-
Twice upon a Time: Women Writers and the History of the Fairy Tale (review)
- MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly
- Duke University Press
- Volume 65, Number 2, June 2004
- pp. 301-304
- Review
- Additional Information
MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly 65.2 (2004) 301-304
[Access article in PDF]
Over the past three decades feminist critics have expanded scholarship on the literary fairy tale in important ways. Beyond focusing attention on gender stereotypes in "classic" fairy tales and their possible effects on female readers in particular, they have rediscovered a significant corpus of literary fairy tales written by women in England, France, and Germany. Twice upon a Time represents another phase in this growing, transforming body of criticism. Harries starts with the argument that the literary fairy tale "invents" a tradition of oral storytelling as its origin. A number of critics have demonstrated how Charles Perrault and the Grimm brothers, the fathers of the genre (so to speak), crafted their prose to produce a "factitious orality."1 As Harries shows, this convention does not apply, by and large, to women writers of fairy tales and has actually been used to exclude them from the canon [End Page 301] of "classic" fairy tales. Insisting that fairy tales are historical artifacts and are always embedded in culturally specific practices of writing, Harries makes connections between (primarily, but not exclusively) women writers from different historical periods (from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries) and national traditions (France, Germany, England, the United States, and Canada). She shows how the women writers she studies contest many basic assumptions we bring to fairy tales: their tales are not a reflection of the "folk," and they are often not "short and simple" (12). What this book demonstrates, then, is that women writers of fairy tales have been inspired not by the desire to reproduce orality as much as by the wish to display a consciousness of the properly literary traditions of their time.
The first three chapters of this book explore the role of women writers in the birth of the literary fairy tale in France and England. Chapter 1, "Fairy Tales about Fairy Tales: Notes on Canon Formation," examines women's fairy tales published in France during the 1690s and argues that they make a "complex and ironic comment on the historical moment in which they were produced" (24). Harries explains how, beginning in that decade, critics established standards for the genre that effectively excluded the contributions of the conteuses, or women writers of tales. These tales eschew the conciseness and the naive "oral" style most readily associated with Perrault and the Grimms and with a literature written for children. Instead, they feature long, complex, digressive plots with decorative detail that suggests, Harries believes, that they were written for adults. Thus there were two coexisting models for the literary fairy tale, the "compact" form favored by Perrault and the Grimms (among others) and the complex form preferred for the most part by the conteuses. As useful and stimulating as this distinction is in general terms, however, the definition that Harries gives for the compact tale seems to ignore the complexities of the Histoires ou contes du temps passé and the Kinder- und Hausmärchen. In the case of Perrault's tales, for instance, it is difficult to accept that they are not "determinedly and openly 'intertextual' and 'stereophonic'" (17). Similarly, while Perrault framed his tales to appear "stylistically naïve" and connected to an "oral folk tradition" (31), the fact remains that his prose is anything but naive and that his tales are replete with allusions to elite as well as popular (or "folk") culture.
In chapter 2, "Voices in Print: Oralities in the Fairy Tale," Harries examines both the illusion of orality carefully crafted by many fairy-tale editors and writers and the conteuses' aversion to this illusion. Through their frontispieces and their narrative frames, the conteuses evoke the urbane conversations of the seventeenth-century salons rather than the oral storytelling of the "folk." Harries then examines the meanings conveyed by the conversational frames, specifically those of Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy, which...