The Fairy Tale World is a definitive volume on this ever-evolving field. The book draws on recent critical attention, contesting romantic ideas about timeless tales of good and evil, and arguing that fairy tales are culturally astute narratives that reflect the historical and material circumstances of the societies in which they are produced. The Fairy Tale World takes a uniquely global perspective and broadens the international, cultural, and critical scope of fairy-tale studies. Throughout the five parts, the volume challenges the previously Eurocentric focus of fairy-tale studies, with contributors looking at:
• the contrast between traditional, canonical fairy tales and more modern reinterpretations;
• responses to the fairy tale around the world, including works from every continent;
• applications of the fairy tale in diverse media, from oral tradition to the commercialized films of Hollywood and Bollywood;
• debates concerning the global and local ownership of fairy tales, and the impact the digital age and an exponentially globalized world have on traditional narratives;
• the fairy tale as told through art, dance, theatre, fan fiction, and film.
This volume brings together a selection of the most respected voices in the field, offering ground-breaking analysis of the fairy tale in relation to ethnicity, colonialism, feminism, disability, sexuality, the environment, and class. An indispensable resource for students and scholars alike, The Fairy Tale World seeks to discover how such a traditional area of literature has remained so enduringly relevant in the modern world.
Andrew Teverson is Professor of English and Head of the School of Arts, Culture and Communication at Kingston University, UK.
THE ROUTLEDGE WORLDS
THE WORLD OF POMPEII
Edited by Pedar W. Foss and John J. Dobbins
THE RENAISSANCE WORLD
Edited by John Jeffries Martin
THE GREEK WORLD
Edited by Anton Powell
THE ROMAN WORLD
Edited by John Wacher
THE HINDU WORLD
Edited by Sushil Mittal and Gene Thursby
THE WORLD OF THE AMERICAN WEST
Edited by Gordon Morris Bakken
THE ELIZABETHAN WORLD
Edited by Susan Doran and Norman Jones
THE OTTOMAN WORLD
Edited by Christine Woodhead
THE VICTORIAN WORLD
Edited by Marin Hewitt
THE ORTHODOX CHRISTIAN WORLD
Edited by Augustine Casiday
THE BUDDHIST WORLD
Edited by John Powers
THE ETRUSCAN WORLD
Edited by Jean MacIntosh Turfa
THE GOTHIC WORLD
Edited by Glennis Byron and Dale Townshend
THE ATLANTIC WORLD
Edited by D’Maris Coffman, Adrian Leonard, and William O’Reilly
THE POSTCOLONIAL WORLD
Edited by Jyotsna G. Singh and David D. Kim
THE SUMERIAN WORLD
Edited by Harriet Crawford
THE OCCULT WORLD
Edited by Christopher Partridge
THE WORLD OF INDIGENOUS NORTH AMERICA
Edited by Robert Warrior
THE WORLD OF THE REVOLUTIONARY AMERICAN REPUBLIC
Edited by Andrew Shankman
THE SHAKESPEAREAN WORLD
Edited by Jill L. Levenson and Robert Ormsby
THE WORLD OF COLONIAL AMERICA
Edited by Ignacio Gallup-Diaz
THE MODERNIST WORLD
Edited by Allana Lindgren and Stephen Ross
THE EARLY CHRISTIAN WORLD, SECOND EDITION
Edited by Philip F. Esler
THE SWAHILI WORLD
Edited by Stephanie Wynne-Jones and Adria LaViolette
THE SYRIAC WORLD
Edited by Daniel King
THE MEDIEVAL WORLD, SECOND EDITION
Edited by Peter Linehan, Janet L. Nelson, and Marios Costambeys
THE ELAMITE WORLD
Edited by Javier Álvarez-Mon, Gian Pietro Basello, and Yasmina Wicks
THE FAIRY TALE WORLD
Edited by Andrew Teverson
THE ANDEAN WORLD
Edited by Linda J. Seligmann and Kathleen Fine-Dare
The right of Andrew Teverson to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Teverson, Andrew, editor.
Title: The fairy tale world / edited by Andrew Teverson. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2019. |
Series: The routledge worlds | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018031363 | ISBN 9781138217577 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781351609944 (epub) | ISBN 9781351609951 (web pdf) | ISBN 9781351609937 (mobikindle)
Subjects: LCSH: Fairy tales–History and criticism. Classification: LCC GR550 .F23 2019 | DDC 398.209–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018031363
ISBN: 978-1-138-21757-7 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-10840-7 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon by Newgen Publishing UK
For Professor Bill Gray, who has helped shape the fairy-tale world
List of figures xi
List of contributors xii
Acknowledgements xviii
Abbreviations: Tale type and motif index references xix
Introduction: The fairy tale and the world 1 Andrew Teverson
PART I: THE FORMATION OF THE CANON 15
1 Global or local? Where do fairy tales belong? 17 Donald Haase
2 ‘Decolonizing’ the canon: Critical challenges to Eurocentrism 33 Cristina Bacchilega
3 The Middle Eastern world’s contribution to fairy-tale history 45 Ulrich Marzolph
4 The formation of the literary fairy tale in early modern Italy: 1550–1636 58 Nancy L. Canepa
5 Social change and the development of the fairy tale in France: 1690–1799 68 Christine A. Jones
6 National/international/transnational: The Brothers Grimm and their fairy tales 80 Maria Tatar
7 By forgotten hands: The role of translation in the emergence of the fairy tale
Gillian Lathey
8 Fairy tale in Africa: A contrast of centuries
Ruth Finnegan
9 Narratives of the Southwest Indian Ocean: Commonalities and localizations
Lee Haring 10 Fairy tales and folklore in South Africa
Nadia van der Westhuizen
11 Strangers and defiant maids: Empire and the African folk narrative
Andrew Teverson
12 West African magical realism among the wonder genres
Kim Anderson Sasser
13 Francophone fairy tales in West Africa and the Caribbean: Colonizing and reclaiming tradition
Lewis C. Seifert
14 This is not a fairy tale: Anansi and the web of narrative power
Emily Zobel Marshall 15 Decolonizing the curriculum: African fairy tales and literacies
Vivian Yenika-Agbaw
Myths and folktales in Latin
John Bierhorst
17 The politics and poetics of Märchen in Hawaiian-language newspapers
Marie Alohalani Brown
18 The American dream: Walt Disney’s fairy tales
Tracey Mollet
19 African–American adaptations of fairy tales
Neal A. Lester
20 Sexes, sexualities, and gender in cinematic North and South American fairy tales: Transforming Cinderellas 248
Pauline Greenhill
21 Gender, sexuality and the fairy tale in contemporary American literature
Jeana Jorgensen
22 Fairy tales and digital culture
Brittany Warman
23 Fairy tale, fan fiction, and popular media
Anne Kustritz
PART IV: ASIA AND AUSTRALASIA 297
24 Fairy-tale worlds of South Asia
Sadhana Naithani
25 Lovely fairies and crafty ghosts in Indian tales
Pamela Lothspeich
26 Fairy tale in the Bollywood film
Vijay Mishra
27 Fairy tales in China: An ongoing evolution
Juwen Zhang
28 The fairy tale in contemporary Japanese literature and art
Mayako Murai
29 Memory, trauma and history: Fairy-tale film in Korea 356 Sung-Ae Lee
30 Fairies in a strange land: Colonization, migration, and the invention of the Australian fairy tale 368 Rebecca-Anne Do Rozario
31 Renegotiating ‘once upon a time’: Fairy tales in contemporary Australian writing
Danielle Wood
PART V: EUROPE 389
32 The European sources of the fairy tale: A case study of ATU 171, “The Three Bears”
Rose Williamson
33 “No fairy tales of their own?”: The English and the fairy tale from Thoms to Jacobs 402
Jonathan Roper
34 Fairy tales as children’s literature in the Netherlands and Flanders 415 Vanessa Joosen
35 Eco-critical perspectives: Nature and the supernatural in the Cinderella cycle 426 Nicole A. Thesz
36 Tales retold: Fairy tales in contemporary European visual art 438 Sarah Bonner
37 New materialism and contemporary fairy-tale fiction 451 Amy Greenhough
38 Of genres and geopolitics: The European fairy tale and the global novel 462 Kimberly J. Lau
LIST OF FIGURES
5.1 William Dent, A Learned Coalition (1783) 77
5.2 Frontispiece, La Petite Cendrillon, ou la chatte merveilleuse (1810) 78
19.1 Illustration from Hansel and Gretel retold and illustrated by Rachel Isadora (2009)
28.1 Seizō Tashima, cover illustration to Chikaratarō (1967)
28.2 Seizō Tashima, from the installation Blue Sky Aquarium (2013)
29.1 Film still from Hide and Seek (2013), directed by Heo Jeong
29.2 Film still from The Pink Shoes (2005), directed by Kim Yong-Gyun
31.1 Endpaper illustration to Alan Marshall’s Whispering in the Wind (1967)
31.2 Lorena Carrington’s Wild Swans (2011)
35.1 Ludwig Emil Grimm, illustration to “Aschenputtel” (“Cinderella,” 1825)
36.1 Cornelia Parker, The Maybe (1995)
36.2 Vanessa Jane Phaff, Rotkäppchen (2002)
36.3 Vanessa Jane Phaff, Rotkäppchen (detail) (2002)
36.4 Paula Rego, The Blue Fairy Whispers to Pinocchio (1995)
36.5 Alice Maher, Collar (2003)
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
Cristina Bacchilega is a Professor in the Department of English at the University of Hawai‘i-Mānoa where she teaches fairy tales and their adaptations, folklore and literature, and cultural studies. She co-edits Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies; her most recent book is Fairy Tales Transformed? 21st-Century Adaptations and the Politics of Wonder; her recent essays appear in Narrative Culture, the Routledge Companion to Media and Fairy-Tale Cultures, and the Journal of the Fantastic in the Art. With Anne Duggan, she organized the 2017 “Thinking with Stories in Times of Trouble: A Conference in Fairy-Tale Studies.”
John Bierhorst is the author or editor of 40 books on the folklore of the Americas, three of which – Ballads of the Lords of New Spain, Cantares Mexicanos: Songs of the Aztecs, and A Nahuatl-English Dictionary – are on the website <http://lib.utexas. edu/books/utdigital>.
