Thirty years ago, in his book, Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion: The Classical Genre for Children and the Process of Civilization, Jack Zipes located the forerunners of modern fairy tales for children in the tales of Straparola and Basile, Perrault and the Grimms. Although that book has an edgy title and contentious attitude, it was formatted as a history. The book now under review, The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre, is not a history. This misrepresentation may not be Zipes’s fault—Princeton University Press may be to blame—but it does inevitably lead to disappointment for anyone who was hoping for any sort of history, whether cultural, social, or literary.
At least “Fairy Tale” in the title is genuine, and the first two chapters do deal with historical topics. In chapter 1, a sketch of the genre’s prehistory entitled “The Cultural Evolution of Storytelling and Fairy Tales: Human Communication and Memetics,” Aesop makes an appearance in the midst of theorists of communication and literature. Chapter 2, “The Meaning of Fairy Tale within the Evolution of Culture,” explains why conte de fée is such a nebulous, confusing name for a literary genre. According to Zipes, Mme d’Aulnoy and her associates chose to use pagan or fantastic characters and plots, in preference to Christian ones; further, he illuminates her salon with some ideas taken from cultural evolution and sociobiology. This chapter overlaps with the preceding one with its glimpse of fairy-tale prehistory, “a long, profound stream of tales, heard and read, that stem from Greco-Roman myths and may even have more ancient, pagan roots” (38). Weighty assertions like this are too often unsupported by any examples at all.
The fairies in chapter 2 are the first in a short series of fairy-tale characters. Bluebeard is the next: remakes (mostly films) attest to the “genericity” of this character in a discourse on serial killers and the role of women. Then comes the witch, with her many connections to fairies, goddesses, and historical humans. Following Vladimir Propp, Zipes folds Baba Yaga into a single character, a composite of her various instantiations. A chapter on persecuted heroines features four tales from identified nineteenth-century female collectors or narrators, Laura Gonzenbach, Nannette Lévesque, Bozena Nemcová, and Rachel Busk, along with information about their lives and works. Having slipped from fictional characters to real ones, Zipes then devotes the following chapter to the life, work, and significance of Guiseppe Pitrè, the great Italian folklore collector. The final chapter, “Fairy-Tale Collisions, or the Explosion of a Genre,” returns to the topic of tales as they appear in contemporary visual art.
If The Irresistible Fairy Tale is not a cultural and social history of a genre, then what is it? A series of chapters that could be articles or excerpts from other books. And in fact, some of them are. Zipes wrote an article about Guiseppe Pitrè and about him again in his introduction to a collection of some of Pitrè’s tales. Similarly for Laura Gonzenbach. Zipes’s book The Enchanted Screen (2011) included a section on Bluebeard. The earlier versions are not just reprinted; rather, this new volume presents alternate drafts, outtakes, or second thoughts.
Two appendices are said to be book reviews, although the second is really a preview, a review of a manuscript (obtained under dubious circumstances: see page 206, note 1) of a forthcoming book. These books are Fairy Tales: A New History, by Ruth Bottigheimer, and Tales of Magic, Tales in Print, by Willem de Blécourt, both of which assert that printed texts were far more important than oral ones for the historical development of fairy tales. In a footnote on page 158 Zipes explains, “I feel compelled to deal with the [two] books here at some length because they reflect what I see as worrisome tendencies in fairy-tale scholarship. In particular, I am convinced that young students might be misled by what I’ll argue are reductionist theses.” Modern scholarship usually assumes (or at least, pretends) that its participants are adults, not children in need of protection from dangerous ideas.
As most readers of JFR Reviews with any interest in the history of folktales already know, Bottigheimer’s work of the past ten years, leading up to and including A New History, has caused a big fuss. Instead of producing evidence for his own contrary position, Zipes marshals the three authorities (Dan Ben-Amos, Francisco Vaz da Silva, and Jan Ziolkowski) who confronted Bottigheimer en masse in 2006 (Journal of American Folklore 123, no. 490 [2010]). Each of these scholars offered two or three examples of fairy tales documented before 1550 (Cinderella, Cupid and Psyche, etc.). Examples of early tales, motifs, and motif-complexes, arranged as if on a time line, constitute the facts needed to explain how any tale, or genre of tales, came into being. Dozens of references are available in Bolte and Polívka and in the tale type articles in the Enzyklopädie des Märchens.
However, the immediate disagreement between Bottigheimer and her critics lies in the amorphous concept of “fairy tale,” which works as an everyday phrase with multiple meanings but fails as a technical term, and in her insistence on a peculiar subgenre, the “rise tale” (e.g. motif L161, Lowly hero marries princess). Throughout most of Zipes’s long career, no one seriously challenged his particular notion of fairy tales, and now he balks at considering alternatives. When Albert Wesselski and Walter Anderson fought a similar battle about literary vs. oral tradition in folktales beginning in the 1920s, both sides adduced copious evidence that furthered the knowledge base of their discipline(s). Now (or rather, soon) de Blécourt will enter the battle armed with evidence that Zipes disapproves of, along with, if Zipes’s preview is accurate, a strongly confrontational attitude. That evidence will be most welcome, but why must this search for the truth about the history of fairy tales be so adversarial?
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[Review length: 985 words • Review posted on November 28, 2012]