Critical and Creative Perspectives on Fairy Tales: An Intertextual Dialogue between Fairy-Tale Scholarship and Postmodern Retellings

2. Marcia K. Lieberman’s “Some Day My Prince Will Come”

Marcia Lieberman’s “Some Day My Prince Will Come: Female Acculturation through the Fairy Tale” (1972) was one of the first feminist studies in the American fairy-tale renaissance of the 1970s. Published as a reaction to “Fairy Tale Liberation” (1970), Alison Lurie’s commendation of the fairy tale as a subversive and potentially feminist genre, Lieberman’s polemic reply raised fundamental questions about gender representation in popular fairy tales: “In the catalytic exchange between Lurie and Lieberman during the early 1970s, we witness simultaneously the inchoate discourse of early feminist fairy-tale research and the advent of modern fairy-tale studies , with its emphases on the genre’s sociopolitical and sociohistorical contexts . Already anticipated in their terms of debate are nascent questions and critical problems that over the next thirty years would constitute the agenda of much fairy-tale research” (Haase, “Scholarship” 2). That Lieberman’s article is a milestone in American feminist fairy-tale criticism was acknowledged by critics such as Kay Stone (“Feminist ApMarcia K. Lieberman’s “Some Day My Prince Will Come” 2 50 Chapter 2 proaches” 230), Donald Haase (“Scholarship” 31), and Jack Zipes, who included it as one of only four critical articles in his anthology Don’t Bet On the Prince (1983). Lieberman’s article is now nearly forty years old, and feminist fairy-tale theory has evolved since then under the influence of various theoretical perspectives, such as semiotics, psychoanalysis, Marxism , deconstruction theory, and queer studies. Both critics and authors of fiction have shown that there are more sophisticated ways of dealing with fairy tales than the social-realistic and political approach that Lieberman represents, for instance by drawing attention to their qualities as fantasies and by taking into account the genre’s diversity and developmental history.1 Problematic as Lieberman’s approach may be in comparison to later feminist studies, its influence on fairy-tale research remains undisputed. In his survey of feminist fairy-tale scholarship from 2004, Haase writes that “there was—and still is—widespread agreement with Lieberman’s argument ” (“Scholarship” 3), and indeed the discourse of critics such as Patricia Duncker (1992), Maria Micaele Coppola (2001), and Gerard Gielen (2006) still echoes several aspects of Lieberman’s fairy-tale critique.2 In addition, aspects of Lieberman’s argument can still be discerned in the attitude to the traditional fairy tale expressed in many fairy-tale retellings. They still surface in recent texts—especially, though not exclusively, those intended for children. Examples include Babette Cole’s Long Live Princess Smartypants (2004), Will and Mary Pope Osbourne’s Sleeping Bobby (2005), and Marjet Huiberts’ Roodkapje was een toffe meid (2010, Little Red Riding Hood Was a Cool Girl). Moreover, the older revisions that engage with ideas from the emancipation movement, such as Robert Munsch’s The Paper Bag Princess (1980), Babette Cole’s Prince Cinders (1988) and Princess Smartypants (1986), and Jane Yolen’s Sleeping Ugly (1981), are still being reprinted and used in classrooms. According to Manfred Pfister’s criterion of “communicativity,” the prominence of Lieberman’s ideas in the feminist fairy-tale debates makes it a suitable starting point for a thematic comparison on the basis of what he calls “dialogicity.” The Power of the Page “Some Day My Prince Will Come” is first and foremost a critique of the ideology transmitted through popular fairy tales as they were made available through Andrew Lang’s Blue Fairy Book (1889) and in Walt Disney’s Marcia K. Lieberman’s “Some Day My Prince Will Come” 51 animated films. Lieberman refutes Lurie’s defense of the fairy tale’s potential for the feminist cause, which is for the most part based on lesser-known tales such as “Clever Gretchen” and “The Sleeping Prince.” Lieberman stresses the limited scope that these stories have, arguing instead that “an analysis of those fairy tales that children actually read indicates [ . . . ] that they serve to acculturate women to traditional social roles” (185). The popular fairy tales of Lang and Disney, she argues, teach children “behavioral and associative patterns, value systems, and how to predict the consequences of specific acts or circumstances” (187). Lieberman’s article can be situated in the larger feminist debates on the biological nature or cultural constructedness of gender. Although she acknowledges the unresolvedness of the issue, she emphasizes the second pole. Her approach is characterized by the conviction of the ideological and didactic impact of literature and of children...