Enchanted Ideologies: A Collection of Rediscovered Nineteenth-Century Moral Fairy Tales (review)

Scholarly studies of the British fairy tale in the nineteenth century have been flourishing over the past five years. Matthew Grenby has led the way in revising our notions about the social and cultural reception of pre-Victorian fairy tales with a superb essay, "Tame Fairies Make Good Teachers: The Popularity of Early British Fairy Tales," in which he argues that fairy tales were not discredited at the end of the eighteenth century but experienced a smooth development into the nineteenth century, adapting as a genre to new conditions in Great Britain (Lion and the Unicorn 30.1 [2006]: 1-24). In another important study, Laurence Talairach-Vielmas has drawn unusual parallels between the nineteenth-century fairy tales and the sensation novels of the same period. In particular, her Moulding the Female Body in Victorian Fairy Tales and Sensation Novels (Ashgate, 2007) examines how these fairy tales and novels reveal the pressures and expectations that obliged young Victorian women from the middle and upper classes to transform themselves according to aesthetic and cultural models constructed according to male interests and to the rapidly growing commodity market in England. More recently, Caroline Sumpter has shown through her original research how British magazines and newspapers employed fairy tales in diverse ways at the end of the nineteenth century to speak to both children and adults and to try to influence them according to political and religious views. Her significant study The Victorian Press and the Fairy Tale (Palgrave, 2008) has added to our understanding of how working-class people were exposed to and used the fairy tale to their own interests. Now, in Enchanted Ideologies, Marilyn Pemberton has further enriched our understanding of the British fairy tale in the nineteenth century by publishing a valuable anthology of rediscovered moral fairy tales for young women and children.

Pemberton's book consists of a long sociohistorical introduction about the ideological and cultural development of the fairy tale and twenty-one unusual fairy tales that appeared from 1818 to 1899, mainly in women's magazines such as La Belle Assemblée; or, Belle's Court and Fashionable Magazine; The Ladies Cabinet of Fashion, Music, and Romance; and The World of Fashion or in publications for girls such as Aunt Judy's Magazine. Several of the writers are anonymous or unknown, while others like Mary Martha Sherwood, Dinah Mulock Craik, Mary de Morgan, Evelyn Sharp, Mary Molesworth, and Edith Nesbit are recognized literary figures. Building on Grenby's essay, Pemberton focuses more on fairy tales written for and featuring young girls and women. She argues that the fairy tale was very much alive and vibrant throughout the nineteenth century. However, its function and form changed somewhat due to the rise of the middle classes and the transformation of the family in the nineteenth century. The formation of distinct gender roles and "new" domesticity—note that Pemberton concentrates on the bourgeoisie—led to the publication of books on manners and the writing of moral fairy tales in which girls and women were likened to flowers, domestic angels, and faultless wives. Similar to some of the fairy tales published by Sarah Fielding and Madame Le Prince de Beaumont, these stories were intended to prepare young women for marriage and proper roles as good wives.

From a literary perspective, the tales in the anthology from the early part of the nineteenth century, such as "The Rose," "Aglaë," "The Wishing Cap," "Elmina," and "Zerinda," tend to be too didactic and schematic and are only readable as representative "historical documents" of how the fairy tale was flattened to "civilize" young women according to gender and religious expectations. The tales written later by De Morgan, Sharp, Molesworth, and Nesbit problematize the situation of young girls and women and have more literary merit. What becomes apparent from reading the entire collection and Pemberton's introduction is that there was no such thing as the...