Fairy Tale Romance: The Grimms, Basile, and Perrault (review)

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86 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 5:1 than a mainline Whig, Anne Cline Kelly's book on Swift and language, several treatments of Scriblerian anxiety over the proliferation of print, Hermann Real and Heinz Vienken's reconstruction of the extent of Swift's reading—all of those would have assisted Eilon's argument. Nevertheless, Eilon is a sensitive and highly intelligent expositor of Swift. His final chapter especially, though not really contained by the book's nominal theme, gets to grips with Swift's satirical excesses—the rhetorical devices that appear to break the rules Swift himself sets. The features of Swift's satiric personality discussed here are difficult to pin down, but Eilon succeeds admirably in doing so. Brean S. Hammond University College, Aberystwyth James M. McGlathery. Fairy Tale Romance: The Grimms, Basile, and Perrault. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991. xii + 226pp. US$29.95. ISBN 0-252-01741-2. Though a somewhat generous notion of the scope of the eighteenth century might include the authors that James McGlathery identifies in his subtitle, the fact remains that their works were published at either extreme ofthat century: Basile's Pentamerone, from 1634— 36; Perrault's Contes, in 1697; and the Brothers Grimm's Kinder und Hausmärchen in 1812. How, then, can McGlathery's comparative study of these three collections of literary fairy tales be appropriated by those whose particular interest is in the fiction written in, rather than at the extreme outer limits of, the eighteenth century? Jack Zipes (in Fairy Tales and the Art ofSubversion, pp. 14, 15) observes that there was a veritable boom in the writing of fairy tales during the eighteenth century—a boom which "culminated in Charles-Joseph de Mayer's remarkable collection, in fortyone volumes no less, of the major literary fairy tales published in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries" (Le Cabinet des fées, 1785-89). Enthusiasm for this genre was most evident in France, no doubt, but writers in other countries were by no means immune to its appeal. Consider Samuel Johnson's "The Fountains: A Fairy Tale," or Tom Thumb's Folio—one of a number of fairy tales and fairy tale collections published by the Newberrys. McGlathery, however, concentrates on the French contributions to the literary fairy tale during this century, especially the versions of "Beauty and the Beast" written by Mme Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve (1740) and by Mme Leprince de Beaumont (1756). His objective is to "identify and characterize a genre that may be called fairy-tale romance" (p. 1 88)—or in other words, a genre within a genre, fairy-tale romance as constitutive of at least some literary fairy tales. McGlathery readily acknowledges the irony involved in his title and his project, since "in marked contrast to romantic stories as we usually think of them, fairy tales do not dwell on, or even indicate, the character's feelings and emotions. ... When the princess meets her charming prince, in the stereotypical fairytale situation, there is almost never much romantic about it in the way of lovers' talk or description of their reactions. The characters typically appear almost not to feel, only to act" (p. 4). True enough, for the fairy tales of Basile, Perrault, and the Brothers Grimm that McGlathery considers; less true, however, for the versions of "Beauty and the Beast," which, after all, retell an old woman's story intended "to put away the sorrow and revive REVIEWS 87 the spirits of a lady whose principal misfortunes resulted from the dalliance of love"— for that, indeed, is the occasion for the story of "Psyche and Eros," in The Golden Ass of Apuleius. And, if you have seen the recent Disney film version, or better yet Cocteau's, you may wonder whether "the dalliance of love," or erotic desire and its effects, is not precisely what this fairy tale is all about. Given the considerable interest these days in erotic desire in eighteenth-century fiction, McGlathery's study could thus be used quite advantageously to frame—thematically as well as temporally—an approach to this component of the fairy tales written during this century. On the other hand, such an investigation would also...