Harvard Magazine 37

glaring anomalystares out from thecurriculum vitae ofMaria Tatar, whose

10 scholarly books and scoresof articles otherwise display a pleasing consistency. Herworks deal with fairy tales andchildren’s literature: the Broth-ers Grimm, Bluebeard, HansChristian Andersen. Even herfirst book, from 1978, on mes-merism and literature, bears anenchanted title: Spellbound.

But in 1995, Tatar, who isLoeb professor of Germaniclanguages and literatures,published a wild exception tothis rule, digging into sensa-tional material that is Adultwith a capital A. Lustmord: Sex-ual Murder in Weimar Germany ex-plores the vengeful undersideof German national characterduring the 1920s. That Zeitgeistmanifested itself both in luridcrimes (such as murder-rapesin which the chronology ofthose acts was not alwaysclear) and in the powerful, disturbing paintings of George Groszand Otto Dix—who sometimes “signed” his work with a blood-red handprint—as well as in Fritz Lang’s films and in plays andnovels by Frank Wedekind, Hermann Hesse, and Alfred Döblin.A decade later, similar primal feelings, less examined and con-trolled, helped fuel the Nazis’ organized savagery.

The daughter of Hungarian émigrés, Tatar has been fascinatedsince childhood by German culture and the Holocaust. “My par-ents had come from Europe and Europe was a place thatsignified really deep horror,” she says. “I grew up in the shadowof the Holocaust. In the 1950s, a lot of things like the diary ofAnne Frank were appearing, and reports of the Nazi atrocitieswere coming out in the newspapers.”

The young Tatar also gravitated to the Grimm Brothers’ fairytales—evoking adventure, glamour, and virtue, but also seethingwith violence, sadism, revenge, and horrific punishments—where the Teutonic “dark side” symbolically expressed itself. Shewanted to understand how a culture that produced these entic-ing stories and the rapturous beauty of Beethoven, Wagner, andGoethe could also erupt in genocidal rage.

“Violence might be the bridge that connects German folklore

and the Holocaust,” Tatarmuses. “In fairy tales, you havethat same brutality and mon-strosity: there’s something re-ally primal about what is goingon in these stories—and inthose Weimar artists. What Iadmire about the Weimarartists is that they faced up towhat’s inside. Fairy tales alsoface up to the facts of life:nothing is sacred or taboo.Meanwhile they glitter withbeauty. I work at the weirdlyfascinating intersection ofbeauty and horror.”

Tatar ’s passions for theBrothers Grimm and AnneFrank stayed with her, but atPrinceton in the late 1960s, shediscovered that both were ver-boten at the graduate level.“The Grimms were o≠ limitsbecause fairy tales were notdeemed worthy of scholarlyattention,” she explains, “andstudying the Holocaust wastaboo because it raised toomany anxieties about the sta-

tus of German culture in the academy.”She redirected her attention to nineteenth- and twentieth-

century German literature, studying romanticism and Weimarculture. She earned a doctorate in 1971, writing her dissertationon Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert (1780-1860), a German Ro-mantic philosopher who delved into the “dark side of nature,”Tatar explains—subjects such as animal magnetism, the uncon-scious, and dreams. “You could call him a precursor of Freud,”she says. “I didn’t want to study just the good, the true, and thebeautiful—which was what many of my mentors in graduateschool encouraged me to do—but to inquire into humanpathologies, and what leads to events like the Holocaust.”

