Only in a Fairy
Tale:
Discerning the Form
through the Art of Illustration
This will be a 5 part series based on my final project for my course this past fall on the Brothers Grimm and fairy tales. Each post will take on a certain aspect of the fairy tale as a genre, and unpack it by looking at a specific illustration. Hope you enjoy and look forward to hearing your thoughts on the illustrations and my analysis!
Part 1
Once
Upon a Time…
Fairy tales inhabit the world of
“once upon a time”. They are not
bound up by history or specifics of culture or the intricacies of clock time,
they dwell in the land of “faerie” and have rules of their own. Within the world of fairy tales, we
begin in a place that mirrors reality, but then as the journey sets off,
usually through the dark woods, we enter a space where anything can happen,
mothers and fathers can abandon children, wolves can devour you alive, and
witches in confectionary cottages will bake you for dinner. “Once upon a time” is a sort of “dream
time” or “literary time”; it is outside of time, “upon” or above it. It is a place where time itself breaks,
the rules of time do not exist, and real time no longer is. In this way, it resembles closely the
idea of Kairos, moments where “clock
time” seems to open up and no longer exist, where time falls away.
In
Anton Pieck’s illustration for Hansel and Gretel, we see this magical house,
amid a callous, dark forest.
Shadowy figures loom in the background, as a warning to the reader that
perhaps this place is too good to be true; unfortunately Hansel and Gretel are
not privy to this knowledge until it is almost too late. The witch’s house dwells in a time of
its own, and the rules of reality, the fact that a house could not really stand
made of mere sweets, do not hold.
In Derek Stratton’s illustration, ideas of time and different levels of
reality jump out at the viewer.
Hansel and Gretel stand at the foreground, balanced on the threshold
between the dark forest and the tempting candy land. The witch stands as observer, more than that as a god figure
of this realm of time that she dictates, with the peppermint hypnotically dangling,
she controls each step that the siblings take and whether or not they will
survive. That is until the wit and
cunning of a real world child supplants this “once upon a time” goddess.
