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

Although set in a framework of memes and cultural evolution, The Irresistible Fairy Tale is as much a book about fairy-tale collectors, collections, and the media of story expression as about individual tales and transmission. Indeed, Chapter 1, “The Cultural Evolution of Storytelling and Fairy Tales,” refers to and updates the increasingly popularized ideas about memes. Author Jack Zipes asserts, “To say the least, meme has suffered from its popularity and is now loosely used for anything and everything that becomes trendy and acts like a virus” (18). Zipes cites a recent study, The Evolution of Childhood (2010) by Melvin Konner, to claim the memetic aspects that most draw his attention as the fairy tale’s eminent social and cultural historian. He considers memes “cultural units of information such as stories” that undergo “change through innovation,” “chance events,” “social transmission between populations,” “the natural selection of cultural variants,” and “preservation through free decisions, and coerced preservation” (19). Still, references to memetic dissemination appear only briefly throughout the book, with more emphasis on collectors and their collections.

The book does develop a cultural evolutionary approach to the fairy tale by tracing the transformations of pagan goddesses into fairies and witches and the transformations of story protagonists from innocent persecuted heroines to innovative agents of their own stories. Chapters, however, center on Madame d’Aulnoy and the female French salon storytellers who named and perpetuated the literary fairy tale using fairies themselves, Catherine Breillat’s televised and cinematic remake of Charles Perrault’s “Bluebeard,” Baba Yaga stories and the critical work of Russian structuralist Vladimir Propp, heroines and nineteenth-century tale collections of Laura Gonzenbach and three other European women, Giusepe Pitrè and his local collection of Sicilian stories with its international comparative notes, and, finally, a variety of twenty-first-century artists who create fairy-tale mosaics for contemporary issues. While noting the “irresistible rise of fairy tales in almost all cultural and commercial fields,” Zipes keeps his sights on the scholarly study of the genre and on interdisciplinary approaches involving the humanities and natural and social sciences (xi). This is a history invested in extending current assumptions about fairy tales to incorporate visual media and to maintain the purview of fairy-tale studies on connections with oral tradition and folklore scholarship.

Admitting the utopian and dystopian impulses of the fairy tale and of key characters such as fairies and witches, Zipes paradoxically seeks to explain a genre that perhaps works best when provoking and sharing the unexplainable. The urge to outline prehistory leads to generalizations that must be entertained when coming from an accomplished scholar, and all are supported by references to other books and authors. Yet one would probably challenge similar ideas if they were expressed in a composition course. Take, for example, this early sentence: “Though it is impossible to trace the historical origins and evolution of fairy tales to a particular time and place, we do know that humans began telling tales as soon as they developed the capacity of speech” (2). The urge to explain origins of language, mythology, and storytelling created nineteenth-century theories now known by memorable names such as “ding dong,” “bow wow,” and “solar mythology.” That an accomplished scholar such as Zipes follows a similar originary track surely confirms the efficacy of his title and the irresistible desire to know how these powerful stories started. With historical precedent from exploded nineteenth-century theories, one must concede that this origin searching remains a precarious endeavor. Still, Zipes gives a masterful and hopeful description of the genre and its inclinations: “The focus of fairy tales, whether oral, written, or cinematic, has always been on finding magical instruments, extraordinary technologies, or powerful people and animals that will enable protagonists to transform themselves along with their environment, making it more suitable for living in peace and contentment” (2). His capacity to allow the genre expression...