The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [75]
Fantasies of superfluous abundance are one of the happiest things cultures have offered, and almost all cultures offer at least one. In the Hebrew Bible there is “the land of milk and honey.” In medieval Europe there was the “Land of Cockaigne,” where joints of meat grew on trees, macaroni fell from the sky, and pigs ran around with forks and knives in their backs, calling out, “Eat me!” This was something different from travelers’ tales of wondrous places; it was a generally acknowledged fantasy, so it had no logical boundaries at all. The wild paintings of Hieronymus Bosch owe much of their imagery to tales of the Land of Cockaigne.13 There is also the Koran’s depiction of heaven overflowing with grapes and wine. (Yes, alcohol is forbidden on Earth, but handed out in heaven.) And abundance fantasy abounded in the lush European descriptions of the New World, where fish were said to leap out of the rivers. When larders were bare, heaven was sweets and meats.
Such abundance fantasy was harmless fun, not revolutionary planning. Yet it was a little subversive, especially in its rejection of religious self-denial. It was also a childlike rejection of adult reasonableness and a feminine rejection of masculine seriousness. The idea that children were more wild than adults rings a bell for us today, but we tend to depict women as the civilizing force in society, and men as big babies, led around by their immediate desires. This was not so through much of history. Self-control was often understood as a masculine virtue, and indulgence was the provenance of the female. At the feasts of carnival and the imagined festivities of the Land of Cockaigne, the women were in ascendance: there were images of wives dancing, feasting, and riding their husbands around the town square. Images of the fecund New World were often also female, and tough, fleshy girls they were, too.
Perhaps the greatest visions of abundance happiness are to be found in fairy tales. These visions of happiness are rich, bountiful, and explicitly lasting. In fact, their most consistent phrases show that they begin in a singular moment—“Once upon a time”—but that their characters experience a relief that lets them “live happily ever after.” Fairy tales are only stories, but they are a mighty source of our happiness assumptions and fantasies, as well as of our conflicts and ambiguities. A look at them here will repay the extended attention.
Fairy tales were bedtime stories for children, or stories told by the old ladies while they were spinning thread, weaving, or sewing. Naturally, they are filled with the fears and hopes of mothers and their charges: worry over wicked stepmothers should the mother die, worry over the dangers and uses of beauty, worry over starvation, dreams of fortunes birthed continually from farm birds, nightmares of the hungry wolf. Because they are so often told in the moments between wakefulness and sleep, or while engaged in hypnotically repetitive work, fairy tales have the quality of dreams: they mine the subconscious, and they do not eschew the inexplicable. Because they are not included in the idea of high art, they cannot justify themselves on the basis of any of high art’s fancy values. They are honed by time and necessity: if they aren’t good, useful, and wanted, they get forgotten. Each individual story is proven important by virtue of its longevity.
Any fairy tale that takes a desperately poor person and gives her a home and an endless pot of food has actually earned the famous last line—and this is what a lot of fairy tales are about. Fairy tales are profoundly concerned with food. The stories originate from regular