Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 14 Number 1, April 2013

___________________________________________________________________

Zipes, Jack, The Irresistible Fairy-Tale. The Cultural and Social History of a Genre, Princeton and Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2012, p.235, ISBN 978-0-691-15338-4,  Hardback Price 22.95$, 15.56 £

Reviewed by

Evangelia Moula

Executive in Greek Secondary Education

Jack Zipes is indisputably a brilliant and renowned scientist and fairy-tale expert who has assiduously served his discipline for 30 whole years and has produced a copious corpus of work. He brought fairy tales forth onto the foreground of the western society’s interest and his age-long research contributed to the evolution of the genre’s study from the formalistic approach to its socio-cultural re-contextualization.

Before reviewing a newly published book and discussing its shortcomings and virtues, as long as nothing takes place in a cultural void, it is important to establish the dialogic frame, within which the review will be located. So, we will try to place the book among the milestones of the author’s previous writings, to summarize the contents of it, and even to take – to some extent- into account the already published reviews by accredited scholars and researchers.

Jack Zipes has always followed unswervingly the same dialectical materialist interpretative course concerning fairy tales. Ever since his first work: Fairy Tale. The Art of Subversion (1982), he has challenged a century of scholarship on the origins, psychology and universal meanings of fairy tales and held to his view, according to which the tales should be placed into the actual reality that created them (see: extratextuality). Thus, he demonstrated their transitory character, their innate movement, change and interconnection with the surrounding world (see: genericity)  and their contemporary socio-political conditions. He has even more exercised a scalding critique to patriarchal society and insisted that Fairy Tales served to compensate for the impoverished lives of the people, offering some sort of hope for a miraculous change and not a moral lesson or instruction. He highlighted the way authors such as Charles Perrault and the Grimms appropriated and turned age-old folk tales into lessons in European civility and even adjusted the contents of the tales to a children’s audience.  

In Fairy Tale as Myth (1994), Zipes charged Disney with changing our way of viewing fairy tales through his revolutionary technical means which capitalized on an American utopianism and reinforced the social and political status quo. In Why Fairy Tales Stick: The Evolution and Relevance of a Genre (2009) he elaborated his theory by establishing a stronger connection with the social and natural sciences to explain the appeal and resilience of the fairytale as an effect of cultural evolution. If certain stories became classics, it's because they are part of our Western patriarchal DNA, according to Dawkins’ theory of memetics.

In the book under discussion, The Irresistible Fairy Tale. The Cultural and Social History of the Genre, along the same line, Zipes enriches and amplifies this theory, while at the same time he creates a sort of a particular female reading of Fairy tale’s history, a counter-narrative, fragmentary and enlightening at the same time, opening up vistas for further explorations. Commenting on the paratextual information of the title, one would justifiably object to the use of the definite article “the”, since it is not any scrutinous or all-encompassing study of F-T’s social and cultural history, but a selective synthesis of evidences and arguments, whose common axis is their anti-patriarchal, feminist predisposition.

In chapter 1, entitled “The Cultural Evolution of Storytelling and Fairy Tales: Human Communication and Memetics” he establishes oral tradition as Fairy tale’s progenitor, claiming that tales derive from social and biological practices and have always been “the applied verbalizations of social actions”.  In Chapter 2, “The Meaning of Fairy Tale within the Evolution of Culture,” he comments on the elusive definition of conte de fée and places its literary birth among the femino-centric salons of French Court. Mme d’Aulnoy and her associates challenged the strict piety in the Court and disguised their critique of church and state into entertaining fairy tales. Here, Zipes once more, emphasizes the ancient, pagan roots and the Greco- Roman myths as fairy tales’ origins. Assertions like this, are nevertheless, not always supported by adequate examples. In chapter 3, “Remaking the Bluebird” or goodbye to Perrault”, he discusses Breillat’s cinematographic recreation of Bluebird, which by diverging from the misogynistic strain of storytelling within patriarchal culture, celebrates a young woman’s rebellion against it.  In chapter 4, “Witch as Fairy/ Fairy as Witch. Unfathomable Baba-Yagas”, Baba Yaga is presented as a composite of her various instantiations, fairies, goddesses, and historical humans. On the cultural body of Baba Yaga one can trace the inscriptions of cultural processes which transformed goddesses into bad witches. By exploring the inscrutable and ambiguous Baba-Yaga’s origin in Paleolithic and Neolithic cults and her multifaceted role in the Slavic – mostly Russian- tales, he seizes the chance to redeem Propp and underline his colossal contribution to the study of folklore.