Eventually Tatar found her scholarly calling: since the 1970s,she has focused on fairy tales. Her books include annotated edi-tions of what she calls the “classics” (including “Little Red RidingHood,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “Hansel and Gretel”) and of talescollected by the Grimms, an exploration of Bluebeard, and a newedition of the stories of Hans Christian Andersen (just publishedby W. W. Norton, with translations from the Danish in collabora-tion with Julie K. Allen, Ph.D. ’05). “This field has moved from theperiphery into the center of things,” Tatar explains. “Like

The Horror and the BeautyMaria Tatar explores the dazzle and the “dark side” in fairy tales—and why we read them.

by CRAIG LAMBERT

Po r t r a i t o f M a r i a Ta t a r b y J i m H a r r i s o n I l l u s t r a t i o n b y E d m u n d D u l a c f o r T h e L i t t l e M e r m a i d

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38

women’s studies, ethnic studies, or film studies, the study ofchildhood and its literary and material culture has attained acad-emic legitimacy.”

Tatar began with archival work that found its way into The HardFacts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales (1987), which probes harsh themeslike “murder, mutilation, cannibalism, infanticide, and incest.”More recently, she has moved into interpretive and empiricalscholarship that examines the e≠ects of the narratives. “Her inter-disciplinarity has included psychology and psychoanalysis along-side literary history and theory,” says Porter professor of medievalLatin Jan Ziolkowski, director of the University’s DumbartonOaks Research Library and Collection, who has worked withTatar on the committee on degrees in folklore and mythology.“Maria has made an ever-deeper imprint upon the field of fairytales, which lies at one of those all-too-rare intersections betweenthe general public and scholars. Her elegantlywritten books meet the highest academicstandards while remaining accessible to theendangered species known as the generalreader.”

During the past academic year, Tatar was afellow at the Radcli≠e Institute for AdvancedStudy, on sabbatical from her faculty duties.(She also served as dean for the humanities inthe Faculty of Arts and Sciences from 2003 to 2006.) At Radcli≠e,she pursued her newest book project, “Enchanted Hunters: TheTransformative Power of Childhood Reading,” broadening herfocus from folklore to the general subject of children’s stories.

“ ‘Enchanted hunters’ is a phrase from Nabokov,” she explains.“It has an edge, for it applies, on one level, to Humbert Humbertand his pursuit of Lolita. But it also defines us as readers of Lolita—readers who search and exploreas we fall under the spell ofNabokov’s language and his re-casting of ‘Beauty and the Beast.’It’s no accident that many chil-dren’s books begin with boredchildren, like Alice on the river-bank reading a book and nod-ding o≠. How do you move fromboredom to curiosity—how doyou animate the child? My an-swer is: by using the shock valueof beauty and horror, adminis-tering jolts and shimmers thatflip a switch in the mind.”

Fairy tales emerge from anoral tradition; they were passeddown through generations byretellings long before being in-scribed on paper; Jakob and Wil-helm Grimm were early folk-lorists. “Fairy tales should neverbe considered sacred texts,”Tatar says. “They existed in thou-sands of versions; there wasn’tone ‘Little Red Riding Hood.’”

Adults recounted these sto-

ries to a multigenerational audience, and typically the narratorspun out the tales to the rhythms of work. “We have drawingsand paintings from seventeenth-century France showing firesideimages of someone telling a story while others are minding chil-dren, repairing tools, or patching clothes,” Tatar says. “You’ve al-ways got this fire. It’s a communal situation, where people arealso getting warmth and comfort from the stories. The fire re-minds us of the ‘ignition power’ of fairy tales, their ability to ex-cite the imagination and to provide light in the dark. And withthe fire, you also have these shadows, where fearful things mightlurk. The tales not only have this magical, glittery sparkle, butalso a dark, horrific side that stages our deepest anxieties andfears.”

The story itself, Tatar suggests, may be less important than theinterchanges it stimulates. “In the telling, there are always inter-

ruptions—hissing and booing, clapping and cheering,” she says,referencing folklorists’ reports. “The tale is ‘thickened’ by the au-dience until it becomes a kind of collective product. When weread to children, we should bring in that creative dimension andtalk about the story as it unfolds. Have a kind of conversationalreading, and don’t let it end at, ‘They lived happily ever after.’ Youwant to let the story become more than a talisman or mantra—it

should continue to shape-shiftand resonate in new ways.

