| The Fairy Tale: The Magic Mirror of the Imagination New York; London: Routledge, 2002; Xvii + 156; ISBN 0-415-93891-0 Reviewed by Rosemary Lovell-Smith, University of Auckland, New Zealand. Excellent work on the fairy tale is available to my students. I regularly refer them to Maria Tatar, Jack Zipes, Alan Dundes, Bengt Holbek, Ruth Bottigheimer and others. All of these scholars, however, have particular interests, and I have often felt the need for a fairy tale “textbook,” a concise and approachable monograph which would introduce the oral origins of the fairy tale and explain something of the history and practice of the study of oral literatures, as well as the fairy tale's various entries into and diverse formations in written literature, the history of the great national collections, infantilisation, feminist (and other) re-writing, and the range of other critical approaches. Steven Swann Jones's The Fairy Tale: The Magic Mirror of the Imagination , originally brought out by Twayne and now available in paperback in Routledge's “Genres in Context,” seems intended to fill the niche I have described, and although falling somewhat short of my ideal, is a welcome addition to what is now available to the student. Brief introductory chapters on the folklore origins and literary history of the fairy tale provide useful starting-points, and equally useful is the final Bibliographic Essay, a historical survey of schools of fairy tale scholarship and interpretation. My dissatisfaction with the book mainly relates to Jones's understanding of fairy tale as a genre, which means that his net has been cast widely. The result is a kind of bottom trawling able to catch almost anything with fantastic elements; thus Hugh Lofting's Dr Dolittle books – not, in my view, at all like fairy tales - get a mention, on the grounds that they make use of a familiar fairy tale motif, the talking animal. C. S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Mary Norton, and E.B.White ( Charlottte's Web and Stuart Little ) are also mentioned under the rubric of “fairy tale” (42) - I would prefer the descriptor “fantasy for children” - while Swann's chapter called The Fairy Tale Influence deals with three enormously different children's books. Lumping together L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz, Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are , and Dr Seuss's The Cat in the Hat on the grounds that “each depicted a protagonist's exploration of magical worlds and the spiritual and personal enlightenment that accrues from the enlarged sense of the world promoted by these explorations” requires so high a degree of generalisation as to obscure each book's individuality. Fantasy, children's literature, the picture book (three overlapping but far from identical categories) should not be subsumed into the literary fairy tale like this. Moreover, there is danger in Jones's approach, of reinforcing the erroneous idea that the literary fairy tale is a genre for children or young people only. On the plus side, though, Jones's willingness to offer an overall concept of fairy tale, his confidence in defining it and identifying its “thematic core,” will also give students confidence, and should provoke plenty of thinking and discussion in class about just what does characterise this genre – and, indeed, on whether the fairy tale should be seen as a whole anyway, or as a set of related sub-genres. Such a discussion might also raise the question whether the happy ending is as essential to the genre as Jones claims: there certainly are recorded Little Red Riding Hoods and wives of Bluebeard-types who meet a grisly end. Nor are all fairy tale protagonists “good and deserving” (17) - surely the hero of “Puss in Boots” is a case in point? In Jones's interpretations of four tales (“Three Hairs from the Devil's Beard,” “Faithful John,” “The Speaking Horsehead” and “The Search for the Lost Husband”) I find much to disagree with, but these are also the most original and valuable part of the book, of much interest to specialist as well as novice readers. Jones's readings are grounded in his basic claim, that the fantasy element in fairy tales points to a psychological subtext: “fairy tales speak the language of the unconscious mind” (11). What Jones calls “ the poetic and exaggerated symbolism of fantasy”(11) is an area where students – indeed, all of us – acknowledge mysteries and look for guidance. The heroine tells her secret to an iron stove. What can that mean? Swann's answers to such questions are offered very definitely. It is a pity that the plurality of interpretation acknowledged in his Preface and Bibliographic Essay has been abandoned in these chapters. However, in an introductory textbook a narrow focus and consistency of interpretive approach do have benefits. The readings are sufficiently developed to demonstrate the explanatory possibilities of Jones's psychological approach, but will also provoke formulation of alternative readings. Aspects of the book's production are unsatisfactory. Routledge is supposedly a top academic publisher, but The Fairy Tale offers disheartening evidence of editorial ignorance: an unfortunately misplaced comma on p. 11 has turned Geza Roheim into two scholars, Geza and Roheim; Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's name is mis-spelt, as are Asbjörnsen's and Dasent's; Asbjörnsen and Moe are not in the index, and Hans Christian Andersen is spelled differently on p. 43 from earlier, correct, spellings. J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit was not really published at “mid-century,” and whether “Aladdin's Lamp” does directly owe its existence “to folk tradition” (3) must now be regarded as debatable. For readers making a first foray into this field of study, minor slips are likely to produce confusion and uncertainty. Rosemary Lovell-Smith |