Key Words

Enchantment

Fairy

Female

Narratives
 1- Introduction

A fairy tale or a wonder tale, as Marina Warner calls it, is a

magic world full of enchantments that aim to give a lesson and create
a change in our inner thoughts or life experiences. Although they
have a simple generic structure, they are full of exciting or fearful
events that can affect our lives deeply.

There have always been so many fairy tales from old times to
the contemporary era, and they underwent transformations that are
constantly continuing till the present.

Fairy tales are accepted so extensively that many authors and

critics turn to them, and so there are numerous fairy tales from all
over the world and there are multitudinous viewpoints about them
that I would like to refer to some of them to support the ideas stated
in this paper.

ccording to Warner herself the wonder world in which

anything can happen functions to teach us where boundaries lie and
help to deal with reality. It helps us to see the actual world and to
visualize a fantastic one. (Warner, 1994)

Maria M. Tatar believes that a very

important quality in the fairy tale is the
change of all circumstances at the
beginning of the story. She calls it a
radically unstable game that contradicts
all narrative norms, agitates stability, and
violates the idea of misogyny:

“… the hero’s rewards of power,

wealth, and wedded bliss are presented as
consequences of his innate qualities,
whereas the heroine must endure a
process of humiliation for an ending that
signals a loss of pride and an abdication
of power.” (Sellers, 2001)

While Tatar enhances the character,

Vladimir Propp raises the idea that it is
the action of a character that matters, not
the character. In his view, the difficulties
and struggles the character tolerates,
define the frame of the tale and its plot.

Also, where Cronon Rose and

Bettelheim call fairy tales, embryonic
stories of development with a less
complicated process of socialization to
its basic patterns, which needs more
consideration in this article, Maureen
Duffy renders another engrossing
viewpoint. She, like Warner, assumes
that fairy tales let us experience
situations or wishes we cannot attain in
the real life. Duffy and Bettelheim both
agree on the intensity of situations in
fairy tales for children and their
unwanted emotional involvement in them
while they cannot even understand them.

Jack Zipes, the writer of many works on fairies, who

also translated two major editions of the tales of the
Brothers Grimm, focused on fairy tales, their evolution,
and their social and political role in civilizing processes.
According to Zipes, fairy tales serve a meaningful social
function. He declares that fairy tales are the outcome of
specific historical and economic cohesion, and so they
change along with the changes in the values of a society.
(Sellers, Zipes, 2001)

Susan Seller refers to Zipes’ postmodern cites and favors his

idea of reworking fairy tales which she suggests is the interaction
between the known and the new. (Sellers, 2001)

Warner emphasizes the importance of the historical

basis of fairy tales. She affirms that if a fairy tale has a

happy ending, it is based on a misunderstanding of its

origins, and this signifies the historical importance in the

seventeenth century when women could choose the person

they loved for marrying. In her examination of From the

Beast to the Blonde, she disregards the idea of misogyny

=Indigo and does not agree with the idea that all

stepmothers were wicked. In her opinion, when a

stepmother is considered wicked, her situation at that time

must also be examined if not, it can be inferred that all

women are evils. She asserted that the young women died

after their childbirth and then stepmothers entered the

family, they needed to keep themselves and their children

safe and so they were unkind to the orphans. Therefore, the

wrong a woman does in a story, depends on the social and

historical conditions of that time and this should not be

generalized to all women since these circumstances are

subject to change during the time. (Sellers, 2001)

This idea of wicked stepmothers is not seen in

Warner’s The Indigo, for she is keen to remove this notion

from the memories and the history. However, symbolically

the mothers are not present in Indigo, for they are too busy

to do their motherly duties.

Though Susan Sellers moves forwards in fairy tales with a

bottom-up approach, she agrees with some of the concepts stated.

She cites her ideas and agrees with the simplicity of the fairy tale

genre, and that the starting statement of once upon a time, gives a

fixed paradigm to the story which makes the reader follow it. Also,

the magic with the idea of anything can happen, softens the hard

sides of the story and reduces the tension and all its rules will be

breached since they reveal the complex patterns of our desires to

adapt to them. In her vision, Warner and Zipes’s views are the same

based on the framework of historical and economic domains and

Warner’s declaration of continuous change in fairy tales is a

positive and feminist attitude. (Sellers, 2001)

By looking closely at Warner’s From the Beast to the Blonde:

On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers, Indigo or Mapping the Water, and
The Lost Father, one can find examples of her disconcerting status
towards the sexual matters in fairy tales.
 Warner refers to sexual matters as women’s response
to violation through creativity and self-expression rather
than showing women as victims of sexual violence.
Therefore, her look at sexual affairs as seen in The Lost
Father in Rosalba, Anna the narrator, and The Queen of
Sheba is positive and in From the Beast to the Blonde, she
demonstrates women’s longing for beasts in modern
versions of The Beauty and The Beast. Warner is just
concerned about the way the women react to the violence.
In The Lost Father, Rosalba lives in a fantasy world, is
aroused by sexual desires, and cannot find the distinction
between the imaginary and real life. She keeps her sexual
desires hidden even when she is manipulated by Tommaso.

