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The Victorian Search for the Supernatural 

Having broached the frontiers of so many new fields previously mysterious and presumed supranatural—evolution, germ theory, electricity—the Victorians applied themselves with similar vigor to tales of yore, the stories of ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties and things which went bump in the night. Famously, no less venerable a figure than Arthur Conan Doyle devoted himself to seriously proving the existence of fairies, culminating in the embarrassment of the Cottingley Fairy Hoax; perhaps slightly less well-known is his devotion to Spiritualism, the Victorian practice of contacting the deceased via table-rapping, automatic writing, and spiritual ventriloquism. A fad begun by the three Fox sisters of Hydesville, New York, in 1848 when they claimed the ability to communicate with the ghost of a murdered peddler (a skeleton was subsequently found in the basement, supporting their claims), Spiritualism’s popularity demonstrated both the Victorian anxiety concerning their increasing distance from the values of the recent past, and the Victorian certainty that even Death itself could be circumvented with the right approach. Of course, one can only conjecture what sort of anxieties that raised, and what sorts of motivations were then projected onto the purportedly restless dead ….

Doyle was most famously a writer of mysteries, although he dabbled in the supernatural. He was in excellent company in that regard. Bastard love child of the genres of horror and mystery—both, themselves, descended from the venerable Gothic, and recombining incestuously—the ghost story became one of the most popular mediums (if you will pardon the expression) of story-telling in the nineteenth century. Half the time, Gothic tales fell into the lineage of the mystery genre purely because of their penchant for providing a realistic explanation for their purportedly supernatural events. The rest remained mysterious horrors and began to explore greater grotesqueries.

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The Most Famous Ghost Story of its Time

But the ghost story … ah, it is there, in works such as Henry James’ 1898 novella “The Turn of the Screw.” The tale takes its title from a frame narrative of sorts, in which a group discusses a ghost story concluded just before the reader has come onto the scene, in which a young boy witnesses an apparition before waking his mother to bear witness to its presence. The corrupted purity of the child adds a frisson to the horrifying concept of an unclean spirit haunting the premises, prompting our narrator at one remove to ask, “If the child gives the effect another turn of the screw, what do you say to TWO children—?” before proceeding to introduce a tale told to him by his sister’s former governess, now dead these twenty years, as written in her own hand.

In her journal, the governess recounts being hired by a mesmerizing gentleman of quality to care for his orphaned niece and nephew upon his isolated estate. and describes the effects of their beauty and innocence upon her. The journal reveals her gradual awareness of the ominous, repulsive, and yet somehow seductive presence of two strange figures upon the grounds, presences who, she realizes to her dawning horror, are a lowly menial and the former governess and are inappropriately involved with one another, in contravention of all Victorian standards of propriety. The pair had some strange, undue influence on the children, which continues beyond the grave. As the story progresses, it becomes apparent that these revenants appear only to our protagonist, and from her perspective, appear to appear to the children in order to further corrupt them. The paradoxical uncertainty of whether the governess is mad and the world is rational and as we know it, or whether she is sane and the world of order a twisted mockery of itself is the source of the fascination that the story has exercised, first upon the Victorians, and then upon every generation to come across it thereafter. The story’s conclusion implies a fear of corruption that is so overwhelming that it is easier to succumb to the worst possible outcome rather than suffer the inevitable process of contamination, even at the absolute cost of innocence: the turn of the screw, indeed.

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The Tone of Victorian Horror 

In his seminal essay of 1929, “Some Remarks on Ghost Stories,” M.R. James (no relation to Henry) commented: “Reticence may be an elderly doctrine to preach, yet from the artistic point of view I am sure it is a sound one. Reticence conduces to effect, blatancy ruins it, and there is much blatancy in a lot of recent stories.” It is that “reticence” for which the Victorians were so famous in so many avenues of their production, and it is that reticence which, though it may have lost traction in those other venues, keeps the genre of the ghost story firmly in that territory of ambiguity that Tsvetan Todorov called “the uncanny,” and of which he indicated “The Turn of the Screw” as its greatest example. Even today, our best ghost stories are haunted by the shade of that nineteenth-century attitude, which beckons the reader to delve more deeply even as it provokes an off-putting frisson of horror. But where the Victorian ambiguity signaled a deeply-rooted terror of the cost of hewing to their mores, as often as not, today’s stories gesture towards the inverse fear. We fear that all our deviations and explorations might simply leave us just where we started. We fear that perhaps, as Sartre put it, Hell is other people, and ghosts, with all the terrors that they provoke.

