Table of Contents

1.  Introduction  Introduction

   1

2.  The theory by Vladimir Propp  

   1

3.  Morphology of The Queen of Quok  

   4

4.  Other Tales out of Baum s Collection  

   7

5.  Conclusion  

   10

  Bibliography  

   11

  Affirmation  

  I hereby confirm that this paper was written by myself and that all direct and indirect quota-  

  tions from other sources have been documented appropriately  

1

1. Introduction

Fairy tales are an interesting genre to me, so I decided to look upon them in greater detail. To analyze a fairy tale’s meaning seems to be a task almost impossible to fulfill, though. “Every reader reads a different story. Writers who confidently tell us what fairy tales ‘mean’ are over- simplifying their complex, multilayered character,” states The Cambridge Guide to Children’s Books in English (Watson 2001: 249) concerning the matter. Further on, it says that fairy tales “do not contain meaning and they cannot impart meaning. They allow meanings to be made” (Watson 2001: 249). I began to wonder how fairy tales can be compared if not by their mean- ing and what they might have in common. The question leads to another approach on fairy tale analysis: a structural one.

Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale gives a scheme for the structure of fairy tales; it will be described in the following chapter. His work was originally written for Russian fairy tales but could supposedly be applied to other ones, too (Propp 1968). Therefore, I decided to try it on a small collection of American fairy tales by L. Frank Baum to find out their struc- ture. The collection is named American Fairy Tales and contains twelve short tales of various types. My interest lay in finding out if Propp’s scheme can be applied to the considered American fairy tales by Baum. This would indicate that they have a similar structure as the tales Propp classifies as fairy tales.

In the following, Propp’s method will be described and is then applied to the tale “The Queen of Quok” out of Baum’s collection (1978: 43-61) in all detail. Further on, examples of the other tales by Baum and the results of their analyses according to Propp’s scheme will be shown. Conclusions are drawn afterwards.

2. The Theory by Vladimir Propp

An overall description for better understanding first: Propp’s scheme contains a list of functions of characters in a certain order, each function designated by a sign. A sequence of these functions represents a fairy tale’s structure. Such a sequence might look as the follow- ing, taken from one of Propp’s examples: “β 3 δ 1 A 1 B 1 C H 1 - I 1 K 4 w°” (1968: 128). Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale was developed out of the study of about 100 tales by Aarne Thompson taken out of a collection by Afanás’ev (Propp 1968: 23-24). It was originally limited “to fairy tales or Aarne-Thompson tale types [that can be found under the index] 300- 749 [in Afanás’ev’s collection]” (Dundes 1968: xiv). His concern was a “structural analysis of the fairy tale” (Pirkova-Jakobson 1968: xxi), for which he compared the tales by Aarne Thompson (Propp 1968: 19) and came up with a scheme of a fairy tale’s structure.

2 He describes his study of fairy tales later as possible to “be compared to the study of organic formations in nature” (Propp 1984: 82). Propp even gives a definition of the word “mor- phology” out of botany: Here, “the term ‘morphology’ means the study of the component parts of a plant, of their relationship to each other and to the whole—in other words, the study of a plant’s structure” (Propp 1968: xxv). This is similar to his way of studying fairy tales. The definition of a fairy tale remains unclear in the beginning of Propp’s Morphology, since Propp first defines fairy tales as “those tales classified by Aarne under numbers 300 to 749” (1968: 19). What classifies a fairy tale according to Propp becomes clear, however, in the course of Morphology.

Propp speaks of the “two-fold quality of a tale: its amazing multiformity, picturesqueness, and color, and on the other hand, its no less striking uniformity, its repetition” (1968: 20-21). He is concerned only with this uniformity, with the “Invarianten” of a tale, as Elisabeth Gülich and Wolfgang Raible name them (1977: 196). If one rejects “all local, secondary formations [of a tale], and leave[s] only the fundamental forms, we shall obtain that one tale with respect to which all fairy tales will appear as variants” (Propp 1968: 89). This can be pointed out as the overall statement of Propp’s work, because his scheme of a tale is such a “fundamental form.” It shows the structure of a fairy tale, and “[a]ll fairy tales are of one type in regard to their structure” (Propp 1968: 23).

The main point of Propp’s work, according to Gülich and Raible, is that of functions under- stood as the actions of the characters in a tale (1977: 196). His concern lies in these actions and not in the characters (Gülich, Raible 1977: 196). Propp explains that “functions must be defined independently of the characters” and “must also be defined independently of how and in what manner they are fulfilled” (1968: 66). An example of a function would be the action of a character that does, in some way, harm another character. It is important to mention that functions in a tale are not only ascribed to persons, but also to objects and animals (Propp 1968: 5), such as a magical agent serves as a helper, for example (Propp 1968: 82). A tale is then made up out of a sequence of these functions (Gülich, Raible 1977: 198). The functions are usually defined by “a noun expressing an action” (Propp 1968: 21) and are given a literary sign, which makes it possible to come up with “a formula analogous to chem- ical formulae” after analyzing a tale’s structure, as Claude Lévi-Strauss puts it (1984: 171). An example of such a “formula” has already been given above. Staying with the example men- tioned before, here the function of harming someone would be called “villainy” and given the sign A (compare Propp 1968: 30). Other functions will be defined during the analyses in the next chapters. The number of functions is limited: “Only some 31 functions may be noted,” states Propp (1968: 64). After the study of about 100 of Aarne Thompson’s tales, no new func- tions were found (Propp 1968: 23). The functions have a fixed order: “The sequence of func- tions is always identical,” but they do not necessarily all occur in one single tale (Propp 1968: