The Elements of Fairy Tales in Marina Warner’s The Lost Father and

Indigo or Mapping the Waters

The University of Masaryk

Leila Rouhi Shalmaei

Abstract

This article aims to illuminate the elements of fairy tales in some works of Marina Warner. Warner’s fiction
and non-fiction works are rich with various fascinating literary features such as art, vision, myth, fairy,
colonialism, feminism, magic, gossip, superstition, etc. Fairy tales are among the most significant genres in the
literature that have attracted both children and adults for centuries, though they were not meant for children
originally. The magic world of fairy tales, fantasy, spells, and enchantments, where everything is possible, form
the generic structure of this popular literary category in literature. The tales are imaginary and full of fears with
a happy ending that may resemble the incidents in real life and are meant mainly to give hope and pleasure to
women. They survive since they are full of wonders and give pleasure and create a world where women can
break the silence and talk about the unspeakable.

The central question in this paper is how fairy tales could affect the lives of women and why their tellers
were specifically women. To answer this, I will first demonstrate on her novel The Beast to the Blond and then
her other two works, The Lost Father, and Indigo or Mapping the Waters. Examining fairy elements in these
novels reveals that fairy tale plays a significant role in the stories and has been created for women to empower
them and fulfill their wishes.

Key Words: Fairy-tale, Female, Imagination, storyteller

 1. Introduction

Fairy tales embody certain components such as magic, spells, fantasy, imagination,
superstition, witches, heroines, wicked stepmothers, etc, which make them recognizable in
every story. Fairy or wonder stories are old stories that undertook renovations and
amendments with time. They live in our imagination, and vision, and enter our life through
the visual media. They are alive, since they give pleasure with a happy ending, help us to live
in the real life, and teach the women to stand the injustice and talk or stay silent if they prefer.

This paper is going to search for the answer to the questions of what the elements of the
fairy tale in a story are and what are the reasons that the author is using them. Simply, they
were not written for the children from the beginning. To answer these questions, I will
examine Marina Warner’s novels, The Beast to the Blonde, The Lost Father, and Indigo, to
look for any points relevant to fairy content such as imagination, making wishes, pouring
spells, and magic. For the start, I will refer to Warner’s The Beast to The Blonde (1994) and
some other critics to support my sayings.

The Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers is a great book full of various
enchanted tales from Charles Perrault, the Grimm Brothers, and Hans Christian Anderson, as
well as some other famous tales like The Beauty and the Beast, Donkey Skin, as well as Walt
Disney’s with its use of visual media. The book tackles certain major elements of these
stories in two sections, the tales, and the tellers.

The tales were narrated orally, especially by older women to the children, but changed to
written and visual forms with the creation of the printing system and the visual media.

Joann Conard in his Review of The Beast to The Blonde in The Journal of American
Folklore (1999) assumes that one of Warner’s reasons for writing this book is to remove the
barriers between oral and literary forms in the fairy tale and refers to one of her sayings that
…oral purity is doomed to failure… language conducts from mouth to page and back again…
(559).

What Warner means is not discrediting the verbal form, or favouring the written, but the
metamorphosis and recreation from exchanging these patterns over time.

Besides, due to their rich and extraordinary contents, they even entered poetry and the poets
like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, and others used their supernatural features in their songs.
 Warner somewhere in her other book Once Upon a Time (2014) indicates that the
language of fairy tales is poetic, and the poets deployed the imaginary powerful voices of the
fairies so that they can openly talk about ‘unheard’ things (11).

It is also through this power of imagination that fairy tales communicate meaning to the
reader or the viewer (xix).

Warner demonstrates certain other issues in her The Beast to The Blonde (1994) and
declares that when the tales are converted, the history inside them must be saved for it
displays the true condition of the society in those times and so when she creates or presents
characters such as the evil stepmother, a witch, the incestuous father (as in Donkey Skin), the
demon lover (Bluebeard), and even the silent daughter (The Lost Father), she is keen to
repudiate any theory of archetypes.

The archetypal approach leeches the history out of the fairy tale. Fairy or wonder tales,
however farfetched the incidents they include, or fantastic the enchantments they concoct,
take on the colour of the actual circumstances in which they are or were told. While certain
structural elements remain, variant versions of the same story often reveal the conditions of
the society which told it and retold it in this form. (213)

Warner rejects the idea of misogyny in the existence of wicked characters in fairies and
believes that the tales open an opportunity for women to express their ideas (xix). Warner
assumes that if there were malevolent stepmothers, the history and living conditions in those
times must also be noted and the idea that all new mothers were evil must not be accepted or
be generalized to all women (66).

