Fairy Tales: A New History (review)

In the story of "Aladdin, or the Wonderful Lamp," when a peddler comes along offering shiny new lamps in exchange for old ones, the princess inadvertently gives away Aladdin's means of empowerment as well as her own freedom. Not all that's new works wonders. The publisher's Web site showcases Ruth B. Bottigheimer's volume as "the first new approach to fairy tale history in decades," and yet—truth be told in reviewing—we would be as naïve as the princess to mistake this "new" approach for an improvement.

Fairy Tales: A New History is not even that new. Bottigheimer's argument, synthesized in a New York Times article as "the accepted oral tradition of fairy tales is a fairy tale," is definitely well known to scholars of folklore and fairy tales who have read her 2002 book, The Fairy Godfather, on the early modern Venetian writer, Giovan Francesco Straparola, and her subsequent essays about the literary origin of fairy tales. To her exclusively book-centered approach, many scholars in Europe and North America have already responded critically or negatively at conferences and in writing. The general reaction has been not to exclude the interaction of literary and oral narratives in fairy tale transmission, a dynamic that is generally accepted, but to protest the rigidity and inaccuracies of Bottigheimer's perspective Velay-Vallantin et al and "Reflections"). What is new about the 2009 book is that the argument has now taken the shape and authority of a history, and this makes it more pressing from a scholarly and pedagogical standpoint to gauge precisely what is gained and what is lost or compromised in buying this approach.

What does Fairy Tales: A New History claim? First, in Bottigheimer's words, "folk invention and transmission of fairy tales has no basis in verifiable fact" (1), and this alone for her is evidence of its absence. Second, in the "new" book-based history of fairy tales that should replace this "once upon a time" fantasy of the oral tradition, "the ubiquitous and mysterious folk and nursemaids remain, but as consumers of fairy tales rather than as producers" (103). Third, early modern Italian authors play a crucial role that has gone relatively unacknowledged in the "invention" of the genre: "Straparola created the form. Basile provided much of the content that later authors adopted. Together, they created the basis for Europe's fairy tale tradition" (74). French authors, Charles Perrault and the aristocratic women fairy tale writers of the late seventeenth early eighteenth centuries, borrowed from and edited the Italians; and the Brothers Grimm in nineteenth-century Germany perfected this tradition of collecting and rewriting "oral" tales that were actually of bookish lineage. As Bottigheimer states succinctly in her conclusion, "In a large sense the international spread of fairy tales can be explained within a history of predominantly Italian creation, French editing, and German re-editing that took place in a context of commercial mechanisms within book distribution networks" (107).

From the assertion that Venetian writer Straparola single-handedly "invented" the genre of the fairy tale to the simplistic equation of "the lack of evidence" with "evidence of lack," the enormity of Bottigheimer's claims is staggering, since like a magic wand they are supposed to wave away the very possibility of an orally transmitted fairy tale before the sixteenth century. One major problem is that Bottigheimer's exclusively literary genealogy depends upon an extremely narrow definition of the fairy tale as having a specific "rise" plot, that is, a poor boy or girl, thanks to magic intervention, marries a princess or prince and becomes rich (93). This definition is not even consistently supported by Bottigheimer's examples; but there is more to give us pause. Implicitly this definition excludes popular tales of magic such as "Snow White," "Sleeping Beauty," and even many versions of "Cinderella." Furthermore, the "rise" plot that was supposedly unknown before Straparola's "Puss in Boots" is certainly characteristic of many tales from the Arabian Nights, which was...