Feminist Revisions: Frauds on the Fairies?

Abstract

Feminist Revisions:Frauds on the Fairies? Elizabeth Keyser (bio) Fairy Tales and Society: Illusion, Allusion, and Paradigm, edited by Ruth B. Bottigheimer. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986. Don't Bet on the Prince: Contemporary Feminist Fairy Tales in North America and England, edited by Jack Zipes. New York: Methuen, 1986. Disenchantments: An Anthology of Modern Fairy Tale Poetry, edited by Wolfgang Mieder. Hanover: University of New England Press, 1985. The Kiss of the Snow Queen: Hans Christian Andersen and Man's Redemption by Woman, by Wolfgang Lederer. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986. The realm of fairy-story is wide and deep and high and filled with many things. . . . In that realm a man may, perhaps, count himself fortunate to have wandered, but its very richness and strangeness tie the tongue of a traveller who would report them. And while he is there it is dangerous for him to ask too many questions, lest the gates should be shut and the keys be lost. —J. R. R. Tolkien, "On Fairy-Stories" Despite Tolkien's warning about the perils of exploring and reporting on the "realm of fairy-story," men—and, increasingly, women—persist in doing so. Certainly, if we judge from the essays in Fairy Tales and Society, Don't Bet on the Prince, and from Wolfgang Lederer 's book-length study of "The Snow Queen," many questions are being asked, and the tongues, or pens, of the reporters are hardly becoming tied. In fact, in the case of women reporters, tongues once bound are now being loosed, and the tales themselves are being freed to speak in unprecedented ways. And although Tolkien goes on to condemn the "analytic study of fairy-stories . . . [as] [End Page 156] preparation for the enjoying or the writing of them," contemporary writers, especially women writers, appear to have based their revisions of familiar tales, as well as their creations of new ones, on just such analysis. Almost every poem in Disenchantments, according to Wolfgang Mieder, contains within it "a critical discussion" of a familiar tale; together, as his title suggests, they offer a sustained critique of the illusion that we can all "live happily ever after," at least as society is now constituted. While the poems in Mieder's collection serve primarily to expose what their writers believe to be the lies and, more dangerous, half-truths of the best-loved fairy tales, the selections in Jack Zipes's anthology, according to his introduction, provide an alternative vision. As the title, Don't Bet on the Prince, indicates, the writers of feminist fairy tales reject not only the "happily ever after" ending but also the recommended means of obtaining it. Nonetheless, these writers recognize the "uses of enchantment," its revolutionary potential. Although the most polemical and thesis-ridden of these new tales do perpetrate what Charles Dickens called a "fraud on the fairies," the best, like the best fairy-tale criticism, open gates to new realms, admit those previously excluded, and entice the disenchanted to reenter. In his introduction to Fairy Tales and Society, Lutz Röhrich seems to recognize how feminist explorations of the realm of fairy story can both break new ground and endanger the old. On the one hand, he pays tribute to feminist fairy-tale scholarship: "In the past decade the women's movement in particular has sharpened our view of the role of the feminine in fairy tales. Completely new perspectives have resulted" (4). On the other, he wonders whether some tales, viewed from these new perspectives, are not beyond the borders of modern fairyland: "As feminist commentators contend, there are, indeed, astonishing relics and role constraints in connection with gender from the patriarchal realm. . . . Can tales which pass on such material continue to lay claim to a legitimate place in the modern world?" (5). Röhrich temporizes that especially in "fairy tale 'renewals' and reformulations of well-known traditional material, one has to ask whether there is not a lot of ballast in the form of motifs that should be tossed overboard"; but as feminist essays included in both Fairy Tales and Society and Don't Bet on the Prince convincingly demonstrate, many of...