When she refers to ‘where the boundaries are’, she means there is no limit to fairy tales.
The wondrous tale world in which anything can happen shows exactly where the boundaries
lie and enable us to deal with reality better. It helps us to see the actual world and to visualize
a fantastic one. (xx) Its wonders, … disrepute ‘the apprehensible world in order to open
spaces for dreaming alternatives’. (67)

A critical writer, Susan Sellers in her book Myth and Fairy Tale in Contemporary
Women’s Fiction (2001) remarks that she agrees with some of Warner’s ideas (partly
mentioned) and with the simplicity of the fairy tale genre and adds that the starting statement
of ‘once upon a time’, gives a fixed paradigm to the story which makes the reader follow it
and the magic with the idea of ‘anything can happen’, softens the hard incidents of the story
and reduces the tension since they cope to the desires. In other words, it shows our wishes are
promised to come true.

At this point, I would also like to refer to Jack Zipes’s cites in his When Dreams Came True:
Classical Fairy Tales and Their Tradition (1999) on fairy tales as a critical writer on fairy
tales who translated The Brothers Grimm’s tales. He believes that fairy tales ‘serve a
meaningful social function’… for revelation in a society: the worlds projected by the best of
our fairy tales reveal the gaps between truth and falsehood in our immediate society (29).

Zipes in his critical book by examining Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian
Anderson or The Thousand and One Nights (a great tale of Persian origin), and some other
stories tries to show how the authors used this genre to illustrate their personal desires, or
their political and aesthetic preferences in their social contexts and more importantly how
they can use them to create changes in the civilizing process by transferring the social and
cultural values to children and adults.

Considering all these comments and explanations on the fairy tale, we can deduce that
Warner’s adherence to this distinctive literary genre has several implications. She has strong
Feminism views and with these, she is trying to give value to women and encourages them to
proceed in their life and follow their wishes. She recreates a story within another story (as in
Indigo) to make them alive and then employs all the elements in the story to put forward her
social and political viewpoints in modern society.
The second part of Warner’s The Beast to the Blonde (1994) deals with the storyteller. The
role of the storyteller is very essential in fairy tale discussion and in Warner’s opinion. It is
also prominent in The Lost Father and Indigo. This is the teller who creates a balance
between fantasy and the real world:

The storyteller offers a way of putting questions of testing the structure as well as
guaranteeing its safety, thinking up alternatives as well as living daily reality in an examined
way. (411)

Regarding this, Warner indicates that the ambiguous role of the storytellers is to join the two
worlds by leaving an ambiguity within the tale to adjust the gap while the narrator herself is
interwoven in the story:

In popular narratives, their shuttles flashing back and forth between oral warp and
literary woof, the character of the teller encloses the tenor of the tale; how the teller enters
and takes part in the story, becomes a protagonist; how Mother Goose herself exemplifies the
type of the story she tells. (131)

The female storytellers are strongly represented as Sibyl of Cumae, Mother Goose, St. Anne,
the Queen of Sheba, etc. The storyteller is indeed the Sibyl of all periods and places who
bridges historical and cultural gaps (11).

Even though the realities in the tale are hard, the storyteller speaks in an optative or hopeful
voice. The female-centered fairy tales are in a language that serves them to resist the
powerful dominations (410).

Conard in his article which was cited before adds that there is a structural connection between
these tellers and their verbal powers and the fairy tale wicked stepmothers and witches
besides the virtuous heroines. Conard believes that all of them expose the simultaneous
attraction and risk associated with the female figure: the subtle princess, the sorceress, and
the storyteller all finding their powers in the word, the charm, the riddle, or, in fact, ‘silence’
(560).
In The Lost Father (1988), the narrator, Anna, and her mother are story-telling Sibyl-like
figures. In the mid-1980s, the narrator retells her mother's family story, while she is in the
process of rewriting it as a novel called The Duel.

All the tales are fabricated by the narrator’s imagination, Anna, who tries to fill the
unrevealed parts of the story by using the diary or inquiries of others. The main teller is sibyl
who tries to connect the past to the present. The storyteller, Anna, searches for her family
identity in the memories of her mother and uses the diaries to weave the incidents one after
the other. While she is trying to collect the information for drafting her book ‘Duel’, she is
also filling the gap between the events as a storyteller.

The narrator, then, admits that she has changed the circumstances in the story on purpose, so
the incidents may not have happened the same way or Davide could have died in another
situation!

Here again, it is the weaving and imagination power of Anna which forms every incident in
the story. She has been chosen to demonstrate the writer’s interests to us.