“Think about the way youread as a child,” she continues.“There are constant epiphanies.It’s an intellectual process, butit also involves the body in away—you read with your spine,you have a somatic response.”She quotes Graham Greene:“What do we ever get nowa-days from reading to equal theexcitement and the revelationin those first fourteen years?”The young hunger for such dis-coveries. “They are searching forenlightenment,” Tatar declares.“They want to know aboutadult matters. Grown-ups talkabout murder, violence, anddeath in hushed tones, becausethey want to protect children.But children are wildly curiousabout what adults keep fromthem. Adults read with a criti-cal, reflective, detached mind—it’s a complex experience—butchildren just dive right in and

“It’s no accident that many children’s books

begin with bored children. How do you move from

boredom to curiosity? My answer is: by using

the shock value of beauty and horror.”

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Harvard Magazine 39

identify powerfully with the characters.Maybe that’s what raises our anxietylevel about what we read to them.”

Take “Bluebeard,” the saga of a ser-ial killer who murders six wives be-fore getting his comeuppance. Thestory makes readers tremble forthe seventh wife while rootingfor her somehow to outwit thevillain. “ ‘Bluebeard’ is a mar-riage tale, not really a tale forkids,” Tatar explains. “Thoughmaybe a cautionary tale foryoung women entering ar-ranged marriages!”

Yet this European folktalepowerfully moved an African-American child, the novelistRichard Wright, who heard a“colored schoolteacher” namedElla read it to him. “I hungered forthe sharp, frightening, breath-tak-ing, almost painful excitement thatthe story had given me,” Wright re-called in Black Boy, his 1945 autobiography.“He hears this story and he is transformed,”Tatar says. “He wanted to read every novel hecould get his hands on. ‘I burned to know themeaning of every word,’ he said, ‘because it was a gate-way to a forbidden and enchanting land.’”

Indeed. Tatar’s Secrets beyond the Door: The Story of Bluebeard andHis Wives (2004) begins, “Magic happens on the threshold of theforbidden.” Recall that Bluebeard gave his seventh wife keys toall the rooms in his mansion, but forbade her to open one remotechamber—which, of course, she does, when he is away, and sodiscovers the corpses of his former spouses. Fairy tales began asstories for adults, and they dig into precisely those subterraneanaspects of adult life (especially family life) that so intrigue chil-dren, Tatar says. The tales have become a way to crash thegrownups’ party. When the stories “migrated from the firesideinto the nursery, they lost some of their bawdiness and vio-lence,” she believes, but the Grimms worried more about cen-soring sex than violence, and even thought that the violencemight scare children into good behavior. The tales nonethelessgrapple with raw, fundamental emotions: “They are like minia-ture myths.”

Discover, for example, echoes of ancient Greece’s House ofAtreus in “The Juniper Tree,” a tale recorded by the Grimms. “It isfilled with revolting deeds,” says Tatar. “A stepmother chops upher stepson and serves him in a stew to his father, who declaresthe dish tasty. Touchingly, his sister buries the boy’s bones under ajuniper tree and waters the tree with her tears. The boy is rebornas a beautiful bird that sings, and then he becomes a boy again.”

An abomination like a mother dismembering a child sometimestakes on a surreal or almost humorous dimension in the tales. (Instories such as “Cinderella,” the Grimms changed wicked mothersto stepmothers, to protect the image of motherhood: “You can see itin the manuscripts for di≠erent versions of a tale,” Tatar says.)“You get this kind of preposterous violence,” she asserts. At the

end of one story, the hero declares thateveryone’s head is going to be chopped o≠.

(Indeed, one of Tatar’s books is O≠ withTheir Heads!) Bluebeard murders not

one or two, but six wives. In “SnowWhite,” the stepmother dances toher death in red-hot iron shoes.Another stepmother dies when amillstone falls on her head, andthe protagonist of Hans Chris-tian Andersen’s “The Red Shoes”has her feet cut o≠. One versionof “Cinderella” has doves peckout the eyes of the evil step-sisters.

