Key Principle
Fairy tales already occupy contradictory states — alive and dead, true and untrue, rooted and traveling, finished and unfinished — which makes them uniquely suited to generating uncanny fiction. The writer's task is not to make them strange (they already are) but to ground them in specificity until the strangeness becomes unbearable. Dean's method: root fairy tales in real places, add psychology, remove resolution, invent new motifs. — Claire Dean, "In the Forest, Stories Grow"
Why This Matters
Freud claimed fairy tales contain nothing uncanny because their elements (severed heads, dancing feet) exist in "obvious literary detachment from real life." Dean's counter-method reverses this: add real life to fairy tale elements and uncanniness follows. This is a concrete, repeatable transformation process. Each step moves the tale from the detachment Freud described toward realistic grounding, where the uncanny emerges from the collision of wonder and lived experience. — Dean, citing and countering Freud
The method also addresses the deeper question of what fairy tales are. Drawing on Jack Zipes, Dean argues that tales possess characteristics "like burrs, that help them latch on to us, travel with us, and thrive in unexpected places." Treating an inanimate text as a living, parasitic thing "takes us straight into the realm of the Uncanny." Walter Ong's formulation reinforces this: books are "corpses of once living tales that can be reanimated by reader or writer at any time." A fairy tale collection is literally an uncanny object — dead matter containing living potential. — Dean, citing Zipes and Walter Ong
Dean's Five-Step Transformation Method
- Root in real place: Hunt local legends, tourist boards, old newspaper forums, library history sections. "Traditions and local legends accrete in place to form crusts of story." — Dean
- Read fairy tale collections for unexpected details that will resonate when brought into a place you know well. — Dean
- Add realistic psychology: Fairy tale characters are ordinarily without psychology. Adding it creates disturbance — a real mother's exhaustion behind a queen's wish that her baby become a raven. — Dean
- Remove resolution: Replace "happily ever after" with ambiguity. An unfinished story "gives it a lingering resonance that brings it into our everyday reality." — Dean, cf. Hoffmann: "many a fragment of a clever story sinks deep into my soul."
- Invent new motifs: Once fluent in fairy tale language, create original tales that feel as if they should already be known. — Dean
Good Examples
The Raven in the living room: Dean took the Grimms' "The Raven" — a queen wishes her baby would become a raven — and set it in a Chorley living room where the transformed baby cannot get out the window. The wonder that passes unremarked in fairy tale becomes horrifying when it happens in a kitchen. Dean reports this "suddenly made it feel much more disturbing." — Dean
Zoe Gilbert's invented motifs: Gilbert's novel Folk creates invented fairy tale details that "some readers have claimed to find... familiar, as if they have read about them elsewhere." If you can invent a motif that feels like it should already be known — that the reader is sure they have encountered before but cannot place — you have manufactured the uncanny at the most fundamental level: the return of something that was never there. — Dean, discussing Gilbert
Counterpoints
Fairy tales are not automatically uncanny: Freud's objection is real — in their native detached context, fairy tale horrors produce wonder, not unease. The transformation method exists precisely because the raw material requires grounding to produce uncanny effects. — Dean, engaging Freud
False recognition vs. true return of the repressed: Gilbert's invented motifs produce the feeling of recognizing something that was never there. This inverts Freud's core mechanism — the "repressed" was never real. The uncanny effect is manufactured through fluency in fairy tale register, not through actual psychological suppression. — Dean, discussing Gilbert
Key Quotes
"Fairy tales are unreal but they are not untrue." — Max Luthi, quoted by Dean
"I write and retell fairy tales because I'm convinced they are real, that they are talking about our lives as we live them. Not idealized or fantastic." — Helen Oyeyemi, quoted by Dean
"I can hold two contradictory things in my head at the same time while I'm writing." — Graham Joyce, quoted by Dean. Context: The cognitive stance required for uncanny fairy tale fiction — maintaining ambiguity rather than resolving it.
Rules of Thumb
- Fairy tale + specific domestic setting = uncanny collision. The more ordinary the real-world setting, the more disturbing the fairy tale element becomes.
- Remove resolution rather than adding it. An unfinished fairy tale lingers; a resolved one closes.
- The wonder test: if a fairy tale element produces mere wonder in context, it needs more real life. If it produces unease, the grounding is working.
- "Speaking fairy tale" — creating authentic new motifs — requires deep immersion in existing collections before invention. Fluency precedes invention.
- The dual states of fairy tales (alive/dead, true/untrue, rooted/traveling) are themselves uncanny. A writer can foreground these contradictions rather than resolving them.
Related References
- The Uncanny: Core Framework — Freud's return-of-the-repressed mechanism, which Dean both uses and inverts
- Negative Space and Withholding — Withholding and removing resolution connects to Dean's step 4