Through seventeen essays published between 1975 and 2004 Kay Stone turns a clear eye on her favorite themes. Her earliest essays struck at Disney’s use of fairy tales and feminist approaches to the fairy tale. Then, as an interest in revivalist storytelling entered her life, she turned her scholarly attention to the tellers of that revivalist movement and to some traditional tellers met there. After her retirement as Professor of English at the University of Winnipeg, Stone began to explore connections between dreams and tales in a more subjective vein. The last section of the book shares four essays from this period.
Three of the chapters in Section Two: Fairy Tales and Storytelling are reprinted from her 1998 book of essays on this topic, Burning Brightly: New Light on Old Tales Told Today. Three of the essays in Section Three: Fairy Tales and Dreams come from The Golden Woman: Dreaming as Art (2004). Though all of these chapters have previously appeared elsewhere, it is useful to have them gathered here, discussed by Stone, and arranged in an order that shows how her thinking has flowed through the years…her opinions sometimes changing…sometimes intensifying.
In the first two essays Stone pokes repeatedly at the Disneyfication of fairy tales, first angrily castigating him (1975) and then, after visiting the Disney studios to research his thought processes in 1980, allowing that she understands his artistic reasons for changes made while turning a short folktale into a feature-length film. She returns again to this theme in 1988 (chapter 5) noting problems with authenticity in the Grimms’ versions themselves, and concludes: “It is not useful to think of Grimm and Disney in terms of faithfulness to any particular sources. More valuable, and considerably more interesting, is a broad conception of human expressive creativity.” These chapters, along with two essays on feminist approaches to fairy tales (“The Misuses of Enchantment: Controversies on the Significance of Fairy Tales” in 1985 and “Feminist Approaches to the Interpretation of Fairy Tales” in 1986), should make useful reading for students examining these issues.
Stone was one of the first folklore scholars to make serious study of the contemporary revivalist storytelling movement. Her “Oral Narration in Contemporary America” (1986), “Once Upon a Time Today: Grimms’ Tales for Contemporary Performers” (1993), and “Social Identity in Organized Storytelling” (1988) offer an insightful look into the revivalist storytelling movement through interviews with many contemporary tellers. And digging deeper, she began to analyze specific tales from her own repertoire and the repertoires of others: “Burning Brightly: New Light from an Old Tale” (1993), “Difficult Women in Folktales: Two Women, Two Stories” (1997), “The Teller in the Tale” (1998), “Fire and Water” (2004). Among those tellers met and interviewed Stone includes the remarkable Cape Breton teller, Joe Neil MacNeil in “Old Tales, New Contexts” (1998). Because Stone’s focus is on the specific tale as well as the teller, she includes full tale texts in these last five chapters.
In the book’s final section Stone, now retired, releases herself from a need to please academia and allows a turn inward to the world of dreams. Forging deeper now, into unknown ground, Stone continues to apply her scholarly eye to texts, but now these are the texts of dreams and of course their connections to fairy tales. Thus we have the exquisitely written “In My Mother’s Garden” (2004), “The Golden Women: A Dream and a Story” (2004), “Follow Your Frog” (2004), and the book’s title chapter “Some Day Your Witch Might Come” (2004).
Through her preface, introduction, and an epilogue Kay Stone leads us to understand the ways in which all of these themes have woven themselves together in her fruitful life as a student of story.
Stone packages all of this with useful notes, a bibliography of all works cited, a list of Aarne-Thompson tale types, and an index.
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[Review length: 640 words • Review posted on October 8, 2008]