These maimings can actual-ly allay childhood fears. “Kidshave a lot of anxiety about their

bodily integrity,” says Tatar. “Theyworry about loss on so many dif-

ferent levels. Psychologists areright to emphasize the therapeutic

value of fairy tales and how theyenact and work through fears in sym-

bolic terms. Fairy tales move in the sub-junctive: ‘Once upon a time’ means that it

isn’t real and that you can laugh about it in a li-censed form of release.”

In her own childhood, Tatar had deeply a≠ecting ex-periences as a reader. The third of four children in a Hungarianfamily that came to the United States in 1952 (her father was anophthalmologist, her mother a stay-at-home parent), Tatar grewup in Highland Park, outside Chicago, in a trilingual household(her parents also spoke German). She herself reads Latin andDanish, and speaks French in addition to German.

Their home was only two blocks away from an “extraordinarylibrary.” Tatar clearly recalls the moment when, at age nine, “Itook a deep breath and crossed the threshold into the adult sec-tion—there were strict boundaries at that time. I curled up therewith this book of Danish fairy tales—from the folklore collection,without illustrations. My older brother came in and told me Iwasn’t allowed there. The book I treasured most was Grimms’ FairyTales—in German. I couldn’t read the words, but my older sisterwould tell me the stories.”

She learned German at Denison University in Ohio, spendingher junior year in Munich; she later lived for a year in Berlin. Tatarhas spent her entire career at Harvard, having joined the facultyin 1971, fresh from her doctorate at Princeton; she received tenurein 1978. (Her daughter, Lauren, graduated from Harvard in 2006and her son, Daniel, is a senior at the College.)

Tatar’s concept of “ignition power” speaks to the way thesetales can fire a reader’s imagination, and, as with Richard Wright,stimulate a child’s desire to read. She herself, having grown upwith three languages, has a powerful response to the writtenword, in which she finds both “monumental stability and athrilling mutability.” She recalls the “Bump!” in The Cat in the Hat—asignal for manic madness, the “logical insanity” that Dr. Seussaimed for in that book. “Words have always felt to me like [magic]

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40 November - December 2007

wands,” she says, “and theyopen the door to new worldsin which anything is possi-ble—talking rabbits, phantomtollbooths, flying carpets. Istarted out as a math major;the prospect of infinite per-mutations and combinationswas always intoxicating.”

She calls reading a highlycreative activity: “Words onthe page give you instructionsfor imagining new worlds,not with a barrage of descrip-tive details but with sparecues that, even in their filmi-ness and flimsiness, createcomplete images.” She recallsNabokov’s description of howan author constructs a houseof cards that, in the reader’smind, becomes a castle ofglass and steel, part of asturdy and durable world.

Tatar’s researches began byaddressing violence and hor-ror, but, as she says, “I discovered beauty.” A turning point cameon a book tour, when she was telling library audiences about TheHard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales. “I wanted to talk about the ori-gins of the stories, their evolution, and their cultural meanings,”she recalls. “But people kept coming back to me with descrip-tions of their enchantment with the stories and how beautifulthey were. They wanted to know more about the magic of thestories, the deep melodrama and passion—they were almost op-eratic about it. That inspired me to go back to reading the storiesat a visceral level—it was almost like reconnecting with child-hood, the way you read as a child.”

Consider the spell cast by “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” inwhich Hans Christian Andersen describes the emperor’s magicalgarments: “as exquisite as cobwebs” in their pattern and design.“The magical clothing takes over,” Tatar says, “even though itcannot be seen.” Fairy tales stay on the surface. “Beauty is alwayspresented in totally abstract terms,” Tatar says. “In a descriptionof a princess, all you get are light and sparkle, dazzle, shine,golden dresses and silver shoes. You never get a description ofher face. You have to use the power of your imagination.”

