Fairy Tales and Feminism is a compilation of eleven essays that focus on conventional fairytale research and gender, some of which have been updated for this book. These include six essays previously published in Marvels and Tales (2000:14/1) by Bottigheimer, Seifert, Blackwell, Wanning Harries, and Stone, in addition to a revised article by Haring, and other contributions by Odber de Baubeta, Mackintosh, Bacchilega, and Preston. The contributors to the present volume are in the field of folktale and fairytale studies, literary and oral, and share a common ground in feminist scholarship.
The title, as Haase explains, mirrors Karen E. Rowe’s overview, “Feminism and Fairy Tales,” which appeared in 1979. Since the 1970s, feminist fairytale research has developed substantially, as demonstrated by the content of these essays. The essays go beyond the “classical” representations of stereotypical gender roles. By focusing on complex issues of text and context, they take feminist scholarship into a new and complex domain of analysis.
Haase’s overview of “Feminist Fairy-Tale Scholarship” is historical and critical at once. It also functions as a helpful tool for all those who wish to understand the development of feminist fairytale research. Haase highlights the issues of gender and socialization, female image, women writers and the fairytale, and more. His comments on the directions of future research are especially useful, as he postulates possible trends in the study of fairytales that cross disciplinary boundaries.
European fairytale traditions and their modern versions are represented in the work of Bottigheimer, Seifert, Blackwell, and Wanning Harries. In “Fertility Control and the Birth of the Modern European Fairy-Tale Heroine,” Bottigheimer argues that there has been a shift in the discourse of sexuality in which the European fairytale heroine, at least in the textual evidence, had more control over her own sexuality up until the sixteenth century. This shift in attitude occurred simultaneously with the birth of the fairytale heroine and influenced her image in textual representation. In a similar vein, Lewis Seifert explores the contes de fées in France, while Jeanne Blackwell focuses on German fairytales. “The Mirror Broken: Women’s Autobiography and Fairy Tales,” by Elizabeth Wanning Harries explores the use of fairytale references in the literary autobiographies of Krista Wolf’s Kindheitsmuster and Carolyn Kay Steedman’s Landscape for a Good Woman.
Folklorists know Kay Stone through her original and stimulating piece, “Things Walt Disney Never Told Us,” which set the tone for her scholarship. Stone presents something new for readers, revising certain of her previous arguments on fairytale heroines. Stone’s article is personal and warm, and it can be read as a self-reflexive piece, although she goes beyond the limits of self-reflexivity at times and the piece becomes autobiographical. However, it is not a weakness, as one might suspect. On the contrary, she follows the feminist argument that the “personal is political.”
Lee Haring focuses on women as agents of creolization in Madagascar and Mauritius, culling theories from anthropology and folklore. He argues that multilingualism functioned as a creative tool and communicative option for women in interpreting and performing the tales. And it is through these tales that women maintain their importance in the symbolic order.
Cristina Bacchilega chooses the Indian wonder tale as the topic of her essay on gender and genre in three diasporic novels from India. She takes up the concept of “India” itself as a wonder tale and re-examines the notions of “activity/passivity” and “feminine/masculine” in the formation of the Orient and India. She discusses these diasporic novels in relation to gender dynamics, intertextuality, and transnationalism.
Latin American folktales are represented by Patricia Anne Odber de Baubeta and Fiona Mackintosh. While Odber de Baubeta concentrates on the intertextual techniques in Iberian and Latin American women’s writings, Mackintosh takes up the roles fairytales in twentieth-century Argentine women’s writings. And Cathy Lynn Preston, focusing on the use of folktales in jokes, films, and new media, argues that these new forms are useful in understanding the boundaries of gender and genre through which fairytales’ generic identity becomes all the more unstable.
The articles in the present volume take the fairytales and folktales from their frozen textual domain and explore them in the domain of intertextualities, performances, and agencies in the modern sense. The book has many facets, particularly its interdisciplinarity. Some essays are inclined more towards literature and philology, while others are more attuned to anthropology, considering the tales in the framework of migration, creolization, and transnationalism. Articles by Haase, Haring, and Bacchilega are gems for folklorists. From their own scholarly viewpoints, they present the complexities in feminist fairytale research. The extensive bibliography at the end of the book is a great resource for students and scholars in the field, as it references the cornerstones of feminist fairytale research.
In terms of time span and generic foci, the examples range from sixteenth-century texts to modern cinema and film. The book also goes beyond linguistic borders, as the editor emphasizes the need to study the less-studied tales of the non-Western and non-Anglo-American world, complaining that too many studies suffer from “a disciplinary myopia—from having overlooked relevant scholarship, often because it lies beyond the limits of a given discipline or linguistic ability” (ix). Haase is apt in his observations and he does a thorough job in bringing diversity in terms of disciplines and geographic areas. The authors reconsider the fairytale in French, German, and Anglo-American texts and contexts, and also present examples from African, Indian Ocean, Iberian, Latin American, Indo-Anglian, and South Asian tale traditions. However, Eurocenticism is not so easy to escape. For example, Latin America can be viewed as the margin of the Western world. Moreover, when viewed from the East, there is still so much to cover in terms of linguistic and geographic diversity. The international reader wishes for a sequel that would present examples from the less-covered areas of the world, including the Middle East, the Balkans, and the Far East, to complement the readings in the present volume. Nonetheless, I applaud the editor for expanding the geographical and linguistic limits of fairytale scholarship.
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[Review length: 1004 words • Review posted on October 10, 2006]