In chapter 5 “The tales of innocent persecuted heroines and their neglected female storytellers and collectors” Zipes recounts and comments on four tales from identified nineteenth-century female collectors or narrators, Laura Gonzenbach, Nannette Lévesque, Bozena Nemcová, and Rachel Busk, along with information about their lives and works. In these tales young active heroines take destiny into their hands and challenge oppression, revealing how crucial the role of gender is in recording, translating, editing and publishing oral tales, since the classic type of fairy tale established by Grimms was a modification, not to say a misrepresentation, of the raw, genuine tales.

The following chapter: “Giuseppe Pitre and the great collectors of folk tales in the nineteenth century” is devoted to the life, work, and significance of Guiseppe Pitrè, the great Italian folklore collector, who endorsed the notion of fairy tales’ polygenesis and respected the narrators’ voices and styles. Pitre’s demopsychological studies of the moral and material life of people and his diverse collections were intended to offer an alternative to Sicily’s official history. Even more, since women were basically his narrators, one can encounter in his tales extraordinary young women who shape their own destiny in contrast to the literary male versions of Straparola, Basile, Perrault and Grimms. The final chapter: “Fairy-Tale Collisions, or the Explosion of a Genre” deals with the influence of fairy tale topics in contemporary (after the 60s) visual art of women artists, such as Kiki Smith and Paula Rego. Their works, either remakes or assortments of fairy tale fragments, impose a critical, skeptical perspective on contemporary culture and offer disturbing insights through dissonance, Kafkaesque images and realms of estrangement. They keep pace with the work of the second phase of feminist and postmodern writers of the 80’s, like Angela Carter and Tanith Lee.

The two appendices that follow are book reviews, although the second is really a preview, a review of a manuscript of a forthcoming book. These books are Fairy Tales: A New History, by Ruth Bottigheimer, and Tales of Magic, Tales in Print, by Willem de Blécourt, both of which assert the priority and the major importance of the printed texts than oral ones for the historical development of fairy tales. Bottigheimer argues that the absence of documentation of fairy tales is proof for the absence of fairy tales in the lives of the peasantry, while De Blecourt claims that since it’s impossible to uncover the oral history, the only way to establish a true history is to start with the first traceable literary tales. Zipes confronts them by adducing other acknowledged researchers’ findings and criticism and by providing evidence that prove Bottigheimer’s ideological oversimplifications and De Blecourt’s fallacies and contradictions, typical of conservative historians who recount history from the point of view of the ruling classes. He claims that they both lose sight of the complex interaction of oral and literary tales.

To conclude, the book capitalizes on Zipes’ erudition and profound knowledge of his subject. His overall view and knowledge of the scientific dialogue that takes place within the fields of social anthropology and folklore studies offer him the advantage to develop articulate and convincing arguments and to base them soundly, even though he has been criticized that he “balks at considering alternatives”[1]. Within the book one can notice his unflinching and life-long effort to uncover all kind of biases in fairy tales, especially the patriarchal ones, to explain the genre’s longevity, proliferation and variants and to prove fairy tales as records of the social and cultural history of their time.  Although a first glimpse on the book’s content list, gives the impression of a somehow chaotic or at least dispersed material, it’s nothing like “a series of chapters that could be articles or excerpts from other books”[2]. It is well-structured with clear, although not quite balanced, main points. The starting point of the book is the theory of memetics which explains cultural transmission and fairy tale’s adaptability to new environments, even though it has been argued that the whale metaphor “cannot entirely save memetics from suspicion”[3]. The book’s main focus is on female agency and women’s contribution to the evolution of the genre.  Female subjectivity is either reflected on fairy tales’ heroines (from witches and fairies to peasant girls), on the subversive representations of contemporary works of women’s art or on the lives and choices of earlier folklore women fabulists, collectors and modern artists.

Another Zipes’ vantage is that he delves into the details of his “protagonists’” biographies to show how their experiences shaped their personality and beliefs and consequently influenced their works. So, important personalities in the history of fairy tales acquire flesh and blood and become more human and interesting. To end with, we will use an expression Zipes borrows from Frank’s socio- narratology (“Letting stories breathe”). In the Irresistible fairy Tale Zipes manages to breathe new life into the genre’s studies. So, even though Max Ross[4] makes a quite intriguing suggestion, saying that “an expert’s time might be better spent observing media with which people are more actively engaged” inferring to rap music and to the absence of research connecting fairy tale motifs with it, we won’t agree with his view that “following the genre’s incarnations into libraries and art galleries is a down-the-rabbit-hole endeavor”. Zipes’ work brings to light unknown aspects of fairy tales’ history and uses, which can fire the interest of other researchers for further explorations towards the expansion of the studies into more down-to earth fields. In  the same vein, his focus on the almost ignored fabulists and artists that better embody the revolutionary spirit of fable-telling, or on the fairy tale characters –Baba Yaga, peasant girls and witches- that he sheds light on, breathes new life into the fairy tale’s stereotyped structures and interpretations.