Mapping Fairy-Tale Space

Pastiche and Metafiction in Borderless Tales

Christy Williams

• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780814343845
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Folklore et critique littéraire mythique

Mapping Fairy-Tale Space: Pastiche and Metafiction in Borderless Tales by Christy Williams uses the metaphor of mapping to examine the narrative strategies employed in popular twenty-first-century fairy tales. It analyzes the television shows Once Upon a Time and Secret Garden (a Korean drama), the young-adult novel series The Lunar Chronicles, the Indexing serial novels, and three experimental short works of fiction by Kelly Link. Some of these texts reconfigure well-known fairy tales by combining individual tales into a single storyworld; others self-referentially turn to fairy tales for guidance. These contemporary tales have at their center a crisis about the relevance and sustainability of fairy tales, and Williams argues that they both engage the fairy tale as a relevant genre and remake it to create a new kind of fairy tale. Mapping Fairy-Tale Space is divided into two parts. Part 1 analyzes fairy-tale texts that collapse multiple distinct fairy tales so they inhabit the same storyworld, transforming the fairy-tale genre into a fictional geography of borderless tales. Williams examines the complex narrative restructuring enabled by this form of mash-up and expands postmodern arguments to suggest that fairy-tale pastiche is a critical mode of retelling that celebrates the fairy-tale genre while it critiques outdated ideological constructs. Part 2 analyzes the metaphoric use of fairy tales as maps, or guides, for lived experience. In these texts, characters use fairy tales both to navigate and to circumvent their own situations, but the tales are ineffectual maps until the characters chart different paths and endings for themselves or reject the tales as maps altogether. Williams focuses on how inventive narrative and visual storytelling techniques enable metafictional commentary on fairy tales in the texts themselves. Mapping Fairy-Tale Space argues that in remaking the fairy-tale genre, these texts do not so much chart unexplored territory as they approach existing fairy-tale space from new directions, remapping the genre as our collective use of fairy tales changes. Students and scholars of fairy-tale and media studies will welcome this fresh approach.

I

Mapping Fairy Tales

1

Genre and Geography

ABC’s Once Upon a Time and the Mapping of a Fairy-Tale Land

A common way of rewriting fairy tales for modern audiences is to mix up the stories: invert fairy-tale tropes, recast beloved characters, fill in backstory, imagine after happily ever after, blend genres, or literally mix up the tales. This literal mixing of stories results in a fairy-tale pastiche, wherein fairy-tale characters from different tales inhabit the same physical location and appear in each other’s stories. Translating the genre of fairy tales into a geographic location where characters from a variety of different fairy tales mingle and intervene in each other’s stories is not a new narrative trick for retellers. Several retellings have used this pastiche technique to keep contemporary audiences intrigued with traditional tales; for example, Stephen Sondheim’s musical and Disney film Into the Woods (1986, 2014), NBC’s miniseries The 10th Kingdom (2000), DreamWorks’ Shrek film (2001) and its sequels, Bill Willingham’s graphic novel series Fables (2002–15), Robert Coover’s novel Stepmother (2004), and Michael Buckley’s children’s novel series The Sisters Grimm (2005–12), among others, all use this technique. ABC’s Once Upon a Time (2011–18) is a recent, popular retelling that takes this approach. Once Upon a Time premiered as the highest rated nonsports show in its first season with almost thirteen million viewers, and the first few seasons consistently maintained high ratings before waning in the later seasons (“ABC’s ‘Once Upon a Time’ Opens as the Season’s #1 New Drama.”). It was ABC’s highest rated show in three years (“ABC’s ‘Once Upon a Time’ Opens as the Season’s #1 New Drama”). It was also met with positive reviews overall, though as the plots became more intricate in later seasons, critical reviews became more common (MetaCritic).

Geographic translations of fairy tales as a genre, such as Once Upon a Time, wherein the ambiguous settings of fairy tales become a fairy-tale world, typically mix tales from a variety of traditions, drawing on folklore from different (though primarily European) countries by multiple editors and authors. The Grimms’ Märchen, however, have been the primary source for many of these retellings for the obvious reason of their versions being so well-known. Once Upon a Time is unique in that ABC’s corporate ownership by Disney allows the writers of the show access to the Disney tradition to populate its Storybrooke without issues of copyright infringement.

