Find this necklace at The Lost Dog

Steampunk + Fairy Tales: Why It Works

By Gypsy Thornton

Something odd happened to Steampunk this year. It grew arms, legs and Etsy shops, transforming from a loosely defined niche genre into a widely embraced movement. In the process, "steampunkers" began dusting off old volumes of fairy tales and taking them along for the ride. Suddenly a whole lot of people were not only rediscovering their favorite tales from childhood but mining lesser known ones to "steampunk" (yes, it’s now a verb too).

But, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s wind the clock back a bit and pull out our magnifying goggles to see if we can pinpoint just why combining fairy tales with steampunk seems to capture so many people’s imagination and just, somehow, works.

With its organic and rapid development in the past year, steampunk is doing a great job of dodging a succinct definition so, for the purposes of this article let’s just put up a parasol (or, if you prefer, an umbrella) and include the offshoots of dieselpunk, stitchpunk, steamgoth and clockpunk. In fact, let’s include everything that uses a pre-modern form of technology with an echo or more of Victorian sensibilities and get right to the heart of why people of all flavors are jumping on the steampunk train.

It comes down to one word: accessibility.

From highbrow to lowbrow, high-tech to low-tech, be it geek, historian, designer, romantic, antidisestablishmentarian (phew!), neo-goth or cutting edge stylist, steampunk can be enjoyed by everyone in different ways and at different levels. Writers get to play with characters ranging from gritty gutter-rats spouting bawdy language to high society gentlemen cavorting in a comedy of manners and everyone in between. Artists blend their favorite old motifs with new ideas, appealing both to lovers of the cool/cutting edge and the classic/retro tradition, while your local handyman gets to show off all the tricks of his trade in "steampunking" virtually any object so the wow! factor is visibly apparent and can be appreciated. It’s a do-it-yourself genre, one you don’t need any "learnin’" to "get" and both guys and girls are flocking to it in (oddly for any genre) equal numbers. Ask someone how they would retell "Sleeping Beauty" if set in the Ming Dynasty and knee-jerk nervousness sets in. “Er, I don’t know much about that time period - I’d have to research…”, would be a common response, whereas you ask someone to "Steampunk Sleeping Beauty" (there’s that verb again) and the ideas flow almost instantly. In only minutes suggestions go from “you could use that spinning wheel as a way to deliver some sort of poison” to ideas and scenarios as far flung as “time travel.”

The intuitive understanding people have of steampunk is very empowering. Our world is so full of wondrous things it would be hard to recognize magic if we ever met it face to face. Talking cat? Yeah, my brother got one of those – it only says the same fifteen things over and over though. Pumpkin coach? My eco-car gets excellent mileage but the popcorn smell gets to me after a while. Visions of loved ones living in lands far away? Excuse me – I think that’s my Mum calling from Australia on Skype right now… Steampunk does a very important thing: it puts the average Joe and Jane back into the equation so technology is visibly dependent on its human makers for its existence as well as for maintenance and repair. The result? It gives "wonder" back its place. With the day-to-day back within the grasp of our understanding, we can now notice when something magical happens.

But that isn’t why the gears-and-goggles set are drawn to fairy tales. With the steampunker’s enthusiasm for making sense of mysterious and invisible technologies, creating an explainable cause for magic is next on the list. Where’s a good place to find magical concepts ripe for plundering? Fairy tales of course, and this is where is gets really interesting. Present a steampunk enthusiast with a fairy tale and they immediately they set to work, breaking down the pixie dust elements into mechanical parts. A magical forest of thorns becomes a self-building labyrinthine maze of fatally-edged working clockwork gears, able to grind any well meaning prince to dust if he approaches when the time isn’t right. The edgy (or "punk") approach of steampunk removes pressure of "happy-ever-after-ization" that popular culture tells us "fairytales" (as one word) require. Suddenly anything can happen, and does.

You see, in many ways, the popularization of fairy tales has suffered the same fate as our tech-savvy world – they’re so full of special effects we can no longer recognize magic, or the human elements they contain. Once timeless stories now appear irrelevant to our lives and our time. Remove the glamour, however, and suddenly the true heart of the tales emerges. It immediately becomes apparent that, as highly respected fairy tale scholar Jack Zipes observed, fairy tales are about the human condition and that these stories, these fairy tales, still have very important things to tell us, be we princesses or not.

In order to see the wonder in fairy tales, people have needed something to remove the magic curse of the modernized fairy tale to wake them up to their true power. You see the irony. The beauty is that once the tales are reestablished as being about down-to-earth people like you and me then it’s not unusual for people to add their own element of wonder so these gritty stories of the human struggle rise from the ordinary to the extraordinary. Ordinary stories with an element of wonder? Sounds like we’re gearing up for a fairy tale.

Gypsy blogs at Once Upon a Blog. She has collected numerous images and examples of steampunk on her site.
For further reading on steampunk, to get you started Gypsy recommends:
The Steampunk FAQ at The Clockwork Century
SteamPunk: A List of Themes
Steampunk’d, Or Humbug By Design (article by The Design Observer)
Many of the posts by The Steampunk Scholar, starting with this one on Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age

3