Nineteenth-Century American Fairy Tales

Given the derivative nature of so much of American children’s fiction of the day, the emergence of the gigantic stands as a marker of distinctiveness between British and American products. In comparison to the British giants of the period, American giants are far less likely to be used to promote temperance or social reform or to make jokes about a fairy-tale past at variance with the contemporary world. Rather, in several stories, mountain-sized giants help worthy children, carrying them long distances; the American emphasis is on size, commerce, and virtue. When giants and fairies are brought together in American children’s narratives, the home-grown continent-bestriding giant is likely to be kind while the elf or dwarf, more closely drawn from European models, is likely to be plotting subtle malice. We can sense why Americans were drawn to this mode of the gigantic, and why it was so amenable to the self-fashioning of nineteenth-century American consciousness, especially if the giant is construed as powerful but good.