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Fairy Tales in Waterland
1 "Fairy-tale words: fairy-tale advice. But we lived in a
fairy-tale place… Far away from the wide world"
1.1 Much like the setting of a fairy tale, the Fens are a
ficticious location. Equally, they behold community
completely isolated from society, meaning that
scandal is amplified. However the difference lies in
the physical appearance of the landscape: the Fens
are entirely flat and monotonous, a stark contrast to
the rolling hills, lakes and landforms of a make
believe story. This would suggest that the fens are
perhaps further from reality than a fairytale.
2 Sarah, transformed by her solitude and a blow that
stole her life, becomes the reason for her family's
success while she lives, and, after her death, its
downfall. Underneath this fairy-tale, however, the
narrator hints of another, less attractive truth -- that
perhaps Sarah does not watch the community from
her room, but lives in an institution "trussed up in a
straight-jacket" (85). Or perhaps, as some think, the
asylum her sons built in her honor was actually built
for her to inhabit. Over the years, legend builds
upon legend, concealing a potentially horrible truth.
The fables, being easier to bear, remain.
2.1 Yet, whether a mystical force or a madwoman, a
blessing or a curse, Sarah's presence and her
wrongful punishment continue to haunt the
community long after her death. In 1914, forty years
after her funeral, the Atkinson's brewery burns
down, and someone sees her watching over the
conflagration, repeating the only words "specifically
attributed to her in all the years following her
husband's dreadful fit of rage . . . 'Smoke!', 'Fire!',
'Burning!'" (84). Even Sarah's death cannot stop the
power she has acquired in the eyes of the
community.
2.2 Fairy-tales have less power to shelter the narrator as
time progresses. Sarah's granddaughter, Helen Atkinson,
follows her father into seclusion after the brewery burns.
Whether Ernest Atkinson set the brewery on fire himself,
or others struck out against him, the destruction of his
family's empire becomes yet another part of the curse.
For four years, from 1914 until 1918, they seldom
venture from their hall. The townspeople imagine
another set of fairy-tales about a beautiful daughter
trapped against her will by her father. In response to
their story-building, the narrator comments, "in every
myth there is a grain of truth" (215). During these years
alone, both father and daughter change:
2.2.1 A strange thing, but the more the war progresses (if
that's what wars do), the more it loses its fairy-tale
flavor, its rally-round-the-flag, all-over-by-Christmas
flavor, and becomes something appalling, something
quite unlike a fairy-tale, so the more beautiful grows
this daughter. And the more despairing (of mankind)
and worshipping (of his daughter) grows Ernest. Till . . .
Ernest Atkinson beats a headlong retreat, backwards,
inwards, to Paradise, and starts to believe that only
from out of this beauty will come a Saviour of the
World
3 As the madness grows in the world outside the enclosed
space, another sort of madness -- not entirely different from
what the townspeople imagine -- grows within. The world
plunges forward in a feeble attempt at progress while Ernest,
in the face of the apocalypse, seeks retreat into a new
beginning, spinning a fairy-tale around himself and his
daughter to protect himself from his despair. He wants to
become the father of this Saviour that his daughter will bear.
Helen, who grew up in this not quite sane environment,
"love[s] her father, both in the way a daughter should and in
the way a daughter shouldn't"
3.1 but she realizes that this child should not be. Instead, she
urges her father to build a hospital, and in 1918, the
Atkinson's build another asylum to house the shell-shocked
soldiers. She herself emerges from seclusion, transformed
into a nurse with the power to heal. She does not, however,
heal the soldiers as her father imagines, "by the sheer
magic of her beautiful presence" (224) but through telling
stories -- "a way of bearing what won't go away, a way of
making sense of madness" (225). For her, for Ernest, and for
her son, Tom, story-telling plays a fundamental role in
coping with the past; it creates a cushion of distance
between the self and the event, making it easier to bear.
3.1.1 Eventually, as with the war,
the story cannot support
itself. Unable to bear the
madness of her home and
of her work, Helen strikes a
terrible bargain; she will
bear her father's child if he
will let her marry one of her
patients. This child, far from
becoming the Saviour of the
World, is a "potato-head"
and a murderer. The
mystical fairy-tale Ernest
created falls to pieces,
giving way to the perverse
madness it attempted to
conceal. Tom cannot
salvage the tale either; he
possesses Ernest's journal
from those years. He also
has the evidence of his idiot
brother. He can, however,
follow Helen's example and
turn the horror into a story.
4 In another age, in olden times,
they might have called her holy
(or else have burnt her as a
witch) . . . They might have
allowed her the full scope of her
mania: her anchorite's cell, her
ascetic's liberties, her visions
and ravings . . . Now she gets the
benefit of psychiatry
4.1 He cannot turn this into an acceptable
story or his wife into a mystical figure.
She is his wife and this is his present; he
cannot create the necessary distance. He
can only acknowledge how she might
have been perceived in another time, yet
her treatment would have remained the
same. Whether in a cloister or mental
hospital, society keeps the mystics or the
insane in a place apart, because in their
minds, they do not live in the same
world.
5 he presents the problem that arises when
narrative can not be separated from reality:
5.1 He escapes to story-books. Because he can still do that. Jump from one realm to the other, as if they
shut each other out. He hasn't begun yet to put the two together. To live an amphibious life. He hasn't
begun to ask yet where the stories end and reality begins. But he will, he will
5.1.1 Ironically, in this passage Tom speaks of himself in the third person; his reality becomes a
story and he becomes a character in his story. Storytelling comforts Tom, but it also
fractures his understanding of himself.
6 Martha Clay: known locally as a "witch", lives in a run down cottage in
the Fens. Mary and Tom go to her following realisation of the pregnancy,
at which she performs an 'abortion'
7 allusions to fairy tales embedded within the novel from
the off - this blurs the margins between fiction and
reality, contributing to the artistically abstract narrative
structure and overall concept of the novel
8 "Children to whom, throughout history, stories have been told, chiefly
but not always at bedtime, in order to quell restless thoughts; whose
need of stories is matched only by the need adults have of children to
tel stories to, of receptacles for their stock of fairy-tales, of listening
ears on which to unload those most unbelievable yet haunting of
fairy-tales, their own lives"
8.1 What fears does Crick seek to quell?