Paper short abstract

Water in Jacobs’ English Fairy Tales is no backdrop but an agent of destratification. Across four tales, seas, wells, and moats dismantle human hierarchies of class, morality, and identity, enforcing an ecological fatalism where order arises only through submission to nonhuman logic.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how water functions as an active agent in Joseph Jacobs’ English Fairy Tales, contributing to the field of econarratology. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of destratification—the undoing of rigid social and personal structures—it argues that aquatic elements in these narratives dismantle hierarchies of class, identity, and morality, revealing a stark ecological ethic.

Each tale demonstrates a distinct mode of aquatic agency. In “The Laidly Worm of Spindleston Heugh,” the sea resists dynastic restoration, demanding submission to the monstrous and liminal. In “The Three Heads of the Well,” water acts as a moral-ecological machine, rewarding reciprocity and punishing neglect. In “Mr. Fox,” the moat embodies aristocratic stratification, yet its crossing collapses secrecy and exposes hidden violence. In “The Well of the World’s End,” the impossible task of filling a sieve with water opens a destratifying portal, compelling radical reciprocity with a frog whose demand for violent trust leads to renewal.

Taken together, these readings suggest that narrative resolution in folk tales emerges not from human mastery but from recognition of nonhuman agency. Water functions as a force of destratification that reorders human relations and encodes an ecological fatalism: order can only be restored by yielding to the logic of the nonhuman. This folkloric wisdom, far from archaic, resonates urgently in the age of climate crisis.

Keywords: Econarratology, Destratification, Nonhuman Agency, Ecological Fatalism, English Fairy Tales, Water