Fairy Godfather: Straparola, Venice, and the Fairy Tale Tradition (review)

Thanks to the initiative and wide-ranging scholarly industry of Ruth Bottigheimer, teachers and students of fairy tale now have available to them a highly readable, at times quite engrossing account of the little that is known, and whatever can possibly be surmised, about the author who launched the genre that was to become the literary folk fairy tale. Bottigheimer's monograph is indeed, as the dustjacket advertises, the first book-length study of Straparola in any language; and the fact that the language is English means this discussion about the originator of this globally popular genre will be available to the widest possible readership. The only endeavor comparable to Bottigheimer's appears to be the studies of Straparola in Italian by Giuseppe Rua collected in a volume published now over a hundred years ago, to which Bottigheimer makes frequent reference and acknowledgment.

The mention of Venice, the place of publication of the two volumes of Straparola's Pleasant Nights (Piacevoli Notti) in the 1550s, in the subtitle of the present study alludes to Bottigheimer's interest in locating the author and his work quite specifically in the society and culture in which he lived and worked. This emphasis on a societal approach will not surprise those familiar with Bottigheimer's earlier books on fairy tale and folktale, her Grimms' Bad Girls and Bold Boys: The Moral and Social Vision of the Tales (Yale UP, 1987) and the volume she edited, Fairy Tales and Society: Illusion, Allusion and Paradigm (U of Pennsylvania P, 1986). (On the dustjacket for the present volume Bottigheimer is claimed as the author of the work she edited, while no mention is made of the work she did author; one can only wonder whether the misinformation in the one case and omission in the other have something to do, however unconsciously and unintentionally, with which university press published what.)

One of the charms of Bottigheimer's study is that since so little is known about the life of Giovan Francesco Straparola (in the dialect of his native Caravaggio, Zoan Francesco), she is free to speculate on "A Possible Biography," to which she devotes her third chapter (45-81). Her speculations, though, are appropriately based on what is known about the life and times in his native and adoptive cities. She argues for relatively lower class origins and standing and supports the case with an appealing, often persuasive combination of logic and imagination.

Though Bottigheimer does not have an ax to grind, she does have a bias related to her interpretive approach to folktale and fairy tale as appealing to, if not arising from, common people regarding their dreams of wealth and status. Her first two chapters, "Restoration and Rise" and "Ragged Poverty and the Promise of Magic," are devoted to showing how the plots of the some thirteen fairy-tale-like stories, among the seventy-three that constitute the storytelling of the thirteen pleasing nights, tend to revolve either around a loss and recovery of wealth and status or an acquiring of wealth and status, and that magic tends to play a role in both cases. Basic to this view is that in this genre emerging in Straparola's tales the supernatural is introduced to appeal to popular dreams of magical wish fulfillment.

There can be no doubt that this aspect of the popular appeal of magical tales is part of the reason for the emergence and rise of fairy tale. Bottigheimer's approach certainly fits the most famous of the tales fathered or "godfathered" by Straparola, "Costantino and His Cat" ("Costantino Fortunato," night 11, tale 1), known today in the form given to it by Charles Perrault a century and a half later as "Puss in Boots," which Bottigheimer rightly considers a classic among "rise" tales. The five other, earlier rise tales from nights two through eight, for which Bottigheimer...