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  • Red Riding Hood and the Wolf in Bed: Modernism’s Fairy Tales
  • Stephen Benson (bio)
Red Riding Hood and the Wolf in Bed: Modernism’s Fairy Tales. By Ann Martin. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007. 199 pp., bibliography, index.

Modernism’s Fairy Tales, the subtitle of Ann Martin’s book, raises expectations of critique. Many of the artists and writers commonly associated with [End Page 185] European modernism were attracted to what we could call fairy-tale thinking—in particular, faith in a happily ever after. On the one hand there’s the polemical new beginnings of the likes of futurism and imagism, the credos of which posit a slate wiped clean of the accumulated works of recent history; on the other, the projected ever afters of the more radically conservative modernists, for whom the recently literate and urbanized masses needed herding—or worse—in the interests of a new order of the elite. That these very masses might be reading fairy tales, and so perpetuating the threat of a tide of popular culture, is only one of the many ironies of modernism’s dangerously utopian tendencies.

Red Riding Hood and the Wolf in Bed doesn’t quite follow this line, but it’s an indication of the richness of the conjunction of modernism and fairy tale that it should give rise to a host of interpretative possibilities. The conjunction itself is wonderfully unexpected, leading this reader to imagine a series of similarly counterintuitive meetings: Romanticism and the Circus? The Nouveau Roman and the Folktale? Myth is a far more common pairing for modernism, stemming from T. S. Eliot’s infamously tendentious essay on the “mythical method” employed in Joyce’s Ulysses. Martin rather sidesteps this dominant paradigm, but again, her attention is directed elsewhere. The central three chapters of the book chart allusions to and dealings with specific canonical fairy tales in the work of three modernist writers: James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Djuna Barnes. The rationale and justification for such a project is made at various points in the course of a long and wide-ranging first chapter dealing with the history of the fairy tale—in particular, during the nineteenth century, and so with the genre as it was inherited by modernist artists. Martin suggests that the fairy tale is more than simply one of the many worldly objects swept up in the net of the encyclopedic modernist text. The fairy tale is more than just another of modernism’s intertexts. In terms of content, the central tales discussed—“Sleeping Beauty,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Cinderella,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “The Fisherman and His Wife,” and “Snow White”—“explore the individual’s role in a modern urban society. They are predicated upon the dynamics of consumerism and the subject’s performance of a gendered, classed identity . . . texts that reflect and convey modern attitudes towards sexuality, social mobility, urbanity, and commodity culture” (17). That is, the genre of the fairy tale, together with its constituent dramas, is singularly entangled in the very discourses of modernity with which modernist writers were engaged, from commerce and the market to fashion and the commodity, together with the conflicting attractions of tradition and innovation. For Martin, “Fairy tales come to reflect . . . the fluctuating experience of modernity . . . and most importantly, the agency of the subject in a modern consumer society” (40).

In addition to these social and historical matters, Martin also makes a general claim for the genre of the fairy tale as peculiarly related to modernism. Beginning [End Page 186] with reference to “the multiple interpretative possibilities that the texts represent for modernist writers” (8), she goes on to offer a significant proposal: “It is the fairy tale’s involvement in multiple contexts that marks its potential as a system of reference in the work of Joyce, Woolf, and Barnes. In their instability and variety, fairy tales open up a space for the reader in the text. . . . [F]airy tales are used by Joyce, Woolf, and Barnes as modernist works; that is, as texts that reflect the instability and the variability that is the experience of modernity” (12). This is quite some claim, amounting to nothing less than a...

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