Most of these retellings blur narrative boundaries to create a vast location in which multiple tales occur simultaneously, but the landscape is still that of the source tales—a dark forest or kingdom. However, Once Upon a Time’s Storybrooke, Fables’ Fabletown, and The Sisters Grimm’s Ferryport Landing are isolated communities in Maine (Once Upon a Time) and New York (Fables and Sisters Grimm), separated from the “real world” but firmly placed in it. The communities are inhabited by fairy-tale characters who have been exiled from their fairy-tale worlds and are forced to integrate into American culture, with varying degrees of success. The characters’ magic and timelessness necessitates separation from humans, but they are still forced to adapt to the outside world that threatens their very existence. These characters often struggle to sustain their fairy-tale culture in the face of a technologically advanced United States that does not need, and does not want, magic. In Once Upon a Time, the struggle between good and evil is often characterized in early seasons as between protecting (and restoring) the fairy-tale land and its people versus destroying it for vengeance and power. Using Once Upon a Time as a case study, this chapter will examine (1) the technique of translating genre into geography, including the narrative restructuring enabled by collapsing distinct fairy tales into a single world, and (2) how this metaphor of genre as physical location is a useful way of thinking about stories and the process of reinventing tales for new times and places.

Once Upon a Time has two main locations, Storybrooke, Maine, and the Enchanted Forest. Storybrooke is a small, quaint town stuck in 1983. That year, a curse worked by Regina Mills, the Evil Queen from “Snow White,” and built by Rumplestiltskin swept up most of the fairy-tale characters living in the Enchanted Forest and transported them to our world, a land without magic. Separated from our world, but firmly located in it, Storybrooke is also without popular culture—1983 without MTV, Billy Idol, or The Go-Gos, truly “some place horrible,” as described by Rumplestiltskin and Regina (1.1). The curse strips the fairy-tale folk of their magic, memories, and identities and replaces them with ordinary, stagnant, small-town lives. Time does not move during the curse, and it is not until the original curse begins to break that characters are able to progress, develop, and make their own choices.

The Storybrooke setting invokes nostalgia for a simpler time, the 1980s that would presumably reflect the childhood of the show’s target adult audience. Demonstrating Frederic Jameson’s notion of pastiche as nostalgia in “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” the Storybrooke setting primes adult audiences to associate the show and its content with their childhood. It is a distinctly white, middle-class American childhood, but one that is presented as normative throughout television’s history. The association with a nostalgic Storybrooke, then, encourages audiences to make the same connection to fairy tales. Adult audiences will have encountered a variety of fairy-tale texts that challenge and retell the fairy tales of their childhoods, dominated in the United States by Disney animated films. In a promotional interview, cocreator Adam Horowitz stated that his and Edward Kitsis’s interest in fairy tales comes from the genre’s foundational impact on their storytelling: “The seed of it [Once Upon a Time] was that we were trying to figure out what it is about storytelling that we really love, and what we love is the mystery and excitement of exploring lots of different worlds. Fairy tales clicked with us because they were so much in the DNA of what made us storytellers, to begin with” (qtd. in Radish). But Horowitz also links the show’s core tale specifically to his childhood experience of Disney fairy-tale film: “Snow White is ground zero for fairy tales. It was the first movie I saw, as a kid, and I remember being terrified, seeing the Evil Queen” (qtd. in Radish). Within the context of the nostalgic 1980s Storybrooke, audiences can more easily connect the fairy tales on the show to the “simpler” children’s fairy tales of their past. Thus a specific mode of fairy tales, the one Elizabeth Wanning Harries refers to as “compact” in Twice Upon a Time: Women Writers and the History of the Fairy Tale, is invoked both stylistically on the show through repetition of fairy-tale patterns and by association with the nostalgic Storybrooke (17).