Sarah Bonner is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Cumbria, UK. She teaches visual studies and critical theory. Her PhD, Fairy Tales and Feminism in Contemporary Visual Art and Popular Culture, examined how gender, as a repeated construct in fairy tales, is being subverted by a process of mis-repetition in contemporary visual arts. Sarah is published internationally and is co-organiser of the Visualising … series of conferences bringing photographic practice and theory together. Gender, identity, narrative and the visual arts in twentieth and twenty-first century contemporary visual culture are continuing areas of interest and research.
Marie Alohalani Brown is Assistant Professor at the University of Hawai‘i. Her research publications include Facing the Spears of Change: The Life and Legacy of John Papa ʻĪʻī (2016). For the last decade, Marie has carried out extensive research in Hawaiian-language newspapers published between 1834 and 1948, a semi-public forum in which ʻŌiwi shared their knowledge and debated about the important topics of their time’. She is also currently working on a book manuscript, Ka Poʻe Moʻo: Hawaiian Reptilian Water Deities.
Nancy L. Canepa is an Associate Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College, USA. Her research and teaching center on early modern Italian
xii
literature and culture (primarily the seventeenth century), fairy tales, folklore and popular culture, dialect literature, and translation.
Rebecca-Anne Do Rozario wrote a PhD thesis on Disney musicals at Monash University, Australia, where she went on to be appointed a lecturer in literary studies in 2006, teaching fairy tales, children’s and fantasy literature. She has published on a range of topics including fairy tales, pantomimes, animation, Disney princesses, and fantasy literature. Her book, Fashion in the Fairy-Tale Tradition: What Cinderella Wore, will be coming out with Palgrave.
Ruth Finnegan OBE is Emeritus Professor of The Open University, Fellow of the British Academy, International Fellow of the American Folklore Society, and Honorary Fellow of Somerville College Oxford, UK. She has published over twenty scholarly works including Limba Stories and Story-Telling (1967, 1981) and Oral Literature in Africa (1969, 2012). Her recent prize-winning novels include Black Inked Pearl and the young-adult Voyage of Pearl of the Seas.
Pauline Greenhill is Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. Her most recent book is Screening Justice: Canadian Crime Films, Culture and Society (co-edited with Steven Kohm and Sonia Bookman, 2016).
Amy Greenhough is a PhD candidate at Kingston University, UK, currently finalizing her thesis on contemporary fairy tale fiction and new materialisms. Her work examines the agency of matter in contemporary reworkings of fairy tale from Angela Carter, Graham Swift, Philip Pullman and A.S. Byatt. She is interested in how the fairy tale can enable a more interconnected understanding of matter/thought, natural/cultural interactions. She works as an Associate Lecturer at Falmouth University.
Donald Haase is Professor Emeritus of German at Wayne State University, USA. His research has focused on German, French, English, and American literature and film, with emphasis on the production and reception of folktales, fairy tales, and fantasy. With Anne E. Duggan, he is co-editor of the four-volume encyclopedia, Folktales and Fairy Tales: Traditions and Texts from around the World, 2nd revised and expanded edition (2016). He is general editor of the Series in Fairy-Tale Studies published by Wayne State University Press.
Lee Haring is Professor Emeritus of English at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, USA. He has conducted folklore fieldwork in Kenya, Madagascar, and Mauritius. His publications include Verbal Arts in Madagascar, the bilingual field manual Collecting Folklore in Mauritius; Malagasy Tale Index, a comprehensive analysis of folktales; the English translation of Ibonia, Epic of Madagascar, available at www.openbookpublishers/product/109; and two tale collections.
Christine A. Jones is Professor of French and Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Utah, USA. She works in French fairy-tale and cultural studies, and has co-edited two anthologies of tales, Marvelous Transformations (Broadview) and Feathers, Paws, Fins, and Claws (Wayne State), with Jennifer Schacker (University of Guelph). Recently, she published new annotated translations of Charles Perrault’s fairy tales under the title Mother Goose Refigured (Wayne
State). She has a monograph on porcelain (Shapely Bodies, University of Delaware) that mentions fairy tales, too. Her current work includes a translated volume of tales by the little-known Louisiana writer Sidonie de la Houssaye.
Vanessa Joosen is an Associate Professor of English Literature and Children’s Literature at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. She is the author of, among others, Critical and Creative Perspectives on Fairy Tales (Wayne State UP 2011) and Wit als sneeuw, zwart als inkt (Lannoo Campus 2014), a monograph that traces the reception of the Grimm tales in Flanders and the Netherlands. Together with Gillian Lathey, she edited Grimm’s Tales Around the Globe (Wayne State UP 2014). Other research interests include age studies, genetic criticism and digital humanities.
Jeana Jorgensen earned her PhD in folklore from Indiana University, USA. She teaches folklore, anthropology, and gender studies at Butler University and Indiana University, and has also taught at the University of California, Berkeley. Her articles have appeared in journals such as Marvels & Tales, Cultural Analysis, and The Journal of History and Culture and in books such as Transgressive Tales: Queering the Grimms, Channeling Wonder: Fairy Tales on Television, and Folktales and Fairy Tales: Translations and Texts from around the World, 2nd edition. She also writes poetry, directs a dance troupe, and nurtures a sourdough culture.
Anne Kustritz is an Assistant Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. Her scholarship focuses on fan communities, transformative works, digital economies, and representational politics. Her teaching specializes in sexuality, gender, media ethnography, and convergence. Her articles appear in Camera Obscura, Feminist Media Studies, The Journal of American Culture, and Refractory. She also serves on the editorial board of the journal Transformative Works and Cultures, which offers fans legal, social, and technological resources to organize, preserve their history, and promote the legality of transformative works.
Gillian Lathey is Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the University of Roehampton, UK. Publications include The Translation of Children’s Literature: A Reader (2006); The Role of Translators in Children’s Literature: Invisible Storytellers (2010), and Translating Children’s Literature: Translation Practices Explained (2016).
Kimberly J. Lau is Professor of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, USA. She is the author of Erotic Infidelities: Love and Enchantment in Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber (2015) as well as a number of articles on race and the fairy tale, including “Imperial Marvels: Race and the Colonial Imagination in the Fairy Tales of Madame D’Aulnoy” (2016) and “Snow White and the Trickster: Race and Genre in Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy, Snow, Bird” (2016).
Sung-Ae Lee is a Lecturer in Asian Studies in the Department of International Studies at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. Her major research focus is on fiction, film and television drama of East Asia, with particular attention to Korea. Her research centers on relationships between cultural ideologies in Asian societies and representational strategies. She is interested in cognitive and imagological approaches to adaptation studies, Asian popular culture, Asian cinema, folktale, the impact of colonisation in Asia, Trauma Studies, fiction and film produced in the aftermath of the Korean War, and the literature and popular media of the Korean diaspora.
Neal A. Lester is Foundation Professor of English and Founding Director of Project Humanities at Arizona State University, USA. His teaching and research areas include African–American literature and culture, American race relations, privilege and unconscious bias, the Nword, cultural appropriation, and the race and gender politics of hair. He is currently editing a volume on social justice theory and pedagogy to be published by the Modern Language Association.
Pamela Lothspeich is Associate Professor of South Asian Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA. Her research and teaching interests span the Hindu epics, modern Indian literature and theatre, performance studies, and postcolonial studies. She is the author of Epic Nation: Reimagining the Mahabharata in the Age of Empire (OUP 2009). Her current research concerns a twentieth-century Ramayana and the theatre of Ramlīla. She has been a recipient of the FulbrightNehru and American Institute of Indian Studies Senior Research Fellowships.
Emily Zobel Marshall is a Senior Lecturer in Postcolonial Literature at the School of Cultural Studies at Leeds Beckett University, UK. She teaches courses on African–American, Caribbean, African and Black British literature. Her research specialisms are Caribbean literature, Caribbean carnival cultures, trickster studies and folklore and she has published widely in these fields. Her book, Anansi’s Journey: A Story of Jamaican Cultural Resistance (2012) was published by the University of the West Indies Press and she is currently researching her forthcoming book, American Tricksters: Trauma, Tradition and Brer Rabbit, to be published by Rowman and Littlefield.
Ulrich Marzolph is a Professor of Islamic Studies at the Georg-August-University in Göttingen, Germany. Having served as a senior member of the editorial committee of the Enzyklopädie des Märchens (1986–2015), he is currently conducting a research project studying the impact of Middle Eastern narratives on Western oral tradition. He has published widely on the Narrative Culture of the Muslim world, with particular attention to The Thousand and One Nights and similar collections.
Vijay Mishra is the Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Murdoch University, Perth, Australia. Among his book publications are Dark Side of the Dream: Australian Literature and the Postcolonial Mind (1991, with Bob Hodge), The Gothic Sublime (1994), Devotional Poetics and the Indian Sublime (1998), Bollywood Cinema: Temples of Desire (2002), The Literature of the Indian Diaspora: Theorizing the Diasporic Imaginary (2007), What Was Multiculturalism? (2012), Annotating Salman Rushdie: Reading the Postcolonial (2018) and Salman Rushdie and the Genesis of Secrecy (2019). He is Fellow of the Australian Humanities Academy.
Tracey Mollet is a Lecturer in Media and Communication at the University of Leeds, UK. Her research interests include Disney and Warner Brothers animation, contemporary American television and fairy tales. She has written and presented widely on Disney, propaganda and the American dream.
Mayako Murai is a Professor in the English Department at Kanagawa University, Japan. Her latest book, From Dog Bridegroom to Wolf Girl: Contemporary Japanese Fairy-Tale Adaptations in Conversation with the West, was published by Wayne State University Press in 2015.
Sadhana Naithani is Professor for Literature and Folklore at the Centre of German Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. She is the author of In Quest of Indian Folktales (2006), The Story-Time of the British Empire (2010), Folklore Theory in Postwar Germany (2014), Folklore in the Baltic History (forthcoming) and of a novella Elephantine (2016). Her research interests are inter-disciplinary and inter-continental, particularly traversing the boundaries between South Asia and Europe.
