Craving Supernatural Creatures: German Fairy-Tale Figures in American Pop Culture by Claudia Schwabe

Abstract

Reviewed by: Craving Supernatural Creatures: German Fairy-Tale Figures in American Pop Culture by Claudia Schwabe Julie L.J. Koehler Craving Supernatural Creatures: German Fairy-Tale Figures in American Pop Culture. By Claudia Schwabe. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2019. Pp. 334. Paper $32.99. ISBN 978-0814341964. In the fall of 2011, two fairy tale-themed television series premiered, NBC’s Grimm and ABC’s Once Upon a Time, and the following spring featured two big-budget film adaptations of “Snow White”: Rupert Sanders’s Snow White and the Huntsman and Tarsem Singh’s Mirror Mirror. As articles appeared in the New York Times and The Atlantic, everyone was asking why fairy tales were suddenly so popular, but fairy tale scholars knew it was just the latest of many American dives into fairy tale land. Still, it was a new crop of fascinating narratives to explore, and in Craving Supernatural Creatures: German Fairy-Tale Figures in American Pop Culture, Claudia Schwabe takes a hard look at this latest chapter in the unique relationship between the German fairy tale and American entertainment, and demonstrates both its long history and its cultural complexity. A complicated web of intersecting genres, narrative cultures, and value systems connect these overlapping traditions. Schwabe carefully explores not only German fairy tales and film, but also their related variants in other European lands, where appropriate, as well as Germanic myth, saga, and folklore. She also lays out the historical traditions of Germans and other Europeans that play into fairy tale landscapes. Four sets of fairy tale characters are examined in Schwabe’s chapters, which are entitled: “Uncanny Creatures (Golems, Automatons, and Doppelgangers),” “Evil Queens and Witches,” “The Monstrous Other or the Big Bad Beast,” and “Dwarves and Fairy-Tale Imps.” Schwabe’s opening chapter examines mostly German Romantic literary fairy tales and their American contemporary counterparts. The first section compares [End Page 649] E.T.A. Hoffman’s automatons to robots and androids, such as the title characters of Edward Scissorhands (1990) and A.I. (2001). The second section follows German folklore and literary fairy tales of the golem with representations in shows as diverse as X-Files, Sleepy Hollow, and The Simpsons. And in the third section, Schwabe looks at doppelgangers in the Harry Potter franchise, Grimm, and Once Upon a Time. As one can see, the focus of this chapter is quite broad and it takes on massive concepts that could be the topic of entire books (the history of androids in American film, for example). This makes the short discussions of these very complicated intertextual relationships feel incomplete. In the golem section, for example, Schwabe mentions that there are at least a half-a-dozen television shows that have golem episodes that are not covered in the chapter. The third section is the most successful, providing an enlightening and thorough take on some ways that American culture represents doppelgangers and the magic related to them in practical and often silly ways. The conclusion of this chapter sets up one of the most important concepts of the work: “the undesirable has become the desirable in North American popular culture” (85). This theme is expanded in the nuanced centerpiece of her analysis in the middle chapters, a discussion of villains and outcasts. Shows like Once Upon a Time and Grimm regularly represent villains as misunderstood and monstrous others who are, in fact, heroes in disguise. Films like Robert Stromberg’s Maleficent (2014) build their entire plot around a villain’s back story and the unfair oppression of the other. In these chapters, we also see how some heroic characters are blurred. Little Red Riding Hood is sometimes depicted as a wolf herself or as the villain, and prince charming is all too often obsessed with power and/or his own good looks, playing the role of antagonist rather than hero. Certainly, America’s value of individualism counters many nineteenth-century German fairy tale structures. Schwabe’s exploration of this fascinating transformation in these chapters is engaging, clear, and well-organized. Schwabe’s final chapter reveals the dynamic representations of characters from two tales, “Rumpelstiltskin” and “Snow White,” in American pop culture. Starting with the depiction of...