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

Twice Upon a Time, Women Writers and the History of the Fairy Tale. By Elizabeth Wanning Harries. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. xiv + 216.

In this readable book, Harries argues that the history of the fairy tale has focused exclusively on one particular type of fairy tale and has excluded equally valid forms of stories which do not conform to the model of the short, simple, and putatively oral tale popularized by Charles Perrault at the end of the seventeenth century and the Brothers Grimm at the beginning of the nineteenth century. These latter are, in Harries's very useful term, "compact tales," which have entered the canon and have determined, both in folklore/fairy-tale research and in fairy-tale collections, the definitive format of the genre. There is, however, an equally valid tradition of more sophisticated tales for which Harries suggests the term "complex tales" to stress that these stories have a history which stretches as far back, if not farther, than that of the compact tales. In her book, Harries sets out to examine this muted history of the complex fairy tale; she identifies the mechanisms by which these stories were marginalized and shows the commonalities between the strategies employed by the seventeenth-century conteuses who had first popularized the complex contes de fées and contemporary revisions of fairy tales. Harries argues that there is a long tradition of women writers who use the fairy-tale form to "reorder the world" (163) and to establish a new language which allows them to write "outside the law" (quotation from Rich, 163), questioning and subverting social patterns and normative expectations.

The book has two halves, separated by an "interlude" which summarizes the argument of the first half--a rereading of the history of the fairy tale--and introduces the aims of the second: a discussion of contemporary revisions of fairy tales drawing on the work of a wide range of writers and one artist which cites them as a continuation of the muted strand of fairy-tale history. Chapters one to three engage with the knotty issues of canon formation, the nature of orality, and the "invention" of the fairy tale in Britain in the nineteenth century. Harries shows how the study of the fairy tale provides a good example of the mechanics of canon formation, where gendered cultural standards and the construction of the fairy tale as an artless and seemingly naive narrative form combined to exclude the sophisticated tales written by women. In addition, the conteuses did not claim allegiance to the unlettered peasant teller of stories, constructed by Perrault and, later, the Brothers Grimm, but to a literary tradition of tale telling. Judged against conventions of the simple "oral" tale as "folk art," which was being constructed as the dominant model, the consciously literary style, complex structure, ironic self-referentiality, length, and historic specificity of their elaborate contes generated derogatory criticism and rejection, which has endured. Harries's perceptive comparative reading of versions of the same tales by Perrault and Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy or Catherine Bernard revalues their elaborate style not as an "inferior imitation" (Grimm 23), but in their own terms, as a knowingly mocking and psychological exploration of a common tale and a coded comment on the practices and values of women's writing. In the same way that she shows how Romantic perceptions of the folk and folk art contributed to a dramatic narrowing of the fairy-tale canon, in chapter two Harries engages with the notion of orality as a central and constituting feature of the Märchen. Taking issue with the belief that fairy tales are documents of and give access to an oral, preliterate tradition, she argues that the orality of the compact tale is a carefully constructed simulation which excludes other forms of oral culture, such as the conversation of the aristocratic salon. Rather than the nostalgic evocation...