| The
Fairy Tale: The Magic Mirror of the Imagination New York: Routledge, 2002 Review by Ruth B. Bottigheimer, Stony Brook Routledge's series, Genres in Context, is the editorial home of Steven Swann Jones's very traditional historical description of the fairy tale; it relies on views, definitions, and descriptions of the fairy tale as first adumbrated by the Grimms two hundred years ago and as added to by subsequent oralist-inclining scholars. In positive terms, Jones ably sums up currently reigning anglophone views. That unfortunately means that he passes on pre-publishing history notions and that he treats as fact unproveable tenets such as the following: fairy tales were born amongst the folk, some in prehistoric times, and were transmitted forward by a variety of folk tellers until they were recorded beginning in sixteenth-century Venice (Straparola), seventeenth-century Naples (Basile), eighteenth-century France (Perrault, d'Aulnoy et Cie.), and finally in nineteenth-century Germany (the Grimms) and by folklorists in other nineteenth- and twentieth-century cultures. Although these are commonly held views in the United States and England, German scholarship has long dropped such innocent and inappropriately anthropological premises in favor of data-based publishing studies like that of Manfred Grätz's Das Närchen in der deutschen Aufklärung (1988, The [Fairy]Tale in the German Enlightenment). Jones is known for his meticulous scholarship and psychological interpretation of the "Snow-White" narrative, and his predilection for psychological approaches is also here evident. One drawback is that Jones presents interpretation as fact, as when stating that a peasant figure represents the good side of the hero's father [figure] and the king a dispenser of laws (47). It would perhaps be better if that were presented as an interpretation generated by Freudian literary analysis. But this is Jones's approach and it has served him well in other, specifically psychological contexts, such as his study of Snow-White. Jones implicitly acknowledges performance studies, when he discusses the infinite variety that disparate storytellers confer on single narratives. Much evidence confirms performance theory, but here as elsewhere the implications of performance theory for theories of oral transmission remain unexamined: first and foremost that the observable richness of narrational variety would logically and inevitably alter the stories in question and destroy narrative continuity, unless some other factor (i.e. printed books!) didn't also play a powerful role in maintaining story details unchanged generation after generation. Jones's
book is easily readable, its contents comprehensible.
His concluding bibliographical essay gives a good overview
of fairy tale scholarship, which neophyte scholars will
find helpful. Missing, however, is information about
recent investigations of the institutional spread of
core fairy tales -- such as that through nineteenth-century
school curricula in European countries. Ruth B. Bottigheimer |