For the child audience of ABC’s family show, Storybrooke is different enough from the reality of the show’s airdates to be distinctly “the past” without recalling specific memories. The child protagonist of the show, Henry Mills, for example, is able to wander around town and the surrounding woods without adult supervision, and no one appears to have any concerns about crime or safety, experiences that the show’s child audience likely cannot relate to. Though not invoking personal or cultural memory, the show still functions nostalgically for children by touting a simpler time before they were born. This connection also primes children to associate the fairy tales in the show with “simpler,” older versions of fairy tales that may not reflect a twenty-first-century child’s experience of fairy tales from parodies like the Shrek series or the Hoodwinked! films. In “Fairy Tales and Fairy Folk: Evolving Expectations of Contemporary Fairy Tales,” Linda J. Lee has pointed out that because of the popularity of fairy-tale parodies at the turn of the twenty-first century, “American society is, perhaps, raising a generation of children whose experience with fairy tales is dependent upon fractured plots, inverted quests, and fuzzy boundaries between generic categories.” Children can also be exposed to fairy-tale fragments before their sources tales. In explaining their choice of “Snow White” as the main tale for the series, Horowitz not only refers to his own experience, as cited above, but to that of his children:

I’ve got twin daughters, who are 2½ years old, and I don’t even remember showing them anything, but they know Snow White. It’s amazing. When I was watching dailies for the pilot, they would see the stuff of Ginny in the coffin and start going, “Snow White is sleeping!” and I was like, “How do you know who she is already?” I think it’s just something in our DNA. Because of that, everybody loves the character and loves that story so much that it’s going to continually be told, in new and different ways. (qtd. in Radish)

Children’s first experiences with fairy tales could very well be with parodies rather than the source tales on which they are based, making the source tales referenced in Once Upon a Time less familiar than their contemporary incarnations.

The anachronistic Storybrooke serves an important narrative function through its nostalgic context that provides a frame of reference for how the genre of fairy tales is meant to be understood by the show’s audience. For Once Upon a Time to “find things about [fairy tales] that we haven’t explored before,” as Horowitz claims it does, it must first establish an understanding of the genre to react against (qtd. in Keily). Invoking Disney, which the show does constantly, is one way to establish a fairy-tale tradition, but the repetition of stylistic features of classic tales within the context of a nostalgic past provides audiences with an ideal of fairy tales as a genre that is simple, straightforward, and quaint—old-fashioned. This is not a derisive implication, as nostalgia clearly implies fondness, and the show celebrates fairy tales as an important part of culture, but it does play into the myth of fairy tales as a simple genre, which does not reflect the reality of the complex genre.

The first episode of Once Upon a Time begins with a series of black screens and typed exposition: “There was an enchanted forest filled with all the classic characters we know. Or think we know. One day they found themselves trapped in a place where all their happy endings were stolen. Our world. This is how it happened . . .” (1.1). What makes “our world” horrible is the lack of happy endings, but also, I would add, the lack of magic and the loss of the fairy-tale narratives. Everything that makes the fairy-tale characters fairy tales is stripped away and replaced with the mundane troubles of a fairly stable small town stuck in the 1980s. The curse has been in place for twenty-eight years when the series begins, and time does not pass in Storybrooke, so that the characters may live, but they do not move forward (at least until Emma Swan, the curse-breaker, arrives).1 The loss of magic, and with it, the loss of wonder and being part of a story greater than oneself, is what is horrible.

There is no magic in Storybrooke until the curse is broken, thus our mundane world (which is also referred to as the Land Without Magic) is contrasted with the magical Enchanted Forest. Claudia Schwabe, in “Getting Real with Fairy Tales: Magic Realism in Grimm and Once Upon a Time,” has commented on the division of magic by location in Once Upon a Time, positing it as a form of magical realism. Schwabe classifies Once Upon a Time as a “Reality Fairy Tale,” a tale in which “magic crosses over into the real world,” forming an overlapping “third reality” located in a specific place that blends the fantastic with the mundane (297). In this space, “real magic exists in today’s world, which fuses the magical with the everyday—a literal magic realism” (295). For Schwabe, this magical realism is a vital part of the show’s intervention into and challenging of its source tales. Referring to Once Upon a Time and Grimm, she argues, “Such stories suggest that the real world is nuanced with multiple layers of detail and meaning and with connections that are sometimes difficult to uncover given our limited perception” (299). Schwabe points out that the show’s emphasis on villain motivation—showing backstory that depicts the villains before they were bad—demonstrates “nuance” along the good/evil divide, and she locates this nuance as possible because of the way magic and reality intersect on the show. She argues that “magic realist stories such as Once Upon a Time and Grimm indicate that the real world does not follow a black-and-white pattern reminiscent of the interior design in Regina’s office. They rather urge the viewer to never stop questioning what might lie hidden beneath the façade of a certain object, person, or place” (314). The setting and initial world-building directly impacts the possibilities for character development and plot revision of the source tales.

