Critical and Creative Perspectives on Fairy Tales: An Intertextual Dialogue between Fairy-Tale Scholarship and Postmodern Retellings

Conclusion

In the introduction to this book, I referred to Jack Zipes’s description of the evolution of the fairy tale in terms of Darwinist and epidemiologic analogies. Indeed, on the basis of the primary texts that have been presented and analyzed, the flexibility and wide dissemination of the stories cannot be denied. Some retellings retain the structural and stylistic features of the fairy tale but produce variations on the content through reversals, deletions, small additions, or alternative endings. Others revitalize the traditional tales through formal adaptations, merging the plots with generic features borrowed from the picture book, poetry, the psychological novel, the historical novel, the short story, and other forms and genres. Together, all these retellings, even those that take such a critical position that they seem far removed from the traditional fairy tale, do sustain and reinforce the interest in this genre. They rely on its popularity to be understood as revisions and reinforce it by repeatedly using it as a pre-text. Conclusion 300 Conclusion The three case studies illustrate that fairy-tale retellings display a wide variety of intertextual overlaps with critical discussion about the traditional fairy tale. In some retellings, metacritical ideas are explicitly phrased by either the narrator or the fictional characters; in many others, they can be derived from deletions, additions, exaggerations, and corrections. Some retellings evoke arguments from critical fairy-tale debates to explain their raison d’être in autoreflective passages or fictional claims for truth. In most analyses of the retellings in fairy-tale studies, criticism is referred to in order to explain the attitude of these texts with regard to the traditional pretexts . Conversely, fairy-tale retellings and illustrated fairy tales can also actively contribute to the reception of fairy-tale criticism; and theories of intertextuality, when used in a sense that allows for achronological and nonintentional parallels, can be invoked to make aspects of this reception clearer. In the variety of genres and age groups that they address, fairy-tale retellings have certainly succeeded in implicating readers other than academics in the fairy-tale debates. These audiences have their own specific characteristics and needs, and the difference in the implied readership affects which ideas are expressed in literature and how certain effects are achieved. The fact that the retellings are usually written by nonacademics and address a nonspecialized audience may explain why some fairy-tale critiques find a belated equivalent in the retellings. In this sense, the fairy-tale retelling does not serve the survival of the traditional fairy tale alone. From the parallels that I have drawn between critical texts from the 1970s and some very recent retellings, it can be argued that the fairy-tale retelling is also a site where outmoded critical views of the traditional fairy tale live on. Some of these fictional texts recapitulate the development of certain lines of thought with regard to the fairy tale, expressing views of the fairy tale that have long been problematized in academic circles. These views of the fairy tale are detached from the historical context in which they were topical in fairy-tale criticism, and their presence in recent retellings demonstrates the relativity of categories such as conservative and progressive. Especially in retellings for young children, early feminist and Marxist views still find equivalents today, as if new readers are expected to run through the evolution of these critical paradigms beginning with the most basic views and gradually evolving to more complex ones. This is not to say that all retellings for children rely on simplistic corrections: many of them pose high Conclusion 301 demands on the intellectual capacities of the readers as well as on their intertextual competence. This is particularly true for retellings that overlap with psychoanalytic interpretations. The latent content of fairy tales as critics such as Bettelheim analyzed it also finds its way into children’s books in softened versions or through literary techniques that demand active reading strategies and thus leave room for several interpretations. Illustrations, and the wide array of interactions they can have with a text, often play a vital role in this process. Moreover, recent retellings for children occasionally return to the older versions of Western culture’s most popular fairy tales before they were adapted for children (see Joosen, “Back to Ölenberg”). This evolution supports a further shift in the image of the young reader, who is offered literature that enhances not only identification but also...