Marina Warner in her studies on fairy tales also concentrates on their tellers; among the first
of them was the Cumaean Sibyl who gave a tradition to storytelling that continued in
sibylline voices everywhere around the world. As Marina Warner illuminates Sibyl’s ‘words,
originating in the past, apply to the rolling present whenever it occurs.’

Here, the main point lies in the connecting joint between the past and the present. The Sibyls
are attaching the past to the future and transferring the tradition orally through the ages. Anna
is the Sibyl, for she is searching for the family history and transmitting it to others. Her main
source was memories of her mother Fantina, who has a shadowy character and does not
remember exactly all the facts, and what she tells is from her mother. The oral transmission
is, as was told before, the role of the females.

Anna, the narrator, tries to reconstruct the circumstances of her mother's life in New York
and Italy, and the mysterious events surrounding the death of her grandfather, Davide
Pittagora.

At the end of the novel, Anna with her mother goes to America to find out more details about
the family history and the legend of Davide’s duel for her book.
The story depends on the narrator and the same story can have as many versions as various
narrators retell it. Anna has no real witnesses, but her mother’s memories, relatives, and some
newspapers.

In this fiction, Rosalba is ‘the narrator’ of the fairy-tale and she identifies herself with
Carmelina. She would like to adapt the story to reality, but she realizes that it is impossible.

Another storyteller is Franco, Rosalba’s younger brother. He is a musician who is preparing a

play for an opera. He promised to celebrate the fascist leaders in an opera he is going to write.
He has chosen the story of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba to retell and apply it to the
present political state.

The story of the Queen of Sheba is chosen here on purpose. Warner describes her “as a seeker
after wisdom, as a putter of hard questions, as a woman who learns

and passes on what she has learned”. (97)

She compares her to the Sibyls with their prophecies all around the world and with these
examples stresses the important position of women in the world’s history that is sometimes
overlooked.
Indigo or Mapping the Waters (1999) includes three stories, each told by Everard’s black
maid Serafine, who prophesied in them for young Miranda and Xanthe and later Miranda’s
mother Astrid. Indigo sends the readers into the lives of silenced characters: Sycorax,
Caliban's absent mother and the original ruler of the island, Ariel, an Indian girl, rendered as
her adopted daughter, and Miranda

The storytelling opens and closes with Serafine, the Sybil who connects the 17 th century to
the 20th century of post-colonial.

In Indigo, there are three stories told by Serafine, the Sybil, who tells magic stories to
Miranda, Miranda and Xanthe, and Miranda’s Mother. The stories with a magical structure
were told to give moral lessons. The first one has a happy ending for Miranda and gives her a
lesson, but the second one, the Caribbean myth of a sea monster, Manjiku, brings a sad
ending for Xanthe’s future life, and she dies.

The tales do not have a happy ending, though they are in the realm of fairy stories, but
somehow predict future incidences, give moral lessons, and have a deep message inside to
immigrant women like her, to English invaders, the colonizers, etc. She is indeed the voice of
mute women who try to keep their identity in foreign countries.

As storytellers do (224) in the book may suggest that like the protagonist in the Lost Father,
Serafine can fabricate the stories as they fit her intentions.

Conard (1990) believes that the role of storyteller or soothsayer is marginal and strongly
performed by female figures who are ambiguous, and this ambiguity gives them the power
and they can also treat: Sibyl of Cumae, Mother Goose, St. Anne, the Queen of Sheba,
Marie-Jeanne, L’Heritier, Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy, and Angela Carter are some of the
women storytellers Warner produces to support her claims (360).

In his idea, Warner considers the role of storytellers as hyphenating the two worlds, posing
and mediating riddles through the tales, and the reconciliation of the gap (360).
 The Lost Father

The Lost Father (1988) is Marina Warner’s imaginary memoir of an Italian family
undergoing different incidents in the stream of life. This fiction portrays realistic family life
in a historical period within a specific culture. Here the imagination of the writer Anna and
the fantasy of the main character Rosalba form the setting for the fairy to be inserted into the
story.

Rosalba tries to stick to her imagination and fantasy and live in the created world where she
can reach her desires and feel happy. In her imagination, she resembles Carmelina, a fairy
tale character, who could grab her prince from Zenaida the witch. By the power of
imagination and fairy, she sinks herself into another world where her wishes are promised.

