Debussy's Paris by Catherine Kautsky

Author:Catherine Kautsky [Kautsky, Catherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2017-08-07T04:00:00+00:00

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Fairies and Fairy Tales

Fairy tales were very much on the minds of Debussy and his countrymen. The early collections by Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm appeared in the first half of the nineteenth century, and these were in fact the first fairy tales to cater to the unsullied imaginations of children rather than the jaded mindset of adults. Posters like the one in figure 8.1 were endemic. The tales are now understood to play an important role in children’s comprehension of their perilous world, and psychoanalysts, most famously Bruno Bettelheim, have written extensively about the function of fairy tales in the mind of a child. “The child intuitively comprehends that although these stories are unreal, they are not untrue.”1

For a child, the boundaries between reality and illusion are far more porous than for an adult. Even children old enough to “know better” can conjure themselves into a witch at Halloween, embrace Santa Claus at Christmas, and welcome the Tooth Fairy (or “la petite souris,” a beneficent mouse who visits only French children) when she alights at their home. Debussy and his contemporary symbolist poets were likewise still able to imagine being as mighty as the wind, as powerful as the elephant, as exquisite as a fairy, and as seductive as a water sprite. They greeted Cupid in Jean-Antoine Watteau’s fête galante paintings with enthusiasm and attended masked balls alongside the “fantÔmes” of Pulcinella and Scaramouche. They defied their own limitations by taking on other identities, and since those identities featured eternal life, then, by extension, they defied mortality.

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