Over the past several years, I’ve written and published a number of myth and fairy tale retellings. In my fiction work, it is the activity I’ve been the most engaged with. Two of the books I’m currently creating fall into this category. The publishing world has seen an explosion of similar retellings, and for good reason. People need to read them.
My dissertation work on the Storyteller Archetype has led me to realize that psychologically-speaking, not only do we need to be exposed to these retellings, we need to create them, as well. Bruno Bettelheim wrote about the ways fairy tales help with child development in The Uses of Enchantment. Carrying his work forward, I would say that fairy tales serve as emotional and psychological roadmaps and playgrounds for adults just as much as they do for children.
However, because of the cultural shift from oral storytelling toward written and film storytelling types, we lose that critical connection between the story and the present moment. Without a storyteller looking us in the eye to make the story critical and relevant, we are left to do a bit more work on the tales themselves.
Oral Storytelling is Malleable
In my dissertation, a study of the Storyteller Archetype, one of the things that was repeated by storytellers was the element of improvisation. Many storytellers memorized motifs, or elements of stories, and then built them on the fly in the moment of a new telling.
This bricolage of story motifs was useful because one of the most important skills of a storyteller is to pair their stories to the audience and the occasion. If they do not have a substantial repertoire of known tales, they may not have an appropriate story to tell. If an audience responds positively to certain kinds of images, it’s likely they will want to amp up those kinds of story elements and tone down less popular ones.
Even mythology was malleable like this. Mythos in Ancient Greek is the term from which we derive the words myth and mythology. It meant “word of mouth”. Written words were Logos (the root word of the term logic). And myths were largely shared via live, at least partially improvisational, storytelling events. This allowed the stories, like folktales, to be adapted to the occasion, audience, or mood of the crowd by a talented storyteller. (Even Homeric epics were recited in a semi-improvisational form, as Alfred Lord pointed out traits of memorization and repetitions to help fill rhymes during performances.)
The benefit of this improv is that it can address psychological needs of an audience real-time. By directly speaking to the reality of an audience, the storyteller is better able to contextualize immediate lived experiences.
Written Stories Get Hard and Stale
The act of writing down – and editing – oral folktales does these tales and their tellers a disservice. Though sometimes frame tale narrators are concocted to provide a whiff of a storytelling occasion, the tales themselves are hardened in written form. A tale that was collected by the Grimms in 1812 would speak to the psychological needs of the woman who told it and her audience in nineteenth-century Germany. While some of these needs might be universal, and many Grimm stories still speak to us today, they may not fully resonate with all audiences anymore.
The further act of Disney’s animation and popularization of stories in film form create further ossification. Instead of a series of variants and variations of a single story existing in books from various collectors and cultures, we now have a mental image of a blue-eyed, blonde version of Cinderella or a red-headed Little Mermaid. In fact, most folklorists’ greatest problem with Disney’s ownership of certain fairy tale images is that they reduce the wild array of options in folktales down to a single mental image.
This hardening of the story can make it hard to use as tool for psychological healing. If the version that is seen as canonical does not adequately represent us, or if it does not speak to our psychological needs for the story, it is almost useless to us.
We have the Power to Retell Stories
The reason why there are so many mythology retellings and fairy tale retellings on modern bookshelves is because modern writers are dissatisfied with the versions of the tales they grew up with.
While the kernel of the story may hold some significance and meaning to a modern reader, it doesn’t always feel true or right anymore. The “Fairy Tale Time” setting of some stories may feel disingenuous, writers may wish to see more diversity represented in the story, or modern values and mores may take center stage. My first story printed in an anthology was a dieselpunk Rapunzel retelling, with a lesbian pairing and a disabled “prince.” None of that fit the Disney mold, but some readers told me they felt reflected in the tale in a new way.
We need to see these tales as they were in the oral tradition – malleable, adaptable, and in constant flux. We need to see these stories as kernels of potential inspiration.
However, rewriting fairy tales – or writing original fairy tales – isn’t as easy as it first may appear. We might think we know the motifs and basic components. After all, we grew up with them! But then the story just doesn’t dance off the page the way we expect it to. There’s a bit of science to that magic.
This summer, I’m going to teach a 6-week class at Morbid Anatomy about how to do just this. We will use the rules of storytelling to break down the motifs we want to work with and write our own original or retold fairy tales. We will have an opportunity to workshop the stories together, and will hopefully be well on our way toward completed stories by the end of the session.