Did Zenaida burn up, poison herself by the robe of a prickly pear? Had she had time to
free Tommaso from his changed shape? Had Rosalba, no Carmelina broken the spell which
held Zenaida herself captive? Did she put on the magic dress, the dress made of pain and
courage, and become herself transformed into a human woman, lovely and gentle, whom
some other wicked creature had once enchanted too? (66)

Another fairy-tale element that Warner has included in Warner’s study is gossiping.
According to her, ‘gossip and fairy tales have in common a cavalier relation to accuracy…
they can achieve considerable, even dangerous, influence…the old can oppress the young
with their prohibitions as well as enlighten them. But the tale-bearing will, in either case, pass
on vital information about the values and beliefs’… (49).

When Rosalba’s mother realizes that her daughter suffers from her ugliness and so she tries
to calm her by another gossip about a girl in the neighbourhood. She gives her an example of
what happened to a beautiful girl from Rupe, the village they were living in.

‘It’s much easier to be happy in this life without prettiness. The beauties go to the bad,
you only have to think of what happened to Serafina…her poor mother, what is she to do
with her, two babies already, and both of them by Lord knows who?’ (23)
Devaluation of the role of women in life and suppressing sexual desires through her mother
are evident here:

You know too, my darling, my perfectly named Rosalba, that what men do with
women isn’t worth much, not to women like you and me. It’s another kind of woman, poor
things, who are born with cravings because their mothers were too much exposed to the hot
wind from the south when they were carrying them…. (24)

Rosalba receives no attention or eagerness from Tommaso, but she does not realize this truth
and lives in her imaginary world where everything is going to be as she wishes. She tries to
identify herself with some fairy tale characters, and other times she is dreaming about her
love. Her imagination helps her to bear the reality, but later she even loses the connection
between what is real and what is just in her mind. She seems to live in her imagination.

The more of a villain or a lout Tommaso Talvi appeared to others, the sweeter she
found her task of siding with him, of divining the exceptional qualities in him, of standing by
his side. This was the proper enterprise of the loving wife, to defend her man…. (87)

Dreams also are formed in another part of the story by Davide and Caty where Davide
dreams of Tommaso. In one dream two horns are growing out of Tommaso’s forehead. They
are ‘lumps like a kid at birth’. (29)

The evil side of his dream will follow Davide in his destiny and will lead to his death
eventually.

Tommaso appears as evil in another dream, this time Caterina’s.

On the whole, the tale is replete with gossip, superstition, dream, and fairy character, which
are the symbols of the fairy world, and the protagonist, Rosa, tries to find her wishes in her
imaginary fairy world. She is silenced and the fairy world of her imagination is a way out to
be happy and satisfied while frustrated because of her loneliness and ugliness.

Magic power gives strength to women if they can not cry their desires.

The story also empowers all females in the story as Devide’s wife after his death.
 Indigo or Mapping the Waters

Indigo (1992) is a post-colonial tale based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611) which
constructs an interlink between two narratives, a 17th-century adventure, a colonialist story,
and another one between the same Caribbean Island and London in the 20th century.

The story is full of many adventures and includes some elements of fairy tales.

Making a wish shows the traces of fairy in this novel.

Miranda makes a wish when Xanthe is born. She is the fairy character by making wishes for
the child: a good nose, hard common sense, a hard head, and a heartless of statue (58-60).

Characters of prince or princess are also emblems of this genre. Also, Xanthe, the young aunt
of Miranda, is shown as a character in fairy stories:

…shook more golden dresses and slippers from the wishing tree (297).

The moment of the slave’s child (Dulé) delivery from the drowned slave at the hands of
Sycorax is a miracle, also the noises that haunt the island or Sycorax speaks in the noises that
fall from the mouth of the wind, are all indications of fairy features in the book (85).

Serafine, the black Caribbean maid in the Everard family, narrates specific stories that
illustrate this literary genre quite clearly. These tales are told in three

portions, Serafine I, II, and III.

Between the first two Serafine is the tale of the modern Everards, the christening Xanthe, the
story of the invader Edvard and his long story, and Dule rebellion against the island’s
invaders. It is between Serafine II and III that the new colonialism of contemporary Everards
and his siblings are narrated, which peaks at the tragic revolt of Liamuigan islanders against
the tourists.

In tale I, she says the story of Midas, a king who was given a magical power by a god.
Whatever he touched, he turned into gold, and he turned her only daughter into gold by
reckless touching. This was a curse by the evil god for the king. The elements of fairy are
evident here in this curse and the magical power of the king in the tale. Serafine by telling the
stories is foretelling the future incidents of the Everard family, which mainly includes,
Miranda and Xanthe. She warns Miranda about the future events that may happen to her:
 Don’t you let anyone know who you are or notice you too much. Always be a secret
princess, sweetheart. (12)

The word ‘princess’ gives fairy power to the girl, Miranda. Serafine is making Miranda ready
for the future life, which is full of pains and dangers, by telling such stories.