James concluded by saying, “There need not be any peroration to a series of rather disjointed reflections. I will only ask the reader to believe that, though I have not hitherto mentioned it, I have read ‘The Turn of the Screw.’” While I, as it happens, have, the sentiment holds.

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Out of Oral Tradition, Into The Salon

Although “Once upon a time” began as a way to avoid censure from the powers-that-be, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Fairy tales, rather than being concretely linked to a specific time (or place, considering the “in a land far, far away” bit) became universal, allowing and encouraging writers from generation after generation to adapt the tales and make them their own. Originally, our stories were not divorced from time and place in this fashion: When we read the Greek myths, we see the markers of time and place which tell us that this story happened in Athens, Cythera, Mycenae, Crete; before, during, after the Trojan War. But when fairy tales were in their prime, circumstances bade otherwise.

Fairy tales enjoyed their heyday in seventeenth century France, during the reign of the Sun King, Louis XIV. Two thirds of their tellers were upper class women, writing about the things which were of primary concern to their peers: marriage, childbirth, and inheritance, as Terri Windling has said. The young heroines of the tales were substitutes for their authors, as were the heroines’ wise advisors: the fairy godmothers. In fact, it is the fairy godmother who has given her name to the fairy tale. These French stories were known as the contes des fées, the tales of the fairies, a phrase which can be interpreted as being about the fairies or by the fairies. Their authors were known as conteuses.

The original fairy godmothers were very like their authors: They were aristocratic, typically nobility among the fairies; they were cultured and educated, with much emphasis placed upon their wit; and, perhaps most important of all, they were neither omniscient nor omnipotent. As the authors of the fairy tales had to be cunning in order to accommodate the demands of the Sun King and the world of men, so too were their creations. For example, the first and greatest of the conteuses, Mary Catherine d’Aulnoy, married against her will to a man more than twice her age, schemed to remedy her circumstances by having him condemned for treason. When her plotting was discovered and she was banished, she reportedly acted as a spy for Louis XIV in England, whereby she won the right to return to Paris. There she established her salon and began writing her tales.

Her creations exercise similar guile: Merluche, the godmother to d’Aulnoy’s Cinderella-prototype character Finette Cendron, most seriously counsels her protégé to abandon her wretched sisters and let them starve preemptively lest they betray her. Finette, like a good fairy tale princess, declines. Finette needs no one to rescue her, but happily beheads ogres, triumphs over her sisters, and wins the heart of her prince with little more than good advice, good sense, and the loan of a fairy steed.

So how, then, did we move from Cinderellas who readily swung axes to Disney’s Cinderella, who needed to be rescued by singing vermin? (As Jane Yolen put it, “Poor Cinderella. Poor Us.”) She didn’t do it to herself. From the sixteenth century onward, the popularity of the fairy tale rose with the exponential growth of literacy. While the fairy tale had once depended upon individual storytellers to carry it hither and thither and alter it slowly, print culture took the fairy tale princess and bent her to its own needs.

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To The Mass Market To Buy Me a Tale

The literary fairy tale’s popularity in France brought it next to Germany, riding a wave of immigration fueled by French refugees. As the Brothers Grimm embarked upon a project of story collection in the interest of preserving their Teutonic heritage, they had no idea how much these new arrivals would change their project.

The Grimms set out to capture German folktales, but their process of collection was contaminated by secondary orality. Tales which had been published fifty years earlier in France were retold verbally by recent immigrants to their first-generation children and native German neighbors, sometimes introducing new stories into their lexicon, sometimes altering the details of old ones. And while the Grimms had imagined their work as a scholarly endeavor, annotated and footnoted and destined for the dusty stacks of libraries, upon the publication of the first edition of the Children’s and Household Tales in 1812, they found that the majority of their correspondence came from the burgeoning, newly prosperous, newly literate middle class.

