In 1926, French psychoanalysts sufficiently overcame the objections of medical and psychiatric professionals to establish an Institute of Psychoanalysis. Thenceforward French intellectuals took up this revelatory system of thought, but when Freud died in 1939, psychoanalysis was still controversial. Thereafter, psychoanalysts around the world multiplied, then diminished, but at the death of Jacques Lacan in 1981, France had more psychoanalysts per capita than any other nation. The psychoanalytic criticism of literature there has had notable champions: Charles Mauron, Jean Bellemin-Noël, Hélène Cixous, even Roland Barthes. For folktale it has had one: Nicole Belmont, who shows in Poétique du conte (1999) how, without ignoring the Grimms, the Finnish school, or V. Propp, Freudian dream interpretation can be adapted to oral literature. Folktales invite criticism as if they were collective dreams. The book under review, a dissertation written under Nicole Belmont’s direction, tests and validates psychoanalytic criticism of folktale by concentrating on a single theme, fictional cannibalism, in a defined corpus, wonder tales orally told, from a single nation and language, Greece. The author seeks to establish what anthropophagy may mean for the psychological development of heroes and heroines. Despite a perhaps inevitably tedious dissertation style, the author knows the corpus of her materials well, shows admirable grasp of the history of folktale analysis, and presents convincing if limited interpretations of Greek versions, which will not be familiar to many scholars.
After a detailed introduction forecasting the contents, the book is divided into three parts, each with its own introduction explaining, in good dissertation style, what will come next. The first part deals with two tale types about daughters who are depicted in Greek tradition as eating their parents—Cinderella (Aarne-Thompson-Uther 510A) and the Cannibal Sister (ATU 315A). Greek versions of type 510A show cannibalism as an insuperable obstacle to a daughter’s marriage. Two daughters kill and eat their mother, thus regressing to the oral stage of the libido and dooming them to celibacy; the third daughter, by identifying herself with their mother, attains sexual maturity. The tale of the Strigla, who incessantly devours animals, then is discovered and destroyed by her brother, shows the link between oral and incest fantasies; both tales trace cannibalistic representations to the primordial relation between mother and child (295). Here and in all the texts discussed, cannibalism is decisive in shaping the initiatory path of the hero or heroine towards maturity.
In the second part, the author takes up cannibal parents, treating Greek versions of Little Brother and Little Sister (ATU 450), The Devil (Witch) Carries the Hero Home in a Sack (ATU 327C), and The Brothers and the Ogre (ATU 327B + 328). She proposes that in these texts, ogres and ogresses represent both father and mother figures to the hero. In ATU 450, a return to the womb constitutes a mythic sort of dénouement, which violates the norms of the folktale genre. One type (327C) is one of the few especially aimed for children. Its ogress is a cannibalistic mother figure, who must be tricked and trapped by the tiny, potentially edible hero. To deal with the threat of a man-eater, he utilizes the ogress’s very own means, thus representing “the sadistic aspect of infantile oral fantasies” (299). The Greek Tom Thumb—in a rich collection of varied texts, some showing the influence of Perrault, others departing from him—is shown traversing orality and emerging victorious from the Oedipal stage.
Analyzing, in her third part, the Rescue by the Sister (ATU 311) and The Ghoulish Schoolmaster and the Stone of Pity (ATU 894), the author shows connections to other tale types. Though she treats each type as a semantic unit, thus honoring the history of folktale classification, her Greek versions show the same tendency to escape strict classification that transpires from Hans-Georg Uther’s revision of Aarne and Thompson (reviewed by William Hansen inJFRRin 2005). But the Greek corpus rewards study. In type 311, cannibalism is interpreted as the heroine’s representation to herself of what sexuality looks like at the moment she discovers it. In other tale types, a girl again discovers the cannibal nature of her husband, a theme so widespread (we think of Bluebeard and the African tale of the fille difficile) that Emmanouela Katrinaki’s insistence on the initiatory character of most folktales is confirmed.
Such patient, detailed narrative and comparative analysis helps to demonstrate the relevance of psychoanalytic interpretation to folktale study, at a time when American folklorists continue to resist it. It would be difficult to refute Emmanouela Katrinaki’s contention that cannibalism, like other folktale themes, is always symbolizing something about family relations, sexual development, and oral and incest fantasies. But the contention is addressed only to her colleagues. For readers outside the academy, the startling quality of Freudian interpretation would still have charm, if it were given a shorter and more forceful presentation.
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[Review length: 801 words • Review posted on October 27, 2009]