Twice Upon a Time, Women Writers and the History of the Fairy Tale (review)

Abstract

In this readable book, Harries argues that the history of the fairy tale has focused exclusively on one particular type of fairy tale and has excluded equally valid forms of stories which do not conform to the model of the short, simple, and putatively oral tale popularized by Charles Perrault at the end of the seventeenth century and the Brothers Grimm at the beginning of the nineteenth century. These latter are, in Harries's very useful term, "compact tales," which have entered the canon and have determined, both in folklore/fairy-tale research and in fairy-tale collections, the definitive format of the genre. There is, however, an equally valid tradition of more sophisticated tales for which Harries suggests the term "complex tales" to stress that these stories have a history which stretches as far back, if not farther, than that of the compact tales. In her book, Harries sets out to examine this muted history of the complex fairy tale; she identifies the mechanisms by which these stories were marginalized and shows the commonalities between the strategies employed by the seventeenth-century conteuses who had first popularized the complex contes de fées and contemporary revisions of fairy tales. Harries argues that there is a long tradition of women writers who use the fairy-tale form to "reorder the world" (163) and to establish a new language which allows them to write "outside the law" (quotation from Rich, 163), questioning and subverting social patterns and normative expectations.