Beastly Humans, Humane Beasts: The Blurring of Human-Animal Boundaries in Fairy Tale Retellings for Adults
Beastly Humans, Humane Beasts: The Blurring of Human-Animal Boundaries in Fairy Tale Retellings for Adults

Summary/Abstract: The goal of this study is to examine how fairy-tale retellings for adults blur the boundaries that separate humans from animals. Uninhibited by the restrictions imposed on children’s literature, these retellings take the genre back to its subversive origins, depicting a more complex and intimate human-animal relationality. Drawing on Ann-Sofie Lönngren’s more-than-an-thropocentric reading strategy, the essay mobilizes a metonymic approach that attends to fairy-tale animals as animals rather than as metaphorical stand-ins for humans. By applying this approach, the study traces the literal presence and relations of humans and animals in these retellings, making visible the dynamics of embodiment, agency, and entanglement that are obscured when animals are reduced to metaphor. This method resists the speciesist tendency to reduce fictional animals to their symbolic functions in the service of hu-man meanings. The corpus consists of adult retellings of “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Goldilocks and the Three Bears,” and “Jack and the Beanstalk” from Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow’s six-volume anthology series. These tales are selected for their shared motif of human disregard for territorial borders – of trespassing: Jack steals treasures from the giant’s castle, Goldilocks breaks into the bears’ home, and Little Red Riding Hood ventures into the woods. This study demonstrates that these retellings blur human-animal boundaries by anthropomorphization or zoomorphization, or by fusing them through consumption or copulation. These narrative strategies create various forms of hybridity that denaturalize the categorical distinctions humans use to separate themselves from animals and expose the constructedness of these boundaries.

• Details
• Contents