Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2004

Review by Vanessa Joosen, University of Antwerp.

It has been five years since Marvels and Tales published Donald Haase's survey “Feminist Fairy-Tale Scholarship,” an article that has become a helpful tool for all who wish to discuss fairy tales from a feminist angle. The article has been updated and forms the introduction to Haase's new book Fairy Tales and Feminism . The title, as Haase himself writes, mirrors Karen E. Rowe's overview “Feminism and Fairy Tales” from 1979. Since the 1970s, feminist fairy-tale research has evolved substantially, as the contributions to this collection convincingly prove. No longer focussing on mere descriptions of stereotypical gender representation, all the articles in this volume take feminism a step further, paying attention to socio-historical contexts and pointing out nuances, ambiguities and contradictory messages in the texts.

Haase's overview of “Feminist Fairy-Tale Scholarship” is a chronological survey of the different stages in fairy-tale research. Whereas the early women's movement mainly criticized the passivity of female fairy-tale characters, later the spectrum was broadened and new approaches were invented and refined. Feminists tried to recover women's voices by looking for hidden messages in the tales and unearthing indications of female subversiveness or matriarchal societies. They devoted books and articles to the female story-tellers who surrounded Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, and compared different editions of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen to see how the Grimms adapted the tales to fit their bourgeois and patriarchal moral. Moreover, feminist scholars and authors helped to (re-)publish the tales of many female authors that had been neglected in the male-dominated fairy-tale canon. To some of these authors, the so-called conteuses from seventeenth-century France (the best known of which are Mme Lheritier and Mme d'Aulnoy), Lewis C. Seifert devotes a more elaborate contribution in this book. Jeannine Blackwell did a similar research on German female authors of fairy tales, and includes several translated fragments of their tales in her article.

The first six essays in Fairy Tales and Feminism were previously published in Marvels and Tales , but their originality, as well as their contributions to fundamental issues in fairy-tale research, justifies a reprint in this book. In “Fertility Control and the Birth of the Modern European Fairy-Tale Herione,” Ruth Bottigheimer corrects the commonly held view that the portrayal of women as we know it from Grimm and Perrault's fairy tales is representative for the whole of the pre-twentieth-century period. With convincing analyses of medieval textual references to sexuality, fertility and the fear or pleasure that women associate with sexuality, Bottigheimer shows that the modern European fairy-tale heroine is not of all times, but that there is textual evidence that women had more control over their own sexuality up until the sixteenth century. Gradually, the texts suggest that women lost charge over their own fertility and started to link sexuality with fear of unwanted pregnancy and rape. This shift in attitude occurred simultaneously with the birth of the fairy-tale heroine, and influenced its image. Intelligently written in an engaging style, Bottigheimer's article is a joy to read.

In “The Mirror Broken: Women's Autobiography and Fairy Tales,” Elizabeth Wanning Harries explores the use of fairy-tale references in the literary autobiographies of two female authors: Krista Wolf's Kindheitsmuster and Carolyn Kay Steedman's Landscape for a Good Woman . Referring to Bacchilega's parallel between fairy-tale retellings and the mirror, Harries shows convincingly how the image of the broken mirror not only features literally in the texts that she studies, but that it can also be considered a metaphor for the fragmented style in which the tales are recycled in these two novels. A different field of interest is chosen by Cathy Lynn Preston, who discusses the use of folktales in jokes, films and new media. Her references to television shows such as “ Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire?” and the Cinderella adaptation Ever After prove that the fairy tale is more alive than ever in contemporary society, albeit sometimes in somewhat unexpected forms.

In many Anglo-American publications, researchers limit themselves to English, German and French fairy-tale traditions. The journal Marvels and Tales has a tradition of looking beyond these linguistic borders, and Donald Haase, as its editor in chief, is conscious of the fact that fairy tales from other parts of the world have exciting stories and research material to offer. Christina Bacchilega chooses the Indian wonder tale as the topic of her essay. Latin American folktales are represented by Patricia Anne Odber de Baubeta and Fiona Mackintosh.

Fairy Tales and Feminism is a rich and readable book that covers a broad spectrum in time and space. Several appearances of the fairy tale occur in a balanced equilibrium, from the seventeenth-century story-tellers to early twenty-first-century TV shows. You do not have to be a member of the women's movement to find the articles exciting and inspiring, but the book does prove that no critical paradigm has provided so many interesting and influential insights into the fairy tale as feminism.

Vanessa Joosen