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American Folklore

© Virginia Marin

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When I was a young undergraduate, we had a great literature professor. He was charming, relatively young, good-looking, entertaining, intelligent and a great lecturer, a double trilogy not often found among male professors. In addition, he also smoked a pipe and wore a bow tie. We adored him...

He reminded us in different and exciting ways at the beginning of each class of the wonderfulness of American folklore and of its uniqueness in this genre.

One of the defining themes found in American folklore is that down-to-earth, every-day-type-of-living is something the tale's hero must learn to value and enjoy, rather than something from which he must escape as is prominent in tales from other countries.

Authors such as L. Frank Baum, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott and Ruth Plumly Thompson entered into the heart and soul of American culture by creating characters who relied on inner strength and discovery rather than other-world magic. Their words and thought patterns underwent a drastic change in order to sustain these "American values".

Washington Irving, Howard Pyle and Carl Sandburg remythologized the traditional stories by forcing the reader to recognize that the challenge and activities found on American soil provided more than enough setting and inspiration for any tale.

The typical European fairy or folk tale takes place in a fixed society in which the usual theme is that boy or girl, through some type of magical intervention, becomes rich or marries into royalty. These characters must succeed within a fixed social system. Continental tales are rich with all manner of beasts; oceans which have no shores; stars without a sky; unending symbolism; personification and alliteration. Not so in American tales.

American tales are unique in that the world changes to fit the circumstance instead of the characters changing to fit into the world. For example, Rip Van Winkle after having enjoyed a twenty-year nap awakens to learn that his British colony has become a new nation--out with the old, in with the new! His world as he sees it through newly opened eyes is an oddity. He is perplexed at an entirely new and strange society in which he plainly feels to be a misfit.

In American tales wealth is not predominent, neither are good looks nor social standing. In Hawthorne's Feathertop a witch turns a scarecrow into a gentleman who enters the real world for the expressed purpose of showing everyday people the snobbery of the well-to-do.

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