A Research Fairytale (written for my research seminar)

Once upon a time, a girl wandered into a wood. Now this wood was not particularly magical, or so she thought. She liked the wood- she always liked places where she could hide among trees- and she had been in and out a half dozen times before. But that had been different. This time, she had a purpose. And when one catches onto a purpose, one tends to notice things that had somehow escaped the mind’s notice before.

You see, one day the girl had been sitting and listening to an admired tale-turner speak about fairytales. The tale-turner mentioned that one could interpret fairytales differently depending on one’s worldview. Having read various versions of “Little Red Riding Hood,” another girl questioned the amount of violence in Roald Dahl’s version. The first girl, the one who found herself in the wood, had stitched the two ideas together almost involuntarily. The butterfly that often perched on her ponytail voiced the question for her, and once a thought is voiced it gains a life of its own.

“I wonder,” began the butterfly, “whether Dahl makes Red bloodthirsty to show her exercising her power as a woman (for the tale itself- in some telling- seems to have been a puberty story of sorts, marking a loss of innocence) or whether he is commenting on the corruptibility of women.”

“That’s a very complex thought for such a silly bug,” remarked the girl.

“It was your thought,” the butterfly retorted, “Now go ask the tale-turner what to do with it.”

The tale-turner had suggested that they search for the answer inside the wood. She had instructed the girl to notice particularly the blue leaves and purple flowers, which would guide her to her answer. And so it came to pass that the girl entered the forest with a purpose: collecting the blue leaves and purple flowers which could be arranged into an answer. Hardly more than two minutes into her journey, she realized that she didn’t know what kind of tree had the oddly colored foliage that she was searching for. So she sat down and grabbed a handful of wireless data from the air around her. She was close enough to home still that the air was just filled with emails, text messages, journal articles, pictures, and other useful things. She shook her handful of data and asked it where she could find these trees. The data shimmered for a moment, and then it told her to look for the species known as PR6054.A35. After taking another moment to find the butterfly and writing this name down on one of its legs, she thanked the data, released it, and headed on her way.

A little further on, she came across a shimmering pool of voices. She asked the pool what it could tell her about Roald Dahl, careful to remember that the voices were not all-knowing and were sometimes even mischievously deceptive. At first, she was frustrated. The pool refused to help her because she didn’t have the right plugin. Something about Flashplayer. Then, however, she coaxed it into giving her the basics.

She found out that Roald Dahl had experienced a lot of loss and violence in his early life. His sister and father died when he was very young; he had been beaten by teachers (mostly female) and hazed by classmates at British boarding schools; he had fought as a fighter pilot in World War II; he had been blinded temporarily as a result of a plane crash (and, she read skeptically, he fell in love with one of his nurses during this time and fell out of love only after he regained his sight). He had buried one daughter, nursed a maimed son back to health, and nursed his wife back from a debilitating pregnancy complication that left her partly blind and paralyzed. This before divorcing her to marry her recently divorced and much younger business friend, with whom he had been having an affair.

Knowing that the voices are not always accurate and are rarely objective, the girl still noted these fragments of fact on the butterfly’s legs. If she could find two or three other sources with the same claims, she would give them credit. In the meantime, they gave her a rough place to start.

The pool also told her that Dahl was born during the first surge of violence in the feminist movement. He was born in 1916, three years after Emily Davison- whomever she might be- was trampled by the king’s horse on Derby Day- whatever that is- while protesting for women’s rights. She learned that Dahl was Norwegian and also that he died in November of 1990, the month and year in which she was born. Finally, the pool told her to begin her search 800 paces north and 79 paces to the left.

Lo and behold, at the location indicated by the pool she found four trees with blue leaves and purple flowers. She quickly climbed the first tree and began to search among the golden winter leaves for the few oddly colored ones that would somehow help her out. First she found “American in style.” Then she found “schooled in Derby 1929.” As she wondered if this Derby was the same as the one where that Davison person was killed, the butterfly pointed out to her that the branches of the trees were widely spread out and that the sun was setting quickly. Realizing that she didn’t have time to teeter out onto the edges of the tree-limbs, she decided to settle for the leaves and petals that she could collect from the ground beneath the trees.

There had recently been a strong winter wind, and so there were plenty of fragments on the ground for her to collect. She gathered them into a black bag with a picture of some pears on it.

“Boarding schools used corporal punishment,” she read. Maybe Dahl was bitter about the adults who beat him in schools. Maybe this was why he gave the youthful Red such power.

“Buddies with Hellman, author of The Children’s Hour,” she read, “Married Children’s Hour actress Patricia Neal.”

