Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion: The Classical Genre for Children and the Process of Civilization, and: The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood: Versions of the Tale in Sociocultural Context (review)

In Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion, Jack Zipes says, "the fairy tale is the most important cultural and social event in most children's lives." He doesn't really mean it, of course—unless he actually intends to downplay the significance of television, school, toilet-training, other children, Santa Claus, grandmothers, peanut butter, and parenting.

But Jack Zipes is never one to fool around with subtle implications. He says that the fairy tale writers of Perrault's time "sought to civilize children to inhibit them, and perhaps pervert their natural growth," and he hints darkly about "where socialization through the reading of the Grimms' tales has led us"—as if those stories were responsible for the whole awful way the world is nowadays. Meanwhile, "What saves Andersen's tales from simply becoming sentimental homilies (which many of them are) was his extraordinary understanding of how class struggle affected the lives of people in his times," and "Baum sought to subvert the American socialization process based on competition and achievement"; as for "The Selfish Giant," "Obviously it is related to Wilde's homosexuality, and he depicted the love for the boy as a form of liberation." Obviously?

It's only after one adjusts to Zipes' penchant for exaggeration that one realizes what he means: when he says that fairy tales are the most important social and cultural influence on children, he actually means that the tales do have some social and cultural significance. And he is right. The writers who first borrowed these tales from the oral tradition changed them so they would communicate their own values to the children who heard them. As societies changed their mind about which values they wished to communicate to children, these stories changed. As he did in his earlier book, Breaking the Magic Spell, Zipes explores these changes to show how they are "part of the historical civilizing process." In Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion he goes over the ground covered in that earlier book in more detail, and with greater concentration on the mainstream of fairy tales written for or read by children in English-speaking countries; and he shows how, for the past five hundred or so years, we adults have used fairy tales to impress upon children the ideals we have fallen away from themselves.

Unfortunately, Zipes notices how repressive that is only when he doesn't himself share the particular ideals in question. When it's aristocrats trying to make their children into aristocrats, that's disgusting; when it's contemporary West Germans trying to make their children believe in collective action, that's delightful. Zipes wants us to go on repressing children just the way we always have-only this time, we're supposed to repress them with values he shares instead of ones he feel superior to.

But the most unfortunate result of Zipes' insistence on arguing from the unobjective viewpoint of his own political position is that is causes him to seriously misrepresent the history he claims to be revealing. While he quite correctly says that the fairy tales of the Victorian period were affected by "the development of a strong proletarian class, industrialization, urbanization, educational reform acts, evangelism," and so on, he says nothing about literary or artistic trends—about the Victorian fascination with things mediaeval, about Pre-Raphaelitism and its dreamy mooning over gothic artifacts, and so on. I suspect Zipes ignores such elements in the tales of Wilde and MacDonald because to acknowledge them would force him to admit that these tales are escapist, not...