Once the curse has been broken at the beginning of season two and the fairy-tale characters regain their magic and fairy-tale memories, those characters that were not swept up by the curse awaken in the fairy-tale world to a destroyed Enchanted Forest. They band together to try and restore what they can of their once-great kingdoms and to look for survivors. The secondary plot of season two is a battle for magic and enchantment between those who seek to preserve, restore, and return to the Enchanted Forest and those who want to destroy the Enchanted Forest and portals that allow travel to and fro. The second season of Once Upon a Time makes this threat against enchantment explicit with the presence of two non-fairy-tale outsiders—Greg Mendel and Tamara—who are literally trying to destroy all magic in the real world, including Storybrooke and its inhabitants. While active, the curse protects Storybrooke, keeping the fairy-tale characters trapped in town and non-fairy-tale outsiders outside the town limits. Once the curse is broken and magic returns, outsiders can cross the border.

As seasons progress, the season-long plot arcs take on different conflicts grounded in specific locations. Each season, starting with season three, typically has two major plots with distinct villains marked by a midseason winter hiatus. Season one features Regina and Rumplestiltskin as the primary villains, and they remain a constant presence on the show, shifting roles at multiple points, with breaking the curse as the primary conflict. Season two’s conflict is centered on the inhabitants of Storybrooke protecting the town, their lives, and magic from Greg and Tamara. A second plot that is interwoven with the first for the entirety of the season features Snow White and Emma in the Enchanted Forest protecting those who escaped the curse from villains Cora (Regina’s mother) and Captain Hook (whose role also shifts in later seasons). These two plots merge at the season’s end.

Seasons three through six use the midseason hiatus to separate major story lines marked by new locations. Season three sees the main cast journeying to Neverland to save Henry from the villain Peter Pan (Rumplestiltskin’s father) before Zelena, the Wicked Witch of the West (Regina’s sister), becomes the primary villain and Oz is introduced as a new location. This plot also introduces Robin Hood, the second reoccurring secondary character based in legend and folk ballad after Mulan. Season four is split between the Snow Queen and the Queens of Darkness (Maleficent, Ursula the Sea Witch, and Cruella de Vil) as primary villains. The first half includes Arendelle as a location and Anna and Elsa from Frozen, and the second takes place largely in New York and introduces the Author as a major figure and explains the creation of the storybook that houses the fairy tales on the show. This second half is directly metafictional, with characters not only aware of their fictionality but explicitly trying to rewrite their stories. This is a progression from Zelena trying to relive her past and Regina trying to recreate the world in vengeance—the evil plots become explicitly more textual and self-reflexive as more stories are introduced and the show’s geography expands. Season five is shared by King Arthur and Merlin in Camelot and Hades in the Underworld. Season six features the Land of Untold Stories and Mr. Hyde and the Evil Queen as the primary villains, progressing into a series wrap-up that brings together multiple plotlines and characters and reveals the origin of the dark magic that is the catalyst for the series’ conflict. This season is a soft finale, with many major characters leaving the show.

Season seven, the final season, is a soft reboot featuring an adult Henry in much the same scenario as Emma in season one, tasked by his child—whom he does not know—to break a curse that has made all of the fairy-tale characters in a Seattle neighborhood forget their fairy-tale selves. It builds on previous seasons’ lore and plots, and it culminates in a unification of the disparate story realms in a single location, creating genre and geographic unity and emphasizing Regina’s role, making the whole series about her redemption.

Each episode of Once Upon a Time contains two story lines distinguished by location, and much of the tension in the show is created by the intertwining narrative threads. The “real world” of Storybrooke has a straightforward linear plot that is easy to follow, episode to episode, and adheres to a season-long plot arc, but the narratives set in the fairy-tale world are fragmented from an overarching season-long plot, instead organized by characters (providing origin stories that retell well-known tales) rather than time, meaning that these stories are not presented in chronological order. This fragmentation—moving the audience back and forth between episodes and presenting fragments of fairy-tale history out of order—keeps the audience unstable ...