Jonathan Roper is a Sheffield-trained folklorist, interested in traditional verbal forms. He currently works as Senior Researcher in English and Comparative Folklore at the University of Tartu, Estonia. He is the author of English Verbal Charms (2005) and editor of various books including Alliteration in Culture (2011).
Kim Anderson Sasser is the author of Magical Realism and Cosmopolitanism: Strategizing Belonging (2014) as well as numerous articles and book chapters on magical realism. She is the co-editor, along with Christopher Warnes, of a critical collection on magical realism that is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press (2018). Associate Professor of English at Wheaton College, USA, Kim teaches courses on magical realism, West African literature, Black British literature, modern global literature, and other topics pertaining to contemporary Anglophone literature.
Lewis C. Seifert is Professor of French Studies at Brown University, USA. His research interests include early modern French literature and culture, folk- and fairy-tale studies, gender and sexuality studies, and environmental humanities. He is the author of Fairy Tales, Sexuality, and Gender in France, 1690–1715: Nostalgic Utopias (1996) and Manning the Margins: Masculinity and Writing in Seventeenth-Century France (2009); co-translator of Enchanted Eloquence: Fairy Tales by SeventeenthCentury French Women Writers (with Domna Stanton, 2010) and Fairy Tales for the Disillusioned: Enchanted Stories from the French Decadent Tradition (with Gretchen Schultz, 2016); and editor of a special issue of Marvels & Tales on “Queer(ing) Fairy Tales” (2015). His current research projects include a study of the trickster in the folklore and literature of the French Atlantic world and, with Pierre-Emmanuel Moog, a critical edition and comparative translation of Charles Perrault’s fairy tales.
Maria Tatar is the John L. Loeb Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures, and Folklore and Mythology at Harvard University, USA. She is the author of The Annotated Brothers Grimm (2012) and The Annotated African American Folktales (2017), among many other volumes. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Slate, and other media outlets, and she is a frequent contributor to National Public Radio. She is a Senior Fellow at Harvard’s Society of Fellows.
Andrew Teverson is Professor of English Literature and Head of Arts, Culture and Communication in the Kingston School of Art, Kingston University, UK. He is the author of Fairy Tale: New Critical Idiom (Routledge 2013), co-editor of The Selected Writings of Andrew Lang (Edinburgh University Press, 2015), and editor of The Selected Children’s Fictions, Folktales and Fairy Tales of Andrew Lang (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming).
Nicole A. Thesz is Associate Professor of German at Miami University, Ohio, USA. She has published articles on the German fairy tale, ecocriticism, post-World War II
literature, pop literature, the GDR, German film, protest movements, and science and the humanities. Her monograph, The Communicative Event in the Works of Günter Grass: Stages of Speech, 1959–2015, appeared in 2018 (Camden House). Currently, she is writing a book on science and nature in German literature from the nineteenth century to the present.
Brittany Warman is a PhD candidate in English and Folklore at The Ohio State University, USA, where she is currently writing her dissertation on fairy tales, fairy legends, and the Gothic aesthetic. Her research interests include folk narrative, adaptation, speculative literature and media, and gender and sexuality studies.
Nadia van der Westhuizen recently graduated from Kingston University, UK. Her PhD thesis explored manifestations of the Gothic in the fairy tale rewritings of British author Tanith Lee. Her research interests mainly center on adaptations of fairy tales, myths and legends in contemporary feminist popular fiction.
Rose Williamson recently completed her PhD at the University of Chichester, UK, through the Sussex Centre for Folklore, Fairy Tales, and Fantasy (2017). Her research topic investigated food details in literary fairy tales with a particular focus on bread and grain. She is currently working as Campaigns and Education Enhancement Coordinator for Anglia Ruskin University Students’ Union, and drafting a fairy-tale novel in her spare time.
Danielle Wood lectures at the University of Tasmania, Austalia, and is the author of several books, including the fairy-tale themed fiction collections Rosie Little’s Cautionary Tales for Girls (Allen & Unwin, 2006) and Mothers Grimm (Allen & Unwin, 2014). A work-in-progress is The House on Legs, which transports Baba Yaga into the tradition of the Tasmanian Gothic.
Vivian Yenika-Agbaw is Professor of Education in the department of Curriculum and Instruction at the Pennsylvania State University, University Park, USA, where she teaches courses in children’s/adolescent literature. She has published several articles, and authored/co-edited several books including Representing African in Children’s Literature: Old and New Ways of Seeing (Routledge, 2008) and African Youth in Contemporary Literature and Popular Culture: Identity Quest (Routledge, 2014). She has also reviewed manuscripts for The Lion and the Unicorn, Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-tale Studies, and Children’s Literature in Education. She is currently serving on the International Research Society for Children’s Literature Board (2017–2019).
Juwen Zhang is Professor of Chinese Studies at Willamette University, Oregon, USA, and Visiting Professor of Folklore at Beijing Normal University, China, with a PhD in Folklore and Folklife from the University of Pennsylvania. He has published on folktales, filmic folklore, rites de passage, and Chinese/Asian American folklore in English and Chinese.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Nadia van der Westhuizen, Editorial Assistant: A special debt of gratitude is owed to Nadia van der Westhuizen who worked as editorial assistant on this project; her diligence and attention to detail have proved invaluable throughout. Thanks is also due to Kingston University’s Humanities Research Fund for providing the financial support that made this editorial assistance possible.
Contributors to this study have benefitted enormously from opportunities to share their work whilst it was in development. Some of the material in these pages was first presented at the conference ‘Thinking with Stories in Times of Conflict’ at Wayne State University, Detroit, in August 2017. Thanks to Cristina Bacchilega and Anne Duggan for hosting such an inspiring and important event. We are also grateful to the organising committee of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research (ISFNR) for commissioning a panel that drew on chapters in this book for their conference ‘Folk Narrative in Regions of Intensive Cultural Exchange’ held in Ragusa in the Summer of 2018. We have been fortunate that work on this book coincided with two events in the world of folk-narrative studies that have shared its concerns and objectives so precisely.
Additionally, I’m grateful to the editorial team at Routledge for their support, guidance, and patience. In particular, thanks to Polly Dodson for commissioning this book, and to Zoë Meyer for overseeing its production. I’d also like to thank Simon Morgan-Wortham and Patricia Phillippy at Kingston University for helping me to carve out research time in a busy management schedule. Finally, my unending gratitude and love to Simone, Dominic and Tristan, my folk.
Note that sections of Chapter 14 (‘This is Not a Fairy Tale: Anansi and the Web on Narrative Power’) have appeared in Emily Zobel Marshall’s book Anansi’s Journey: A Story of Jamaican Cultural Resistance (2012). The author would like to thank the University of the West Indies Press for permission to reprint these sections.
ABBREVIATIONS
Tale type and motif index references
In this collection tale types are identified using the indexing system developed by Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson, revised by Hans-Jörg Uther in 2004 as The Types of International Folktales (3 parts, FF Communications 284, Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia Academia Scientiarum Fennica). Unless specified otherwise tale-type numbers will refer to this index, and will be prefaced by the acronym ATU (for Aarne, Thompson, Uther). Where contributors identify an index code and title for motifs (recurrent tale elements), references are to Stith Thompson’s six volume Motif-Index of Folk-Literature (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1955–1958), now available electronically at https://sites.ualberta.ca/~urban/Projects/English/Motif_Index. htm. Finally, where pertinent, tales in the Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Tales) of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm will be identified using the standard abbreviation of Kinder- und Hausmärchen – KHM – combined with the number of the story in the final edition to be published in the Grimms’ lifetime (1857). For instance, the story “Rapunzel” by the Grimms is KHM 12.
INTRODUCTION
The fairy tale and the world
Andrew Teverson
This is a study of the genre of fiction commonly designated fairy tale, Märchen, magic tale, or wonder tale – the short, popular tale of magic that is generally regarded as traditional because of its broad circulation, its perpetuation over time and across cultures, and its identification as a form of fiction that is collectively owned rather than individually authored. Typical features of this genre include an acceptance within the fictional environment of magical events as unremarkable, or even normal; a depiction of benevolent magical forces in conflict with malevolent forces to determine the fate of a central protagonist with whom the hearer/reader identifies; the presence of stock characters who fulfil a limited and often predictable set of functions within the fiction; and a narrative trajectory that involves decisive transitions for the central characters, propelling them from rags to riches, neglect to acceptance, or generally depicting a rite of passage that involves significant change. According to the definition given by the Scottish folklorist David Buchan:
The normative type of the fairy tale involves a quest in which a young individual, either male or female, leaves his or her native environment, engages in various tests and tasks in an imaginative story-landscape peopled with marvellous creatures and strange beings, successfully overcomes all vicissitudes, and at the end achieves property and marriage ... Especially through the depicted conduct of the hero and heroine in the tests and trials, but also through that of other characters, the traditional tale performer exemplifies admirable and unadmirable social behaviour, and communicates both a sense of life’s grained texture and, more concretely, the values of the group to which he or she and the audience belong.
(Buchan 1990: 979)
The oldest substantial evidence we have for the existence of this form of storytelling is provided by a narrative recorded on Egyptian papyrus dating from the twelfth century BCE. This is The Story of the Two Brothers, inscribed during the reign of Seti II (c. 1200 – c. 1194 BCE), and preserved in the Papyrus D’Orbiney, so named after the English traveler, Elizabeth D’Orbiney, who purchased it in Italy in 1852 and whose
estate subsequently sold it to the British Museum (Hollis 2008; Maspero 1915: ix). The tale concerns a pair of shepherd brothers who become estranged after the wife of the elder brother (Anupu) falsely accuses the younger (Baîti) of attempting to seduce her. Baîti flees his home having discovered, with the assistance of some helpful talking cows in the herd he has tended, that Anupu is planning to kill him. Anupu pursues his fleeing brother, but Baîti has sought the protection of the god Phrâ-Harmakhis, who places a protective river filled with crocodiles between the young men. Speaking to his brother from the shore of the protective crocodile-infested lake, Baîti demonstrates his innocence, and informs Anupu that he is going to take refuge in the Valley of the Acacia, were he will remove his heart from his body and store it on top of an acacia blossom. Should his heart ever be in danger, Baîti declares, this will be magically revealed to Anupu by a frothing cup of beer, and Anupu will know that Baîti is in need of assistance. The narrative that develops from this opening scenario is one of redemptive struggle: Anupu must resurrect his brother after the cedar blossom sustaining his heart is discovered and cut down, whilst Baîti must endure further trials – and further betrayals – in the form of a bull and a persea tree before he is reborn as the Pharaoh’s son. The story ends with Baîti’s elevation to Pharaoh upon the death of his father, and with his appointment of his brother as crown prince (for the story, see Hollis 2008: 1–9; Maspero 1915: 3–20).
