Cinderella in America: A Book of Folk and Fairy Tales (review)

The turn of the millennium signaled a change in the way that scholars and popularizers frame and package the folk narratives of the United States. Twentieth-century “American” folktale collections focused overwhelmingly on discrete traditions limited to a single state (J. Russell Reaver’s Florida Folktales [1988]), region (Vance Randolph’s six collections from the Ozark Mountains), ethnicity (Jerome Mintz’s Legends of the Hasidim [1968]), or some combination thereof (Jerome M. Carrière’s Tales from the French Folk-Lore of Missouri [1937]). The few nationwide anthologies of the 1900s (such as Benjamin Botkin’s Treasury of American Folklore [1944] and Kemp P. Battle’s Great American Folklore [1986]) titled themselves with the term “folklore” rather than “folktale” and mixed oral narratives with literary spinoffs and non-narrative genres. The published record of the twentieth century implies that there is no real “American” tradition, but rather innumerable mutually isolated traditions shaped by separate values and circumstances.

But since 2000, three large collections have attempted, in very different ways, to embrace the whole sweep of American storytelling, and all identify “folktales” (or, in McCarthy’s case, “folk tales”) in their titles. All, by design or otherwise, display not only the diversity of the nation’s oral narrative traditions but also their interconnectedness. Thomas Green’s Greenwood Library of American Folktales (four volumes, 2006), the largest and most expensive, breaks the nation into eight regions and concentrates on written sources published before 1920. In contrast, Carl Lindahl’s American Folktales from the Collections of the Library of Congress (two volumes, 2004) draws entirely on audio recordings dating from 1933 to 2001, most previously unpublished, and focuses on the narrators and their relationships with the collectors.

Most recent is William Bernard McCarthy’s Cinderella in America: A Book of Fairy and Folk Tales. With 538 pages pressed into one paperback volume, Cinderella is easily the shortest and most affordable of the three. But the book’s size is hardly a drawback, because McCarthy packs into it some 144 tales (each followed by a useful discussion), along with a concise introduction explaining the purpose and range of the anthology, a strong introductory statement for each of the book’s six sections, and back matter aimed at general readers and specialists alike.

McCarthy distinguishes American tales from folktales that merely happen to be told in America. He is express in his notion of e pluribus unum: “after five hundred years on the continent and two hundred years under the Constitution there is no longer any question that we are a distinct and distinctive people with a distinct and distinctive set of . . . folkways . . . not yet wholly shared . . . by the new immigrant” (12). McCarthy bypasses tales told by new arrivals and turns instead to narrative communities that have inhabited the country for generations and adapted their tales to New World environments.

As title references to Cinderella and fairy tales attest, McCarthy focuses on oral fictions of European descent, those most closely cognate with the märchen of the Brothers Grimm. The core of this repertoire is the magic tale, with its kings and giants, and its unlikely protagonists who walk into a world of wonders as children and emerge from it as adults. But McCarthy’s anthology, like the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, also embraces humorous narratives of fools and numskulls (German schwänke), adventure tales similar to märchen but lacking magical elements (Thompson’s novelle), animal and formula tales, and texts that blur the boundaries between märchen and legend. For all of its surface variety, this is a “unified repertoire” with a shared geographic spread and shared contexts for telling (“adults at a wake . . . men working at fishing or lumbering . . . children at bedtime . . . family and guests whiling away the long hours of winter darkness between sundown and sleep”), occasions presumably “different from the occasion and audience for jokes, legends, tall tales, or personal...