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Timothy H. Evans - Review of Pauline Greenhill and Jennifer Orme, editors, Just Wonder: Shifting Perspectives in Tradition

Timothy H. Evans - Review of Pauline Greenhill and Jennifer Orme, editors, Just Wonder: Shifting Perspectives in Tradition


Painting of a hand with butterflies on it

As stated by Pauline Greenhill and Jennifer Orme, this interdisciplinary collection explores themes of wonder and justice in “popular texts and folkloric traditions that point to injustices and/or envision forms of redress” (4). This primarily means folk/fairy tales/märchen, but extends to other kinds of traditions and narratives. The editors decline to “make a qualitative distinction between folklore/traditional culture…and popular/mass culture,” but look instead to offer “readers ways of looking critically as well as wondering creatively to expand possibility, resist oppression, and seek justice” (4). The authors in this volume expand the meaning of “wonder tale” (often used as a synonym for märchen) to encompass any narrative or tradition that evokes the sensation/emotion of wonder.

Just Wonder: Shifting Perspectives in Tradition consists of an introduction and twelve essays divided into three sections of four essays each, followed by an afterward, index, and brief biographies of contributors. The introduction (“Just Wondering about Hope”) briefly examines the range of meaning of the concepts “wonder” and “justice,” thus setting the themes of the book.

Section 1, Enacting Justice, explores the relationship between justice and activism as expressed in specific texts. The first essay is co-authored by Icelandic folklorist Eva ꝥórdis Ebenezersdóttir and Stekkjastaur, a Jólasveinn (mischievous Yule lad), a supernatural being. Both authors have experienced disability. The article focuses on ways that ꝥórdis came to see “mirroring” between herself and Stekkjastaur (commonly depicted as having wooden legs), and ways that Stekkjastaur has come to be regarded in a positive way, as a kind of disability activist, thereby countering the negative images of disability in many traditional stories. Marek Oziewicz’s essay views the BBC series The Detectorists (a comedy about metal detectorists) as a kind of “ecocentric” expression of the reciprocity of human characters with each other, with natural ecosystems, and with the flow of time. Although the show is superficially realistic, the magical qualities of objects found by the characters sweep them up into large vistas of time and nature. Veronica Schanoes asks what justice means in fairy tales, and what it could mean. Examining antisemitism in several European fairy tales, Schanoes tells us, “I don’t think scholarship can restore or repair damage.… Scholarship doesn’t provide justice; it asks, and sometimes answers, questions” (64). Scholars must “look unflinchingly at the ways fairy tales and folktales affect and are inflected by discourses of race, religion and sovereignty” (65). Justice requires truth. Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada examines the indigenous Hawai’ian-led protests against expansion of the observatory atop the Maunakea volcano, focusing specifically on “wonder tales” of magical, supportive experiences during protests. These narratives affirm that, when humans have reciprocal relationships with nature, “wonder” exists in the mundane, not just in the fantastic. Restoring wonder, Kuwada tells us, is a critical part of resistance to colonialism.

Section 2, Re/Viewing Justice, explores narrative representations of injustice, and of possible ways of responding to injustice. Andrea Braithwaite’s essay focuses on Seanan McGuire’s Indexing novels, which chronicle a secret government agency that uses the Aarne Thompson tale type index to “predict and manage the intrusion of fairy tales” into everyday reality. McGuire’s characters (according to Braithwaite) discover that “truths are changeable,” that fairy tales (and police procedurals) can be creatively reworked to bend toward justice. Heidi Kosonen explores the theme of masculine suicide in the 2006 film The Fall, noting the multiplicity of perspectives offered, and ways in which they challenge institutionalized notions of masculinity. Jack Zipes looks at “soldier stories,” as represented by six nineteenth-century collectors of European folktales, and utilized in four twentieth-century novels. Zipes describes soldier stories as an overlooked genre that expresses the very real trauma and anger of common soldiers and makes it possible to “imagine a world in which there is justice and compassion” (149). Ming Hsun-Ling examines recent live action fairy tale films from Disney, focusing on ways that they subvert gender expectations and promote “the hope of solidarity among women, and the end of patriarchal oppression” (162).

Section 3, Seeking Justice, engages with texts that “counter invisibility and erasure” (11). Kay Turner’s close reading of two versions of “The Three Spinning Women” (ATU 501) taken from the first and seventh editions of the Grimm’s Kinder- und Hausmärchen, focuses on how this and other märchen feature women who support each other in the face of social erasure. The act of spinning gives Turner’s essay its central metaphor and structure, as she demonstrates how märchen, and the analysis of märchen, has the potential to queer our understanding of narrative structure, kinship, social class, and the means of production.  Anne Kustritz analyzes the 2020 film Promising Young Woman, with its themes of rape and revenge, by using “Little Red Riding Hood” (ATU 333) as an “intertext” to clarify issues of sexual violence. Kustritz makes the case that alternative versions of “Little Red Riding Hood” offer ways to recognize the pervasiveness of sexual violence in contemporary society and to find answers that “exceed the privatized domains of neoliberal heterosexual coupling and individual acts of self-improvement, agency, toughness and revenge” (214). Allison Craven follows the history of “Little Goody Two Shoes.” Goody Two Shoes started as an exemplar of virtue in a popular English children’s book from 1765, a kind of precursor to the “virtue will make you rich” stories associated with Horatio Alger and many others. Over time, multiple variants of her story took on many characteristics of fairy tales. Eventually she becomes a meme more than a narrative. Craven documents how the label “Goody Two Shoes” is now used to insult young activist women such as Greta Thunberg or Malala Yousafzai. Her essay charts the “undulating rhetorics of the child as moral subject and its repression of the child as political agent” (234).  Steven Kohm analyzes two Canadian horror films, Clearcut (1991) and Blood Quantum (2019), “that deal…with postcolonial trauma for Indigenous peoples” (242). Kohm advocates looking at such films through the lens of “cultural criminology,” and more specifically the ways that these films are “a cultural site that reflects and refracts the haunting traumas of the past, present and future for Indigenous communities” (243).

Although only two of the authors in this volume have folklorist as their professional identity (ꝥórdis and Turner), most of them engage with materials that folklorists would see as within, or close to, our disciplinary boundaries. The interdisciplinary dialogue of the volume as a whole is certainly welcome. All of the essays are well written and engaging. The only essay that can be described as ethnographic is Kuwada’s; the others focus on textual analysis. They vary in the manner and extent to which they engage key concepts: “wonder” is central to several (Oziewicz, Kuwada) but less important to others (Kosonen, Zipes); “justice” is central to most of the essays, sometimes in very specific ways (Kosonen, Zipes), sometimes engaging very broadly with the concept (Schanoes, Turner). Some focus on narrow topics (Kosonen, Lin), others on much broader topics (Schanoes, Kuwada). Several of them are quite playful (ꝥórdis and Stekkjastaur, Turner), a quality that is sadly lacking in most academic writing. Some folklorists, however, may be uncomfortable with folklorist Eva ꝥórdis Ebenezersdóttir‘s extending the idea of “working with people from marginalized groups” (22) to co-authoring a paper with a supernatural being.  

In Orme and Greenhill’s brief afterward, they describe their audience as “academics, activists and artists” (264). While this is a worthy goal, I wonder how many artists or activists are likely to read this volume. It asks important questions, but in this era of climate change and growing fascism, perhaps the most urgent question to ask is how folklorists (and our colleagues in other disciplines) can have a role in shaping, as well as studying, the stories we tell. This volume is a step the right direction, but how can we go further?

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[Review length: 1291 words • Review posted on November 1, 2024]