TY - JOUR
AU - Kato, Daniela
AB - Recent years have seen a plethora of fairy-tale adaptations for both adults and children that thematize human–animal interactions, interspecific transformations, and human–animal hybrids in various forms of media such as literature, film, television, and visual and performing arts. Fairy-tale criticism has responded to this emerging canon of animal-themed fairy-tale adaptations based most notably on “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Beauty and the Beast,” and “The Little Mermaid” from feminist, postcolonialist, cultural materialist, and other perspectives. This rising interest in fairy tales centered around representations of animals and human–animal relations in both public and academic contexts seems to reflect the change in our perception of animals that indicates a shift away from an anthropocentric and exclusive view of nonhuman animals towards a more inclusive one that values interdependence and interconnectedness between human and nonhuman animals. As an increasing public awareness of negative impacts of human activities on other species worldwide calls for a radical reconsideration of our relationship with nature and wildlife, the fairy tale, a genre of narrative that has long told stories about animals as agents and various human–animal entanglements, seems to be able to offer a useful framework to reexamine our perceptions of animals and our entanglements with them and to provide us with clues to transforming the way we coexist with other species. This potentially fruitful line of research, however, has not yet been explored in depth as Pauline Greenhill and Leah Claire Allen point out in their chapter “Animal Studies” in The Routledge Companion to Media and Fairy-Tale Cultures (2018), a groundbreaking essay that surveys recent developments in the intersections between fairy-tale studies and animal studies. This cluster of four essays aims to develop the line of research delineated by Greenhill and Allen by looking specifically at the representations of human-animal entanglements in contemporary fairy-tale adaptations on a global scale and by considering how they retell traditional narratives about animals in ways that will cast a new light on the existing notions of animals and human-animal relationship. An early reevaluation of fairy tales that has something in common with modern ecocritical concerns can be found in nineteenth-century tale collections such as those edited by the Brothers Grimm and Aleksandr Afanas’ev. As Nicole A. Thesz points out in the entry “Ecocriticism” in Folktales and Fairy Tales: Traditions and Texts from around the World, these fairy tale collections can be regarded as Romantic reappropriations of oral folktales and fairy tales because these collections were in sympathy with the Romantic movement that turned to pastoral stylizations of nature as an antidote to the increasing urbanization caused by the Industrial Revolution. Thesz claims that, “[w]hile fairy tales in the oral tradition often reflect a fear of natural forces, the collection of tales by the Grimms in particular reveals an appreciation of nature, which in the later editions is even more clearly associated with purity and innocence” (Thesz 286). Indeed, the forest in the Grimms’ version of “Little Red Riding Hood” is described in pastoral mode both by the cunning wolf and by the innocent little girl: He walked for a while beside Little Red Cap. Then he said: “Little Red Cap, have you seen the beautiful flowers all about? Why don’t you look around for a while? I don’t think you’ve even noticed how sweetly the birds are singing. You are walking along as if you were on the way to school, and yet it’s so heavenly out here in the woods.” Little Red Cap opened her eyes wide and saw how the sunbeams were dancing this way and that through the trees and how there were beautiful flowers all about. (Tatar 14) Such romanticizing views of nature and wildlife were also widely found in Japan until the major earthquake and tsunami in March 2011, which also caused the Fukushima nuclear power plant accident. Mayako Murai’s article below discusses this de-romanticizing turn in contemporary Japanese society by examining Tomoko Kōnoike’s artwork that uses the fairy-tale motif of interspecies marriage for exploring an alternative way of conceiving our relationship with, as well as our uses of, nature and its inhabitants. If the Grimms foregrounded and pastoralized forests and some of their wild inhabitants such as birds, one of the important topoi in the Romantic imagination, they did not go so far as to romanticize the wolf, a fast disappearing species in nineteenth-century western Europe. In more recent reimaginings of “Little Red Riding Hood” that began to appear after the rise of the modern environmentalist movement in the 1960s, the wolf has come to figure as a symbol of primeval wilderness that counteracts the constraints of civilization or a victim of environmental destruction caused by human activities, a trend extensively analyzed by Kaisa Lappalainen in this cluster. “The Company of Wolves,” Angela Carter’s rewriting of “Little Red Riding Hood” published in 1979, can be regarded as a key ecofeminist text that has inspired many critical and creative reinterpretations of this classic fairy tale about human–animal conflict. In Carter’s retelling, the pubescent girl feels compassion for the werewolf and, knowing that “she was nobody’s meat” (Carter 147), voluntarily becomes his bride. Yet, as Daniela Kato argues in her article, the way that Portuguese artist Paula Rego configures entanglements between women and other animals in a series of pastels inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s tales draws our attention to a darker side of such entanglements under oppressive biopolitical conditions—a darker side that remains disturbingly actual. While an ecocritical perspective can re-animate human–animal interactions in fairy tales, such fairy tales—both traditional tales and their contemporary adaptations—can serve as a narrative framework for working out strategies to coexist with different species at a time when the relationship between people and wildlife is changing rapidly due to increasing human encroachment on the natural environment. Thesz points out the interactive relationship between the “nature tale” and nature; whereas frightening tales about wild animals such as wolves and bears can have formative influence on human perception of those animals and can affect their attitude towards them in reality (e.g. excessive fear may lead to unnecessary hunting), the enhancement of environmental attitudes goes hand in hand with learning from traditional folktales (Thesz 287). As we will see below, Danielle Wood’s writing embodies this dynamic by critically and creatively reappropriating the Baba Yaga figure within contemporary Tasmanian political and ecological contexts. Although the interplay between nature and its representations is, of course, never direct and straightforward, the essays in this special cluster seek to show that fairy-tale criticism and ecocriticism can work together to tell new stories of human–animal entanglements and to re-story the world for multispecies survival. Works Cited Carter Angela. “The Company of Wolves.” The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories . Gollancz , 1979, pp. 137 – 47 . Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Greenhill Pauline , Claire Allen Leah . “Animal Studies.” The Routledge Companion to Media and Fairy-Tale Cultures . Ed. Greenhill Pauline et al. . Routledge , 2018 . Kindle. Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Tatar Maria , ed. The Classic Fairy Tales: Texts, Criticism . Norton , 1999 . Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Thesz Nicole, A. “Ecocriticism.” Folktales and Fairy Tales: Traditions and Texts from Around the World: Second Edition , vol. 1 . Ed. Duggan Anne E. , Haase Donald , Callow Helen J. . Greenwood , 2016, pp. 285 – 88 . Google Preview WorldCat COPAC © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Introduction: Human–Animal Entanglements in the Fairy Tale
JF - ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment
DO - 10.1093/isle/isz064
DA - 2019-10-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/introduction-human-animal-entanglements-in-the-fairy-tale-pczpozzvZJ
SP - 722
EP - 725
VL - 26
IS - 3
DP - DeepDyve
ER -