“Wrote The Honeys about two sisters who murder their controlling husbands.”

“Wrote Madame Rossette with strong sexual undertones but which ultimately features a man stopping a woman (a brothel owner) from abusing other women (the prostitutes).” Could this indicate feminist sympathies? Or perhaps this is more about the corruptibility of women in groups, whether they seek to destroy each other or an external being such as a husband?

As she threw these leaves into her bag, she stopped to admire the shape of one of the leaves. She fell into a daydream about writing an ecological version of the three little pigs in which there are actually four pigs. The first two build their houses of straw and sticks, using nature but not using the brains that nature gave them. The third builds his house out of bricks that he molded out of the clay-heavy soil and dried in the sun, using nature and his brains to construct a sturdy home. The fourth pig builds his house out of glass and screens, rejecting nature and getting eaten along with the first two pigs. The girl was then torn between wondering what would happen if the wolf were an orthodox Jew, and so refused to eat pork, and wondering about whether the life plans that she and her boyfriend had been recently discussing could be described as made out of hand-molded brick. She hoped so, murmured something about a garden, and startled herself back into real time having wasted only 3 minutes of sunlight. Still, she rebuked herself for being so foolish.

She focused on collecting as many leaves and flowers as she could in the remaining time. As soon as she found a flower which seemed to absolutely declare that Dahl was a feminist looking to empower the meekest of women (“The reviewer for Time made special note of Dahl’s gallery of females’ Intrigued by the deceptiveness of these characters’ gentle demeanors, this reviewer described them as ‘lovely ladies, indeed, but heaven help the poor man who falls into their clutches”) she would find one which asserted with equal confidence that Dahl was focused on the flawed nature of both women and men (“He presented caricatures of human frailty”).

He seemed to be preoccupied with sex to an extreme extent. Some leaves of a different shape, consistently sympathetic to his first wife whom he divorced, claimed that he was obsessed with it, emphasized his interest in D.H. Lawrence as if such an interest indicated nymphomania automatically, and subtly implied through choice of diction that he was particularly feminine and insecure even as he engaged in multiple affairs and wrote shorts for Playboy. The girl wasn’t personally familiar with Playboy, but she found these leaves curious when contrasted with the leaves from one of the other trees (for there can be many varieties of a single species of tree, and the girl knew this quite well). The other leaves seemed to focus on how he was protective of young girls- possibly due to the early loss of his sister- and how he frequently wrote about one sex struggling for power over the other.

As the last glimpse of sunlight sank below the horizon, the girl caught a glimpse of a woman’s shadow flitting between the trees. “Follow me,” she ordered someone out of sight, “I’ll bring you where you need to go, but don’t think I’m staying around once we get there.” She was one of Dahl’s characters, a twilight apparition. The girl thought about the leaves and flowers she had gathered. There was not time tonight to collect enough for her to construct a full picture out of them. She was hardly sure how interpret even the little that she had. She looked at the butterfly.

“It seems,” he said, “that Dahl placed women over men but children over all. And he couldn’t stand cruelty without a purpose.” The girl shook her head.

“It seems,” she said, “that I shall wait in the dark for a while yet. But I learned about yet another children’s author whose life wasn’t exactly G-rated-“

At this moment, the tale-turner appeared to guide the girl out of the woods and into the safety of her home for the night. However, when they arrived at the girl’s home, she declined to enter.

“If you don’t mind,” she began, excusing herself to the tale-turner, “I would like to sit out in my garden for a bit. You see, I’m just fascinated by stories that pretend to be for children but aren’t. I’m intrigued by authors who pretend to write for children, but who really have their own agendas. This is why I’m interested in fairytales in the first place; this is why I’m curious about Seuss and Sendak…and now Dahl.”

“A garden is a good place to think,” responded the tale-turner, “and if you can propose three wishes…well… I can’t guarantee that I can grant them, but I can point you in the right direction.”

A murmured “thank you” was all that the girl could manage. She thought a moment and then shook her head. “I don’t even know enough to know what to wish for yet,” she confessed, “I need more time in the woods.”

“Take your time and get all you can from the woods,” encouraged the tale-turner, “Just remember to look other places too. Try a meadow or something. There are flowers there too.” And with that, she vanished, leaving the girl in the dark garden wondering what it would be like to be a sunflower.

**"Trees" used included:

Roald Dahl by Mark I. West (Twayne Publishing, NY 1992)

Roald Dahl by Jeremy Treglown (Jeremy Treglown, NY 1994)

Over to You by Roald Dahl (Reynal and Hitchcock, NY 1946)