Then comes the Disney animated film of the story, which fills inall the details and renders an exact image of the princess. Most ofthe students in Tatar’s popular undergraduate courses, like “FairyTales, Children’s Literature, and the Construction of Childhood,”know these stories via Disney versions, and so are amazed tolearn, for example, that in Andersen’s original, the Little Mermaiddies at the end. Tatar explains, “Disney turns Andersen’s story—literally and figuratively—into a cartoon version of itself.”

Yet a Disney film is simply another version, another retelling,of a narrative that already exists in countless variations. AndTatar is quick to point out that without Disney, we might nothave these stories. “Film has an instant way of pulling you in,”she says. “There’s intensity, there’s melodrama, and you identify

closely with the characters.Hollywood has mastered theart of the popular aesthetic,getting us to buy into on-screen fictions in powerfulways. Yes, there’s cause forconcern, in that movies are somuch easier to get into thanbooks are. But Disney films[have] kept fairy tales alive.And alongside the Disney ver-sion, 15 di≠erent print editionsof ‘Beauty and the Beast’ willbe published, for di≠erent lev-els of readers.

“Competition among mediaisn’t always a bad thing,” shecontinues, pointing out thatthe beautiful illustrations thathave so often accompaniedprinted fairy tales amount to a“second text.” “I try not to gettoo romantic or nostalgicabout the book,” she says.“Media feed o≠ each other ininteresting ways; the printed

word, oral storytelling, film, and television interact with eachother, are embedded in each other, and generate new interest inthe old, as well as new versions of old stories.”

And the audience itself has changed. “Our conception of child-hood has changed dramatically in the past couple of decades,”Tatar says. She cites the work of French social historian PhilippeAriès on the “invention” of childhood in the sixteenth and seven-teenth centuries: in earlier times, children were immediatelyconscripted into the labor force when they were physically ableto work. In his 1982 book The Disappearance of Childhood, media ana-lyst Neil Postman argued that the literacy gap between adultsand children formerly allowed adults to control information andso create a two-tiered society; when electronic media brokedown adults’ ability to control information, adult and child con-verged. “Today, you could argue that we’re going back to theolder model,” Tatar says. “With exposure to media at early ages,children have access to what was once adult knowledge—theyknow what we didn’t know until we were teenagers. Kids seemto be savvy about the facts of life. Yet they are still infantilized,and more dependent on their parents than ever.”

In “Enchanted Hunters”—a project that Tatar says has been inthe works for 10 years—she examines how children interactwith stories and investigates what happens when kids migrateinto worlds that have been created by di≠erent media. Some ofher ideas have emerged from more than 300 interviews with herstudents about childhood memories of their reading experi-ence—how one student used a purple crayon (less successfullythan Crockett Johnson’s Harold) on his bedroom wall, how an-other (very much a swan, Tatar notes) had read “The Ugly Duck-ling” hundreds of times during adolescence, how a third trieddesperately to develop telekinetic powers after reading RoaldDahl’s Matilda. Tatar marvels at the ways in which students ap-proach stories: undergraduates, for example, will “read all the

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Harry Potter novels or the entire Chronicles of Narnia over aweekend, becoming e≠ortlessly absorbed by a world they con-struct from nothing but black marks on a white page.”

The seven Harry Potter books, having sold 325 million copies inmore than 60 languages, of course represent the worldwidemegahit of children’s literature for the past decade. Tatar drawson her scholarly expertise to account for their vast success. Au-thor J. K. Rowling “writes for children but never down to them,”she says. “[Rowling] does not shy away from the great existentialmysteries: death and loss, cruelty and compassion, desire and de-pression. Think of those fiendish Dementors who are experts inmaking you lose hope—what could be more frightening thanthat?” Furthermore, “Rowling puts magic into the hands of chil-

dren—they are the anointed and the appointed,” Tatar says. “Butthere’s more to it than that: Rowling declared that the books arenot so much about good and evil as about power, and Harry Pot-ter gets the chance to defeat [arch-villain] Voldemort and to seizepower. The sorcery of the books involves more than wizardryand magic, for the child has the chance to right wrongs.”

