Fairy Tales and Feminism: New Approaches (review)

Perhaps because of its wide appeal across the humanities and social sciences, the fairy tale has been the subject of more feminist critiques than any other genre of folklore. Beginning in the 1970s with the publication of Alison Lurie’s essay “Fairy Tale Liberation” (The New York Review of Books 15(11): 42–4, 1970) and Marcia R. Lieberman’s spirited response, “`Some Day My Prince Will Come’: Female Acculturation through the Fairy Tale” (College English 34(3): 383–95, 1972), scholars from a variety of disciplines, including but not limited to folklore and literary studies, have generated a steady stream of discourse about the role of women in the production and content of fairy tales. They have brought an array of different tools to this endeavor, using theories from Frankfurt School Marxism to semiotics and second-wave feminism. Their goals, however, have remained essentially the same: to address women’s roles in the production and reception of fairy tales and to examine the modalities and consequences of their various portrayals.

Fairy Tales and Feminism promises a change in direction—an exploration, as the book’s subtitle suggests, of some new approaches. It consists of eleven essays written by some of the most prominent names in fairy-tale research today. Beginning with editor Donald Haase’s survey of feminist fairy-tale scholarship, it includes pieces by Ruth Bottigheimer, Elizabeth Harries, Lee Haring, Cristina Bacchilega, and feminist fairy-tale pioneer Kay Stone. Haase writes in his introductory chapter that one of the goals of the volume is “to expand the focus of feminist fairy-tale research beyond the Western European and Anglo-American tradition, and even within those traditions to investigate . . . the work of minority writers and performers” (p. 29). The collection achieves this goal admirably, addressing narratives from the Middle Ages to the Information Age, and from the traditional fairy-tale locale of Germany to the Indian Ocean islands of Mauritius and Réunion. While no single essay in this volume escapes too far beyond conventional conceptions of the subject matter, as a unit Fairy Tales and Feminism opens for readers a commendably sprawling vista.

Even as the collection nibbles at the genre’s historical and geographical edges, however, it remains indelibly committed to its core. In his essay “On Fairy Tales, Subversion, and Ambiguity: Feminist Approaches to Seventeenth-Century Contes de fée,” Lewis Seifert reflects on the French conteuses who, although long ignored, have become a critical focus of feminist fairytale scholarship. In like fashion, Jeannine Blackwell, in her “German Fairy Tales: A User’s Manual,” examines the role of female informants in the collecting activities of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. Depending on how you choose to count, six to eight of the eleven essays in Fairy Tales and Feminism deal directly with the Anglo-European tradition. This does not necessarily constitute a limitation to the volume’s purported breadth, but it can certainly be read as testament to the continuing weight of the genre’s historical home.

Of course, innovative approaches never occur only at the boundaries of a genre. New reinterpretations of an established body of data are often just as challenging, if not more so, than new data seen through established lenses. Although it does not happen across the board, the essays in Fairy Tales and Feminism do offer some new and compelling reinterpretations. Of particular note in this regard are the essays by Cristina Bacchilega, Kay Stone, and Cathy Lynn Preston. Bacchilega and Preston both address the ambiguities of gender, genre, postcolonialism, and postmodernism: the former examines fairy-tale elements in the Western construction of India, while the latter investigates the impact of popular culture on understandings of “the real and the unreal . . . the authentic and the unauthentic . . . the authoritative and the nonauthoritative as they blur genre boundaries” (p. 210). Stone, on the other hand, offers something of an autoethnography, exploring the role of context and memory in her own storytelling and the changes wrought in tales from iteration to iteration. [End...