Enchanted Heroes

In the mid-twentieth century, parents who read fairy tales to their children thought of them in a context influenced by the Romantics and nineteenth-century illustrators: once upon a time, in a world lit by candles and firelight, hard-working rural folk made up tales to pass long winter nights. The tales spread among the people, developing various versions. As literacy increased, they were collected and printed, but while they have moved from oral to written culture, they retain their folk nature.

As those mid-century children grew up, feminists condemned the assumptions they had imbibed with the tales: once upon a time in a patriarchal society, people told stories in which beautiful princesses were rescued by handsome princes, or lovely maidens were married to beasts. The only alternative to this helpless model of femininity was the Wicked Witch or the Wicked Stepmother—the portraits of strong women were always negative. Walt Disney’s versions of Cinderella and Snow White have fixed this misogynistic vision in modern culture, encouraging women to be deferential, passive, and dependent.

As feminist critiques proliferated, Bruno Bettleheim’s influential book The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (1976) offered yet another tale about the tales: once upon a time, in a world before Freud and Jung, people told stories that externalized their deepest fears and desires. The stories, products of the unconscious mind, are fraught with sexual symbolism, and their violence allows childish readers to deal with their negative feelings—hating, for example, the Wicked Stepmother instead of their own mothers.

Today, grandparents who give their grandchildren the Opies’ The Classic Fairy Tales (1980) and new translations of the Grimm Fairy Tales by Jack Zipes or Philip Pullman view the tales differently than their grandparents did; and a large popular audience encounters the tales reworked in fiction, on stage, and on the screen. Behind this changed vision is an enormous corpus of scholarly works—ideological, post-structural, schematic, and cultural-historical—that has affected the tales over the past fifty years.

The assignment given to Marina Warner for Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale is to reflect upon the tales, their history, and their present cultural milieu in a 200-page book slightly smaller than a Kindle. It’s a task no less daunting than carrying water in a sieve, but Warner performs it with sprezzatura that readers familiar with her work will recognize and admire. The immense knowledge that informed From the Beast to the Blonde (1994), No Go the Bogeyman (1998), and her more recent Stranger Magic: Charmed States & The Arabian Nights (2012) is distilled here, with all the brilliant critical insight that has informed her work since the publication of Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary in 1976.

As Warner’s title suggests, she is not writing a history of the fairy tale, that is, a literary history; she is writing about fairy tale—a way of thinking, a state of wonder at the unlikely, the uncanny, the magic that has evolved over centuries of oral and literary culture and is still in a fruitful state of change. She begins by envisioning the history of fairy tale as a map in which the tales of Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm are the most “prominent landmarks”; the Arabian Nights are “aquifiers” from the east “running through the entire expanse”; the north is lit by beacons from Denmark and Russia, and the whole is surrounded by the Ocean of Story. Across this wondrous landscape, fairy tales “migrate on soft feet, for borders are invisible to them, no matter how ferociously they are policed by cultural purists.” The lovely metaphor posits a history that is not linear.

The feature of fairy tale that makes it non-linear, Warner asserts, is its absence of “a precisely delineated literary form.” Unlike the novel, it moves “between written and spoken versions and...