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  • Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales
  • Edith Lazaros Honig
Zipes, Jack. Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979.

Jack Zipes' Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales is a stimulating contribution to the critical literature of folk and fairy tales. As the first book-length work of Marxist criticism to treat this subject in the English language, the book has a refreshing, yet somewhat problematic viewpoint.

This viewpoint is forcefully stated in the introductory chapter in which Professor Zipes traces the history of folk and fairy tales. "Folk and fairy tales," he tells us, "have always spread word through their fantastic images about the feasibility of utopian alternatives, and this is exactly why the dominant social classes have been vexed by them" (p. 3). Professor Zipes explains the differences between folk and fairy tales and ties each genre firmly to its time and place of development. The folk tale, he reminds us, was an oral narrative of the common people with motifs that can be traced back to rituals, habits, customs, and laws of primitive or pre-capitalist societies. The fairy tale, on the other hand, represented a drastic change of folk materials for the aristocratic and bourgeois audiences. Dr. Zipes outlines the history of this change up to the present day, culminating in this statement: "Whereas the original folk tale was cultivated by a narrator and the audience to clarify and interpret phenomena in a way that would strengthen meaningful social bonds, the narrative perspective of a mass-mediated fairy tale has endeavoured to endow reality with a total meaning except that the totality has assumed totalitarian shapes and hues because the narrative voice is no longer responsive to an active audience but manipulates it according to the vested interests of the state and private industry" (p. 17). Having no doubt shocked at least some of his readers with this statement, Professor Zipes does pull back somewhat, assuring us that there is no conscious conspiracy on the part of big business and government. Indeed by the end of this introductory chapter, we are assured that fairy tales still offer us something: "an emancipatory potential which can never be completely controlled or depleted..." (p. 18).

Each subsequent chapter of the book, while delineating and supporting the ideology of [End Page 2] the opening chapter, is a completely separate essay. In fact, three of the chapters have been previously published as journal articles, and the book sometimes reads like a collection of separate essays on folk and fairy tales rather than a cohesive whole.

It seems only fair to mention too that while the scholarship that is evidenced here is impressive, there is too heavy a reliance on German folk and fairy tales and German criticism. Dr. Zipes, a professor of German and comparative literature and co-editor of New German Critique, does acknowledge this emphasis in his preface, but perhaps it should have been reflected in the book's title or subtitle.

Chapters 2 through 6 treat "The Politics of Folk and Fairy Tales," "The Romantic Fairy Tale in Germany," "The Instrumentalization of Fantasy Through the Mass Media," "The Utopian Function of Fairy Tales and Fantasy," and "The Use and Abuse of Folk and Fairy Tales With Children."

In the chapter entitled "Might Makes Right —The Politics of Folk and Fairy Tales," Dr. Zipes gives us the history of the political climates that produced folk and fairy tales, again emphasizing the differences between the two. He maintains that the central theme of all folk tales is "might makes right" because in the feudalistic society of the folk tale even when a peasant prevails, it is by becoming a monarch. This chapter includes an interesting political interpretation of "Hansel and Gretel" and emphasizes again the importance of historical context to the interpretation of folk and fairy tales. Zipes rejects the idea that certain folk and fairy tales have survived because of the psychological verities they portray, stating instead that these tales continued to ". . . reflect and speak to the conditions of the people and the dominant ideology of the times to...

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