The Story of the Two Brothers reflects the preoccupations and concerns of the society that preserved and inscribed it. The thematic interest in resurrection, the depiction of the divine aspect of the Pharaoh, and the roles played by the various divinities in the story are common in Egyptian mythologies of the period (Hollis 2008: 29–31). The story may also contain references to specific political developments in the course of Seti II’s rule: notably, to a struggle for power and territory that took place between Seti II and a usurper named Amenmesse, identified by some historians as Seti II’s half-brother (see Hollis 2008: 110, 192). Though the narrative is applied to the present concerns of its Egyptian scribe and the society in which he worked, however, the scribe also makes use of narrative motifs and patterns that have become familiar in popular narrative traditions from diverse regions and periods. The motifs of the animals that render assistance following good treatment (‘animal helper’), the heart that can be stored outside the body, the serial transformations of a sorcerer, the sign (‘life token’) that magically reveals the peril of a loved one from a distance, and the magical obstruction that prevents a pursuit (‘obstacle flight’), are all recorded as common fairy-tale elements in Stith Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk-Literature (respectively B300, D2062.1, D610, E761, D672). Likewise, in its broad narrative developments, the Egyptian story appears to belong to a common international tale type catalogued by Antti Aarne, Stith Thompson, and Hans-Jörg Uther as “The Twins or Blood-Brothers” (ATU 303).
One of the best known narratives in this category is the fairy tale “Die zwei Brüder” (“The Two Brothers”) in the Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Tales, 1812–1815) of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm (KHM 60). This is the longest and most narratively complex of the tales in the Grimm collection, but amongst its several narrative strands is the story of a pair of brothers who, upon separation, are told that if a knife they have been given becomes rusty on one side of its blade, then the other will know that his brother is in danger of death. The younger of the brothers travels to a great city and meets with various adventures that include the defeat of a dragon and marriage to a princess; eventually, however, whilst he is engaged on a quest in
an enchanted forest, the younger brother, along with a retinue of loyal animals, is turned to stone by a witch. The elder brother learns of this danger from the magic knife and travels to the city to render assistance. In the city he is mistaken for his brother, and spends three nights in the royal bedchamber, but takes the precaution of placing a double-edged sword between himself and his brother’s wife to prevent infidelity. After three nights, the brother is ready to venture into the enchanted forest, where he overcomes the witch and revives his brother. The younger brother, however, upon learning that his sibling has spent three nights in bed with his wife, is overcome by jealousy, and impetuously beheads his rescuer. At this point, the division between the brothers seems insuperable, but fortunately, the hare companion of the younger brother fetches a “Lebenswurzel” (“root of life”) that reconnects his head to his body and brings him back to life (Grimm and Grimm 1992: 247). The brothers are reconciled, and the fidelity of the younger brother is revealed.
The plots of this story and the narrative of the D’Orbiney papyrus are by no means identical – but they bear comparison: both depict the separation and reunion of the questing brothers, and both include plotlines involving serial reanimations, false accusations of infidelity concerning the wife of one of the brothers, and the elevation of one brother to the office of potentiate. The stories also share a number of common motifs – notably, the magical ‘life sign’ that alerts one brother to the danger of the other (the frothing mug of beer and the knife that is rusted on one side), and animals that have been treated with kindness and render magical assistance. Such comparisons cannot be seen as evidence of an unbroken line of transmission between the fictions of ancient Egypt and Modern Germany; they do, however, furnish evidence that tales of magic with resemblances to those fictions we now call fairy tales were in circulation in Ancient Egypt three millennia before the genre-defining collections of the modern era. They also show that the earliest literary narrative that preserves elements of the Märchen – the story that Wilhelm Mannhardt called “Das älteste Märchen” (the oldest fairy tale) – derives from Africa, though this by no means sets a limit on the age or the geographical spread of such traditions (Hollis 2008: 11).
Many similar examples may be given of narratives from outside Europe that reveal the early currency of traditions now associated predominantly with the European fairy-tale canon. Amongst the most frequently cited of these is the Chinese story of Ye Xian (sometimes transcribed Yexian or Yeh-Hsien), a version of the tale type known in Europe as “Cinderella” (ATU 510a) which was written down in the ninth century by the Tang Dynasty scribe and poet Duan Chengshi from (in his own account) the narration of a servant in his household named Li Shiyuan (Beauchamp 2010: 447, 451–2). This narrative, in common with European variants of the “Cinderella” story, concerns a deserving young woman, mistreated and degraded by her stepmother, who is aided by magical forces towards marriage with a king, and whose true identity is revealed following a test to discover whether or not her foot will fit into a shoe she has left behind at a festival (see Beauchamp 2010: 490–1, and, in this collection, Greenhill: 251–4 and Zhang: 342–3). Reflecting upon the possible transmission paths of this story, Fay Beauchamp argues that the narrative in its now familiar form took shape in China in the ninth century, influenced by both Buddhist and Hindu textual traditions, and was transmitted to Europe in the seventeenth century by merchants or Jesuits travelling between China and the major Italian ports of the era. On this basis Beauchamp also argues that the designation of the tale type should be
adjusted to remove the assumption of European primacy: for Beauchamp, the title “Yexian/Cinderella,” rather than simply “Cinderella,” would be more reflective of the story’s complex cultural history (2010: 449).
The Chinese story is not the only precursor that has been suggested for “Cinderella”. Scholars have also drawn attention to the story of Rhodopis, recorded by the Ancient Greek geographer Strabo in the first century BCE, and identified by Strabo as a “mytheuousi” (fabulous story) told in Egypt in connection with a pyramid said to be her tomb (Strabo 1932: vol. 8, 93–5; see also Anderson 2000: 27). In the story, an eagle seizes one of Rhodopis’s shoes whilst she is bathing and carries it to Memphis, where it is dropped into the lap of the king. The king is “stirred both by the beautiful shape of the sandal and by the strangeness of the occurrence,” and sends “men in all directions into the country in quest of the woman who wore the sandal” (Strabo 1932: vol. 8, 93–5). When Rhodopis is found, she is brought to Memphis, where she is married to the king. The story, as Graham Anderson notes, does not include Cinderella’s rivals, the encounter of the Prince and Cinderella at the ball, or other details that we would now associate with this tale type (2000: 27); but the familiar shoe test, the helpful bird (in this case an eagle), and the heroine’s dramatic elevation to royalty, are “consistent with a basic pattern of Cinderella” and so may be taken as a tentative indication of the currency of Cinderella type stories in the classical period (Anderson 2000: 29). Earlier traces of the Cinderella story are also suggested by Anderson in fragmentary texts from the ancient Mesopotamian civilisation of Sumer which record the narrative of Inanna, who, having been confined to the spinning of flax, is provided for by a tree, and ultimately comes to marry the Shepherd-Prince Dumuzi (2000: 39–40). Fairy tales, Anderson concludes, “seem at least capable of surviving – for the most part doubtless submerged in oral tradition – over very long periods” (42). Equally his evidence shows that over the long periods of their survival, fairy tales are also shared widely amongst diverse cultures.
Fairy tales, in this respect, were global fictions long before the modern era of globalisation. They are fictions that have been shared across borders and between peoples, both in script and orally, for longer than written records can show, with the result that it is now impossible to say where any given fiction may have originated, or what the various, complex stages of its journey may have been. Any claim to these materials on the part of specific national groups or ethnicities must therefore be tempered with a recognition that, even as these stories, in specific manifestations, may reflect the culture and identity of a community, they also, as tale types, often bear witness to the sustained and frequently traceless intersection and interaction of cultures. Stories settle and resettle, and as they do so they take on the characteristics of local peoples, and become significant within local cultures; but equally many of the stories that we claim as our own may be found in variant forms, actualised in diverse ways but nonetheless recognisably similar, in other cultures too.
This international dimension of the fairy tale has long been a theme of folknarrative scholarship. In the nineteenth century, as the discipline of folkloristics took shape, the transcultural character of the fairy tale was one of the principal areas of enquiry for the major scholars in the field. This internationalism is frequently overshadowed by the century’s simultaneous focus upon the importance of folk and fairy tale collections to the development of national identities. For much of the nineteenth century, the collection and preservation of folk and fairy tales in Europe, was
part of a process of establishing the cultural longevity and ethnic durability of specific national groups, and resulted in the collation of numerous major national collections, including Thomas Crofton Croker’s Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland (1825–1827), Elias Lönnrot’s epic assemblage of Finnish songs, the Kalevala (1835–1849), Jørgen Moe and Peter Asbjørnsen’s Norske Folkeeventyr (Norwegian Folktales, 1841–1844), and Aleksandr Afanasyev’s Rússkie naródnye skázki (Russian Folktales, 1855–1864). Most nationalist scholars, however, even as they promoted the collection and preservation of their domestic cultural heritage were aware that the local traditions they assembled also provided grounds for cross-cultural communication. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, as pioneers of folk-narrative scholarship, are commonly thought of as nationalists because of their focus upon German traditions, and because of the uses (many would now argue, misuses) made of their collection by extreme nationalists in the twentieth century (see Kamenetsky 1984). Whilst the Grimms regarded the folk and fairy tales of German peoples as expressions of the durable and original spirit of the German volk, however, they also believed, following their intellectual mentor J. G. W. Herder, that the unique and inviolable folk cultures of one national people provided grounds for an understanding of what is common to all humanity (as F. M. Barnard says of Herder’s philosophy: “nationalism and internationalism were not currents that ran in opposite directions but rather successive stages of historical development”; 1965: 86). Accordingly, in the scholarly materials that accompany the Grimms’ tales, international variants for the stories they collected are listed alongside their German sources (see Kamenetsky 1992: 26–7, and Tatar in this volume: 83). In their notes to the story of “The Two Brothers,” for example, the Grimms record both the German sources of their narrative – it derives from Paderborn and Hesse – and cite a range of international parallels, including an ancient Indian variant in Sanskrit collection Kathasaritsagara (The Ocean of Story), and a Persian version, “The Story of Lohrasp,” in Firdusi’s Shahnameh (Book of Kings) (see Grimm and Grimm 1884: vol. 1, 418–22). This emphasis on the international dispersal of common folk-narrative traditions becomes standard practice in the nineteenth century, and is central to several major theories about the folk narrative developed in the century – including, those of the Scottish folklorist and writer, Andrew Lang, whose introduction to the English translation of Grimm’s tales made by Margaret Hunt in 1884 seeks to elaborate on the scholarship of the Grimms by establishing the near identity of many “incidents, plots, and characters” in tales across the borders of Europe, the Middle East and India:
Everywhere we find the legends of the ill-treated, but ultimately successful younger daughter; of the triumphant youngest son; of the false bride substituted for the true; of the giant’s wife or daughter who elopes with the adventurer, and of the giant’s pursuit; everywhere there is the story about the wife who is forced by some mysterious cause, to leave her husband, or of the husband driven from his wife, a story which sometimes ends in the reunion of the pair. The coincidences of this kind are very numerous.
