An enormous interest in fairy tales has occurred over the past few decades, and no scholar has been more important in this endeavor than Jack Zipes. Now retired and in his ninth decade, his output remains prodigious. His latest offering, Buried Treasures: The Power of Political Fairy Tales, is sure to delight those already familiar with Zipes’s work, as well as those who are approaching it for the first time.
Buried Treasures is a collection of essays about unconventional fairy tale authors, bookended by an introduction and closing chapter with Zipes’s own ideas. Though most of the essays have been published before, bringing them together under one heading gives them a theoretical coherence. Zipes is a scholar of (among other things) German literature and Jewish studies, so it is not surprising that most of the essays focus on material by German and Jewish authors, though Zipes also writes about the French Edouard Laboulaye, the American Charles Godfrey Leland, and the Italian Gianni Rodari. Though there are a few well-known names here, such as Ernst Bloch and Felix Salten, most of the authors discussed are relatively obscure, and part of the pleasure of this volume is discovering the many varied and extraordinary ways that fairy tales have been rewritten and reworked.
The introductory chapter begins with a story that sounds like a fairy tale: the young Zipes is with his grandmother in Princeton, New Jersey, when they encounter Albert Einstein walking home. The grandmother instructs Einstein to stop walking (which he does) and to put his pipe away (which he does) and then asks what her young grandson can do to become as highly educated as the great man himself. Without hesitation, Einstein replies that he should read fairy tales. “But what then?” asks the grandmother. “More fairy tales,” says Einstein. It is clear that Zipes took this advice to heart.
Buried Treasures shows Zipes’s trademark combination of nuance, theoretical breadth, and readability. In his finely honed analyses of individual authors, we learn about the qualities of their work as well as the historical, political, and social context of the writing. In the essay on Felix Salten, for example, we learn about Salten’s family, social and professional life, political ideas, and passion for the forest. This background enriches Zipes’s focus on Salten’s most famous work: Bambi. Disney acquired the film rights in 1937 from the director Sidney Franklin (who had paid Salten only $1000) and changed the story almost beyond recognition. Zipes takes us back to the original. As a lover of animals, Salten sides with them against the hunter. As a Jew in the Austro-Hungarian Empire during the interwar years, he knew what it was to be hunted.
The great overarching theme of this volume is that fairy tales exist in the real world while simultaneously presenting alternate worlds, worlds that can be models for good or evil. As Zipes says, “We live in a conflicted world…and fairy tales can be used by all of us for enlightenment or abused by small groups of powerful people who seek domination” (6). Fairy tales present a world in which the virtuous succeed while the evil fail, where goodness is rewarded and vice punished; it is also a world in which the young man succeeds by trickery, the young woman’s fate depends upon her beauty, and the outsider is thrust into an oven.
No book is without flaws, but the ones I found are minor. I find Zipes’s terse dismissal of Bruno Bettelheim lacking in analysis. When Zipes discusses Charles Godfrey Leland’s work with “Italian witches,” he does not say if he means people who call themselves witches, people who are called witches by others, or something else entirely. And when Zipes says that Kurt Schwitters was “literally carried away by all the experimental movements in the arts” of post-World War I Germany, he means, of course, that Schwitters was figuratively carried away (61).
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[Review length: 651 words • Review posted on September 30, 2024]