Recognizing female sexuality: at 313, the maid as mentor in the young man's maturation

AT 313, The Girl as Helper in the Hero’s Flight, amongst the longest of Marchen, is also rich with complex symbolism, and requires, for a comprehensive interpretation, a much fuller treatment than can be adequately contained within the prescribed twenty minutes. It is for this reason that I focus principally on one aspect of the tale’s meaning, summarized in the first part of my title, Recognizing Female Sexuality. The second part of my title AT 313, The Maid as Mentor in the Young Man’s Maturation aptly summarizes what I feel would be an appropriate renaming of the tale type, if such a renaming were based uniquely on versions of the tale I or my students have collected from French Newfoundlanders over an almost thirty year period, and if, more pertinently, there was sufficient scholarly agreement on the meaning and function of the tale. In focussing on female sexuality in the tale, however, I wish to stress not only its centrality to an understanding of the tale’s meaning, but also the crucial significance of the relationship between tale interpretation and what Bengt Holbek called “the storytelling community.” My theoretical approach derives from Bengt Holbek’s Interpretation of Fairy Tales (1987). I trust it is safe to assume your familiarity with this most important study, if only for its insistence on the relationship of meaning to context, because my interpretation of AT 313, and of the many other folktales collected amongst French Newfoundlanders, is based on the same premise. The question of meaning in narrative, then, deals here with the specifics of one storytelling community rather than with universals or generalities. In drawing on Holbek’s work, I note that AT 313 is, by his definition, a fairy tale, i.e. a tale “which end[s] with a wedding or with the triumph of a couple married earlier under ignominious circumstances, after a series of events characterized by the occurrence of tale elements [...] defined as symbolic” (p. 452). For Holbek, symbolic elements are the marvellous motifs in such tales, and he argues that “symbolic elements refer to features of the real world as experienced by the storytellers and their audiences” (p. 435). They allow the narrator “to speak of the problems, hopes and ideals of the community” (p. 435). Holbek explains the metamorphosis of emotional impressions into symbolic expressions by a sequence of seven rules, including the split, particularization,