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Agents of Enchantment: Surrealism Revisited Through the Fairy Tale

Supervisor: Caroline Levitt
Advisor: Dorothy Price

In resistance to the prevailing rationalist ethos that had come to shape life in 20th-century European society, André Breton’s first Manifesto of Surrealism (1924) proposed a radical reassertion of the imagination as a revolutionary psychic force. Equating the practice of imagination with freedom of thought, Breton asserted man’s vital need for enchantment, for the eruption of the marvelous in the everyday — for “fairy tales to be written for adults, fairy tales still almost blue.”
Taking this mission statement as its basis for investigation, my thesis examines the significant yet largely overlooked relationship between Surrealism and the fairy tale, asking how the archetypal logic and narrative elasticity of the genre served as both mirror and medium for Surrealist imagination. By “fairy tale” I refer to a transhistorical narrative mode—circulating between oral, literary, and visual forms—in which a magical state of reality is communicated through a rhetoric of wonder. To wonder, as posited by Marina Warner, “communicates the receptive state of marvelling as well as the active desire to know, to inquire”, signalling two defining characteristics common to the fairy tale and Surrealism: pleasure in the fantastic, and curiosity about the real. Through repeated acts of symbolic projection, the familiar plots, characters, devices, and symbols of the fairy tale are reconfigured in line with fears and desires emerging within specific socio-historical conditions; the resulting tales, as described by Jungian scholar Marie-Louise von Franz, “are the purest and simplest expression of collective unconscious processes”, reflecting the archetypal patterns and symbols of the collective psyche without the overlay of specific conscious cultural material typically found in myth. While both psychoanalysis and mythology have been widely explored as central frameworks in Surrealist studies, no sustained academic survey of the role of the fairy tale in Surrealist art and ideology exists to date. This thesis redresses that gap, drawing scholarly attention to the profound resonance between the fairy tale corpus and the products of Surrealist thought.

Through a series of case studies, the thesis explores the Surrealist recasting of fairy tale themes, motifs and tropes in accordance with concerns central to the movement, demonstrating the emergence of a Surrealist fairy-tale vernacular through which a critical gaze was cast on modern life and an alternative worldview was propounded. This study demonstrates the critical value of the fairy tale as both a generative methodology and key interpretative framework for Surrealist works. In tracing how the movement mobilised enchantment as a mode of critique and renewal, this thesis reveals the fairy tale as a vital imaginative structure through which Surrealism sought to re-enchant modern life — transforming the everyday into a site of poetic, psychic, and spiritual potential.