You've Come a Long Way, Beauty (and Beast)

Jacques Barchilon, to whom Zipes's book is dedicated, has called the story of Beauty and the Beast, with its origins in the ancient myth of Cupid and Psyche, an "immemorial adventure." By the second century of our era, Apuleius had incorporated a version of the tale as a central episode in his novel The Golden Ass. Since then, a multitude of versions in a variety of forms have been created to tell and retell this story about the power of love and its ability to transform a horrible creature into a handsome, noble prince. Jack Zipes's collection of thirty-six French fairy tales that are concerned with this theme and Betsy Hearne's investigation of the major variations of the story remind us just how lively this archetypal narrative has remained.

Zipes's volume provides new translations of thirty-six of the best French fairy tales, bringing together different types of beauties (the sleeping kind being, of course, one of the best known) and various species of beasts (leopards, ogres, serpents, frogs, and the like). The starting point for Zipes is two collections of fairy tales translated and published by John Robinson Planche: Four-and-twenty Fairy Tales Selected from Those of Perrault, Etc. (1858) and Countess D'Aulnoy's Fairy Tales (1885). To his selection from these tales, Zipes has added translations often others, including Perrault's "Little Red Riding Hood" and Leprince de Beaumont's "Beauty and the Beast," which do not appear in the Planché volumes. The result is an impressive collection of fairy tales by twelve French authors covering a period of roughly a hundred years. Only Iona and Peter Opie's The Classic Fairy Tales (1974), a collection of twenty-four of the most famous fairy tales, is comparable to Zipes's effort. But Zipes's volume is more comprehensive, particularly in its inclusion of all of Perrault's prose tales.

Zipes's translation successfully renders a style appropriate to the seventeenth-century French literary fairy tale. The language of these tales incorporated some typically précieux elements, characteristic of an aristocratic literary genre, into traditional narratives rooted in popular literature. Since a literary French fairy tale was essentially a kind of performance in style and wit by authors of good taste, this highly sophisticated form of language could present intricate traps for a translator. On the whole, Zipes captures the general tone of these fairy tales and gives the reader the flavor of an often outdated style in which hyperbole is the rule. The major difficulty for Zipes lies in translating into English the seventeenth-century rhymes—such as those in Perrault's moralités or Mme. d'Aulnoy's verses within or at the end of her tales. He describes his solution to this problem: "In most cases I sacrificed meter and style to meaning; in some cases, particularly in d'Aulnoy's tales, I endeavored to temper the bombastic and lavish tone and style" (14). At times Zipes even surpasses d'Aulnoy's style: in shortening her morals, he greatly improves them.

In his introduction to the volume, Zipes provides a short historical survey of the French folktale, tracing its origins from the oral tradition into the seventeenth century, when it entered the literary salons of the most aristocratic society and turned into one of the most popular genres: the literary fairy tale. In this form, the tale became an expression of the idealism ("l'esprit précieux") of an aristocratic elite that glorified heroism and worshiped love in all the fashionable literary genres of the time (for example, the novel, the letter, the courtly poem). It was no accident that in a predominantly male literary world, a majority of the French fairytale writers were female; they represented, Zipes explains, a movement of...