'Red Riding Hood and the wolf in bed': Modernism's fairy tales (James Joyce, Ireland, Djuna Barnes, Virginia Woolf)

Though fairy tales appear consistently in modernist literature, there have been few explorations of their significance. Fairy tales are not just stories from the folk but part of the fabric of modernity; part of academic discourses, children's literature, and commodity culture. In works from the 1920s and 1930s, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Djuna Barnes use fairy tales as a system of reference that bridges high and low art, and that involves readers in the act of interpretation. Allusions to Continental fairy tales inform characters' approximations of cultural norms based on class and gender, and signal the possibilities and limitations of negotiating the demands of consumer societies.; The transmission and reception of fairy tales from the court of the Sun King to the London of T. S. Eliot indicate the layers of readings and retellings that accrue to the texts. The result is that fairy tales are not stable points of reference, but instead indicate interpretative possibilities, as signaled by the image of the Wolf-as-Grandmother from Nightwood. This history allows for resistant readings of previous encodings of the stories, as well as narrative experimentation. In Ulysses, Joyce reacts against the Celtic Revival's depictions of the folk and their lore, using Wilde's cracked looking-glass and versions of “Cinderella” to signify the gap between ideals and their enactments in the contexts of nationalism and consumerism. Woolf responds to gender norms of Victorian variants, especially those of her aunt, Lady Ritchie. While Woolf adapts stories from Perrault, she resists the inherited ideologies, capitalizing instead upon the disruptive aspects of pantomime versions of the tales. Barnes indicates the power structures that enable and restrict the stories' uses, refiguring her Grandmother's authority through several different fairy tale allusions. She associates the palimpsestic tales with cross-dressed bodies, suggesting that the texts' excessive meanings make writerly and readerly control of narrative provisional at best.; The approach to intertextuality signaled by Joyce, Woolf, and Barnes acknowledges and requires the active participation—the resistance as well as the compliance—of the reader, who negotiates the fairy tale and the modernist text as he or she would negotiate modernity itself.