The Narratives and the Narrator???????????

Another prominent issue in connection to fairy tales is the

role of the storyteller. Marina Warner asserts that
storytelling is the act of art, and the narrators of fairy tales were
originally females. Her interest in fairy tales and their history which
is in a close connection with the storytellers is prevalent in The Lost
Father and Indigo. In The Lost Father, all the tales are fabricated by
the narrator’s imagination, Anna, who tries to fill the unrevealed
parts of the story by using the diary or inquiries of others. The main
teller is the sibyl who tries to connect the past to the present. The
storyteller, Anna, searches for her family identity in the memories of
her mother and uses the diaries to weave the incidents one after the
other. While she is trying to collect the information for drafting her
book, she is also filling the gap between the periods as a storyteller.
Warner believes that the Sibyl, as the figure of a storyteller, bridges
divisions in history as well as hierarchies of class. (Warner, 1994)

Joaan Conard indicates that the storyteller’s function may not

seem so powerful, it is strongly represented by females who are
ambiguous and may seem powerful and threatening like Mother
Goose and the Queen of Sheba (The Lost Father). This ambiguity in
storytellers of any type serves to hyphenate and connect the two
worlds and bring together the gap in history. The teller serves as an
analog for the tale and is interwoven into the texts themselves.
(Conard, 1999)

In Indigo, as Hany Helmy asserts, the narrator of Indigo

weaves various sequences from the postcolonial tradition to rework
the Shakespearean drama to demythologize and annotate the history
of European colonialism in the New World with its effects that can
be seen to the present.
 Sycorax is depicted as a completely independent childless
woman in contrast to her status in The Tempest. She figures as a
foster mother for both Caliban and Ariel. Serafine, the old Caribbean
nanny, takes over the role of a storyteller and by telling her fairy
tales, she provides another version of colonial mythological
fabrications.

Tobias Döring sees that, in contrast to the little critical

attention paid to Ariel, who performs a key function in the story that
Indigo relates, the narrative is predominantly concerned with
Miranda and her story. (Döring, 2001)

In the part of the story which takes place in England, in the

20th century, the narrative moves toward Miranda and her happiness
with a Caliban figure. In this stage, Indigo adopts the fairy tale
structure of The Tempest.

In Indigo, we have two islands, two ages, two plots, and

various characters like Prospero, Caliban, Sycorax, and Miranda.
However, these lines are bounded around the binary oppositions of
colonizer/colonized, man/woman, and white/black and the narrator
attempts to bridge the gap between them.

In the novel the Beast to the Blond, one half of

the book is The Tales, and the other part is
dedicated to The Tellers. The novel explores the
social context, meaning, and metamorphosis of
fairy tales from the Queen of Sheba via Old Mother
Goose to Disney and the role of women as
storytellers, and their role to pass fairy tales to the
next generation which is also pertinent to Warner’s feminist views.
 The Lost Father

The Lost Father is Marina Warner’s imaginary memoir of an

Italian family undergoing different incidents in the stream of life.
This fiction portrays realistic family life in a historical period within
a specific culture. Here the imagination of the writer Anna and the
fantasy of the main character Rosalba form the setting for the fairy to
be inserted into the story.

Rosalba tries to stick to her imagination and fantasy and live

in the created world where she can reach her desires and feel happy.
In her imagination, she resembles Carmelina, a fairy tale character,
who could grab her prince from Zenaida the witch. She is not
beautiful and is not understood emotionally, so she resorts to fairy to
get what she wants. By the power of imagination and fairy, she sinks
herself into another world where her wishes are fulfilled.

“Did Zenaida burn up, poison herself by the robe of a prickly pear? Had
she had time to free Tommaso from his changed shape? Had Rosalba, no
Carmelina broken the spell which held Zenaida herself captive? Did she put on the
magic dress, the dress made of pain and courage, and become herself transformed
into a human woman, lovely and gentle, whom some other wicked creature had

once enchanted too?” (The Lost Father, 1988, p66)

She also compares Tommaso with another fairy character, a

Beast, who she fell in love with him to undo magic and change him
into a prince. She always imagines him as a prince.
 This fantasy world brings her security, power, perfection, and
the implementation of desires, as Maureen Duffy says that fairy tales
make us experience situations or wishes we cannot have in the real
life! (Sellers, 2001)

That is why Maria M. Tatar says the main character, the

heroine, in the fairy seems foolish or innocent just like Rosalba who
does not seem to live in the real world. She leaves her room with her
bare foot, unaware of her surroundings, walking in her unrealistic
world. She is emotionally involved in her imagination and fairy
stories so deeply that she cannot accept or see the wicked character
of Tommaso, the man she loves.

Warner puts her in a fairy world to uncover her inner

struggles, even sexually, since in this way she can solve her problems
and may reach her wishes which are not possible in the real world.

