On fairy tales, collaboration, and finding your niche
The Ontarion interviewed the University of Guelph’s SETS Professor, Jennifer Schacker, on her latest anthology Feathers, Paws, Fins, and Claws: Fairy-Tale Beasts, and how we create meaning surrounding fairy tales in contemporary society.
Claire Wilcox: Could you tell me a bit about Feathers, Paws, Fins, and Claws and its significance to you?
Jennifer Schacker: It’s significant to me in a few different ways. That was the first time I’ve been able to collaborate with a visual artist, so that was really fun, and something that literary scholars don’t get to do very often. It’s aiming for a hybrid audience, for people with a scholarly interest in fairy tales and a general interest in fairy tales. Also because it’s a collaboration between three different women living in three different countries.
In terms of the actual material, because I’m a parent, I’ve had so many encounters outside my professional life with editions of fairy tales that are aimed at young readers, so that’s always been interesting to be working on the fairy tale and encountering all these books for kids that are fairy tale books, and that are often based on underlying assumptions on fairy tales and their audience, that I find myself questioning in my own work. It’s published by an academic press, but our hope is that young adult readers can actually access this book. The fairy tale concerns classic young adult issues like sexuality [and] courtship—all these fundamental building blocks of the adult self.
C.W.: What inspired this anthology?
J.S.: A few things. One was when Christine [Jones] and I were working on Marvelous Transformations. We were looking for cover art, and I was on the Internet searching for artists. I came across Lina [Kusaite]’s work. We thought it would be really fun to actually commission work, to have original artwork. We thought a themed volume, something with a small number of tales that had a thematic link, would be a really fun way to create something for a broader audience, and to generate work with Lina. There were all sorts of challenges with an international collaboration, but that’s really where it came from.
C.W.: On the topic of Lina Kusaite’s illustrations, what do you believe they add or emphasize in the anthology?
J.S.: This was a really fun process, because between [Lina’s] reading of the text and our conversations, she would pick up on certain things. For me, it was like opening a Christmas present, to see what she actually did with the stories, and how she interpreted them visually. She was doing a lot of research on the particular time periods in which these various texts first appeared. Some of them are early modern Italian stories, and then there are stories from Hungary, and stories from Portugal. So [Lina] was thinking about the visual traditions that create an environment for each one of these texts, and then interpreted it through her own lens.
I think [the illustrations] add enormously, because each illustration is an interpretation of the text, and those have interesting points of resonance with the way I would interpret the text, but they’re also really uniquely Lina’s interpretations.
C.W.: What is it about animals featured in fairy tales and folklore that has lasted throughout the ages?
J.S.: The anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss talked about animals in other kinds of narrative and material traditions as “good to think with.” The fact that they keep coming up shows that they aren’t just simple symbols, that somehow they provide people in various contexts the raw material to think about certain kinds of oppositions, ideas, conflicts [and] dilemmas.
The way I tend to look at it when things recur—and that’s what defines folklore, when things recur with variation—is that if something recurs and persists, it doesn’t show that it has a particular stable meaning, but rather that it has incredible flexibility. It’s “good to think with.” They provide us with something that helps us to think through what it is to be human.
C.W.: What was your process on choosing the stories that you included, because they are, in general, lesser-known fairy tales?
J.S.: Christine and I have always really liked the idea of putting in the spotlight stories that people don’t associate with the fairy tale genre. There is, at present, a really narrow canon, and it tends to come from only a few sources: The Brothers Grimm, Charles Perrault, or Hans Christian Andersen. There [is] so much more out there […] so part of it is a recuperative gesture. But on the other hand, we both have a really strong interest in looking with fresh eyes at things we think we know. One of the stories we included is The Three Bears, because everyone thinks they know it. It’s fun to rediscover it, and realize that not long ago it was told quite differently. There is no Goldilocks, and the bears are not a nuclear family—they’re all male.
C.W.: In the majority of fairy tales and folklore, animals take on various human qualities. What is the significance of studying them?
J.S.: In The Three Bears, there’s an old woman, rather than Goldilocks, that is invading the home. And she’s really animalistic. Nasty. She’s what we’d associate with a totally uncivilized wild animal that has no respect for property. Sometimes it’s used for humorous effect, to point out some of the assumptions that we make about the difference between humans and animals, the civilized and the uncivilized. Sometimes characters are real shape-shifters. In the Norwegian tale East of the Sun, West of the Moon, the polar bear that’s introduced early on ends up being a prince, but there’s something essential about who he is that’s revealed when he’s a bear. He’s partly that bear, even when he’s a human being.
C.W.: Do you have any advice for aspiring writers or researchers out there?
J.S.: I think [it’s important] having a really strong sense of who your audience is, both defining where you fit in an existing field of publication, and figuring out whether there’s a gap you’re filling, if you’re doing something distinctive. Usually, presses of any kind want to know what’s distinctive.
C.W.: What are your current or near-future plans in research?
J.S.: I had a SSHRC grant from 2004 to 2007, and I was all set to push that into a finished monograph, a project on fairy tale pantomimes. It’s interesting, it’s subversive. It has a lot of cross-dressing, [and] it has a lot of very time-sensitive and localized humour. It really captured my imagination. That’s my objective over the next six months.