Marvelous Transformations: An Anthology of Fairy Tales and Contemporary Critical Perspectives ed. by Christine A. Jones, Jennifer Schacker (review)

This volume’s strength lies in both its range of primary source stories and the span of secondary criticism included. With their selection of texts, Jones and Schacker have also attempted to situate fairy tale studies in a broader interdisciplinary context that emphasizes the relationship between literary history and folklore history, particularly field-based oral storytelling (16). As they point out in their introduction, students are often locked into traditional interpretations of classic fairy tales that reduce the stories to tidy moral messages. “Little Red Riding Hood,” for example, is seen as a warning against talking to strangers, or about the need for young girls on the edge of sexual maturity to listen to their mothers. To help dislodge these more limited readings and to model how they suggest the tales within the volume should be read, Jones and Schacker explicate “Little Red Riding Hood,” emphasizing the importance of separating the different layers of the tale: the social context in which a story is created and performed; its political or ideological reception; the larger generic context in which a tale circulates; and the particular textual form and details of the individual story (25).

Thus, when “Little Red Riding Hood” is read in the original Charles Perrault version (“Le Petit Chaperon Rouge” [1697]), the moral attached to the end of Perrault’s tale clearly situates the story as a cautionary message for young female courtiers. In fact, as Jones and Schacker suggest, the moral of the story may be that it is impossible for these young women to avoid the social and sexual politics of the court and therefore being devoured by the predatory male courtiers. Even in the differing Grimm version (“Rotkäppchen” [1857]), Jones and Schacker argue, when the language of the story is analyzed closely the text suggests how important it is for Little Red Riding Hood and her Grandmother (and females in general) to be able to master and to control verbal discourse in order to navigate the dangers of the world (and random wolves). This is far from the simpler message that little girls need to listen to the advice of their mothers not to stray off the forest path.

Following the introduction, the body of primary texts is divided into five broad time periods: “Early Written Traditions”; “Early Print Traditions”; “Romanticism to the Fin De Siècle”; “Modern / Postmodern Tales”; and “Contemporary Transcriptions and Translations.” The editors comment that they selected stories that figure in current fairy tale scholarship, then arranged them chronologically instead of by national tradition or theme, with the intention of highlighting each story’s cultural and textual uniqueness (36–38).

Within these divisions, Jones and Schacker include a brief introduction to each tale that attempts to clarify its relationship to the larger world of fairy tale studies. These pieces are somewhat less successful than their commentary in the general introduction. While it is likely that Jones and Schacker were constrained by space limitations, there is some inconsistency in the amount of background information included for each entry. For example, the introduction to the first story, the Egyptian tale of “The Two Brothers,” offers little useful discussion to contextualize it, although the notes appearing throughout the story do help to clarify specific points of the narrative. Background information also could have been elaborated for the Straparola stories. In general, the notes accompanying the tales are useful and extend the introductory material, although some stories—perhaps those the editors felt were more self-explanatory—have few or no notes at all. My own students, however, would benefit from as much background information as possible to help construct their own close readings from texts that are drawn from so many different historical periods and cultural traditions. Jones and Schacker also emphasize that they had selected stories that figure in current fairy tale / folktale scholarship; to this end, it would have been extremely useful to...