Reading an Oral Tradition

Though in many ways an informative and perceptive study of different thematic aspects of the fairy tale, Joyce Thomas's Inside the Wolf's Belly is also disturbing and misleading. It tends to rehash phenomenological, Jungian, and Freudian notions about the whole-some and holistic nature of fairy tales without questioning whether these notions are valid. Moreover, Thomas disregards most of the recent historical, sociological, and feminist critiques of fairy tales as though they had no bearing on our understanding and reception of fairy tales today.

Her book is divided into six chapters which focus on the aspects of the fairy tale that she believes are crucial for understanding the "essence" of the fairy tale: the human at the center, since, as she says, "the hero is the tale" (17); fantastic effigies; animal helpers and monsters; landscapes and things; and language, form, and structure. Simply stated, her main thesis purports that all fairy tales are concerned with the "humanization" of a protagonist, who must learn to acquire characteristics that she or he lacks to become whole. Along the way, other figures, animals, and landscapes are designed to assist the protagonist in his or her quest. Moreover, the language and style of the tales serve to reinforce the notion of "humanization." In this regard, Thomas follows in the tradition of Max Lüthi, whose works have treated the phenomenological features of folk and fairy tales. However, unlike Lüthi, who covers a wide tradition of folktales, she refers primarily to tales in Margaret Hunt's translation of The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales and Joseph Jacobs's English Fairy Tales, with some casual comments on tales by Basile and Perrault. As she states in her preface,

My foremost concern is with the tales themselves, as narrative, as story. These are the Volksmärchen as fairy tales, products of anonymous tellers that were orally transmitted from one generation to another until fixed in print. Taking my cue from other scholars, I employ both "fairy tale" and "Volksmärchen" to designate those oral creations best distinguished from other folk tales by the presence of the "faerie"—wonder, magic, marvels experienced as reality.

[9-10]

Thomas is at her best when she interprets individual fairy tales in detail, for she is a sensitive critic who has a fine appreciation of the symbolic language and subtle meanings of the fairy tales. Thus, her discussions of "Snow White" (69-75), the animal-helper tales (12336), "The Frog Prince" (157-60), and "Rumpelstiltskin" (227-232) are all stimulating, but not because they support her overall theory. Rather, they reveal just how insightful Thomas is as a reader. Her interpretations are valid readings of the texts, but her theoretical premises are, bluntly put, vacuous and erroneous.

To begin with, Thomas claims to study folk fairy tales—that is, the oral tradition—and yet almost all her examples are from the literary tradition. There have been some excellent studies by Heinz Rölleke, Maria Tatar, and Ruth Bottigheimer that have demonstrated how the Grimms composed their own tales from different variants and how they relied on literature, not on the oral tradition, for their collection. Yet Thomas does not even allude to these studies or to the problematic nature of the so-called folk-fairy tales she claims were preserved and transmitted by anonymous tellers. Her references are almost always to a literary tradition: Basile, Perrault, the Grimms, and even Jacobs. And in the case of the Grimms, she has chosen the most archaic and faulty collection on the market; for Hunt's work is filled with incorrect titles and inaccurate translations.

It seems to me an amazing tour de force (French for chutzpah) to try to develop a phenomenological and descriptive theory of the contents of the oral fairy tale when the critic relies mainly on literary sources and when she also makes generalizations about all folktales but focuses primarily on a tiny group of tales extensively revised by the brothers Grimm. Moreover, though Thomas talks about the reality of...