| Fairy tales, with their potentially revolutionary message that lower-class people can ascend to power, helped to shape social attitudes during the Romantic and early Victorian periods. Victorian novelists used allusions to fairy tales to criticize their society for its failure to fulfill the tales' ideals. As writers became more disillusioned about their society's possibilities, however, they altered the models, rewriting the tales to reflect their disbelief in the social myths these folk narratives embody.;This study focuses on three tales: "Dick Whittington," which embodies the social desires of working-class youths; "Cinderella," which imagines a better life for women through passive acceptance; and "Beauty and the Beast," which links social elevation to Christian sacrifice and the taming of violent male instincts. In Dombey and Son, a Whittingtonian career is a realistic possibility for Dickens's lower-class hero, Walter Gay; later, in Great Expectations, the fairy-tale message is undercut by the alienation and bitterness of Pip's failed expectations. Charlotte Bronte evokes "Cinderella" to positive effect in Jane Eyre but undermines this tale in Villette, as she recognizes the implausibility of fairy-tale fulfillment for Victorian women. The message of "Beauty and the Beast" is implicitly accepted in Jane Eyre but is rejected by Emily Bronte in Wuthering Heights and George Eliot in Middlemarch, in both of which "beastly" males remain untamed by the heroines. In each case, as the fairy-tale model of a society in which social and economic advancement comes through individual merit no longer seemed tenable, the writers revised the traditional tales to expose the limitations of society.;Nineteenth-century writers of original fairy tales proposed new social ideals to replace the traditional measure of success in terms of wealth and political power. George MacDonald offers a society modeled on Christian virtues and cooperation to overcome obstacles. Oscar Wilde's fairy tales reflect a radical rejection of material society and base success on individual transfiguration and love. By the end of the century, the fairy tale itself had undergone radical change in response to the social conditions it served to question. |