In a family where the patriarch still matters and honour is

more valuable than feelings, covering the desires both emotionally
and sexually, and hiding in the shelter of imagination and fairy are
the best way to move with the life. Rosalba is an example of the
silenced women who cannot convey their genuine feelings freely:

“… the stories are fantastical… they also encode a great deal of

experience and knowledge from among the usually unnoticed and voiceless group-

women, children, the poor.” (Warner, 2010)

 Indigo or Mapping the Waters

Indigo is a modernized and altered retelling of William

Shakespeare's The Tempest. The novel lies within the boundary of
post-colonial writing. In this sense, this book is concerned with the
world as it exists during and after the period of European imperial
domination with the effects that exist in the contemporary era.

As in The Lost Father, there are some elements of magic,

spells, and miracle which symbolize the existence of the fairy in the
novel.

Xanthe, the young aunt of Miranda, is shown as a character

in fairy stories: shook more golden dresses and slippers from the
wishing tree (Indigo, 1992)

Miranda makes a wish when Xanthe is born. She is the fairy

character in this novel as a godmother by making wishes for the
child: a good nose, hard common sense, a hard head, and a heartless
of a statue (Indigo, 58-60)

Miranda made a wish for she was influenced by Serafines’ fairy

tales.

On the impact of fairy tales on children, Bettelheim remarks

that while the tale teaches them and shows them a solution to solve
their problems, they may have a limited understanding of the tales
and get too much involved in them. Miranda, though a kid, makes a
wish and pours spells on the baby, which proves her tense
involvement in the fairy power and the magic.

Italo Calvino states that spells in fairy tales demonstrate a

mysterious power that dominates the characters’ life and as Warner
herself asserts in her Once Upon A Time making wishes, wish
fulfilment, and spells are the components of fairies and are used to
show their power.

When the plot changes in the second part of the novel in the
twentieth century, it takes the framework of The Tempest fairy tale.
In the novel, one trace of fairy can be the magic or miracle when the
child is rescued: Sycorax had cast a spell and brought the dead to
life. (Indigo, 1992)

The moment of Dulé’s delivery from the drowned slave at the

hands of Sycorax is the beginning of her story and her life of exile on
a deserted part of the island and this miraculous rescue warns the
beginning of her long death which also contains signals of fairies like
the noises that haunt the island or Sycorax speaks in the noises that
fall from the mouth of the wind. (Indigo,1992)

Monsters will be included in magic and fairy tales and so the

expression of kin to Manjiku, the mythical sea monster who swallows
native women, can be another aspect of fairy tales. Later, Serafine
refers to these words again and tells Miranda, Manjiku’s pale, pale,
he can’t bear the light of the sun, it burns his pale skin, his pale
flesh… (Indigo, 1992)
 4. Conclusion

Fairy tales are enchantments with a usually happy ending that

give a lesson to children and adults. Children’s lives are affected by
listening to fairy tales or watching them in the visual forms, like
Miranda who made spells, for she was influenced by listening to
fairy tale stories of Serafine.

Marina Warner embedded fairy tale items to manifest her

purposes in writing her novels. In manipulating these literary skills,
she is trying to encourage women to express themselves, break the
silence, and talk. Fairy tales are the common place for girls and
women to make wishes and expect that one day they come true. They
exist to allow women to speak of unspoken.

In this article, the three books of Marina Warner were

analyzed for the fairy elements to exhibit the writer’s purpose in
manipulating them, besides making the novels rich and fascinating.
Spell, magic, monsters, imagination, superstitions, happy endings,
etc, are the constituents of fairy tales.

Fairy stories have no boundaries. They are not limited to any

place or time. It is not even confined to any ideological theory or any
religion. They are free to be used and to be read without any
prejudiced beliefs or judgments. They are also endless. They are
reformed and altered, but their basic structures are always the same.
References

-Bettelheim, Bruno, The Use of Enchantment: The Meaning and

Importance of Fairy Tales, Penguin, 1976.

-Bibliography Archived, at the Way Back Machine, 2006.

-Conrad Joann, The Journal of American Folklore, Autumn, 1999, Vol.

112, No. 446

-Dearnley, Elizabeth., Interview with Marina Warner, July 2013

-Döring, Tobias. Woman, Foundling, Hyphen: The Figure of Ariel in

Marina Warner’s Indigo Alizés: Revue Angliciste de la Réunion 20

(July, 2001): 9-26.

-Hany Helmy Hanafy, Voices in the Noises of the Isle’: Marina Warner’s

Indigo and Revisioning Shakespeare’s The Tempest, 2005

-L. Barbara, Myth lore, A V ale: A Very Short, Conrad, Joann, University

of California, The Journal of American, 2019

-Tatar, M. Maria, Introduction A. S. Byatt, The Annotated Brothers

Grimm, Norton & co inc, 2012.

-Sellers Susan, Myth and Fairy Tale in Contemporary Women’s Fiction,

PALGRAVE, 2001

-Warner Marina, The Lost Father, Chatto & Windus, 1988

-Warner Marina, Indigo, First published by Chatto & Windus, 1992

-Warner Marina, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their

Tellers, Chatto & Windus, 1994

Warner Marina, Fairy Tale: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University

Press, 2018

Warner, Marina, Once Upon A Time, 2014

https://www.jstor.org/stable/541496

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/marina-warner/indigo-2/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Zipes