(Lang 2015: 88)
Lang and his wife, Leonora, also sought to popularize this conception of folk and fairy tales in the anthologies of fairy tales, known as the Coloured Fairy Books, they
produced between 1889 and 1910. “Even a child,” Andrew Lang writes in the introduction to the first of these anthologies, The Blue Fairy Book
must recognise, as he turns the pages … that the same adventures and something like the same plots meet him in stories translated from different languages. The Scotch ‘Black Bull of Norroway,’ for example, must remind the very youngest reader of ‘East of the Sun and West of the Moon,’ a tale from the Norse. Both, again, have manifest resemblances to ‘Beauty and the Beast,’ and every classical student has the fable of ‘Eros and Psyche’ brought back to his memory, while every anthropologist recollects a similar Märchen among Kafirs and Bassutos.
(Lang 2015: 152)
“We are,” Lang summarizes, “still repeating to boys and girls of each generation the stories that were old before Homer sang, and the adventures that have wandered, like the wandering Psyche, over all the world” (Lang 2015: 152).
Even as they agreed in principle about the international character of the fairy tale, however, scholars of the nineteenth century disagreed profoundly about the explanations for this internationalism. The distinction between the Grimms’ arguments and those of the later ‘anthropological’ folklorists represented by Lang is a case in point. According to the Grimms, their Märchen had originated with Aryan tribes in ancient and unrecorded times, and had subsequently spread, along with those dispersing tribes, throughout the Indo–European area – from India in the East to Ireland in the West, and from the Mediterranean in the South to Scandinavia in the North. Whilst the stories they collected had international scope, therefore, the Grimms believed that the geographical region to which these story types belonged should nonetheless be limited to the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, and Europe. This view was accepted and elaborated by a number of subsequent scholars in the nineteenth century, including, prominently, the scholar of Sanskrit, Max Müller, who used linguistic evidence to argue that folk tales of the Indo–European language area were the dispersed remains of a once coherent Aryan mythology (see Müller 1909). Lang, however, rejected those accounts that limited the dispersal of cognate Märchen to the Indo–European (or “Aryan” area), and argued instead for a much wider – indeed global – international dissemination of common tale types. Lang’s arguments rested in part upon empirical observation: new story collections made in the later nineteenth century as a result of colonial exploration and missionary scholarship were revealing that “tales similar to the Aryan in incident and plot existed in non-Aryan countries – Africa, Samoa, New Guinea, North and Central America, Finland, among the Samoyed, and so forth” (Lang 1893: xi). But Lang and his contemporaries in the ‘anthropological’ school also advanced a bold new hypothesis to explain their empirical observations about the international distribution of the fairy tale. This was the theory that similar story elements could be found in different parts of the world, not because they had been spread through verbal dissemination, but because they had been invented independently of one another as a result of fundamental similarities in patterns of human thought and development (Lang 2015: 86).
In presenting the reading public with these arguments, and in popularising them through his journalism and his fairy-tale anthologies, Lang did much to reshape the thinking of a generation about the history and significance of folk and fairy tales. At
the cusp of the twentieth century, he sought to familiarize his extensive readership with storytelling traditions well beyond those with which they were hitherto familiar, and he endeavored to demonstrate that many of the stories that might once have been thought of as national possessions coexisted in variant forms in numerous cultural contexts. Nowhere is this endeavor more apparent than in three consecutive Coloured Fairy Books that Andrew and Leonora Lang produced between 1904 and 1907, each of which exhibited to the British public an extraordinary cornucopia of global traditions: The Brown Fairy Book (1904) places side by side the narratives of Aboriginal Australians, Ancient Egyptians, the Basutos of South Africa, Brazilians, Germans, the Icelandic, Indians, Laps, Native Americans, and Persians; The Orange Fairy Book (1906) incorporates Berber, Catalan, Celtic, Danish, French, Punjabi, Rhodesian, Scandinavian, Scottish, Slavic, and Ugandan stories; and The Olive Fairy Book (1907) features, in addition to more stories from the above sources, Armenian, Sudanese, and Turkish tales. It is arguably from these three anthologies that we can date the now widespread conception that the diverse traditional magical narratives of the world can be assembled under the universalising (but also European) banner of ‘fairy’.
Whilst the Coloured Fairy Books did a great deal to introduce early twentieth century readers to the international diversity of the folk and fairy tale, however, it would be a mistake to assume that the diverse cultures represented in the fairy books are approached on equal terms. In the first place, Lang’s culturally evolutionist approach to human civilisation depended upon the assertion that some civilisations –the civilisations of Western Europe, for instance – had reached a relatively advanced stage of development, whilst others were presented as being at primitive stages of development. Though these stories appear side by side in the Coloured Fairy Books, therefore, they are conceived, by Lang, to belong to a hierarchy in which Western European traditions represent modernity, and ‘native’ traditions reveal to Europe the ‘savage’ past it has left behind.
As this focus upon the evolution of European civilisation will suggest, furthermore, the fairy books also work to reinforce fundamental disparities between the cultural traditions it draws upon by making Europeans – specifically the British – the central subject of address, whilst relegating cultures conceived as other to the margins. This practice becomes especially apparent in the prefaces to the fairy books, in which Lang repeatedly addresses British readers as his assumed audience whilst positioning the non-European cultures upon which he draws as objects of European attention and anthropological or folkloristic study. Lang also explains in his prefaces that the tales incorporated into the fairy books have been actively reworked to suit the tastes and social priorities of British children and their families. In the Preface to The Crimson Fairy Book, for instance, Lang records that the international stories he and his wife have gathered have been “adapted to the needs of British children by various hands” (Lang 1903: v). More substantially, in his Preface to The Brown Fairy Book, Lang notes that “Mrs Lang” in her adaptations of stories: “does not give them exactly as they are told by all sorts of outlandish natives, but makes them up in the hope white people will like them, skipping the pieces which they will not like” (Lang 1904: viii). As this formulation will suggest, it is not an objective of the fairy books to enable an understanding of the traditions of other cultures on their own terms, but to repackage and reformulate these stories so that they can be easily consumed by European readers.
We might further note that in many cases, Lang’s renderings of these native traditions are not the product of a single act of European mediation, but the culmination of serial mediations. The story of “The Bunyip,” for instance, which appears as the fourth tale in The Brown Fairy Book, was originally collected from Aboriginal Australians (the region and people are not recorded) by the British colonial Mr W. Dunlop in around 1850, and preserved in the form of notes (Dunlop and Holmes 1899: 22). Later, some 50 years after this act of collection, Mr Dunlop’s daughter, “Mrs David Lyall,” worked these notes up into a coherent narrative in English, and passed the story, along with several others, to Mr Connop Schmitz, who in turn passed it to T. V. Holmes of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, who published it in the Institute’s journal (Dunlop and Holmes 1899: 22). Here Andrew and Leonora Lang found it, and Leonora Lang again reworked the story for its publication five years later in The Brown Fairy Book. It is impossible to know the extent to which Mrs Lyall’s reworking of her father’s notes changed the narrative, or indeed, what changes were imposed upon the traditional story by Mr Dunlop in the act of collection, but Leonora Lang’s alterations to the story printed in the Journal of the Anthropological Society are extensive and considerable. A comparison of the opening of the story written by Mrs Lyall and the story as reworked by Leonora Lang is indicative. Mrs Lyall’s story opens:
On a bright sunny day, after all the rain had passed, a party of young men went out from the camp to look for food to supply the lubras and children. They had their spears in their hands and amused themselves as they went through the honeysuckles and green flats by throwing their spears. The air rang with the loud young voices and cheerful mellow laugh unchecked by any fear. The country was all their own, or there were too many of them to dread an attack. There was not supposed to be any dangerous animal near; they talked of their skill in the chase, of throwing the spear or boomerang, and of how far they must walk before they might expect to see the game they sought.
(Dunlop and Holmes 1899: 22)
Leonora Lang’s adaptation begins as follows:
Long, long ago, far, far away on the other side of the world, some young men left the camp where they lived to get some food for their wives and children. The sun was hot, but they liked heat, and as they went they ran races and tried who could hurl his spear the farthest, or was cleverest in throwing a strange weapon called a boomerang, which always returns to the thrower. They did not get on very fast at this rate.
(Lang 1904: 71)
These changes are not merely stylistic; they also intervene in the meaning and significance of the story. In the Lang version, the elaborated opening formula serves to distance the tale in time and space from its British readers, making it more explicitly into an ‘other’ story. This act of othering is then compounded by the details that follow: Leonora Lang adds that the sun was hot, but that the characters in the story liked the heat – an observation that an Aboriginal Australian narrator would not
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change of less than ten thousand in this enormous poll would restore the Democratic party to power. If President Harrison permits this unrighteous crusade on the peace of the South, and the prosperity of the people, this change and more will be made, and the Democratic party restored to power.
