Fairy Tales, Myth, and Psychoanalytical Theory: Feminism and Retelling the Tale by Veronica Schanoes (review)

To open her book’s “Introduction: The Mother’s Looking Glass,” Veronica Schanoes offers a “sorcerous mirror” scene from Tanith Lee’s White as Snow (2000), where a daughter’s desire activates her mother’s own magic power; Schanoes guides readers to see how Lee’s representation of “mother-daughter dyads and mirrors, vision and revision, to represent feminine subjectivity” re-envisions “Snow White”—so often used to reinforce competition between women—into a feminist story. Figures of doubling, permeable boundaries and revisionist desires apply to texts as well as psyches in this remarkable critical study of how fairy-tale retellings from the 1970s and 1990s (from Angela Carter to Kelly Link and Catherynne Valente) mirror contemporaneous feminist psychoanalysis (from Nancy Chodorow to the relational theories of the Wellesley Stone Center). Mirrors, for Schanoes, “combine truth and illusion, and such a combination is fruitful rather than deadly if we recognize and understand what we are seeing/reading”—that is, “the confluence of thought and seeming” in which “fantasy can be an accurate, feminist reflection” (111)—a reality that is both familiar and strange. By exploring such uncanny doubles, Schanoes seeks to reclaim an intertextuality that is “collaborative” and “affectionate” (8), to reconnect myth and fairy tales with psychoanalytical theories of a multiple and fluid feminine subjectivity, and to show how the mirror as a source of self-creation is “a space for expressing the lived experiences of women and envisioning the feminist change necessary to improve those experiences” (9). In doing so, she produces a regenerative reading of second-wave feminist psychoanalysis, perspicaciously nuanced analyses of fairy-tale and myth revisions, and an understanding of fantasy that is both generous and politicized.

Developing her captivating essay “Book as Mirror, Mirror as Book,” the book’s argument is twofold: we benefit from reading second-wave feminist psychoanalytical theories together with feminist revisions of fairy tales and myths because their approaches to feminine subjectivity developed at the same time and responded to one another; both theory and literature focus their view of feminine subjectivity on the mother-daughter relation and mirroring as sites for revision and change. While my own work on fairytale revisions is not psychoanalytical, I find Fairy Tales, Myth, and Psychoanalytical Theory’s take on psychoanalysis to be refreshing and significant. On the one hand, Freudian and Jungian analyses tend to dominate the discussion of the unconscious in fairy tales and myth, relegating women’s desires to second place; on the other hand, with the notable exception of Shuli Barzilai’s, many psychological feminine and feminist analyses of fairy tales and myth are in the self-help mode and do not take revisions into much consideration. So, methodologically, the book pioneers and exemplifies a new and much needed understanding of how a psychoanalysis that takes women’s subjectivity as the norm without idealizing it bears on fantasy and feminist rewritings in particular.

The book has two parts: the first two chapters focus on mother-daughter relations, the final two on the mirror trope. Hinging these discussions of doubling tropes is Chapter 3, “Revisions and Repetition,” a reflection on various twentieth-century theories of rewriting and influence. Not only does Schanoes provide original readings of well-known revisionary texts such as Angela Carter’s, but her project is innovative in reading canonized writers along with Kelly Link and other writers of genre fiction. Schanoes’s claims concerning revision as a transformative process that depends on and nurtures multiplicity and feminine subjectivity are provocative in a productive way. We need more theoretically sophisticated readings of experimental fictions, just as we need new feminist readings that revitalize gendered perspectives of storytelling and subjectivization. Schanoes’s book does important work in all of these areas.

A few more qualities make this book stand out for me. The introduction is exemplary in its clarity, nuanced and careful presentation of arguments, and communication of the book’s distinctive interventions in fairy-tale studies, genre and adaptation studies, and feminist theory...