Fairy Tales Framed: Early Forewords, Afterwords, and Critical Words

Address to the Reader

xiii Address to the Reader Fairy tales’ whimsical plots and dark possibilities fascinate readers, who often visualize them as the products of rustic storytellers. Well-known theorizers of fairy tales like Bruno Bettelheim, Carl Jung, and Vladimir Propp respectively championed the principle that fairy tales communicate deeply embedded personal psychological truths, posited universal symbolism in the details of their plots, and analyzed their construction based on a set of thirty-four “moves.” Rebellious readings of fairy tales first grew out of Germany’s 1968 university protest movement when students rejected the Grimms’ canonical status. Those sentiments fostered a skepticism that was taken up and developed by Marxists and feminists in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Throughout this decades-long revisioning of Europe’s fairy tales, the Grimms’ views about ancient oral origins of Märchen (usually translated as “fairy tales”) continued to shape both popular and scholarly thought about where fairy tales came from and how they survived from one generation to another. Beginning in the 1980s, histories of authorship, reading, and publishing emerged, and in the course of the 1990s those studies began to affect some scholarly thinking about fairy tales. That part of the story is less familiar. Now a generation of twenty-first-century scholars is recovering long-ignored or forgotten sources to explore fairy tales from new points of view and novel reference points—including fairy-tale authors’ addresses to their readers, which we explore on the following pages. We are all fairy-tale scholars who have long worked with the fairy tales addressed by these prefaces, commentary, afterwords, and critical words. In our articles and books, individually and as a group, we consider fairy tales in their historical and sociocultural, as well as in their literary and linguistic contexts, which contributes to our perspectives on the language of the period in general and the language and tone of these texts. Translating is a notoriously complex undertaking. Individually and as a group we have tried to convey the spirit as well as the content of the original texts. But there were limits. For instance, Perrault composed his first three tales—“Griselda,” “Ridiculous Wishes,” and “Donkeyskin”—in elegantly witty xiv / Address to the Reader verse. We aimed at elegance and wit, but only rarely did we try to rhyme the resulting translation. Occasionally, it seemed important to include the specific word or phrase that had appeared in the original, and those appear in parentheses. This is most frequently the case with genre terms, because terminology can be a thorny problem in fairy-tale studies. Early Italian and French authors used a variety of names for the individual tales in the cluster of narratives within which fairy tales and fairyland fictions took shape. It seemed important to include that information—hence their terms appear in parentheses where it seems relevant. We also had to weigh the value of consistency against that of exact transcription. Inconsistency permeates seventeenth- and eighteenth-century spellings, an inconsistency that includes the ways in which they used abbreviations in their pretense of public anonymity. As one example, Mme d’Aulnoy is sometime Mme D*** and at other times Mme D. or Mme D. . . . We have followed their usage, despite the inconsistencies which that entailed. Similarly, we have largely maintained seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury spellings for book titles. And finally, we have prepared these texts both for scholarly reference and for classroom use. Because instructors often assign individual chapters rather than a text as a whole, some information appears more than once in the talking footnotes. —Sue (Ruth B.) Bottigheimer ...