In her industrial growth the South is daily making new friends. Every dollar of Northern money invested in the South gives us a new friend in that section. Every settler among us raises up new witnesses to our fairness, sincerity and loyalty. We shall secure from the North more friendliness and sympathy, more champions and friends, through the influence of our industrial growth, than through political aspiration or achievement. Few men can comprehend— would that I had the time to dwell on this point to-day—how vast has been the development, how swift the growth, and how deep and enduring is laid the basis of even greater growth in the future. Companies of immigrants sent down from the sturdy settlers of the North will solve the Southern problem, and bring this section into full and harmonious relations with the North quicker than all the battalions that could be armed and martialed could do.
The tide of immigration is already springing this way. Let us encourage it. But let us see that these immigrants come in wellordered procession, and not pell-mell. That they come as friends and neighbors—to mingle their blood with ours, to build their homes on our fields, to plant their Christian faith on these red hills, and not seeking to plant strange heresies of government and faith, but, honoring our constitution and reverencing our God, to confirm, and not estrange, the simple faith in which we have been reared, and which we should transmit unsullied to our children.
It may be that the last hope of saving the old-fashioned on this continent will be lodged in the South. Strange admixtures have brought strange results in the North. The anarchist and atheist walk abroad in the cities, and, defying government, deny God. Culture has refined for itself new and strange religions from the strong old creeds.
The old-time South is fading from observance, and the mellow church-bells that called the people to the temples of God are being tabooed and silenced. Let us, my countrymen, here to-day—yet a homogeneous and God-fearing people—let us highly resolve that we will carry untainted the straight and simple faith—that we will give ourselves to the saving of the old-fashioned, that we will wear in our hearts the prayers we learned at our mother’s knee, and seek no better faith than that which fortified her life through adversity, and led her serene and smiling through the valley of the shadow.
Let us keep sacred the Sabbath of God in its purity, and have no city so great, or village so small, that every Sunday morning shall not stream forth over towns and meadows the golden benediction of the bells, as they summon the people to the churches of their fathers, and ring out in praise of God and the power of His might. Though other people are led into the bitterness of unbelief, or into the stagnation of apathy and neglect—let us keep these two States in the current of the sweet old-fashioned, that the sweet rushing waters may lap their sides, and everywhere from their soil grow the tree, the leaf whereof shall not fade and the fruit whereof shall not die, but the fruit whereof shall be meat, and the leaf whereof shall be healing.
In working out our civil, political, and religious salvation, everything depends on the union of our people. The man who seeks to divide them now in the hour of their trial, that man puts ambition before patriotism. A distinguished gentleman said that “certain upstarts and speculators were seeking to create a new South to the derision and disparagement of the old,” and rebukes them for so doing. These are cruel and unjust words. It was Ben Hill—the music of whose voice hath not deepened, though now attuned to the symphonies of the skies—who said: “There was a South of secession and slavery—that South is dead; there is a South of union and freedom—that South, thank God, is living, growing, every hour.”
It was he who named the New South. One of the “upstarts” said in a speech in New York: “In answering the toast to the New South, I accept that name in no disparagement to the Old South. Dear to me, sir, is the home of my childhood and the traditions of my people, and not for the glories of New England history from Plymouth Rock all the
way, would I surrender the least of these. Never shall I do, or say, aught to dim the luster of the glory of my ancestors, won in peace and war.”
Where is the young man in the South who has spoken one word in disparagement of our past, or has worn lightly the sacred traditions of our fathers? The world has not equaled the unquestioning reverence and undying loyalty of the young man of the South to the memory of our fathers. History has not equaled the cheerfulness and heroism with which they bestirred themselves amid the poverty that was their legacy, and holding the inspiration of their past to be better than rich acres and garnered wealth, went out to do their part in rebuilding the fallen fortunes of the South and restoring her fields to their pristine beauty. Wherever they have driven—in marketplace, putting youth against experience, poverty against capital—in the shop earning in the light of their forges and the sweat of their faces the bread and meat for those dependent upon them—in the forum, eloquent by instinct, able though unlettered—on the farm, locking the sunshine in their harvests and spreading the showers on their fields —everywhere my heart has been with them, and I thank God that they are comrades and countrymen of mine. I have stood with them shoulder to shoulder as they met new conditions without surrendering old faiths—and I have been content to feel the grasp of their hands and the throb of their hearts, and hear the music of their quick step as they marched unfearing into new and untried ways. If I should attempt to prostitute the generous enthusiasm of these my comrades to my own ambition, I should be unworthy If any man enwrapping himself in the sacred memories of the Old South, should prostitute them to the hiding of his weakness, or the strengthening of his failing fortunes, that man would be unworthy. If any man for his own advantage should seek to divide the old South from the new, or the new from the old—to separate these that in love hath been joined together—to estrange the son from his father’s grave and turn our children from the monuments of our dead, to embitter the closing days of our veterans with suspicion of the sons who shall follow them —this man’s words are unworthy and are spoken to the injury of his people.
Some one has said in derision that the old men of the South, sitting down amid their ruins, reminded him “of the Spanish hidalgos sitting in the porches of the Alhambra, and looking out to sea for the return of the lost Armada.” There is pathos but no derision in this picture to me. These men were our fathers. Their lives were stainless. Their hands were daintily cast, and the civilization they builded in tender and engaging grace hath not been equaled. The scenes amid which they moved, as princes among men, have vanished forever. A grosser and material day has come, in which their gentle hands could garner but scantily, and their guileless hearts fend but feebly. Let them sit, therefore, in the dismantled porches of their homes, into which dishonor hath never entered, to which discourtesy is a stranger—and gaze out to the sea, beyond the horizon of which their armada has drifted forever. And though the sea shall not render back for them the Arguses that went down in their ship, let us build for them in the land they love so well a stately and enduring temple—its pillars founded in justice, its arches springing to the skies, its treasuries filled with substance; liberty walking in its corridors; art adorning its walls; religion filling its aisles with incense,—and here let them rest in honorable peace and tranquillity until God shall call them hence to “a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.”
There are other things I wish to say to you to-day, my countrymen, but my voice forbids. I thank you for your courteous and patient attention. And I pray to God—who hath led us through sorrow and travail—that on this day of universal thanksgiving, when every Christian heart in this audience is uplifted in praise, that He will open the gates of His glory and bend down above us in mercy and love! And that these people who have given themselves unto Him, and who wear His faith in their hearts, that He will lead them even as little children are led—that He will deepen their wisdom with the ambition of His words—that He will turn them from error with the touch of His almighty hand—that he will crown all their triumphs with the light of His approving smile, and into the heart of their troubles, whether of people or state, that He will pour the healing of His mercy and His grace.
AGAINST CENTRALIZATION.
A
DDRESS S U
V , J 25, 1889
M . P , L G : In thanking you for this cordial—this Virginia—welcome, let me say that it satisfies my heart to be with you to-day This is my alma mater Kind, in the tolerant patience with which she winnowed the chaff of idle days and idler nights that she might find for me the grain of knowledge and of truth, and in the charity with which she sealed in sorrow rather than in anger my brief but stormy career within these walls. Kinder yet, that her old heart has turned lovingly after the lapse of twenty years to her scapegrace son in a distant State, and recalling him with this honorable commission, has summoned him to her old place at her knees. Here at her feet, with the glory of her presence breaking all about me, let me testify that the years have but deepened my reverence and my love, and my heart has owned the magical tenderness of the emotions first kindled amid these sacred scenes. That which was unworthy has faded—that which was good has abided. Faded the memory of the tempestuous dyke and the riotous kalathump—dimmed the memory of that society, now happily extinct, but then famous as “The Nippers from Peru”—forgotten even the glad exultation of those days when the neighboring mountaineer in the pride of his breezy heights brought down the bandaged bear to give battle to the urban dog. Forgotten all these follies, and let us hope forgiven. But, enduring in heart and in brain, the exhaustless
splendor of those golden days—the deep and pure inspiration of these academic shades—the kindly admonition and wisdom of the masters—the generous ardor of our mimic contests—and that loving comradeship that laughed at separation and has lived beyond the grave. Enduring and hallowed, blessed be God, the strange and wild ambitions that startled my boyish heart as amid these dim corridors, oh! my mother, the stirring of unseen wings in thy mighty past caught my careless ear, and the dazzling ideals of thy future were revealed to my wondering sight.
Gentlemen of the literary societies—I have no studied oration for you to-day. A life busy beyond its capacities has given scanty time for preparation. But from a loving heart I shall speak to you this morning in comradely sympathy of that which concerns us nearly.
Will you allow me to say that the anxiety that always possesses me when I address my young countrymen is to-day quickened to the point of consecration. For the first time in man’s responsibility I speak in Virginia to Virginia. Beyond its ancient glories that made it matchless among States, its later martyrdom has made it the Mecca of my people. It was on these hills that our fathers gave new and deeper meaning to heroism, and advanced the world in honor! It is in these valleys that our dead lie sleeping. Out there is Appomattox, where on every ragged gray cap the Lord God Almighty laid the sword of His imperishable knighthood. Beyond is Petersburg, where he whose name I bear, and who was prince to me among men, dropped his stainless sword and yielded up his stainless life. Dear to me, sir, are the people among whom my father died—sacred to me, sir, the soil that drank his precious blood. From a heart stirred by these emotions and sobered by these memories, let me speak to you to-day, my countrymen—and God give me wisdom to speak aright and the words wherewithal to challenge and hold your attention.
We are standing in the daybreak of the second century of this Republic. The fixed stars are fading from the sky, and we grope in uncertain light. Strange shapes have come with the night. Established ways are lost—new roads perplex, and widening fields stretch beyond the sight. The unrest of dawn impels us to and fro—
but Doubt stalks amid the confusion, and even on the beaten paths the shifting crowds are halted, and from the shadows the sentries cry: “Who comes there?” In the obscurity of the morning tremendous forces are at work. Nothing is steadfast or approved. The miracles of the present belie the simple truths of the past. The church is besieged from without and betrayed from within. Behind the courts smoulders the rioter’s torch and looms the gibbet of the anarchists. Government is the contention of partisans and the prey of spoilsmen. Trade is restless in the grasp of monopoly, and commerce shackled with limitation. The cities are swollen and the fields are stripped. Splendor streams from the castle, and squalor crouches in the home. The universal brotherhood is dissolving, and the people are huddling into classes. The hiss of the Nihilist disturbs the covert, and the roar of the mob murmurs along the highway. Amid it all beats the great American heart undismayed, and standing fast by the challenge of his conscience, the citizen of the Republic, tranquil and resolute, notes the drifting of the spectral currents, and calmly awaits the full disclosures of the day.
