Twice Upon a Time: Women Writers and the History of the Fairy Tale (review)

Well crafted and carefully researched, Elizabeth Wanning Harries' Twice Upon a Time argues that the women fairy tale writers of seventeenth-century France—D'Aulnoy, Murat, and L'heritier—were silenced. Ironically, they were relegated to a domestic literary sphere, the salon, and Harries contends that this relegation has had a profound effect on contemporary notions of the history of the literary fairy tale. She asserts that this silencing must be acknowledged. Her use of the visual cultures of seventeenth-century France, eighteenth-century Germany, and nineteenth-century Britain support her claims that a beloved icon, the wizened, storytelling wet nurse by the fire, supplanted more accurate and respectful, and more literarily informed, representations of the aristocratic women of seventeenth-century French salons reading written texts.

In chapters 2 and 3, Harries examines how the works of D'Aulnoy, Murat, and L'heritier were appropriated and revised by Perrault and later translated into English by the Grimms—all of whom assert that the fairy tales were told to them by a mother figure of the service class, a "raconteuse," a "Mother Goose." Harries argues that this claim confused the history of the fairy tale, that fairy tales did not progress from storyteller to writer, as we have come to believe, but rather, from writer to storyteller. In so doing, she distinguishes the fairy tale, crafted for a highly literate audience, from the folktale, partially informed by those written tales and disseminated orally. Harries thereby separates literary and folkloristic scholarly ideologies, revealing a distinction central to her analysis: that the fairy tale, crafted for a highly literate audience, is an act of creation, whereas the folktale, partially informed by those written tales and disseminated orally, is the act of storytelling.

Chapters 4 and 5 describe contemporary retellings of fairy tales, such as those of Sexton, Broumas, Byatt, Carter, and Atwood. It should be noted that Harries's focus is on contemporary women writers retelling fairy tales for adults (in contrast to such writers as McKinley, who writes for young adult readers, or Maguire, who is male). Harries asserts that these contemporary retellings by women writers, who questioned the literary canon even as they were inducted into it, are creative acts. She links their work to those of their female fairy tale forbears—as well as acts of transliteration—allowing their link to canonical literature to reestablish an appreciation for the literary fairy tale. As Harries notes in her conclusion, contemporary women literary retellers give a voice to those women literary fairy tale writers who were silenced.

Harries asserts that the silencing of the women fairy tale writers of seventeenth-century France must be acknowledged, but her argument ultimately falls victim to itself by depending on making an absolute distinction between literary fairy tales and oral folktales. To Harries, fairy tales are, finally, a literary genre—to confuse them with the productions of the folk is to perpetuate canon formation and formal definitions of genre. Or, simply put, because they were written by women in France and translated for British children roughly two hundred years later—because they were by women for children—fairy tales have been given the same secondary treatment and classification as the productions of the poor, the uneducated, the innocent, and the voiceless. Fairy tales were the product of privileged women who had voices but who were retrospectively silenced when associated with other, secondary citizens of literature.

Without the understanding that there are two subgenres here, the fairy tale and the folktale, we cannot truly examine the genre of the tale. Indeed, Mother Goose, the icon of that initial silencing, has a place of honor in folklore, but folklore does not have a place of honor in literature. Harries's final argument is that those original, female...