They heard specifically from the mothers of young children who desired to inculcate their offspring into their rapidly fading heritage, who implored the Grimms to edit out the … less palatable … details of the old stories, which had most decidedly not been composed with children in mind. In the six editions that followed, the tales grew less and less subversive, and more and more conventional. So, too, the godmothers and the princesses inside the tales—the former growing ineffectual, the latter simply … passive.

In short order, the British, at the nexus of prosperity, imperialism, and European literature, proceeded to repeat the process, first publishing a translation of the Grimms’ tales in 1823 before proceeding to translate and normalize the fairy tales of various nations, molding them into the uniform “once upon a time” and “happily ever after” brackets that we still keep to today. The godmothers, and, indeed, all the fairies, were quite literally diminished from their ancient grandeur and dignified seventeenth-century French elegance into the minute, garden-dwelling, flower-bedecked, harmless, be-winged, and—there’s simply no other word for it!—twee figures with which we still associate the word today. And as for the princesses? Passivity became their middle name, an image enhanced by their passage into and representation by yet another medium which increased their visibility in the twentieth century: cinema, as envisioned by Walt Disney.

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Disney’s Perfectly Passive Princesses

Disney selected and adapted the tales with an eye toward reinforcing certain specific princess-y traits, and there’s no coincidence that the heroines of two of the first Disney movies, 1937’s Snow White and 1959’s Sleeping Beauty, spend much of their tales not just helpless, but unconscious. At a time when America, and, indeed, the majority of the first world grew more democratic and less concerned with the quality of one’s blood and the rank into which one might be born, the image of the princess became more and more desirable. This can be attributed, first, to the social mobility which made it possible for even those who were “common as mud” to aspire to the trappings of royalty. Second, we have the conflation of “princess” with both the concepts of “femininity” and “just reward”—consider Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess, originally published as a novel in 1905 and adapted into a movie starring no less than Shirley Temple in 1939, just two short years after the release of Disney’s Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs. Burnett’s story emphasizes the innate nobility which belongs to any little girl who is kind and generous … and the bounty which is sure to follow. And third, we have the gradual transition to a focus on the commercial and material aspects of princess-hood—the trappings!—which focus less on inheriting a kingdom, and more on wearing the proper attire (the phrase “princess dress” brings to mind a very specific image).

This last element can certainly be attributed in no small part to the Disney company’s ever-burgeoning marketing schemes. They began by developing and advertising books related to the movies, grew into designing and selling character-related accessories, and eventually found a way to sell entire personas taken from the films. Only consider the fact that Disney markets both baby accoutrements and princess-themed wedding gowns. Should a woman choose to subscribe to the hegemony of the fairy tale princess, Disney is ready to carry her through her entire life cycle.

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A Royal Renaissance

How to rebel, you might ask? Many contemporary authors are doing so by reclaiming the image of the princess and recasting her. Their predecessors, the Victorians, responded to the co-optation of the fairy tale form by writing original fairy stories, such as John Ruskin’s “King of the Golden River” and Charles Dickens’s “The Magic Fishbone.” This eventually led to the birth of the field of fantasy. Many of these writers’ efforts, such as William Morris’s early novels, would eventually be published under Lin Carter’s Sign of the Unicorn imprint, which brought about a resurgence of interest in the idea of fairy tales not for children.

