The Ant and The Grasshopper - Later Adaptations

Later Adaptations

La Fontaine's portrayal of the Ant as a flawed character, reinforced by the ambivalence of the alternative fable, led to that insect too being viewed as anything but an example of virtue. Jules Massenet's two-act ballet Cigale, first performed at the Opéra Comique in Paris in 1904, portrays the cicada as a charitable woman who takes pity on "La Pauvrette" (the poor little one). But La Pauvrette, after being taken in and fed, is rude and heartless when the situation is reversed. Cigale is left to die in the snow at the close of the ballet.

La Fontaine's poem has also been subverted by several French parodies. Tristan Corbière's A Marcelle - le poete et la cigale is a light-hearted literary criticism of a bad poet. In the 20th century, Jean Anouilh uses it as the basis for two almost independent fables. In La fourmi et la cigale the ant becomes an overworked housewife whom the dust follows into the grave. The cicada’s comment is that she prefers to employ a maid. In La Cigale, Anouilh engages with the reality of the artistic life, reviewing the cicada as the type of the female musician. In this fable she figures as a night-club singer who asks a fox to act as her agent. He believes that she will be an easy victim for his manipulations but she handles him with such frosty finesse that he takes up singing himself. Pierre Perret's 1990 version in urban slang satirises the cicada's more traditional role as a thoughtless ‘queen of the hit parade’. The subversion lies in the four-line moral at the end, in which he advises that it is better to be an impresario than a performer.

Roland Bacri takes the tale into fresh territory with his Fable Electorale. An unelected politician out of funds visits the ant and, on being asked what he did during the past election, replied that he sang the national anthem. Playing on the final words of La Fontaine's poem (dancez maintenant), the industrialist advises him to stand for president (presidensez maintenant). On the other hand, Francoise Sagan turns the satire against the too industrious. Her ant has been stockpiling all winter and urges the grasshopper to invest in her wares when spring comes. But the grasshopper's needs are few and she advises holding a discount sale instead. To take a final example, the Anti-Cancer League has turned the fable into an attack on smoking. The grasshopper's appeal, out of pocket and desperate for a cigarette, is turned down by another play on the original ending. So, she had smoked all through the summer? OK, now cough (Et bien, toussez).

The English writer W. Somerset Maugham reverses the moral order in a different way in his short story, "The Ant and The Grasshopper" (1924). It concerns two brothers, one of whom is a dissolute waster whose hard-working brother has constantly to bail him out of difficulties. At the end the latter is enraged to discover that his 'grasshopper' brother has married a rich widow, who then dies and leaves him a fortune. The story was later adapted in the film Encore (1951) and the English television series Somerset Maugham Hour (1960). James Joyce also adapts the fable into a tale of brotherly conflict in "The Ondt and the Gracehoper" episode in Finnegans Wake (1939) and makes of the twin brothers Shem and Shaun opposing tendencies within the human personality:

These twain are the twins that tick Homo Vulgaris.

In America, John Ciardi's poetical fable for children, "John J. Plenty and Fiddler Dan" (1963), makes an argument for poetry over fanatical hard work. Ciardi's ant, John J. Plenty, is so bent upon saving that he eats very little of what he has saved. Meanwhile, Fiddler Dan the grasshopper and his non-conforming ant wife survive the winter without help and resume playing music with the return of spring.

John Updike's 1987 short story "Brother Grasshopper" deals with a pair of brothers-in-law whose lives parallel the fable of the ant and the grasshopper. One, Fred Barrow, lives a conservative, restrained existence; the other, Carlyle Lothrop, spends his money profligately, especially on joint vacations for the two men's families, even as he becomes financially insolvent. However, at the end comes an unexpected inversion of the characters' archetypal roles. When Carlyle dies, Fred, now divorced and lonely, realizes that he has been left with a rich store of memories which would not have existed without his friend's largesse.