Who shall be the heralds of this coming day? Who shall thread the way of honor and safety through these besetting problems? Who shall rally the people to the defense of their liberties and stir them until they shall cry aloud to be led against the enemies of the Republic? You, my countrymen, you! The university is the training camp of the future. The scholar the champion of the coming years. Napoleon over-ran Europe with drum-tap and bivouac—the next Napoleon shall form his battalions at the tap of the schoolhouse bell and his captains shall come with cap and gown. Waterloo was won at Oxford—Sedan at Berlin. So Germany plants her colleges in the shadow of the French forts, and the professor smiles amid his students as he notes the sentinel stalking against the sky. The farmer has learned that brains mix better with his soil than the waste of seabirds, and the professor walks by his side as he spreads the showers in the verdure of his field, and locks the sunshine in the glory of his harvest. A button is pressed by a child’s finger and the work of a million men is done. The hand is nothing—the brain everything. Physical prowess has had its day and the age of reason has come. The lion-hearted Richard challenging Saladin to single
combat is absurd, for even Gog and Magog shall wage the Armageddon from their closets and look not upon the blood that runs to the bridle-bit. Science is everything! She butchers a hog in Chicago, draws Boston within three hours of New York, renews the famished soil, routs her viewless bondsmen from the electric center of the earth, and then turns to watch the new Icarus as mounting in his flight to the sun he darkens the burnished ceiling of the sky with the shadow of his wing.
Learning is supreme and you are its prophets. Here the Olympic games of the Republic—and you its chosen athletes. It is yours then to grapple with these problems, to confront and master these dangers. Yours to decide whether the tremendous forces of this Republic shall be kept in balance, or whether unbalanced they shall bring chaos; whether 60,000,000 men are capable of selfgovernment, or whether liberty shall be lost to them who would give their lives to maintain it. Your responsibility is appalling. You stand in the pass behind which the world’s liberties are guarded. This government carries the hopes of the human race. Blot out the beacon that lights the portals of this Republic and the world is adrift again. But save the Republic; establish the light of its beacon over the troubled waters, and one by one the nations of the earth shall drop anchor and be at rest in the harbor of universal liberty. Let one who loves this Republic as he loves his life, and whose heart is thrilled with the majesty of its mission, speak to you now of the dangers that threaten its peace and prosperity, and the means by which they may be honorably averted.
The unmistakable danger that threatens free government in America, is the increasing tendency to concentrate in the Federal government powers and privileges that should be left with the States, and to create powers that neither the State nor Federal government should have. Let it be understood at once that in discussing this question I seek to revive no dead issue. We know precisely what was put to the issue of the sword, and what was settled thereby. The right of a State to leave this Union was denied and the denial made good forever. But the sovereignty of the States in the Union was never involved, and the Republic that survived the storm was, in the
words of the Supreme Court, “an indissoluble Union of indestructible States.” Let us stand on this decree and turn our faces to the future!
It is not strange that there should be a tendency to centralization in our government. This disposition was the legacy of the war. Steam and electricity have emphasized it by bringing the people closer together. The splendor of a central government dazzles the unthinking—its opulence tempts the poor and the avaricious—its strength assures the rich and the timid—its patronage incites the spoilsmen and its powers inflame the partisan.
And so we have paternalism run mad. The merchant asks the government to control the arteries of trade—the manufacturer asks that his product be protected—the rich asks for an army, and the unfortunate for help—this man for schools and that for subsidy. The partisan proclaims, amid the clamor, that the source of largess must be the seat of power, and demands that the ballot-boxes of the States be hedged by Federal bayonets. The centrifugal force of our system is weakened, the centripetal force is increased, and the revolving spheres are veering inward from their orbits. There are strong men who rejoice in this unbalancing and deliberately contend that the center is the true repository of power and source of privilege —men who, were they charged with the solar system, would shred the planets into the sun, and, exulting in the sudden splendor, little reck that they had kindled the conflagration that presages universal nights! Thus the States are dwarfed and the nation magnified—and to govern a people, who can best govern themselves, the central authority is made stronger and more splendid!
Concurrent with this political drift is another movement, less formal perhaps, but not less dangerous—the consolidation of capital. I hesitate to discuss this phase of the subject, for of all men I despise most cordially the demagogue who panders to the prejudice of the poor by abuse of the rich. But no man can note the encroachment in this country of what may be called “the money power” on the rights of the individual, without feeling that the time is approaching when the issue between plutocracy and the people will be forced to trial. The world has not seen, nor has the mind of man conceived of such miraculous wealth-gathering as are every-day tales to us. Aladdin’s
lamp is dimmed, and Monte Cristo becomes commonplace when compared to our magicians of finance and trade. The seeds of a luxury that even now surpasses that of Rome or Corinth, and has only yet put forth its first flowers, are sown in this simple republic. What shall the full fruitage be? I do not denounce the newly rich. For most part their money came under forms of law. The irresponsibilities of sudden wealth is in many cases steadied by that resolute good sense which seems to be an American heritage, and under-run by careless prodigality or by constant charity. Our great wealth has brought us profit and splendor But the status itself is a menace. A home that costs $3,000,000 and a breakfast that cost $5000 are disquieting facts to the millions who live in a hut and dine on a crust. The fact that a man ten years from poverty has an income of $20,000,000—and his two associates nearly as much—from the control and arbitrary pricing of an article of universal use, falls strangely on the ears of those who hear it, as they sit empty-handed, while children cry for bread. The tendency deepens the dangers suggested by the status. What is to be the end of this swift piling up of wealth? Twenty years ago but few cities had their millionaires. Today almost every town has its dozen. Twenty men can be named who can each buy a sovereign State at its tax-book value. The youngest nation, America, is vastly the richest, and in twenty years, in spite of war, has nearly trebled her wealth. Millions are made on the turn of a trade, and the toppling mass grows and grows, while in its shadow starvation and despair stalk among the people, and swarm with increasing legions against the citadels of human life.
But the abuse of this amazing power of consolidated wealth is its bitterest result and its pressing danger. When the agent of a dozen men, who have captured and control an article of prime necessity, meets the representatives of a million farmers from whom they have forced $3,000,000 the year before, with no more moral right than is behind the highwayman who halts the traveler at his pistol’s point, and insolently gives them the measure of this year’s rapacity, and tells them—men who live in the sweat of their brows, and stand between God and Nature—that they must submit to the infamy because they are helpless, then the first fruits of this system are gathered and have turned to ashes on the lips. When a dozen men
get together in the morning and fix the price of a dozen articles of common use—with no standard but their arbitrary will, and no limit but their greed or daring—and then notify the sovereign people of this free Republic how much, in the mercy of their masters, they shall pay for the necessaries of life—then the point of intolerable shame has been reached.
We have read of the robber barons of the Rhine who from their castles sent a shot across the bow of every passing craft, and descending as hawks from the crags, tore and robbed and plundered the voyagers until their greed was glutted, or the strength of their victims spent. Shall this shame of Europe against which the world revolted, shall it be repeated in this free country? And yet, when a syndicate or a trust can arbitrarily add twenty-five per cent. to the cost of a single article of common use, and safely gather forced tribute from the people, until from its surplus it could buy every castle on the Rhine, or requite every baron’s debauchery from its kitchen account—where is the difference—save that the castle is changed to a broker’s office, and the picturesque river to the teeming streets and the broad fields of this government “of the people, by the people, and for the people”? I do not overstate the case. Economists have held that wheat, grown everywhere, could never be cornered by capital. And yet one man in Chicago tied the wheat crop in his handkerchief, and held it until a sewing-woman in my city, working for ninety cents a week, had to pay him twenty cents tax on the sack of flour she bore home in her famished hands. Three men held the cotton crop until the English spindles were stopped and the lights went out in 3,000,000 English homes. Last summer one man cornered pork until he had levied a tax of $3 per barrel on every consumer, and pocketed a profit of millions. The Czar of Russia would not have dared to do these things. And yet they are no secrets in this free government of ours! They are known of all men, and, my countrymen, no argument can follow them, and no plea excuse them, when they fall on the men who toiling, yet suffer—who hunger at their work—and who cannot find food for their wives with which to feed the infants that hang famishing at their breasts. Mr Jefferson foresaw this danger and he sought to avert it. When Virginia ceded the vast Northwest to the government—before the Constitution was
written—Mr Jefferson in the second clause of the articles of cession prohibited forever the right of primogeniture. Virginia then nobly said, and Georgia in the cession of her territory repeated: “In granting this domain to the government and dedicating it to freedom, we prescribe that there shall be no classes in the family—no child set up at the expense of the others, no feudal estates established—but what a man hath shall be divided equally among his children.”
We see this feudal tendency, swept away by Mr. Jefferson, revived by the conditions of our time, aided by the government with its grant of enormous powers and its amazing class legislation. It has given the corporation more power than Mr. Jefferson stripped from the individual, and has set up a creature without soul or conscience or limit of human life to establish an oligarchy, unrelieved by human charity and unsteadied by human responsibility. The syndicate, the trust, the corporation—these are the eldest sons of the Republic for whom the feudal right of primogeniture is revived, and who inherit its estate to the impoverishment of their brothers. Let it be noted that the alliance between those who would centralize the government and the consolidated money power is not only close but essential. The one is the necessity of the other. Establish the money power and there is universal clamor for strong government. The weak will demand it for protection against the people restless under oppression—the patriotic for protection against the plutocracy that scourges and robs—the corrupt hoping to buy of one central body distant from local influences what they could not buy from the legislatures of the States sitting at their homes—the oligarchs will demand it—as the privileged few have always demanded it—for the protection of their privileges and the perpetuity of their bounty. Thus, hand in hand, will walk—as they have always walked—the federalist and the capitalist, the centralist and the monopolist—the strong government protecting the money power, and the money power the political standing army of the government. Hand in hand, compact and organized, one creating the necessity, the other meeting it; consolidated wealth and centralizing government; stripping the many of their rights and aggrandizing the few; distrusting the people but in touch with the plutocrats; striking down local self-government and dwarfing the citizens—and at last confronting the people in the
market, in the courts, at the ballot box—everywhere—with the infamous challenge: “What are you going to do about it?” And so the government protects and the barons oppress, and the people suffer and grow strong. And when the battle for liberty is joined—the centralist and the plutocrat, entrenched behind the deepening powers of the government, and the countless ramparts of money bags, oppose to the vague but earnest onset of the people the power of the trained phalanx and the conscienceless strength of the mercenary.
