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Marvels & Tales 16.2 (2002) 311-313



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Book Review

A Wolf at the Door and Other Retold Fairy Tales


A Wolf at the Door and Other Retold Fairy Tales. Edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000. 166 pp.

A Wolf at the Door and Other Retold Fairy Tales adds another collection to what is emerging as a fairy-tale genre of its own, specifically the "retold tale," [End Page 311] a tale that departs markedly though still recognizably from its more widely known cognate. Such retold tales range from the sophisticated literary retellings of Angela Carter and the poetic versions of Anne Sexton to children's books like Babette Cole's Princess Smartypants and the highly parodic Politically Correct Bedtime Stories of James Garner. Edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, A Wolf at the Door and Other Retold Fairy Tales is a collection of thirteen retold tales for young readers.

Datlow and Windling open the book with a brief introduction intended to provide some historical context to the collection while also encouraging young readers to see fairy tales as a more complex genre than "these sweet and simple versions that most of us know today" (vii). They suggest going "back to the older versions" (vii) to find the scarier, more interesting stories lacking in happy endings, and they give as examples Red Riding Hood's being gobbled up by the wolf, Rapunzel's lover being blinded by the witch, and the Little Mermaid dying when the prince opts to marry a human. Regardless of the fact that these incidents still exist in the classic fairy-tale versions of these stories (e.g., Kinder- und Hausmärchen) or, as the case may be, in the literary tale of Hans Christen Anderson's The Little Mermaid, Datlow and Windling's vague and imprecise introduction does little to repair what they perceive as the problem with how fairy tales are understood today. They do, however, provide interested readers with references to other collections and to websites where they might find more information about fairy tales.

The stories themselves seem typical of stories written for young readers. As retold tales, however, they tend, with a few exceptions, to suffer from the relative obscurity of the tales from which they choose to depart. That is, retold tales depend--for their effect, for their pedagogical value, for their humor, etc.--upon the tension that exists between the transformed version of the story and the reader's cultural familiarity with the original. Thus, if the reader is not already familiar with the tale being retold, the retelling loses all of its transformative power and is simply another story.

Each story in A Wolf at the Door and Other Retold Fairy Tales is followed by a short author biography in which most authors describe their own fascination with fairy tales as well as their decisions for choosing the tales they use as the basis for their own retellings. In some cases, the authors even make explicit their intentions in retelling the chosen tale (see, for instance, Jane Yolen's explanation of her story "Cinder Elephant," though here Yolen's explanation is unnecessary as the tale's retold meaning seems quite obvious given the cultural familiarity that most readers have with "Cinderella"). It's possible that A Wolf at the Door and Other Retold Fairy Tales would benefit from reprinting versions of the original tales along with the author biographies, [End Page 312] though even then the disjuncture created between the two might not carry enough cultural relevance to convey the intended meanings.

With the brilliance of Angela Carter's retellings and Anne Sexton's transformed tales and James Garner's humorous parodies, even young readers interested in retold fairy tales would be best served by these new "classics" than by the stories in A Wolf at the Door and Other Retold Fairy Tales.

 



Kimberly J. Lau
University of Utah

Kimberly J. Lau is Assistant Professor of English and Women's Studies at the University of Utah. She is the...

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