folktale is a down-to-earth story with peasant characters in everyday circumstances that typically has a moral to it, a caution, or a truth.
In contrast, a fairy tale can use the rarified characters of royalty, kings and queens, elevated characters, distant from the lives of ordinary people, who ironically act out a deeper wisdom as idealized figures, archetypal heroes and heroines.
As more tales were added to the index, one fairy tale heroine became clearly dominant in the “Cinderella” tale type. It is one of the most told stories in the world—variants of the story appear in the folklore of many cultures. Folklorists disagree about how many versions of the tale exist to over 1,500 with the Aarne Thompson Uther classification, ATU 510A.
Some of the best candidates for the earliest Cinderella version include the Egyptian tale, Rhodopis. The Rhodopis tale was first recorded by the Greek historian Strabo in the first century CE, and is considered to be loosely based on a real person—a Greek slave girl abducted to Egypt—written by Herodotus five hundred years before Strabo. The story of Yeh-hsien, also known as Yeh-Shen and Sheh Hsien, is the oldest known Cinderella tale recorded in China. It appears in Yu Yang Tsa Tsu (Miscellany of Forgotten Lore) written by Tuan Ch’êng-shih around the 9th century CE, but was known in the oral tradition centuries before. Motifs in these two archaic tales similar to our own Cinderella fairy tale were told by peoples of widely divergent cultures.
These motifs include: a kind, persecuted maid; a wicked stepmother; a magical helper; a fancy celebration; a lost garment, usually a shoe; and a revealed identity of true beauty to a prince or man of wealth.
If we strip away these many Cinderella versions down to its core theme, it could be an innocent maid, suffering the cruel enmity of female antagonists, with the intervention of magical creatures and/or elder godmothers, is eventually recognized for her inner worth.
Origin Fairy Tales of the Heroine
So, the fairy tale heroine began to surface through the work of folklore scholars over the last few centuries, her tales collected, identified, codified, with enduring, feminine themes that had existed in the pre-literate oral tradition, often suppressed or diluted, but never fully destroyed.
Their undying, universal appeal demonstrates that these stories continue to guide women in their search for identity and fulfillment, no matter what era or culture.
The study of the fairy tale heroine soon came under intense scrutiny in the 20th century with the theories of Carl Jung who found archetypes in fairy tales as an expression of the collective unconscious with powerful implications. The Swiss psychologist, Carl Jung, published his theories in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (1934–1954), and stated that it is through fairy tales that one can best study the psyche.
To Jung, fairy tales played a unique role in a wider understanding of human nature because in stories such as “Rumpelstiltskin” and “Snow White” there is less of a cultural layer than in historically important myths and legends. Jung theorized that archetypes in fairy tales are spontaneous basic patterns that represent ancestral wisdom, part of the collective unconscious, existing in each of us. These Jungian concepts explained how similar folktale motifs were repeated in oral traditions of worldwide cultures—even those with no connection or contact.
The archetypal patterns in these tales arose from a universally shared unconscious.
In her 1970 book, The Interpretation of Fairy Tales, Jungian psychologist Marie-Louise Von Franz described fairy tales as “the purest and simplest expression of the collective unconscious psychic process... representing the archetypes in their barest and most concise form.” Von Franz's interpretation of fairy tales was based on Jung's, as a spontaneous and naive product of soul, which can only express what soul is. Hers is a profound understanding of these fantastic stories that penetrate to the heart of the human experience through a symbolic language of magic and truth.
But it is the book Von Franz later wrote, The Feminine in Fairy Tales, (1983, 1993, 2001) in which she explored the feminine archetypes, symbols, and themes found in fairy tales and showed how the feminine reveals itself in fairy tales of German, Russian, Scandinavian, and Eskimo origin with particular emphasis on the Slavic tale “Baba Yaga and Vasilisa the Beautiful.”
In this Slavic story, Von Franz unearthed what she calls one of the most complete heroine tales from matriarchal times, discussed it in depth, and included the text of the tale. Finally, with this publication, still in demand, we discover six fairy tales of the primordial heroine’s journey, sifted from the many thousands collected over the centuries. These few narratives contain the essential patterns, the feminine archetypes with enough material left intact to build new stories and bring them to life.
In 1992, Clarissa Pinkola Estés, a Jungian, published Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype, a sleeper book that would become a runaway bestseller, read and reread by women since then. Estés disclosed rich intercultural myths, fairy tales, and stories in order to help women reconnect with the fierce, healthy, visionary attributes of their instinctual nature uncovered from the “ruins of the female underworld.”
Through fourteen full text stories and revealing commentaries in this groundbreaking book, she interpreted the symbology of feminine fairy tales and challenged women to learn again their essential, deep psychic powers. Hers and other anthologies of traditional, feminine fairy tales (1970s - current) can provide access to stories of the fairy tale heroine and her journey.
Yet the very timelessness of the oral tradition ensures a continuity of stories, from those tales first uttered to those now told in the 21st century. The stories we personally create may not have princesses, magic, or dragons, but the basic story elements will remain the same. Perhaps we can only interpret experience in a finite number of ways.
Fairy tales told throughout the ages, and the contemporary ones we tell one another, seem to fall within certain patterns. Who better than women, the matriarchal storytellers, to tell the heroine’s tale forward?
Democracy in the 21st century now includes women in “the people” seeking equal freedoms. Telling the essential, feminine story is vital to her pursuit of happiness.
###To be continued
PROMPTS
I look forward to reading your comments and answers to these questions!
Why do you think the original tale of the Wizard of Oz is relevant in America today?
How is Dorothy like a “Cinderella” in the story?
What is your Cinderella story?
My goodness, I was just thinking how specific The Wizard of Oz is as a fairy tale to the US. It resonates so much and allows us to reflect on the worship of the charlatan-as-leader. Thanks so much for this powerful research and writing!
My goodness, you have researched all this in such depth! Very useful for the 21st century awareness of story, tale, fairy tale etc. Perhaps we need to think about the thematic and traditional forms our story takes, often I'm thinking, they're in the unconscious spooling of our stories.