Against this tendency who shall protest? Those who believe that a central government means a strong government, and a strong government means repression—those who believe that this vast Republic, with its diverse interests and its local needs, can better be governed by liberty and enlightenment diffused among the people than by powers and privileges congested at the center—those who believe that the States should do nothing that the people can do themselves and the government nothing that the States and the people can do—those who believe that the wealth of the central government is a crime rather than a virtue, and that every dollar not needed for its economical administration should be left with the people of the States—those who believe that the hearthstone of the home is the true altar of liberty and the enlightened conscience of the citizen the best guarantee of government! Those of you who note the farmer sending his sons to the city that they may escape the unequal burdens under which he has labored, thus diminishing the rural population whose leisure, integrity and deliberation have corrected the passion and impulse and corruption of the cities—who note that while the rich are growing richer, and the poor poorer, we are lessening that great middle class that, ever since it met the returning crusaders in England with the demand that the hut of the humble should be as sacred as the castle of the great, has been the bulwark and glory of every English-speaking community—who know that this Republic, which we shall live to see with 150,000,000 people, stretching from ocean to ocean, and almost from the arctic to the torrid zone, cannot be governed by any laws that a central despotism could devise or controlled by any armies it could marshal
—you who know these things protest with all the earnestness of your souls against the policy and the methods that make them possible.
What is the remedy? To exalt the hearthstone—to strengthen the home—to build up the individual—to magnify and defend the principle of local self-government. Not in deprecation of the Federal government, but to its glory—not to weaken the Republic, but to strengthen it—not to check the rich blood that flows to its heart, but to send it full and wholesome from healthy members rather than from withered and diseased extremities.
The man who kindles the fire on the hearthstone of an honest and righteous home burns the best incense to liberty. He does not love mankind less who loves his neighbor most. George Eliot has said:
“A human life should be well rooted in some spot of a native land where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of the earth, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, a spot where the definiteness of early memories may be inwrought with affection, and spread, not by sentimental effort and reflection, but as a sweet habit of the blest.”
The germ of the best patriotism is in the love that a man has for the home he inhabits, for the soil he tills, for the trees that gives him shade, and the hills that stand in his pathway. I teach my son to love Georgia—to love the soil that he stands on—the body of my old mother—the mountains that are her springing breasts, the broad acres that hold her substance, the dimpling valleys in which her beauty rests, the forests that sing her songs of lullaby and of praise, and the brooks that run with her rippling laughter. The love of home —deep rooted and abiding—that blurs the eyes of the dying soldier with the vision of an old homestead amid green fields and clustering trees—that follows the busy man through the clamoring world, persistent though put aside, and at last draws his tired feet from the highway and leads him through shady lanes and well-remembered paths until, amid the scenes of his boyhood, he gathers up the broken threads of his life and owns the soil his conqueror—this—this lodged in the heart of the citizen is the saving principle of our government. We note the barracks of our standing army with its
rolling drum and its fluttering flag as points of strength and protection. But the citizen standing in the doorway of his home— contented on his threshold—his family gathered about his hearthstone—while the evening of a well-spent day closes in scenes and sounds that are dearest—he shall save the Republic when the drum tap is futile and the barracks are exhausted.
This love shall not be pent up or provincial. The home should be consecrated to humanity, and from its roof-tree should fly the flag of the Republic. Every simple fruit gathered there—every sacrifice endured, and every victory won, should bring better joy and inspiration in the knowledge that it will deepen the glory of our Republic and widen the harvest of humanity! Be not like the peasant of France who hates the Paris he cannot comprehend—but emulate the example of your fathers in the South, who, holding to the sovereignty of the States, yet gave to the Republic its chief glory of statesmanship, and under Jackson at New Orleans, and Taylor and Scott in Mexico, saved it twice from the storm of war. Inherit without fear or shame the principle of local self-government by which your fathers stood! For though entangled with an institution foreign to this soil, which, thank God, not planted by their hands, is now swept away, and with a theory bravely defended but now happily adjusted —that principle holds the imperishable truth that shall yet save this Republic. The integrity of the State, its rights and its powers—these, maintained with firmness, but in loyalty—these shall yet, by lodging the option of local affairs in each locality, meet the needs of this vast and complex government, and check the headlong rush to that despotism that reason could not defend, nor the armies of the Czar maintain, among a free and enlightened people. This issue is squarely made! It is centralized government and the money power on the one hand—against the integrity of the States and rights of the people on the other. At all hazard, stand with the people and the threatened States. The choice may not be easily made. Wise men may hesitate and patriotic men divide. The culture, the strength, the mightiness of the rich and strong government—these will tempt and dazzle. But be not misled. Beneath this splendor is the canker of a disturbed and oppressed people. It was from the golden age of Augustus that the Roman empire staggered to its fall. The integrity of
the States and the rights of the people! Stand there—there is safety —there is the broad and enduring brotherhood—there, less of glory, but more of honor! Put patriotism above partisanship—and wherever the principle that protects the States against the centralists, and the people against the plutocrats, may lead, follow without fear or faltering—for there the way of duty and of wisdom lies!
Exalt the citizen. As the State is the unit of government he is the unit of the State. Teach him that his home is his castle, and his sovereignty rests beneath his hat. Make himself self-respecting, selfreliant and responsible. Let him lean on the State for nothing that his own arm can do, and on the government for nothing that his State can do. Let him cultivate independence to the point of sacrifice, and learn that humble things with unbartered liberty are better than splendors bought with its price. Let him neither surrender his individuality to government, nor merge it with the mob. Let him stand upright and fearless—a freeman born of freemen—sturdy in his own strength—dowering his family in the sweat of his brow—loving to his State—loyal to his Republic—earnest in his allegiance wherever it rests, but building his altar in the midst of his household gods and shrining in his own heart the uttermost temple of its liberty.
Go out, determined to magnify the community in which your lot is cast. Cultivate its small economies. Stand by its young industries. Commercial dependence is a chain that galls every day. A factory built at home, a book published, a shoe or a book made, these are steps in that diffusion of thought and interest that is needed. Teach your neighbors to withdraw from the vassalage of distant capitalists, and pay, under any sacrifice, the mortgage on the home or the land. By simple and prudent lives stay within your own resources, and establish the freedom of your community. Make every village and cross-roads as far as may be sovereign to its own wants. Learn that thriving country-sides with room for limbs, conscience, and liberty are better than great cities with congested wealth and population. Preserve the straight and simple homogeneity of our people. Welcome emigrants, but see that they come as friends and neighbors, to mingle their blood with ours, to build their houses in our fields, and to plant their Christian faith on our hills, and honoring our
constitution and reverencing our God, to confirm the simple beliefs in which we have been reared, and which we should transmit unsullied to our children. Stand by these old-fashioned beliefs. Science hath revealed no better faith than that you learned at your mother’s knee —nor has knowledge made a wiser and a better book than the worn old Bible that, thumbed by hands long since still, and blurred with the tears of eyes long since closed, held the simple annals of your family and the heart and conscience of your homes.
Honor and emulate the virtues and the faith of your forefathers— who, learned, were never wise above a knowledge of God and His gospel—who, great, were never exalted above an humble trust in God and His mercy!
Let me sum up what I have sought to say in this hurried address. Your Republic—on the glory of which depends all that men hold dear —is menaced with great dangers. Against these dangers defend her, as you would defend the most precious concerns of your own life. Against the dangers of centralizing all political powers, put the approved and imperishable principle of local self-government. Between the rich and the poor now drifting into separate camps, build up the great middle class that, neither drunk with wealth, nor embittered by poverty, shall lift up the suffering and control the strong. To the jangling of races and creeds that threaten the courts of men and the temples of God, oppose the home and the citizen—a homogeneous and honest people—and the simple faith that sustained your fathers and mothers in their stainless lives and led them serene and smiling into the valley of the shadow.
Let it be understood in my parting words to you that I am no pessimist as to this Republic. I always bet on sunshine in America. I know that my country has reached the point of perilous greatness, and that strange forces not to be measured or comprehended are hurrying her to heights that dazzle and blind all mortal eyes—but I know that beyond the uttermost glory is enthroned the Lord God Almighty, and that when the hour of her trial has come He will lift up His everlasting gates and bend down above her in mercy and in love. For with her He has surely lodged the ark of His covenant with the sons of men. Emerson wisely said, “Our whole history looks like
the last effort by Divine Providence in behalf of the human race.” And the Republic will endure. Centralism will be checked, and liberty saved—plutocracy overthrown and equality restored. The struggle for human rights never goes backward among English-speaking peoples. Our brothers across the sea have fought from despotism to liberty, and in the wisdom of local self-government have planted colonies around the world. This very day Mr. Gladstone, the wisest man that has lived since your Jefferson died—with the light of another world beating in his face until he seems to have caught the wisdom of the Infinite and towers half human and half divine from his eminence—this man, turning away from the traditions of his life, begs his countrymen to strip the crown of its last usurped authority, and lodge it with the people, where it belongs. The trend of the times is with us. The world moves steadily from gloom to brightness. And bending down humbly as Elisha did, and praying that my eyes shall be made to see, I catch the vision of this Republic—its mighty forces in balance, and its unspeakable glory falling on all its children—chief among the federation of English-speaking people—plenty streaming from its borders, and light from its mountain tops—working out its mission under God’s approving eye, until the dark continents are opened—and the highways of earth established, and the shadows lifted—and the jargon of the nations stilled and the perplexities of Babel straightened—and under one language, one liberty, and one God, all the nations of the world hearkening to the American drumbeat and girding up their loins, shall march amid the breaking of the millennial dawn into the paths of righteousness and of peace!
