Georg-August-Universität Göttingen

Seminar für Englische Philologie

,,Gender and Intertextuality in Contemporary Retellings of Fairy Tales"

Literaturwissenschaftliches Proseminar im WS 2006/07

"You must be the Prince."

Traditional Fairy Tale Motifs in A.S. Byatt′s

"The Djinn in the Nightingale′s Eye"

Schriftliche Hausarbeit

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Table of Contents

1. Introduction 3

2. The Sleeping Maiden 4

3. The Fairy Tale Wedding 7

4. The Three Siblings and the Quest 9

5. Hunter, Woodcutter & Co. 11

6. Conclusion 13

Bibliography

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1. Introduction

The British female author A.S Byatt has always been fascinated by

fairy stories, "from years of reading myths and fairytales under the

bedclothes, from the delights and freedoms and terrors of worlds and

creatures that never existed."1 In 1994, she published her own collection

of fairy tales, titled "The Djinn in the Nightingale′s Eye".2 Four of the

five tales are quite short and told in a narrative style typical for the genre,

whereas the title story, which merges realism and fantasy, is of the length

of a novella. The first two stories of the collection, "The Glass Coffin"

and "Gode′s Story", were originally published in Byatt′s successful

novel "Possession" and are reprinted verbatim in combination with three

new stories in "The Djinn in the Nightingale′s Eye".3

Byatt′s work is remarkably intertextual, "The Djinn in the

Nightingale′s Eye" seems virtually to be a rich collage of fairy tale

motifs. While the title story brims over with references to narratives of

Oriental origin, as the Tales from Arabian Nights, the epics of Gilgamesh

or the ancient myth of Cybele, and the works of Shakespeare and

Chaucer, "The Glass Coffin" and "The Story of the Eldest Princess" are

based on many themes and elements alluding to the traditional European

fairy tales collected by Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm. Byatt

herself mentions that "I read through the whole collection (in German)

and made a kind of patchwork or jigsaw Tale out of all the motifs that

most moved and excited me [...]."4 This essay wants to examine how

Byatt uses and transforms these familiar motifs, plots and characters from

the "old stories" in order to give her heroines more power over her own

life in her new stories.5

1 A.S. Byatt, "Fairy Stories: The Djinn in the Nightingale′s Eye."

A.S. Byatt Homepage

24/03/2007

<http://www.asbyatt.com/oh_Fairies.aspx>, see appendix.

2 A.S. Byatt,

The Djinn in the Nightingale′s Eye. Five Fairy Stories,

(London: Chatto & Windus, 1994). In the

following abbreviated DNE.

3 Richard Todd,

A.S. Byatt.

(Plymouth: North Cote House, 1997) 39-54. Todd points out that the stories bear a

meaning relavant to the characters in "Possession" and that they change their form just by being reprinted

without the embedding narrative matrix in "The Djinn in the Nightingale′s Eye".

4 A.S. Byatt, Fairy Stories.

5 The focus is obviously placed on "The Glass Coffin" and "The Story of The Eldest Princess", for they are full

of allusions to the Grimms′ fairy tale collection, whereas "Gode′s Story" and "Dragon′s Breath" do not present

such clear references to familiar motifs.

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2. The Sleeping Maiden

In Byatt′s story "The Glass Coffin", which is a modern modification

of a tale by the Grimms ("Der Gläserne Sarg"), the reader encounters a

motif he is familiar with from various traditional fairy tales: A beautiful

and usually nubile sleeping maiden in distress, waiting for her male

rescuer. "Sleeping Beauty" is supposed to be the best known example,

not least because it has been popularised by the Disney movies. On her

fifteenth birthday the heroine of "Sleeping Beauty" pricks her finger on a

spindle and so a wicked fairy′s curse is fulfilled. The young princess falls

asleep for a hundred years and can only be awakened by the kiss of a

prince.

Similar to the "Sleeping Beauty" theme, in a manner of speaking a

special variation of it, is the motif of the young lady lying in a quasi-

sleeping state in a transparent glass or crystal coffin. Nearly every reader

has been familiar with the story of "Snow White" from childhood. After

being poisened by her wicked stepmother, Snow White falls in a

comatose sleep. The Seven Dwarfs, her fellows, do not have the heart to

bury her because she still looks so alive and beautiful, and decide to lay

her up in a coffin made of glass. A prince, who happens to come by, is

enchanted by her beauty and instantly falls in love with her. He beggs the

dwarfs to let him take the coffin to his castle, and during the bumpy

transport, Snow White coughs out the piece of poison apple and awakens.

"The Glass Coffin" is a less common tale by the Brothers Grimm, as

well containing a sleeping young woman in a transparent glass chest. The

heroine, bewitched by a black magician for rejecting his proposal, lies

silenced and imprisoned in a glass coffin, hidden in an underground

dungeon. An unimpressive but brave tailor adventures to enter the

dungeon and frees the sleeping maiden from her imprisonment and thus

wins her as his bride.

Considering the given examples, one might say that the sleeping

maiden, imprisoned in a tower or a glass coffin, is a motif which

ostentatiously permeates the Grimms′ collection of fairy tales. Feminist

fairy tale scholars have brought a special sensivity to gender associations

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