Red Riding Hood and the Wolf in Bed: Modernism's Fairy Tales (review)

In Alice to the Lighthouse: Children's Books and Radical Experiments in Art, Juliet Dusinberre sets out to connect the child readers of Alice and other children's literature not only with the adults they later became, "but to a generation of thought and writing" (1). How, she asks, did such modern writers as Virginia Woolf, reflect and transform their childhood reading in their own texts? Ann Martin explores a similar question in Red Riding Hood and the Wolf in Bed: Modernism's Fairy Tales. She examines how three modern writers' allusions to fairy tales reflect these writers' views of their cultures, including such anxiety-laden factors as sexuality and gender roles, class mobility, commodification, and the relationships between tradition and present.

In the first chapter, "Turning Back the Covers: Fairy Tales in the Modern Age," Martin briefly summarizes the history of the literary fairy tale in Western culture, from Apuleius's "Cupid and Psyche" in the second century AD, to the French salons of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and British chapbooks through the eighteenth century, to the pantomimes and Christmas books of the Victorians. She emphasizes the nineteenth-century's ambivalence about fairy tales: on the one hand, they evoked the "innocence" and "primitive nature" of the child and the peasant, whereas, on the other, their adaptation into modern culture in such forms as pantomimes, advertisements, and expensive picture books, suggested corruption and commodification. Martin suggests that this conflicted feeling, as well as the large number of variants, helped make the fairy tale a rich source of allusions for modern writers.

In this chapter, Martin also explains her decision to focus specifically upon James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Djuna Barnes. Although other twentieth-century writers reference fairy tales in their work, these three are among those who "use the stories to involve not just the past but the present" (40). Thus, Joyce, Woolf, and Barnes not only use the stories to suggest nostalgia and innocence, but to explore contemporary conflicts. Their fairy tale allusions also suggest the characters' and readers' power to make meaning. The characters actively adapt fairy tales to make sense of their lives, and readers must examine multiple, sometimes contradictory, fairy tale references to arrive at their own conclusions.

Martin then proceeds to in-depth explorations of these writers' fairy tale allusions in some of their texts, drawing upon cultural, psychological, and gender theory to do so. In "James Joyce: The Fashionable Fairy Tale," Martin suggests that Joyce uses "Cinderella" to investigate both the possibility of class mobility in modern times and the loss of self this may involve. For example, in Joyce's Ulysses, Stephen Daedalus is offered employment by several fairy godmother figures, but fears they would make him "a commodity in a capitalist system toward which he feels most ambivalent" (64). However, characters can also use fairy tales for their own ends, as is shown by the characters of Bloom and Gerty Macdowell, who use "Beauty and the Beast" as a pattern for their sexual fantasies, but also tailor the story to meet their individual needs.

In "Virginia Woolf: A Slipper of One's Own," Martin notes that fairy tales were very much a part of Woolf's literary upbringing. She made frequent reference to them in her journals and essays, as well as in her fiction. In particular, Martin describes the influence of Woolf's aunt, Anne Thackery Ritchie, who wrote adaptations of older fairy tales, such as Perrault's "Cinderella." Martin suggests that, in citing and transforming these stories, Woolf both acknowledges Ritchie as a female literary ancestress, and sabotages the Victorian values reflected in Ritchie's adaptations. In Woolf's Orlando, for example, the protagonist undergoes Cinderella-like transformations, but subverts traditional views of social...