Introduction References to fairy tales in the fiction of British writers Iris Murdoch,Margaret Drabble and A.S.Byatt highlight the importance of human connection,in a modern world where people feel increasingly alienated and alone.Characters in their fiction are continuously tempted toward solitude and withdrawal.Typically,protagonists are distanced from their families,engaged in romances that have been based on fantasy and illusion,and reluctant to participate in a wider community that will judge their achievements.If certain characters surrender to the temptation to withdraw from what Anne Cavidge,a former nun in Murdoch's novel Nuns and Soldiers (1980),calls the "horribleness and dangerousness of life....the warmth,the mess"(Murdoch,Nuns 242),happiness in these novels seems to be reserved for those who resist the attractions of solitude.Human engagement matters even more than that:in the worlds described by these authors,the pursuit of relationships is intimately connected with a moral life. Fairy tales,which typically centre on the movement of an isolated hero into a community,inspire characters in this fiction to establish meaningful connections with others.There is,however,an ambivalence in these writers'use of fairy tales to illustrate this theme.Relationships are difficult for many of their characters,and solutions presented at the ends of novels tend to be imperfect,quite unlike the"happily ever after" endings we associate with fairy tales.In Murdoch's novels,loving someone truly means not prying too deeply into their inner life;this means that characters sometimes fall in love without really knowing each other.In Drabble's novels,characters seem eager to enter into relationships,but have trouble making them meaningful;her later novels centre
on friendly,middle-aged women living surrounded by their own and other people's children,yet plagued by loneliness and depression.Byatt's protagonists are more often than not reserved academics who have difficulty with relationships of any kind; frequently,the ending to a work finds them alone.But the general movement in these novels away from isolation and towards community reflects an affirmative view of humanity that is central both to fairy tales and to the fiction of these writers. Numerous folklore scholars have identified community as an important motif in fairy tales.Freudian Bruno Bettelheim suggests that fairy tales,with their isolated protagonists-orphans,retired soldiers,outcasts-mirror the child's"desperate feelings of loneliness and isolation"(Bettelheim 10).He says that the weddings that mark the end of many fairy tales illustrate"that which alone can take the sting out of the narrow limits of our time on this earth:forming a truly satisfying bond to another"(10-11).Cultural- materialist Jack Zipes observes,"If a Grimm protagonist...does not communicate with helpers,whether they be beasts,fairies,devils,giants,or hags,he or she is lost.The tales describe the need for communicative action that enables the protagonist...to conceive a more just realm"(Zipes,Brothers 81).Swiss formalist Max Luthi went even farther, indicating,in The European Folktale:Form and Nature(1947),that if the protagonists of fairy tales are typically isolated,conversely,their isolation presents them with greater opportunities to join communities.If protagonists,initially,"are not linked by a vital relationship to any family,people,or other kind of community,"or set the tale in motion by leaving what community they have in order to"go out into the wide world as isolated individuals"(Luthi,European 38),the fairy-tale hero subsequently proves capable of establishing relationships with many different kinds of people.Two themes that Luthi 2
identified in fairy tales,what he termed“isolation'”and“universal interconnection,.”are linked,according to him."It is not in spite of their isolation but because of it that folktale characters are capable of establishing contact with any other character.If they were bound by permanent human ties...they would not be free at any given time to establish the ties that are required by the situations in which they are placed"(54-55). According to Luthi,fairy tales can be distinguished from other kinds of traditional stories by the degree to which this movement towards community is embedded in their structure. Those few scholars who have acknowledged the influence of fairy tales on novels by Murdoch,Drabble and Byatt have dismissed it as unimportant to an understanding of their work.For instance,Peter Conradi only allows that in Murdoch's novels,such narratives"are sometimes played with and made to help yield decoration for