And the Prince Turned into a Peasant and Lived Happily Ever After

For a radical theoretician like Jack Zipes, fairy tales have to be worthwhile; they represent "the collective, active participation of the people," and the people know best. But fairy tales are fantasy, and radical theoreticians usually consider fantasy an escapist diversion from the necessary consideration of things as they are. Darko Suvin, a Marxist critic of science fiction who admires just that one sort of fantasy enough to insist on its political usefulness, has nothing but disdain in Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (Yale University Press, 1979), for what he calls "the Great Pumpkin antics" of most fantasy. Fairy tales are filled with Great Pumpkin antics; some of them even describe how Great Pumpkins are turned into great coaches. Even worse, fairy tales originated back when a repressive aristocracy held all power, and even a bourgeois, pseudo-intellectual, would-be capitalist like myself can see that the values they express are feudal, outmoded, and not likely to promote the revolution. A radical theory of fairy tales is bound to be unwieldy, and Zipes does not bring off the impossible acrobatics he attempts in Breaking the Magic Spell. But following him as he tries to do so is stimulating and suggests much about fairy tales as children's literature.

Zipes claims that socio-historical forces express themselves in fairy tales in different ways at different points in history. As the collective creation of a precapitalist people, folktales express "their wishes to attain better living conditions." Later, literary fairy tales such as "Beauty and the Beast" show how the superficially bestial aristocracy is morally superior to the "crass, vulgar values of the emerging bourgeoisie," while the witch in "Hansel and Gretel" represents "the entire feudal system or the greed and brutality of the aristocracy." In our own century, the dragon in Tolkien's The Hobbit is "the capitalist exploiter," and folktales, refashioned by the mass media, merely confirm the passive values of a consumer society.

Zipes's attempts to allegorize the evil characters of fairy tales are not convincing. Using the same specious logic, businessmen might see the dragon as the AFL.-CIO.; women might see it as men, children as their parents, dopers as the narcs. We all have our dragons.

But having located the specific meanings of fairy tales in history, Zipes can perform the operation basic to his argument: he can separate their distasteful values from their thrust as a kind of literature. He can admit that folktales affirm dangerous feudal values but still say that they have "emancipatory potential." He can acknowledge the solipsistic escapism of the fairy tales written in Germany in the early nineteenth century, but he can see it as a socially valuable refusal "to be formed by the powers of domination." And he can insist that those old stories that once had emancipatory potential now merely co-opt our individual imaginations when communicated by mass media.

Zipes doesn't always present these ideas clearly. He rarely discusses individual tales, preferring instead to summarize in abstract jargon the abstract arguments of numerous German leftist theoreticians. He assumes that his analysis of a few German fairy tales allows him to draw general conclusions about the history of all European folktales. He seems to confuse the way in which folktales were created with the values they express, so that any collective creation is assumed—incorrectly—to promote collective values. And he doesn't make clear whether he dislikes the co-opting power of the mass media in general or something specific to mass-media versions of fairy tales. He claims to argue the second of these possibilities but only writes about the first.

With good reason—mass-media culture is popular culture, enjoyed by the mass of the populace. Zipes could not attack the values it promotes without attacking The People. Not surprisingly, his discussion of mass media never mentions demographics—the insidious way in which the communications industry figures out what most of us want and...