The second story told by Serafine is Manjiku, a male sea monster who devours females,
especially the pregnant ones, to bear a child of his own. Here again, the story includes some
supernatural characters like the monster, a silver starfish woman, a magic flower, a curse, and
the god of fire and life. In this enchanting story, it is the female character who loves her
husband, sacrifices herself, breaks the spell, and defeats evil. By telling this devil-included
tale, Serafine tries to give another lesson to Miranda and Xanthe:

Only a woman who knew what real love is could undo its power. (224)

The third tale by Serafine is told in the hospital where Sir Anthony Everard’s daughter-in-law
sleeps unwell and isolated. Serafine is the only person who comes to look after her and
decides to tell her a story of a tigress:

I heard a story these days going around about love that would break your heart, Miss
Astrid. (400)

She tells the story of a tigress who is tricked by hunters that put a ball-like mirror when the
animal was passing and then attract her attention. Then, when the tiger sees herself so small
in it, she stops there and is captured by the hunting men.

There is no magic in the tale other than the mirror that is used symbolically. Astrid sees
herself completely de-characterized both in the mirror and in the photo, without ‘any smell or
fur’, and ‘ugly as sin’ (401-2).
 Conclusion

Marina Warner embedded fairy tale items to manifest her purposes in writing her novels. By
manipulating these literary skills, she is trying to encourage women to express themselves,
break the silence and talk, or stay quiet if they prefer so. Fairy tales are commonplace for
women to make wishes and expect that one day they come true. Warner has strong Feminism
views and tries to give value to women and encourages them to proceed in their life and
follow their desires.

In this article, the three books of Marina Warner were analysed for the fairy elements to
illustrate the writer’s purposes in creating them:

She recreates a story within another story (as in Indigo) to make them alive and then employs
all the elements in the story to put forward her social and political viewpoints in modern
society.

Warner’s tales are cross-generational and cross-cultural. The Lost Father exemplifies the
‘silent’ woman, in which the female character in a patriarchal family remains quiet through
the story and hides her inner intentions as Rosalba in The Lost Father.

Warner gives power and superiority to the characters in all these books. She makes Rosa
happy by making her follow her dreams and ignore her mother’s warnings, gossip, and
patriarchs of the family. Not all women dare to do so. Anna, the female character, has the
authority to weave the story as she likes. She can decide where the direction of the story
would be, and Devide’s wife will continue to live alone after his death with her children.

The Queen of Sheba is the symbol of an experienced wise woman.

Warner’s Indigo, as a postcolonial rewriting of The Tempest, contains stories told by

Serafine, who is living in a foreign land but has a kind and positive attitude to all members of
the family. Although she lives with them as a child carer and a storyteller, her voice is the
same as that of Warner in her books, optative and kind.

Serafine tries to use fairy stories to warn the young girls about their future life and the
dangers they may face and make them prepared. There is a message in all her stories, also for
Astrid who is addicted to alcohol and was abandoned by everyone.
The voice in all these stories belongs to women and must be heard more than before. They
can use fairies to reach their desires and be happy.

To conclude, fantasy is a world where women can live there while living in the real world. It
helps to solve the problems and move on. Fairy tales can have some social and political
messages for the contemporary period. They were made to give an opportunity to women to
make their voice heard, regardless of their nationality or colour.

The storytellers are essential to transfer the tales and fill up the historical gap and keep it
alive. Warner, though a writer, is herself a storyteller, for she weaves stories in the way they
fit her own goals.
 References:

Conard, JoAnn, Reviewed Work(s): From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their

Tellers by Marina Warner, 1999.

Dearnley, Elizabeth., Interview with Marina Warner, July 2013.

Hanafy Hany Helmy, Voices in the Noises of the Isle: Marina Warner’s Indigo and
Revisioning

Shakespeare’s The Tempest, 2005

Sellers Susan, Myth and Fairy Tale in Contemporary Women’s Fiction, PALGRAVE, 2001

Warner, Marina. Indigo, or Mapping the Waters. London: Chatto and Windus 1992; Vintage

1993.

---. From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers. London:

Chatto and Windus 1994; Vintage 1995.

---. The Lost Father. London: Chatto and Windus 1988; Vintage 1998.

---. Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale Marina Warner. Oxford

University Press, 2014.

Zipes, Jack.When Dreams Came True: Classical Fairy Tales and Their Tradition,1999.