In addition to the deep themes and the struggle for justice,“Rowling taps into rich literary traditions,” Tatar explains. “She isa master of bricolage: recycling stories and stitching them together invibrant new ways. Rowling is on record as declaring her favoriteauthor to be Jane Austen, but in the Harry Potter books there is alsomuch of Dickens and Dahl, with heavy doses of fairy tales andArthurian legend, British board-ing-school books, and murdermysteries. We have all the arche-typal themes and characters ofchildren’s literature: an abject or-phan, toxic stepparents, false he-roes, helpers and donors, villainyand revenge.”

With its staggering popularity,“Harry Potter has created a globalcultural story, one that will beshared by multiple generations ofliterate children and adults,” saysTatar. Indeed, one factor in theseries’ success is that the storiesappeal both to adults and toyounger readers.

Children’s books, of course, areprimarily written by adults, andmuch scholarship on children’sliterature also embodies adultviewpoints. Psychoanalyst Bru-no Bettelheim ranks among thebest-known fairy-tale theorists;his 1976 book The Uses of Enchant-ment is a classic in the field. (Bet-telheim analyzed Hansel and

Gretel’s attempt to take a bite from the witch’s house as “oralgreed.”) It would take a long while to exhaust the interpreta-tions of Turkish delight, the real-world name C.S. Lewis used fora fictional confection so pleasurable that it completely enslavesEdmund Pevensie in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

But Tatar is trying to escape the adult perspective on children’sliterature. (“The psychosexual readings have become pre-dictable,” she says.) “I’m trying to capture what happens in thechild,” she explains. That’s an ambitious goal, because childrenthemselves are not particularly articulate on such matters, andadult recollections brim with distortions and idealizations. SoTatar also goes directly to the literary texts, mining her insightsfrom words on the page, an admittedly speculative enterprise.

This approach has led her toconsider magical thinking andhow stories teach childrenthat you don’t need wands—just words—to do things. Theso-called classics are classicsfor a reason: they have power-

ful language, and use not just sparkle and shine but also gothicgloom to get children hooked on a story and on reading. The mar-vels that tumble thick and fast through these narratives lead read-ers to wonder not just about the world of fiction but also aboutthe world they inhabit.

“The radical view is that it doesn’t matter what story a kidreads,” she continues. “In some ways, children’s literature is pulpfiction: it’s melodramatic. John Updike called fairy tales ‘thetelevision and pornography of their day, the life-lightening trashof preliterate peoples.’ Children who read escape not just fromreality but into opportunity: they learn how to navigate in thelarger world; they become more connected and curious, ener-

gized by the propulsive wondersof Narnia, Oz, or Never Land.”

And to wrestle with the darkeraspects of life as well. Tatar’s at-traction to what Germans call the“night side” dates to the begin-nings of her scholarly work. She re-calls, with some amusement, giv-ing a paper on the sexual-murdermaterial that developed into Lust-mord and hearing a question from aGerman academic: “Why alwaysthe pathological?” She has a readyanswer. “It seems so much moreinteresting than the good, the true,and the beautiful. Trying to under-stand why things go wrong seemsto me more productive than justfocusing on what is right.” Even so,she is not immune to the charms ofTurkish delight, and remains aseager as the rest of us, child andadult alike, to be seduced by thebeauty of a well-told story.

Craig A. Lambert ’69, Ph.D. ’78, is deputyeditor of this magazine.

Children’s literature is pulp fiction: it’s melodramatic.

John Updike called fairy tales “the television and pornography

of their day, the life-lightening trash of preliterate peoples.”