Language and Gender in the Fairy Tale Tradition: A Linguistic Analysis of Old and New Story Telling (review)

This book, based on Levorato's doctoral dissertation at Lancaster University, is a fascinating study of the linguistic tools that can be put to use in the study of narratives. Levorato has decided to focus her attention on twelve versions of the Little Red Riding Hood tale, beginning with a translation of the fifteenth- or sixteenth-century oral tale ("The Story of Grandmother") from France. The other eleven versions are as follows:

• • Charles Perrault, "Little Red Riding Hood" (French, 1697)

• • The Brothers Grimm, "Little Red Cap" (German, 1812)

• • Sabine Baring-Gould, "Little Red Riding Hood" (British, 1895)

• • James Thurber, "The Little Girl and the Wolf" (American, 1939)

• • Catherine Storr, "Little Polly Riding Hood" (British, 1955)

• • Merseyside Fairy Story Collective, "Red Riding Hood" (British, 1972)

• • Otto F. Gmelin, "Little Red Cap" (German, 1978)

• • Angela Carter, "The Werewolf" (British, 1979)

• • Angela Carter, "The Company of Wolves" (British, 1979)

• • Chiang Mi, "Goldflower and the Bear" (Chinese, 1979)

• • Roald Dahl, "Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf" (British, 1982).

Levorato focuses on fairy tales because she believes that they "are the first important socializing event in children's lives," and she focuses on this set of fairy tales because they present her with an opportunity to study how the language of these tales does in fact "code an entire world-view, a perspective in which language is bound to prove both an instrument of maintenance as well as change" (x). Her larger objective, however, is never far from view: She wants to demonstrate that the language of these tales has a real and significant bearing on the depiction of gender roles and power relations. Specifically, Levorato is concerned to demonstrate the uses of these tales, namely, either to confirm traditional male hegemony and female helplessness, or to challenge that hegemony with images of female independence, strength, and resourcefulness.

To achieve these ends, Levorato depends upon several theorists and practitioners (M. A. K. Halliday, Norman Fairclough, and Theo Van Leeuwen, among others), and she employs a variety of linguistic tools and methods—quantitative analysis, grammatical analysis, and considerations of intertextuality. Levorato introduces each theory and each kind of analysis in turn, chapter by chapter, and she puts those tools to work on the various texts.

The work that Levorato does on these twelve texts is indeed interesting. Her analysis of word frequency and collocations, her study of the grammar of clauses (especially her discussion of subjects and transitivity), and her work on intertextuality provide very strong supplementary evidence of the worldviews evident in these various narratives. But there are three matters that keep this brief study from being entirely convincing.

First, there are basic questions about the texts themselves. The non-English texts are, necessarily, translated into English, but there is no attempt to demonstrate that the original texts have the same lexical, grammatical, and rhetorical contours as the translations. Further, some of these texts are quite short—Thurber's sketch is 183 words long, not counting the title, and Dahl's poem is 362 words. It is not clear how much value there is in the quantitative analysis of such brief texts. Finally, the genres also vary widely, from classic fairy tale form to quite other kinds of literature. Thurber's version, for instance, is a parody of the fairy tale, and as such it may not speak directly to the issues of gender and power relations; Dahl's poem is from a collection of "revolting rhymes," and his focus is mainly on the comic potential of his retelling. It's not clear to me that Levorato addresses the issue of genre constraints as fully as she should.

Second, Levorato begins the book with her convictions about the basic orientation of these tales firmly in place:

. . . if Perrault, the Grimms, and Baring Gould represent instances of the western insistence on maintaining conservative stereotypes of women, Thurber, Storr, the Merseyside Fairy Story Collective, Gmelin, and...