The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre by Jack Zipes (review)

This is the latest in a prodigious output of publications over the past three decades through which Jack Zipes has developed his theories regarding the cultural positions of folktales in Western society. As is typical, Zipes ranges far and wide, juxtaposing a disparate set of topics (some of which he has discussed before) in an attempt to further demonstrate the theory he set forth in Why Fairy Tales Stick (2006) and has developed in more recent articles such as "What Makes a Repulsive Frog So Appealing" (2008) and "The Meaning of Fairy Tale within the Evolution of Culture" (2011): that the cultural evolutionary theory of memes can account for the fluid nature of folktales and their continuing existence. Chapter one reiterates that theory; chapter two considers the work of Catherine d'Aulnoy in the development of the French fairy tale tradition from oral form to print; and chapter three returns to the story of "Bluebeard" by Charles Perrault, this time focusing on Catherine Breillat's 2008 film version as a feminist response.

As a reader, I was particularly interested in chapters four and five, which investigate (or purport to investigate) topics that I teach and research on but about which little has been written. In chapter four, "Witch as Fairy/Fairy as Witch: Unfathomable Baba Yagas," Zipes's purported aim is to position Baba Yaga in the historical development of the witch figure in European folk literature. To do so, he presents summaries of the work done on Baba Yaga and Russian folk literature by Andreas Johns, Vladimir Propp, and W. R. S. Ralston. The discussion is useful in that it brings such work together, but beyond that Zipes has little to contribute about her; nor does he actually offer much in the way of objective proof for the assertion that begins and ends the chapter: that witches—along with fairies, mermaids, and other supernatural female creatures—are a later incarnation of the pagan and Greco-Roman goddesses.

The title of chapter five, "The Tales of Innocent Persecuted Heroines and Their Neglected Female Storytellers and Collectors," is somewhat misleading, in that both it and the first few paragraphs allude to the idea of the Innocent Persecuted Heroines tale type, the subject of a special issue of Western Folklore back in 1993 but little discussed since then. However, Zipes uses the term not to investigate those particular tales but rather to present similar, lesser-known tales by female storytellers and collectors from the nineteenth century, tales which he says are "innocently persecuted" because they have been ignored in favor of the more patriarchally situated Grimms' stories. This chapter is, like the others, pretty much a stand-alone piece that provides interesting reading but only nominally shores up the claim that this book charts a history of the development of fairy tales. Here Zipes addresses tales and tellers who have been left out of the canon and ignored even by feminist scholars, but fails to provide a closely examined argument regarding why this is the case, or why popular culture continues to favor the stories that it does.

Chapters six and seven continue this focus on lesser-known retellers, with discussions first of obscure nineteenth-century male collectors and then of late twentieth-century female visual retellers. The purpose of chapter six, "Giuseppe Pitrè and the Great Collectors of Folk Tales in the Nineteenth Century," seems to be that of filling out our understanding of the establishment of the folktale canons by bringing to light collectors who were active at the time but who have not been translated, overshadowed by the popularity of the Grimms, Andersen, and others. Zipes spends a good bit of the chapter exploring the work of Guiseppe Pitrè as an example; yet again, however, he has no clear answers as to why Pitrè and others have been largely ignored. Chapter seven, "Fairy-Tale Collisions, or the Explosion of a Genre," focuses mostly on...