With a couple of well-chosen quotations from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), the epigraphs for The Meanings of Enchantment: Wondertale Symbolism Revisited promise exactly what this book delivers: wonder and enchantment of course, but also humor and much needed fun. Purists may be offended by the use of an obviously not-traditional text in this context, and indeed by Vaz da Silva’s sometimes tongue-in-cheek and personal delivery. But this is, nevertheless, a very serious work, and it is one that anyone interested in international wonder tales should read. Once they do, it is a book they will consult often.
Vaz da Silva insists that theorists and analysts of fairy tales should examine multiple (oral) variants. It’s an old-fashioned idea, but he gives it new life with telling attention to metaphor and imagery in “a mental ethnography of the wondertale—a cartography of its symbolic landscape” (27). He understands wonder tales as “coming-of-age processes hinging on the acquisition of supernatural powers, which usually requires a symbolic death and rebirth” (28), specifically “the semantic realm of lunar transformations” (30). That is, he seeks to understand the meanings of wonder tales across text and tale type.
Vaz da Silva is less compelled by explanatory approaches to the form focusing on specific texts, or on readers (or, presumably hearers and viewers) as audiences. He understands teller-based, performance-based, and perhaps even culture-based academic interpretations as inherently biased and missing the point of the intertextuality of wonder tales. But those of us will differ who instead see that wonder tales, even more than other narrative forms, are constantly reworked, revisioned, and recreated by their readers, hearers, and viewers. And academic interpreters, regardless of their ideological locations, also see themselves and others in wonder tales.
The perspective dismissing some current (and indeed, historical) scholarly perspectives is not inherent or necessary to Vaz da Silva’s own interpretation, and so his overall structural/semiotic theory, à la Bengt Holbek, Vladimir Propp, or Alan Dundes, remains compelling. Like we do with the works of the latter individuals, some of us will wish to take what is useful and leave the rest.
The seven chapters take readers through Vaz da Silva’s procedure, drawing on specific tales as exemplars. I will not attempt to reproduce the specifics of the argument; it is complicated and worth following from beginning to end in the original. It draws on several tales which become exemplars for the argument, four of which are well known (The Maiden in the Tower, ATU 310; Sleeping Beauty, ATU 410; Cinderella, ATU 510A; and Snow White, ATU 709) and four less so (The Three Stolen Princesses, ATU 301; The Dangerous Night-Watch, ATU 304; The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers, ATU 451; and The Monster’s Bride, ATU 507), though Vaz da Silva also includes nearly thirty types in total (thankfully all listed under “ATU” in the index).
Accessible enough for students, complex enough for seasoned academics, The Meanings of Enchantment is both entertaining and insightful, with discussions that will satisfy those of us already obsessed with wonder tales but will also draw in newcomers. The work begins with reference to the book by an infamous psychologist that has received much more attention than its due, which provides the title’s referent. Vaz da Silva encountered the work before entering university; I read it in the New Yorker magazine some three years earlier. Though I have rejected most of its contents by now, it influenced me more than I like to confess now. Vaz da Silva is less ashamed of his love for it but he also, I hope, prefigures the possible influence of The Meanings of Enchantment when he says: “This is the book I would have liked to read when I first started thinking about how wondertales encapsulate realms of figurative thought; and why they are good to think with, even today” (19). If there is any justice in the world (though I suspect there is none) this book will replace its model in that capacity.
--------
[Review length: 664 words • Review posted on February 12, 2025]