Much of the credit for the contemporary re-conceptualization of princesses should be granted to Terri Windling. Windling almost single-handedly began the fairy tale renaissance during her tenure at Tor Books, masterminding the creation of the Fairy Tale series (publishing authors such as Tanith Lee, Greg Frost, Patricia McKillip, and Charles de Lint, to name only a few) and editing the Red as Blood, White as Snow collections with Ellen Datlow, among other projects. Stories edited by Windling tended to feature deliberate twists upon tired roles and unexpected role-reversals: tales in which Snow White was the villain and the stepmother the victim, where Beauty preferred the Beast to the prince, where Sleeping Beauty saved herself. Patricia C. Wrede and other authors like her presented princesses like Cimorene, of the Enchanted Forest Chronicles, princesses who were practical, competent, and wholly fit to perform the most crucial actual function of royalty (so oft ignored): to prepare to rule. And today, writers are re-imagining not just the nature of the princess and the fairy tale, but the form in which she is presented. Authors like Catherynne M. Valente and Seanan McGuire are reenacting the salons of the seventeenth century conteuses on their blogs, telling stories not purely for financial gain, but also to amuse one another, expand shared universes, and, in the process, critique the world around them, their princesses, their emissaries (I highly recommend seeking out McGuire’s “Wicked Girls Saving Themselves” cycle).

Looking at these contemporary visions of the princess—the animated and highly marketed Disney princesses versus the princess heroines dreamed up by rising stars in the fantasy genre—reveals a dichotomy. In some ways, it appears the stereotyped image of the princess, passive and in need of rescuing, is quite dead; in others, the princess takes an inspiration from some of her most famous avatars, Snow White and Sleeping Beauty, and seems magically resuscitated. The princess is dead: Long live the princess?

Known by its Latinate name (cornus, horn, shares the same root as cornucopia, the mythical horn of plenty), the unicorn has a long and storied history. Differing from local myths such as Gorgons and chimera, who may or may not have been real (but who certainly haven’t been encountered recently), creatures such as the unicorn were believed to be very real, if somewhat geographically removed. Scholars of the ilk of Aristotle, Strabo and Pliny the Elder all reference fleet one-horned beasts, which they commonly located in fabulously distant India.

Some believed them to possess magical qualities from the get-go: In the 5^th century BC, Ctesias of Cnidus attributed the ability to detect poison and cure disease to the horn of the unicorn, making them that much more desirable. The “unicorns” of the early natural historians (called also monocerus, or, on occasion, cartazonos) resemble a variety of documented animals, from the graceful but double-horned oryx to the lumbering but single-horned rhinoceros. (In their defense, Marco Polo made the inverse error during his travels when he first encountered the rhinoceros in person, saying “They are not at all such as we describe them when we relate that they let themselves be captured by virgins, but clean contrary to our notions.” Indeed.) In a fascinating example of how oral transmission can affect a story, the unicorn appears to have been born from the amalgamation of different travelers’ tales, emerging an inadvertent chimera by the Middle Ages, with the delicate hooves of a goat, the tufted tail of a lion, and, of course, the famously spiraling ivory horn: He represented the desire to know the nature of the world, even unto its furthest corners.

Backwards formation inserted the unicorn into the Bible as well: Although the Old Testament references the re’em, contextually understood as a mighty horned beast who could not be tamed (and thought to have corresponded to the aurochs, known by the Assyrians as the rimu), the translators of the King James Bible made an editorial decision to translate the species of the re’em as well as its referent, transforming it into the unicorn. As symbolic representations go, in terms of virtue the unicorn fits nicely: The passages describing the re’em focus on its might and untamable nature, a characterization befitting both the might of God and the reputation which the unicorn had acquired by the fifteenth century (not a coincidence, as it happens).

During the Middle Ages, the unicorn acquired a dovetailing symbolism which played upon the notion of faith in the unseen, suitable for a mythical beast, and a pure love for the unattainable, inserted into the myth of courtly love via the purity of the virgin. The connection? The Virgin Mary, by way of one of the earliest bestiaries, the Physiologus.

Composed in Greek by an unknown author in approximately the second century AD and translated into Latin during the seventh century, the Physiologus provided a list of birds and beasts, fauna and flora, attributing complex allegorical meanings to them when appropriate. The unicorn was used as a symbol of Incarnation. In this version, the unicorn not only feels a magnetic pull to the lap of a virgin, but nurses at her breast, as Christ nursed from Mary.

