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[adiva_calandia]

F-list, solve my life for me.

Are Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass fairy tales?

Important question is important! Seriously!

Comments

[ashen_key]

Iiiii would say no! Fairytales I think of as being traditions and folklore - the Alice books are still books created by one person.

*lazy with logins*

[i_grenfelz]

Which raises a corollary question, to my mind: Is it possible to write a fairy tale? Not retell one, I mean, but write an entirely new one. Like, what about Pan's Labyrinth? I would unhesitatingly call that a fairy tale structure, with the tasks to fulfill and all; is structure enough to make it a fairy tale?

Re: *lazy with logins*

[ashen_key]

I...would say 'no'. To me it's not just structure, it's also...tradition and history and an organic growing of something. Like the Arthurian tradition, in a way. Fairytales don't belong to anyone.

Sorry, brain not working today so it's hard to articulate things *thawps brain*

Re: *lazy with logins*

[i_grenfelz]

'sokay! This is still helpful. :D

Second corollary question: can a story become a fairy tale? If something exists in our collective consciousness long enough, does it gain the status of myth and folk tale?

See, here's my thing about Alice (to make this sound less like POP QUIZ: FOLK TALE AS LITERATURE): those books shouldn't really be fairy tales, because they don't fit the structure unless you squint reeeeeeally hard -- but they act like them. My theory is that the reason we have all these retellings of Alice is the same reason we have so many retellings of Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty and so on: Alice somehow became so prevalent in our culture that the story's characters and tropes and catchphrases have the same status as the characters and tropes and catchphrases of fairy tales. If I say "Ashie, what a big ______ you have!" everyone can be expected to follow that with "The better to ____ with, my dear!" and if a character in a movie is wearing anything with a red hood, it's a pretty safe bet some kind of metaphorical wolf is

[shati]

Define your terms!

[i_grenfelz]

That's what I'm working on! Because I keep going "Well, a fairy tale has to have [this element], and Alice doesn't have that. Except it kind of does in that . . ."

Example: A fairy tale generally has to have a quest, and Alice is not on a quest. Except in Looking Glass she kind of is because she's on a quest to become a queen. And a fairy tale usually involves magic, and Wonderland isn't a land of magic because unusual things are like laws of physics in Wonderland, not something you have to work at or go to a witch for. Except Carroll calls the Drink Me bottle "the little magic bottle," and Alice does have to go to the Caterpillar for her size-changing mushroom, and furthermore if I try to pin down exactly how to define magic in fairy tales I will go insane. Not to mention that Carroll himself calls it a fairy tale in one of the introductory poems -- I think the one for Looking Glass -- but The Author Is Dead, who gets to define what a text is, blah blah.

My gut feeling is that Alice is not a fairy tale; it looks like one in some

[shati]

I just wouldn't call it a fairy tale because it's a hell of a lot longer than most of the stories I think of as fairy tales. Which is not super meaningful.

You can say a story has fairy tale elements without saying it's a fairy tale, though.

[beyondthesunset]

I was just going to say this: it's not a fairy tale because it's too long. It also isn't a fairy tale because it doesn't take itself seriously. /Alice/ is completely tongue in cheek. Fairy tales, even while utterly fantastic, are srs bizns. That's why Andersen's are fairy tales, and even those dreadful moralizing Victorian things: they mean what they say. They have levels of meaning, true, but they are straightforward about it. Carroll was using the trappings of a fairy tale to satirize society. A fairy tale would never do that. Criticize? Maybe (though usually not). Satirize? No. Fairy tales also tend strongly toward upholding the dominant social order and are pervaded by the culture's morals (this can be seen in the many fairy tales in which vengence is wreacked upon the wicked, cruel and even the lazy).

[sdelmonte]

I will buck the trend and say it is. Anything that is treated as one by the world is one. Same for Hans Christen Anderson. Same maybe even for The Jungle Book.

Yes, I am using use in Fables as an indicator.

[batyatoon]

Bite your tongue; The Jungle Book is ABSOLUTELY not a fairytale.

*bares teeth at Willingham*

[batyatoon]

I think I have to disagree with Ashie and say that a story can be a fairytale without being a folktale -- "tradition and history and an organic growing of something" being essential to the latter but not the former.

This doesn't address whether or not Alice is a fairytale, though. I may still be kind of stumped on that.

[adiva_calandia]

And this is my problem: if I start thinking about fairy tales, I can name any number of short stories and even movies off the top of my head that are deliberately constructed as fairy tales. As mentioned, Pan's Labyrinth; Isaac Asimov's The Fable of the Three Princes; Wilde's The Selfish Giant; like a quarter of Neil Gaiman's oeuvre . . . Yeah, oftentimes these stories are written to subvert some aspect of fairy tales, but you can write a haiku that subverts the form, too. (Haiku isn't hard / You just need seventeen syll / ables to do it.)

But I dunno. I lean towards agreeing with Ashie as a general rule: an author's name under the title makes a text fairy tale like rather than a fairy tale. Fairy tales are unattributed. Which I guess makes Andersen's stories the exception that proves the rule

[batyatoon]

(Well, if your academic article is about fairytales, you should end that with "but it's really a BABY SWAN".)

I don't know if I agree that fairytales are unattributed, is the thing. But there's no real way to determine whether or not that's part of the definition, except by declaring it so (or not).

[beyondthesunset]

LOLing at the baby swan.

I don't think attribution or the lack thereof is as important in this context as structure. It is certainly a part of our common definition, but as you pointed out, there are modern stories that are definitely fairy-tale like. We may have to draw a distinction between folklore/folktale and fairy tale. They often overlap, but one is not always both. Then there are other archetypal stories; they may fit into Jung's collective unconsciousness, but I don't think of them as fairy tales.

The cause-and-effect structure you mentioned might be a good working definition; you can flesh it out as you go.