Fairy Tales Transformed?: Twenty-First-Century Adaptations and the Politics of Wonder

Notes

notes notes to introduCtion 1. When I was writing this book, some of the comments were available on the “Media” link of Goldstein’s website. As Fairy Tales Transformed? goes into production, those links are no longer available, but the blogs are easily accessible online. In dealing with electronic texts in a scholarly project, I have become more acutely aware of the ephemeral accuracy of their citations. 2. “I put up the series on JPG.com to get some feedback and had no idea what would happen next. Hundreds of blogs from all over the world posted the series. My web site was overloaded and thousands of e-mails came in congratulating me. There has also been quite a lot of controversy and discussion over a couple of the pieces. I welcome any interpretation of the work even though I disagree with much of it” (Goldstein, “About the Series,” www.fallenprincesses.com/, accessed on June 8, 2011). The photos have since been exhibited in Vancouver (October 15–November 15, 2009) at the Buschlen Mowatt. The two most controversial pieces are “Jasmine” and “Red Riding Hood,” which many bloggers see as reproducing racial and body stereotypes rather than disenchanting archetypes. See Li Cornfeld’s analysis of “Not-So-Little Red Riding Hood” for an argument based on both visual studies and fairy-tale studies that shows how Goldstein’s photograph “solicits scorn and pity,” thus controversy, but also puts the issue of control over her body as Red Riding Hood’s fare, with no wolf around (Cornfeld 2011). 3. Kay Turner’s essay, “Playing with Fire: Transgressions as Truth in Grimms’ ‘Frau Trude,’” invites a radically different reading of enchantment in fairy tales (in Turner and Greenhill 2012, 248), a reading on which I intend to reflect more and learn from. 4. “Many of the most important differences that emerge from setting [fairy tales] in their historical contexts relate to the sense of wonder that is fundamental 204 ▪ Notes to Introduction to fairy tales, which indeed are often known technically as ‘wonder tales’” (Ziolkowski 2006, 64). 5. Another term that speaks to fairy tales’ poetics and their relations to a specific social context as well as genre system is “marvels” or merveilles (see Seifert 2001). 6. “The verb ‘to wonder’ communicates the receptive state of marveling as well as the active desire to know, to inquire” (Warner 1994, xx). 7. Grammatically, the optative mood expresses hope or desire—a favorable outcome—in relation to the proposition the speaker is making. It is easily identifiable in languages such as ancient Greek, Sanskrit, German, and Navajo. In the English language, its function is taken by “may . . . ,” “let’s,” or “would that . . .” expressions and by some types of subjunctives. It may help to think of the optative mood as opposite of the imprecative mood, with curses positing an unfavorable outcome; grammars inform us that both are volitive moods that express the speaker’s desire for or commitment to having something happen or not. 8. This is how the first poem, “The Gold Key,” in Sexton’s collection ends. The poem metaphorically takes off of No. 200 in the Grimms’ collection Kinderund Hausmärchen, a tale in which the protagonist—a poor and curious boy—is using a small gold key to open a mysterious iron casket. Published in the 1815 edition, this tale was told to the Brothers Grimm by Marie Hassenpflug. See Zipes (1987, 288–89). I return to this tale in the epilogue. 9. Donald Haase’s “Feminist Fairy-Tale Scholarship,” the introduction to Fairy Tales and Feminism: New Approaches (2004), traces the history and trajectories of some thirty years of such criticism. 10. “We might alternatively christen them the Angela Carter generation, in that Carter’s extensive work on the traditions of the fairy tale—as author, editor, and critic—was preeminently influential in establishing a late twentiethcentury conception of the tales, the influence of which has continued into the new millennium” (Benson 2008, 2), writes Stephen Benson who, marking the publication of Contemporary Fiction and the Fairy Tale, organized, with Andrew Teverson, a significant conference in April 2009, “The Fairy Tale after Angela Carter.” Selected and revised papers from that meeting constitute a special issue of Marvels & Tales: A Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies (vol. 24, no. 1, 2010), also guest edited by Benson and Teverson. 11. Focusing on Angela Carter’s and other English-language fairy-tale adaptations that emerged from this cultural climate, my earlier book, Postmodern Fairy Tales...