“Saturday Night” brings retellings of myths and fairy tales into a contemporary atmosphere through an unusual setting: a bar that—instead of serving drinks—serves stories. Characters go to this bar for the same reasons one usually does: companionship, escape, distraction, stress relief, solace, and entertainment, for example. Each retelling addresses its reader in some way, though it’s not always enjoyable or comforting. But then, some of the characters aren’t that pleasant either.

For a retelling of “Sleeping Beauty”:

“Snow White”:

“Little Mermaid” retelling:

Poetry retelling of “Pygmalion and Galatea”:

In “Sparks”, Gregory Frost retells Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Tinder Box”¹ with a decidedly film noir feel, if a bit surreal. Reading it, I was reminded of movies with twisting plots and surprising villains, like “The Big Sleep” and “Laura“. The femme fatale is alive and well in Frost’s retelling, but becomes a wicked stepmother figure, a comparison that I’d never thought to make.

Don Webb‘s “Three Dwarves and 2000 Maniacs” is a bizarre retelling of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” that–among other things–explores the connection between fairy tale violence and film violence. Like “Sparks”, the atmosphere is close enough to modern-day life to produce a very strange, uneasy feeling when fairy tale elements are inserted. The prince, in this case, is the head of a mental institution. And, in a way, it makes sense to approach a fairy tale from the perspective of the insane.

“Steadfast” by Nancy Kress (a version of Andersen’s “The Steadfast Tin Soldier“) is set during the Napoleonic Wars. It contains no magical fairytale elements, and is almost painfully realistic. It reimagines the story from a much more jaded perspective, with obsessive and unhappy characters.² The first-person account from the soldier’s perspective is framed by a journalist’s much later interview with the aging ballerina. This technique produces a sort of dual narration, as well as a strange dialogue between the two characters and their stories. From one of the interview sections:

It was said–and I quote from Le Journal de Paris–that you “dance as if pursued by wolves. Savagely, relentlessly.” Was that so?

Not wolves. Fire. Fire and blood.

I beg your pardon?

You do not have it.

You make no sense, Mademoiselle. Dancing is not war.

So all these stories have gotten me thinking more and more about fairy tales/mythology and intertextuality. What happens when an adaptation becomes more than a simple reworking of the story? Some narratives, like “Into the Woods” and “The 10th Kingdom“,³ weave together many different stories, and some, like “Pan’s Labyrinth” use common fairy tale elements to create an experience that is familiar, but a little uncomfortable in its unexpected realism. Sadly, many people think of the Disney versions when a common fairy tale is named, but it’s important to remember that Disney movies are also recontextualized. They may be faithful to the basic elements of the fairy tale, like characters and setting, but the stories are certainly reshaped for a different demographic.

Even B movies and creature flicks do creative things with mythology. In “She Creature“, mermaids are closer to their ancient Greek counterparts rather than Andersen’s, not only wrecking ships but actually devouring the panicked sailors. Film history abounds with vampires, werewolves, and all sorts of other monsters from mythology and folklore. (Evil snakes are also been a popular theme for years, all the way from the Bible to “Boa“.)

And before you scoff at my B movie enthusiasm,⁴ just think: Which is closer to the source material, violent creature flicks or sanitized Disney movies? And, as the protagonist in “Three Dwarves and 2000 Maniacs” suggests, perhaps we need a good dose of gore to keep ourselves sane:

“A very small percentage of the world’s crazies don’t respond to the standard Spencerzine therapy. They need careful balancing of the secretions of ductless glands, electrolyte balance, and, above all, movie therapy. Gore films work well.”

See?

1. A zippo lighter replaces the magical tinderbox in this version.
2. It was also one of my favorites. Figures.
3. If you haven’t seen either of these, you should. Right now.
4. And you should know better by now!

Jack Zipes, a well-known scholar and translator of fairy tales, discusses the application of memetics to fairy tales in Why Fairy Tales Stick:

“…a good example of a meme is a fairy tale, but not just any fairy tale, an individual fairy tale and its discursive tradition that includes oral and literary tales and other cultural forms of transmission such as radio, film, video, and the Internet. For example, ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ has become a meme that has stuck in people’s minds since at least the seventeenth century and has replicated and propagated itself throughout the world.” (5)

The word “meme” was coined by Richard Dawkins in 1976 and has its origins in the Greek word mimeisthai, “to imitate”. A strangely similar (though etymologically unrelated, as far as I can discover) word is the French même, “same”. Keep this in mind.

With this idea of replication in my head, I started wondering about another selection I’d read. In From the Beast to the Blonde, Marina Warner discusses the role of the wicked stepmother. She suggests (citing Bruno Bettelheim) that the inclusion of an evil stepmother allows young readers/listeners, when applying the concepts of the story to their own lives, to split the concept of ‘mother’ into two parts, good and bad.

“The bad mother has become an inevitable, even required ingredient in fantasy, and hatred of her a legitimate, applauded stratagem of psychological survival.” (212)¹

This enables a child to direct a healthy amount of anger at his or her real mother without feeling guilt. (Mothers? Guilt? I’m sure Freud would have even more to say about this.) So the fictional stepmother replaces the fictional mother, and splits the real mother into two distinct personalities. But what about the fictional stepdaughter? What role does she play in this relationship?

The mother is the original iteration, who dies in childbirth and is–in essence–replaced by the daughter. The situation becomes more complicated when the stepmother is introduced into the family. She is now competing with the daughter as a replacement for the mother. It seems to me that the pattern within this type of fairy tale parallels the external pattern of fairy tales themselves. Evolution through new and competing versions is what drives both the production of stories and these specific characters. This replication and competition is most apparent in “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”, where the rivalry over ‘fairest in the land’² is explicit and constructed much more deliberately than the subtler stepmother-stepdaughter competition in “Cinderella”, in that the characters actually perceive and articulate their contest. Finally, the most important symbolic device in the story is a mirror.³ Coincidence? I think not.⁴

To put this in weirder, more technological terms, the dead mother is version 1.0. The daughter is version 2.0. I think the evil stepmother is also version 2.0, but with slightly different features. And you don’t need two versions of the same thing, right? One is bound to make the other obsolete.⁵

illustration by Jennie Harbour, from “Snowdrop”

1. Guess where else this has popped up recently? Neil Gaiman‘s ‘other mother’ in Coraline is a perfect example of the ‘bad mother’.
2. Incidentally, the French phrase for “stepmother” (and mother-in-law) is belle-mère, literally “beautiful mother”. I find this both charming and disturbing.
3. Want to see something with a really neat expansion of the mirror symbol? Try “The 10th Kingdom” (2000), a cheesy but very clever miniseries.
4. Channeling Gardner Campbell, I see.
5. Beta, I’ll always love you. You gave me my first Chaplin films.