From Folktales to Fiction: Orphan Characters in Children's Literature

Library Trends, Wntr, 1999 by Melanie A. Kimball

INTRODUCTION

   Once there was a child wandering about on the earth who was an orphan. He
   had neither father nor mother, and he was very sad. Nobody paid any
   attention to him, and nobody asked why he was sad. Though he was sad, the
   child did not know how to weep, for there were no tears yet in the world.
   When the moon saw the orphan child going about, he felt compassion: since
   it was night, the moon came down from heaven, lay down on the earth in
   front of the child and said, "Weep, orphan child! but do not let your tears
   fall on the earth, from which people get their food, for that would make
   the earth unclean. Let your tears fall on me. I shall take them with me
   back to the sky." The orphan child wept. Those were the first tears in the
   world, and they fell on the moon. The moon said: "I shall now give you the
   blessing that all people shall love you." After the child had wept his
   heart out, the moon went back to the sky. From that day on the orphan child
   was happy. Everyone gave him whatever delighted and gladdened him. To this
   day people can see on the moon's face the stains of the orphan child's
   tears, which were the first tears in the world.--The First Tears (Algeria:
   Kabyle)(1)

Orphan characters in folktales and literature symbolize our isolation from one another and from society. They do not belong to even the most basic of groups, the family unit, and in some cultures this is enough to cut them off from society at large. In other cultures, orphans are regarded as special people who must be protected and cared for at all costs. In either case, orphans are clearly marked as being different from the rest of society. They are the eternal Other.

Orphans are a tangible reflection of the fear of abandonment that all humans experience. Orphans are outcasts, separated because they have no connection to the familial structure which helps define the individual. This outcast state is not caused by any actions of their own but because of their difference from the "normal" pattern established by society. Orphans are a reminder that the possibility of utter undesired solitude exists for any human being.

Orphans are at once pitiable and noble. They are a manifestation of loneliness, but they also represent the possibility for humans to reinvent themselves. Orphans begin with a clean slate because they do not have parents to influence them either for good or for evil. They embody the hope that whatever the present situation, it can change for the better. When orphans succeed against all odds, their success ultimately becomes ours. We can look to orphans and say, "You see, there is hope for all of us if even this orphan child can overcome obstacles and succeed." Characters such as Dick Whittington and Yeh-Hsien (a Chinese Cinderella variant) go from rags to riches and so can we.

Orphan characters are prevalent in children's literature, both in folktales and in fiction. What is the relationship between the two? Are there patterns in folktales which recur across different stories and cultures? If such patterns exist, do they also occur in literary treatments of orphans? This discussion will show that such patterns can be found in folktales and that they do have a parallel in literary orphan stories.

METHODOLOGY

For this study, I examined fifty folktales from different cultures (see Appendix A) to find similarities, differences, and patterns which contributed to the evolution of the literary orphan hero and heroine. I found most of the tales by using The Fairy Tale Index (Eastman, 1926, 1952; Ireland, 1985, 1989; Sprug, 1994), The Storyteller's Sourcebook (MacDonald, 1982), and Thompson's Motif-Index (L111.4-L111.4.4, "The Orphan Hero"). I found the remaining tales by searching through folktale collections for children.

I used several criteria for story selection. First, both parents of the orphan had to be dead (according to the American Heritage College Dictionary, 3d ed., an orphan can be a child who has lost only one parent). Second, the story had to be a folktale rather than a literary tale. Literary tales are stories created by a particular author. Examples of literary tales which include folkloric elements but which are not really folktales include the "fairy tales" of Hans Christian Andersen and Oscar Wilde. Folktales, by contrast, include "all forms of prose narrative, written or oral, which have come to be handed down through the years" (Thompson, 1946, p. 4). It is impossible to separate the written and oral traditions because they have become so interconnected (Thompson, 1946). While this crossover between literature and oral narrative makes it difficult to discern which is the "original" version, all of the stories in this study, as far as I have been able to determine, are folktales that originated as oral narrative.

Third, I limited the study to those stories which were available in English or English translation. I tried to cast a wide net across a variety of countries, ethnic groups, and cultures. In many cases, I had to take the stories at face value, as source notes were either very sketchy or nonexistent. Some collections, such as Raouf Mama's (1998) Why the Goat Smells Bad and Other Stories from Benin, had very detailed notes and explanations of changes that were made to the stories from their original form, while other collections, such as those of Ruth Manning-Sanders, had no notes at all beyond listing the country of origin.