Tales of Wonder: Retelling Fairy Tales Through Picture Postcards by Jack Zipes

Abstract

Reviewed by: Tales of Wonder: Retelling Fairy Tales Through Picture Postcards by Jack Zipes JoAnn Conrad (bio) Jack Zipes. Tales of Wonder: Retelling Fairy Tales Through Picture Postcards. U of Minnesota P, 2017. Jack Zipes's latest omnibus is a lusciously colorful coffee-table book that (re-) unites fairy-tale themed postcards with their textual inspirations. Seeking to redress the "neglect" (xiv) of such fairy-tale postcards "by collectors, scholars of cultural studies and folklore, and the general public" (xiii), Zipes's stated mission is to examine these "incredibly exotic" (xiii) postcards in order to provide a new "optique" (xx) on fairy tales, forcing us to rethink them through different perspectives. Indeed, the field of fairy-tale studies has been slow to analyze the role of mass-mediated illustrations as semiotic markers, circulating, as do these postcards, disconnected from their tales while tethered to them through their iconization. As a result, illustrations have mostly been treated as complementary and ancillary to the tales themselves, and Zipes's promise of a new integrative analytic approach is as welcome as it is long overdue. Unfortunately, in terms of the material, organization, and analysis, this book fails to deliver on its ambitious goals. The publisher's webpage describes the book as "a pictorial history of fairy-tale postcards throughout the world" ("Tales"), and yet the organization of the material is neither chronological nor historically contextualized. Instead, the organizing principle is the classic European fairy tale, with the images on the postcards receiving slight mention or analysis. Despite the subtitle's promise to "retell" the tales through the postcards, the cards are merely appended to a reiteration of the classic tales. [End Page 387] The book is organized into two lopsided parts: "The Tales" comprising roughly ninety percent of the book, and "The Art" making up the remaining ten percent. The first group introduced, by far the largest, is what Zipes calls "Classical Tales"—Little Red Riding Hood, Little Tom Thumb/Hansel and Gretel, Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and Puss in Boots, but also incongruously The Pied Piper and Rip Van Winkle, both more appropriately categorized as (local) legends, not fairy tales. For all these "Classic Tales" Zipes also provides full texts, and for the first six he lists the versions from both Charles Perrault and the Grimms, although with no other reference to source material, editions, or translators. Additionally, Zipes includes Robert Browning's poem of the Pied Piper as well as Washington Irving's full story of the supernatural encounter in the Catskills. Taking up a good two-thirds of this large book, the inclusion of such readily available texts begs the question: Why include them again here? The presentation of tales and accompanying illustrated postcards proceeds with a series of shorter sections: "A Mélange of the Brothers Grimm," "Stories by Hans Christian Andersen," "Russian Fairy Tales," and "Fairy-tale Novels." In most of these sections, the accompanying postcards are at most described, and often unremarked upon, as if the images are self-evident and ahistorical, their presence bearing witness to the timeless and transcultural nature of the tales themselves, despite the fact that the majority are from the French and German literary canon. The section on Andersen demands a deeper look in that it represents a missed opportunity to truly investigate the dynamic relationship between published tales and their illustrations. Andersen courted magazine editors and publishers who traded in illustrations, and his stories were the subject of hundreds of different visual interpretations during the "Golden Era" of book illustration. Those images, owned by the publishers, were reprinted in a host of media—cards, postcards, calendars, coloring books, paper dolls, and die-cut trade cards, for example. However, rather than focusing on this intersection of the tales and their industrially produced images and mass distribution, Zipes instead relies on his previous biographical and psychoanalytical analysis of Andersen the man. This inattention to historical context coupled with a set of images that comes almost exclusively from German postcards sets the stage for such pronouncements as: "there are not many fairy-tale postcards of ["The Little Mermaid"], perhaps because Andersen was somewhat of a misogynist" (159). Putting aside the impossibility of extrapolating...