"How and to what effect does Elementals rewrite traditional forms of fairytale, myth and Biblical tale?"

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“How and to what effect does Elementals rewrite traditional forms of fairytale, myth and Biblical tale?”

There are many ways in which A.S. Byatt’s collection of short stories modify and seem to change the conventional fashion of fairytales, as well as myths, legends and religious or biblical tales. Every story has an element of old fashioned folklore but at the same time, telling it in a new and modernised way, and each self contained story creates its own atmosphere in relation to this. As fairytales are in fact dark and that of the Grimm’s tales, these stories relate more then, as within the narrative there is some factor of surrounding destructive power but also beauty, which rewrites the conventional fairytale, for example Cold. However, the myth which connects back to the epic Greek tragedies or love stories also plays its part, for example A Lamia in the Cevennes. Finally, as for the Biblical tale, Jael holds its own on religious imagery.

As Charles May commented the short story has ‘…remained close to its primal mythic source’ (The Short Story: The Reality of Artifice, 1995), and indeed Byatt attempts to do this.

Elementals uses particular linguistic and literary features to help rewrite the traditional forms, while not always using an obvious fairytale or myth, it uses the principles a reader would be used to seeing in these tales and adapts them to produce a new kind of story. Certain ways in which Byatt does this includes, through using women as the main characters, but as strong determined women. Typical structures of fairytale would have had a ‘damsel in distress’, rather than the independent tempers of, say, the women in Christ in the House of Martha and Mary or Crocodile Tears. However, Cold reflects traditional values of fairytale, and the main character ‘Fiammarosa’ reflects the conventional princess being courted by princes deemed suitable by her father. But, as the story progresses, it can be said that while the magical atmosphere of a fairytale is no doubt there, a new and different perspective has been decided. For instance, the image of cold and ice instead of sun and lightness (usually associated with fairytale princesses) dominates the narrative. So, although the theme of male domination seems strong within the tale (e.g. the husband building an ice castle for his wife), the princess is more powerful than the conventional ‘sleeping beauty’, for example, as she works out the best way in which she should live, and does not conform to her surrounding family’s expectations. This nature of the tale(s) relates to Angela Carters work ( The Bloody Chamber), of which fairytales were rewritten in an erotic and powerful way, but here her stories had a strong overt narrative, an obvious piece of work reworked for a modern age. Whereas, it seems Byatt’s stories are not always so apparent, and the reader has to look deeper for its connections to myths and legends, or in this case situations of role reversal.

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 Apart from the centralisation of female characters, other features in Elementals involve Byatts attention to not just intricate detail but the inclusion of foreign or continental communication. For instance, French phrases frequently seem to appear, obviously a lot more when the story is set abroad, e.g. Crocodile Tears mostly set in France. The effect of this technique is perhaps to create a certain feeling of realism, that the situation could possibly happen to the reader, but also because people tend to associate romance with this country - and romance is of course an expected element of fairytales and myths. In Crocodile ...

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