| Although frequently dismissed as wish-fulfillment fantasy, fairy tales have supplied archetypal story and image patterns that remain effective within the realistic domain of English fiction. Reflective of the heroic initiation formula described by Campbell and Eliade, the classic fairy tales yet apply it on a domestic scale that allies them in thematic emphasis and in plot design to the novels of even so elegant and morally purposeful a narrative artist as Jane Austen.; Austen's novels, indeed, characteristically focus upon the courtship experience of a young woman whose character and/or fortune in life is to be determined by the critical choices she must make among men and modes of value in moving from the parental home of her childhood to the marriage settlement that represents her achievement of independent adulthood. The career of each heroine involves a specific growth ordeal which nearly parallels that of a popular fairy tale protagonist, Austen's maturing young woman encountering within her mannered society challenges to perception and judgment analogous to the perils posed for her fairy tale counterpart in the archetypal forest of folk tradition. Bruno Bettleheim's analysis of the didactic method of fairy tale in The Uses of Enchantment suggests a strong kinship with Austen's narrative technique, and his commentary on some of the best-known tales provides a useful psychological perspective for comparison of their central maturational dramas with the novelist's studies of moral growth, which clearly mirror their structural patterns.; Like the fairy tales, in fact, Austen's novels may be divided into two basic groups according to the personality-type and functional role of their heroines. All of her protagonists are relatively youthful, socially vulnerable females, but some possess the inner powers of judgment and self-control necessary for rational, principled behavior during the courtship ordeal, while others must learn by trial-and-error to discipline their perceptions and their actions to serve the demands of a complex adult society. These latter, commonly lively and assertive personalities, resemble the mischievous "peasant girl" heroines of fairy tale who typically involve themselves in danger or difficulty through their own misjudgments or egocentric carelessness; the quieter, more innately gifted heroines, on the other hand, share the trials of the unjustly persecuted, frequently imprisoned "true princesses" of fairy tale, whose special virtues are to be recognized and rewarded only after long, painful endurance.; Each archetypal protagonist, then, is matched with a story pattern that tests her character and challenges her to overcome the internal and/or external obstacles to her triumph of moral and emotional selfhood. Elinor Dashwood's Snow White-like sufferings from maternal jealousy, Fanny Price's Sleeping Beauty-like maturational trance, and Anne Elliot's Rapunzel-like emotional exile exemplify the passive "princess" mode of heroineship, while Marianne Dashwood's Red Riding Hood-like seduction by a wolf/libertine, Elizabeth Bennet's perceptual conversion, a la Beauty and the Beast, and Emma Woodhouse's dialectical progress toward an abrupt, Goldilocks-style awakening embody the self-deluding "peasant girl's" education in reason and self-control. In each case the novel's fidelity to archetypal pattern invests its narrative with a thematic and structural backbone that serves to ground its ironic energy in timeless moral/social values and to focus its romantic power in a traditional comic vision of constructive growth and change. |