the plot" (Conradi 11).According to Conradi,Murdoch uses fairy tales to"contribute to... atmosphere"(126).He says that her use of myth is generally"deliberately incomplete, throw-away,and provisional";it has"more the feeling of delighted play or joke than of any palpable symbolic design on the reader"(250).Other scholars have been vague in their interpretations of fairy-tale references in these works,as if the matter were undeserving of any closer examination.Mary Hurley Moran says that Drabble's references to other literature in her novels show that"[o]ur perceptions as well as our identities are shaped by a variety of forces,and the literature and myths of our cultures constitute one of these"(Moran 113).Similarly vague is Jane Campbell's observation that"Byatt has made her own combination of myths,symbols and allusions,but her method of doing so constitutes her own admission that no order of language can hold the chaos of experience"(Campbell 159).William Slaymaker says that,in Murdoch's 3
novels,"myths provide fictional frameworks to support her notion of the incomprehensibility and impenetrability of human action and motivations"(Slaymaker 19).Elizabeth Dipple says that allusions in Murdoch to mythology can result in "overplotted,tricksy"novels;where they work,she says,references to old stories can be seen"assisting the novel toward profound and unnerving ends."What ends,one might ask?Well,they are"religious in impact"(Dipple 3).These scholars do not acknowledge the important role played by fairy tales in the work of these three writers The use of fairy tales by Murdoch,Drabble and Byatt is,in fact,central to an understanding of their fiction.Adult characters in their works repeatedly derive comfort and inspiration from the vision of the world that is presented in fairy tales,even in the notoriously violent German fairy tales of the Grimm brothers,which are my focus here. In Drabble's novel,Jerusalem the Golden(1967),Clara Maugham finds in her mother's house following her death a book of fables,and,flipping through them,is delighted by their relevance to her adult life:she experiences"the(pleasant)shock of finding the new contained and expressed in the framework and the terms of the old"(Drabble,Jerusalem 35).Repeatedly,Murdoch's novels show that she is interested in"[t]he way in which magic can be part of ordinary life"(Murdoch,Flight 192).In Drabble's A Summer Bird- Cage(1963),even the pragmatic Louise Bennett,who marries for money and ends up unhappy,recognizes that"all those things like wicked stepmothers are true....All the fairy-story things"(Drabble,Summer 195).Frederica Potter,escaping an abusive husband in Byatt's Babel Tower(1996),is not so damaged by her ordeal that she has stopped believing that "princes and princesses are what we all are in our minds"(Byatt, Babel 316).Australian writer Rodney Hall suggests in his novel,The Second 4
Bridegroom(1988),that"however important our history is to us our fairytales go deeper" (Hall 67).It is with equal seriousness that these writers approach the stories which other writers have consigned to the nursery. Although references to fairy tales abound in modern fiction,most often,the characters in modem novels who take fairy tales seriously are children.In Australian novelist Tim Winton's Cloudstreet(1991),fourteen-year-old Rose Pickles,who has to go down the street to the local tavem most evenings to collect her mother,tries to imagine her parent's abusive drunkenness as a plot device in a fairy tale,but finds that reality soon intrudes: Now and then Rose tried to see the whole business as hilarious;it was like being in the first chapter of a fairy tale about a sweet girl with a nasty but beautiful step- mother.But the pleasure wouldn't stay with her more than a moment or two. There was too much shame,too much cowering under the neighbours'eyes,too much agonizing embarrassment going to school with a black eye or a fat lip-no, it was too real.(Winton 142) Barbara Hanrahan,another Australian writer,follows another young girl with big dreams to the same conclusion:in The Frangipani Gardens(1980),Lou sometimes imagines herself as a fairy-tale heroine,but the truth of her situation,her poverty and her mother's career as a prostitute,means that dreaming "wasn't something she could rely on.... reality had power"(Hanrahan 90).Canadian novelist Audrey Thomas uses the happily- ever-after unions of fairy tales with bitter irony in her stories about such dreaming young girls growing up to experience abusive,adulterous marriages.For example,in her story "Young Mothers,"a child whose parents are facing divorce remembers their family life, 5