Bees and Spiders: Constructing Identity in West-African and English Folktales

Folktales all over the world depict animals that discuss their problems just like human beings, they also participate in daily life as human beings, irrespective of their appearance. Their presence in folk tales is debated since some see them as masks to hide the identity of real people: “In these narratives, the animal characters have all the physical features of animals. Yet, everything else about them is anthropomorphic; they certainly behave like human beings. Thus they are regarded as masks for making social comments on contemporary issues.”(Okafor, 1991:191); others as creations of immature minds which aim at attracting children’s attention and nothing more. However, I believe animals are strictly related to the culture fairytales stem from and can also contribute to raise awareness on some contemporary key issues such as identity construction, gender and, lately, animal studies. The field of animal studies includes virtual animals as well as instances of “animality” in a text and focuses on the definition of human beings in terms of difference from the animals. Fairytales puzzle this approach for the hybridity they encompass, in which humans and animals share the same context, destroying the dichotomous approach: animals in fairytales are never defined in terms of similarities/dissimilarities from human beings. Seldom are animals ‘only animals’ in fairy tales: they acquire human features, in terms of aspects and also actions (they speak, they stand etc.). Boundaries between the two species are blurred thus uprooting the traditional binary vision used to describe human beings. In fairytales it is not possible to state what it means to be human and what it means to be an animal. ‘Humanity’ is no longer portrayed in binary terms, nor can physical shape be considered a criterion to define characters. Fairy tales allow us to define humanity in broader terms, by looking at actions or feelings instead of just characters’ physical indexes. Starting off from these reflections, I would like to propose a contrastive analysis of English and West African fairy tales to track how animals manage to shape the characters’ identity construction, devoting particular attention to gender related issues.