Fairy Tales Reimagined: Essays on New Retellings (review)

This collection grew out of an Northeast Modern Language Association conference panel, and it displays both the strengths and the weaknesses of its inception. The collection's large number of essays, sixteen plus a foreword and introduction, precludes any of them from having the length for a complex development of their theses. And I would have loved much more of Bethany Joy Bear on Peg Kerr's 1999 queering of Hans Andersen's Wild Swans, or of Joanne Campbell Tidwell's reading of Jane Yolen's recuperation of Barrie's Peter Pan in her 1997/2000 "Lost Girls," where Peter becomes the patriarch enforcing Victorian heteronormativity and the pirates a revolutionary democratic community. "Yolen's story," Tidwell writes, "is of the truly oppressed of Victorian times, girls of mostly working class origins, and it restores the revolutionary and emancipatory nature of the tale" (66).

Despite the relative brevity of the essays, one of the real strengths of the collection is its focus on recent publications of retellings where little criticism has as yet been generated, with stories from the 1990s and 2000 on. Alongside the new stories, the collection embraces an expansive inclusion of less-considered women writers such as Peg Kerr, Emma Donoghue, Robin McKinley, Louise Murphy, and Shannon Hale. And in a genre that Mathilda Slabbert argues is sometimes regarded as "the domain for female writers and the platform for feminist commentary" (69), it is also exciting to find serious consideration of a number of male writers: Robert Coover, Neil Gaiman, Gregory Maguire, Philip Pullman, Gaétan Soucy, and Bill Willingham. Indeed, Willingham's comic book series, Fables 2002-2006, with its cast of fairy-tale figures presented in the "real" world of New York post 9/11, is one that will be new to large swathes of the fairy-tale academy. Mark C. Hill's analysis of the representations of masculinity in its protagonist, Bigby Wolf—"part hard-nosed detective, part soldier, part anti-hero . . . he is the embodiment of the villainous wolves of European fairy tales" (181)—is subtle and engaging, concluding that the series mirrors an America that "glorifies war and the soldiers who fight them" (192).

The claims of the collection's subheadings are a little overblown, and the organization of essays within them are at times misleading, but the discussions that circulate around gender and sexuality, representations of emotional trauma, cultural critique, and the contemporary retelling of the fairy tale are rich and engaging. I would have liked more focus on the metafictional issues of retelling, given the collection's subtitle, but the essays rarely do that, with the exception of Amie A. Doughty's discussion of Robin McKinley and Helen Pilonovsky's impressive analysis of Kate Bernheimer's Complete Tales. It is also a pity that the reference used consistently by the authors is Adrienne Rich's 1972 "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision," a useful and thought-provoking argument but a little dated in the twenty-first century for a discussion of contemporary and postmodern retelling.

Don't look here for cutting-edge theoretical engagement; there is hardly a reference to Bacchilega or Benson (to begin at the Bs of theoretical tale-telling). And the lack of proper dating of the primary texts is a scholarly omission that at times does not allow more useful comparisons. Margarete J. Landwehr compares representations of the Holocaust in Yolen's Briar Rose and Louise Murphy's Hansel and Gretel as if they were contemporaneous novels (as indeed her editions imply), but the fact that Yolen's was written a decade before Murphy's is surely relevant to a comparative reading of retellings. It was frustrating that I constantly had to go outside the volume to discover the original dates for much of the work under discussion. In her foreword, Kate Bernheimer's autobiographical musing on the fairy tale raises a fascinating question as to whether it is affect that unifies the genre in all its...