The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [77]
The phrase for someone living from “paycheck to paycheck,” before they had paychecks, was that they were keeping the wolf from the door—just barely managing to keep the wolf from overpowering your defenses and eating you and your family alive. Hungry like a wolf describes an erotic, tumultuous hunger. A wolf in sheep’s clothing is the very definition of betrayal; Jesus uses the term to refer to false prophets. The phrase wolf it down lets us imagine how it looked to watch a wolf eat. It was a terrifying spectacle. Scarcity was not only about wanting to eat; it was also about not wanting to be eaten.
Nowadays the story of the three little pigs sounds like a lesson in carpentry, but this is a story of savagery. The pigs are children. The wolf—teeth bared, drooling, and wily—is an adult. Wolves do not huff and puff and blow things down. It is a magical talent, attributable to the wolf because the monster does get in, somehow; and of course it is dramatically sexual. In the original versions, the wolf eats two pigs, and only the third brother does better. The brick house, though, is not what saves him, because the wolf is persistent enough to leap onto the roof and drop down the chimney. He almost digs the last pig out, but intelligence wins: that pig has ready a stewpot of boiling water on the fire, and the big, bad wolf himself becomes a symbolic meal.
Life is dangerous and thrilling. Parents and children compete for resources and attention, most Americans eat meat and understand its relationship to their friends at the petting zoo, and everyone wants to be so desired that they are brutally consumed. Scary, yes, but also exciting. And in fairy tales, these scary scenes are played not only to face the fear, but to indulge in the pleasure. As Djuna Barnes put it in her 1936 novel, Nightwood: “Children know something they can’t tell: they like Red Riding-hood and the wolf in bed!” The fairy story’s “happily ever after” is real: we went from being a monster’s prey, to not. We once were wolf food, begging the beast to let us go, with no recourse to the law. We got rid of the wolf. Welcome to paradise.
What about the fairy stories that let a poor girl marry a prince and then live happily every after? Marriage and family seem to do people a lot of good. Also, the poor girl—Cinderella, for example—was in a bad way at the beginning of the tale: covered in cinders from tending the fire, a task both filthy and dangerous. She was poorly nourished, her friends were mice and birds, and on winter nights she was cold. At the end of the tale she is warm, fed, clean, and befriended, and likely happier, ever after. Basing our assumptions on modern research, we may surmise that ten years after the famous royal ball, she would still rate herself much happier than when she was in ashes.
“Happily ever after” made sense at the end of fairy tales because of the level of drudgery and hard work that was taken for granted at the start. Again, these were largely women’s stories, and throughout history women have been occupied with the making of thread, cloth, and clothing. A little girl’s first family chore was to wind the bobbins with the thread her mother had spun. If a sigh is uttered from “the distaff side” in church, it means it comes from the women’s side (until recently much worship separated men and women), because the distaff was the bowlike instrument onto which women