Buried Treasue or Fairy-Tale Verismo ? Framing Sicilian Women's Stories

Beautiful Angiola: The Great Treasury of Sicilian Folk and Fairy Tales Collected by Laura Gonzenbach. Translated and edited by Jack Zipes. Illustrations by Joellyn Rock. New York: Routledge, 2004. xxxii + 364 pp.

Jack Zipes has found "buried treasure." After a career spent detailing the sanitizing of the fairy tale by bourgeois literati, he has discovered a nineteenth-century collection that preserves, with considerable fidelity, the voices of an indisputably subaltern population: Sicilian peasant women. On this ground, Zipes characterizes Laura Gonzenbach's Sizilianische Märchen as "perhaps the most important collection of fairy tales, legends, and anecdotes in the nineteenth century, more important perhaps than the Brothers Grimm" (xii).

When the leading authority in the field puts forward so radical an assertion in so halting a fashion, his unease is evident. The peasant women who speak through the Gonzenbach collection, a remarkable work with a troubled history, outZipe Zipes in their denunciation of economic and gender violence, and Zipes is both greatly enthusiastic and a little disconcerted as he presents the stories for a general readership. When "buried treasure" is resurrected and rehoused as a "great treasury," the lingering smell of the soil can be unsettling.

There were good reasons to bury the Gonzenbach collection not long after its 1870 publication. It was unearthed—along with the complex history of its production and reception—by Rudolf Schenda and especially Luisa Rubini, whose magisterial contribution is properly and generously acknowledged by Zipes.¹ The collection belongs to the much larger body of Mediterranean folktales collected and published in translation by nineteenth-century northern European scholars, with the original texts lost.

Laura Gonzenbach was the daughter of the Swiss consul at Messina and younger sister of Magdalena Gonzenbach, a pioneer of feminism and women's education in Italy. Growing up in the German-speaking colony of textile manufacturers and merchants, she was cared for by Sicilian servants and spent her summers in the countryside playing among the peasants. At the behest of historian Otto Hartwig, who met her in 1860 when he came to serve for five years as chaplain to the Lutheran community in Messina, she began in 1868, at the age of twenty-six, to collect fairy tales. Hartwig was writing a history and expected the tales to provide evidence for his theories of the mixed cultural influences that shaped the Sicilian dialect and character in the Middle Ages. Working among the peasant women in the eastern provinces of Messina and Catania, Gonzenbach found the field so rich that within a year she provided Hartwig with a collection of a hundred stories, sufficient for an autonomous publication. Gonzenbach translated the tales into literary German and provided occasional footnotes with cultural, linguistic, and performance commentary. Hartwig arranged for the Leipzig publication of a two-volume edition of ninety-two of the tales (with two more still in dialect from an as-yet-unidentified Sicilian collaborator, Salvatore Morganti) and wrote a historical preface on the formation of the Sicilian language during the Norman period, recruiting the folklorist Reinhold Köhler to provide comparative notes. The volume came out timed for the Christmas sales of 1869, with a publication date of 1870.

Although it was one of the first scholarly collections of Italian folktales,² and the most accurate and comprehensive until Giuseppe Pitrè's four-volume Sicilian tale collection of 1875, the book was largely buried almost as soon as it was published. The German reviewers got sidetracked in a debate about Indian origins. The Italian reception was mixed. A notice in La rivista europea, a journal promoting the modernization of Italy, praised the book as an example of what could be achieved by an educated woman. More crucially, Italian folklore scholars gave the book a reserved reception, doing nothing to promote it to a wider public or to urge its republication in Italian. Their polite thanks to Hartwig and Köhler were tempered with some nationalist...