Jack Zipes, setting forth a framework for the social history of the literary fairy tale (10), puts the genre back into history. The fairy tale genre, he says, consistently has a potentiality for subversion, a word referring to the transformation of values previously associated with the genre: what Oscar Wilde does to Hans Christian Andersen, what Nazi Germany did to the family image in the Grimm tales, what twentieth-century writers have done “to expand the possibilities to question the fairy-tale discourse” (181). Seeking to fill with historical realities the gap left by the critical agreement to dehistoricize the fairy tale, Jack Zipes applies to this genre the search for an ideological code propounded for European literature by Fredric Jameson in The Political Unconscious (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981). With its two new chapters, one on the innovative Straparola and Basile, the other on the infamous Disney, this important book reorders the field of fairy tale studies.
One reason for its importance is the innovation and depth in Jack Zipes’ historical criticism. That chapter on Straparola and Basile innovatively traces the origin of the literary fairy tale back to sixteenth-century Italy. Chapter 3 shows that “Perrault and the women writers of the 1690s created their fairy tales…to express their views about young people and to prepare them for roles that they idealistically believed they should play in society” (30). The socialization effort continued (chapter 4) with the Grimm tales, which “function to legitimize certain repressive standards of action and make them acceptable for children” (70). If a character does something wrong, the action “involves breaking an inviolate code that is the basis for benevolent patriarchal rule” (71). Chapter 5, building on the work of Bengt Holbek, asserts that Hans Christian Andersen’s “ambivalent feelings about both his origins and the nobility constitute the appeal of the tales” (83), because Andersen, who identified with the power establishment, “consistently rationalized the power of dominant groups that distressed and disturbed him” (92).
Also important is the precision of Jack Zipes’ historical interpretations. Against critics who think that the fairy tale for children went underground in the first half of the nineteenth century, he points to “the tremendous popularity of fairy-tale broadsheets, chapbooks, and the continual favorable reception of Perrrault, the Grimms, and Andersen” as evidence that “the fairy-tale discourse was controlled by the same sociopolitical tendencies that contributed toward strengthening bourgeois domination of the public sphere” (106). In chapter 6, “a new wave of innovative fairy tales” connects George MacDonald to larger social and critical tendencies (109-118). Oscar Wilde uses biblical language to radicalize the fairy tale and “subvert the messages conveyed by Andersen’s tales” (121). L. Frank Baum seeks “to subvert the American socialization process based on competition and achievement” (133). The political perspective of these three writers, like Dickens and Ruskin before them, “placed both the classical fairy tales and society in question” (136). In chapter 7, on Nazi Germany, Jack Zipes brings forth his careful reading of the vast German fairy tale literature in the 1920s-30s, including three Weimar-era writers who use fairy tale and magic motifs “to expose (not disguise) the source of domination and real social contradictions” (154). The better-known Hermann Hesse uses “the fairy-tale discourse in a variety of startling imaginative ways to comment on social problems that were affecting the course of the civilizing process” (159), whereas other German writers at this time were “conservative and regressive” (157-158). The Nazis, for their part, rather than compose new fairy tales, reinterpreted the “classical” tale to reawaken unconscious needs and wishes that would serve their oppressive social order.
Contemporary tales after 1945--by Harriet Herman, the Merseyside group of female authors, Tomi Ungerer, Michael Ende, Jean-Pierre Andrevon, and Michael de Larrabeiti, among others (chapter 8)--rely on the liberating power of the fantastic. Jack Zipes’ criticism here builds on Freud, Ernst Bloch, and Jean Piaget. His definitive interpretive statement is, “through the use of unfamiliar (unheimlich) symbols, the fairy tale liberates readers of different age groups to return to repressed ego disturbances; that is, to return to familiar (heimlich) primal moments in their lives, but the fairy tale cannot be liberating ultimately unless it projects on a conscious, literary, and philosophical level the objectification of home as real democracy under nonalienating conditions” (177).
What, for readers like me, justifies a new edition of Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion is the superlative hatchet job on Walt Disney. Chapter 9 demonstrates that Disney’s destruction of the fairy tale, through animation and book publishing, was “a major regression and caused many of the liberating aspects of the fairy tale to be tamed and to turn in against themselves” (193). Disney’s early “Puss in Boots” infantilizes the fairy-tale genre into “a parable of Disney’s life at that moment” (199). As for the syrupy “Snow White,” seven major changes introduced by Disney “celebrate the domestication of women [and] the triumph of the banished and the underdogs.” Despite having a female heroine, “Snow White” is “a male myth about perseverance” (205). Reception after all is key to Disney’s success: “It is the repetition of Disney’s infantile anal quest to cleanse the world--the core of American mythology--that enabled him to strike a chord with American viewers from the 1920s to the present” (200). “Disney’s self-glorification as organizer, sanitizer, and entrepreneur” (206) generates eight dire changes in the fairy tale genre (207-208), which brainwashed American audiences and attracted them to Disneyland and the homogenized EPCOT center. I think Jack Zipes has said the last word about this pernicious, reactionary purveyor of kitsch. He concludes with kinder words for the Shrek films and the work of Hayao Miyazaki, which use the fairy tale film “to question the degeneration of utopia” (211).
This excellent book implies a debate, never joined, with Ruth B. Bottigheimer, who has attempted to bait folklorists by contending that Straparola (so eloquently treated here) was the inventor of a kind of narrative she calls the “rise tale,” which “marked the beginning of all modern fairy tales that reassured their readers that even the most miserably poor boy or girl could gain enormous material wealth” (Fairy Godfather: Straparola, Venice, and the Fairy Tale Tradition, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002, p. 6, my emphasis). Of course this theme has dominated folktales since antiquity, and anyway Bottigheimer’s reverence for the written word leads her to deny oral narrators any creativity. The oral-written dichotomy contaminating her work does not scratch this book by Jack Zipes, who sees clearly the coexistence of orality and literacy throughout modern European history. The “configurations and symbols” of early modern European oral tales, he says, “were already marked by a sociopolitical perception and had entered into a specific institutionalized discourse before they were transformed into literary fairy tales for children of the European upper classes” (7). Ruth Bottigheimer doesn’t appear in his index.
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[Review length: 1140 words • Review posted on December 12, 2007]