The unicorn continued to be associated with Mary as well as with other, nonspecific virgins throughout its representation in medieval times, but by the thirteenth century, its reputation was expanded to allow for a more romantic personification: Courtly lovers were to worship their beloveds as the unicorn adored the virgin. This interpretation is preserved in the works of courtly troubadours and Christian philosophers such as Petrarch. This perhaps contributed to the more secular representations of the unicorn, as seen in the famous Unicorn Tapestries of the 1500s, where the unicorn leads the huntsmen on a merry chase before being captured and killed … and resurrected, pictured, in the final panel in captivity, a collar around its neck chaining it to a pomegranate tree (a popular symbol of fertility). By this point in time, the unicorn had also come to be seen as the symbol not only of chaste love but also of faithful marriage.

Nineteenth century scholar Thomas Bullfinch attributes the survival of the unicorn through the Middle Ages (alongside such creatures as the phoenix and the basilisk) to the fact that they had no connections to the “false gods” of Paganism. Certainly, this provides one plausible explanation for their popularity and their cooptation alike. Bullfinch describes the historical unicorn primarily through the lens of the classical philosophers, citing Pliny most extensively: He details the difficulty of hunting the prized creature, who was believed to be able to parry with its horn, and even to be capable of surviving great falls from rocky cliffs by using it as a kind of a pole-vault. However, his account of the medieval solution is … ingenious. He writes:

[…] they found out how to circumvent the poor unicorn at last. They discovered that it was a great lover of purity and innocence, so they took the field with a young virgin, who was placed in the unsuspecting admirer’s way. When the unicorn spied her, he approached with all reverence, crouched beside her, and laying his head in her lap, fell asleep. The treacherous virgin then gave a signal, and the hunters made in and captured the simple beast.

This reading seems to say more about the Victorian view of young women than it does unicorns: Indeed, as the unicorn myth continued to develop in a more secular society, many of its adaptations came to reflect as heavily—or more—upon its partner in crime as they did upon it. We can attribute that fact to the concretization of the unicorn myth in the Middle Ages and the changing role of women in society, as well as to the rise of the genre of fantasy in the nineteenth century, and the development of new generic tropes mete for the unicorn’s new environment.

Having appeared in many of the great romances of the Middle Ages which inspired the early fantasists, it’s not surprising that the unicorn would reappear in their indirect descendent, the fantasy. What is surprising is the direction its image has taken. In its earlier appearances in works like Lord Dunsany’s The King of Elfland’s Daughter (1924), the presence of the unicorn signals the incursion of magic, wildness, liminal possibility. But as the genre developed, it came to represent oh, so much more.

In works like Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn (1968), a unicorn quests for the last of her kind, signaling that magic has left the world … and restores it, albeit a little wiser, and a little sadder, now that she has known men. In marked contrast, Patricia C. Wrede’s “The Princess, the Cat, and the Unicorn” (1987) shows us the beginning of the backlash against the implications of the unicorn myth, where the unicorn’s desire for a maiden is a reflection of the worst of the hetero-normative expectations leveled upon young women for materialism, vanity, and shallowness. In Tanith Lee’s Unicorn Trilogy (1991, 1994, 1997), a girl’s repeated brushes with the species in all its guises—magical, mechanical, and everything in between—reveals the absurdity and possibility that are present within her normal purview, and herself.

And in Terry Pratchett’s Lords and Ladies, the unicorn’s fate tells us a lot about how far we’ve come. After sending the elves and all they signify—not just magic, but the alien magic that denigrates and diminishes humanity by comparison—back to Elfland, Granny Weatherwax shoes the unicorn. Not with iron, because the goal is not to subordinate it in turn, but with silver, in order to allow it to coexist in harmony with mankind in a way in which it hadn’t been allowed to in past iterations. The unicorn is no longer bound by the literal past mythology, where it has to die in order for humanity to benefit, and no longer artificially elevated by the fantasy tropes which Pratchett decries—tropes which create a hierarchy that places common humanity at the bottom of the pile. Today, our symbolism points to a hard-won détente: a truce between the magic of the unknown and the control of civilization. We’ve come a long way, baby—in our symbols, and in the desires of the collective subconscious that they signify.