Fairy Tale Review. The Violet Issue (review)

This third issue of Fairy Tale Review is the first to be published in conjunction with The University of Alabama Press. The Blue and the Green issues both preceded the current Violet Issue, and the color-coding of the issues inevitably recalls Andrew Lang’s fairy books, but editor Kate Bernheimer takes a more liberal approach to the fairy-tale genre than Lang did, eschewing straight retellings and filling the issue with a literary mix in both prose and poetry. Fairy Tale Review’s website ( www.fairytalereview.com/index.html ) features a quotation from Max Lüthi, asserting that the fairy tale “gives not only pleasure, it gives form and inspiration.” This inspiration is clearer in some cases than in others.

These pieces are not strictly tied to particular tales; many adopt imagery associated with fairy tales, or an air of magic realism. The issue’s most potent contribution, the first chapter of Espido Freire’s novel Irlanda (translated by Toshiya Kamei), evokes no specific tale but rather the dreamlike landscape of fairy tales, empty of any incident or element beyond the seemingly arbitrary demands of the tale. Similarly, the protagonist’s life has been suddenly emptied, by the death of one sister and by her parents’ need to protect another; Natalia, middle of three sisters, is sent away into the dreaming landscape, the overgrown garden. Perhaps she is on a quest. Perhaps she is the princess. Freire’s first chapter unfolds to the threshold of fairy tale.

Tracey Daugherty’s “The Sailor Who Drowned in the Desert” tells of a miraculous incident outside a small church, when several men descend a rope from the sky, much like Jack on his beanstalk—although neither Jack nor beanstalks are mentioned. With slightly more specificity, in Lucy Corin’s “A Woman with a Gardener,” a server hired for the evening performs in a seamless, almost magical ballet of perfect service, doling out hors d’oeuvres and glasses of champagne, dancing at the ball but not as a guest. At the end of the evening, still in a fugue state, the server is chosen by the hostess as her sexual partner. The parallels to “Cinderella” are obvious if not explicit. Julie Marie Wade’s “Maidenhead” takes the opposite path, her stream-of-consciousness narration invoking Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel, and the Miller’s daughter in turn, as well as the Little Mermaid, Maria von Trapp, the three Billy Goats Gruff, and finally the Virgin Mary refusing the angel Gabriel from a dusty farmhouse in Iowa. The story is tightly packed with intertextual and pop-cultural references, all in service of the girl-narrator’s sexual awakening.

Only a few pieces revise specific tales—all are poems; all state their inspiration in their titles: Kim Addonizio’s “Snow White: The Huntsman’s Story,” Don Mee Choi’s “The Tower,” Lee Upton’s “Beastly Beast,” and Anna Marie Hong’s “Cin City” with its “see-through slipper” (59). The remainder of the collection of twenty-two prose and poetic pieces skirts specific reference, not so much retellings or revisions as they are pastiche or even, in some cases, distant echoes. For instance, Lisa Olstein’s poem “Unsated Sallow” is made up of some elegant imagery bracketing some that is awkward; overall it bears only the faintest relationship to the fairy-tale genre, found perhaps in the evocation of magic in the first lines or in the philosophical suggestion of the last line—that it is possible to contain a larger space inside a smaller, recalling Emma Donoghue’s nesting-dolls approach to the revision of tales in Kissing the Witch, or even C. S. Lewis’s final vision of the Narnia within Narnia. This is indeed only a remote relationship to the genre. While the prose pieces remain grounded in the exploration or invocation of tales and their themes, some of the other poems, whether literally climbing through briars or seemingly tangled in their own imagery, remind us that mere fantastic...