Why Fairy Tales Stick: The Evolution and Relevance of a Genre (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Why Fairy Tales Stick: The Evolution and Relevance of a Genre David L. Russell (bio) Zipes, Jack . Why Fairy Tales Stick: The Evolution and Relevance of a Genre. New York: Routledge, 2006. Readers acquainted with Jack Zipes' voluminous body of work on folktales will find many familiar themes in this latest contribution—particularly his belief in the power of folktales to transmit cultural values and mores, and his conviction that society can best be characterized by the abiding conflict between oppressors and the oppressed. But if the material is at times predictable, it is, nevertheless, provocative and, occasionally, compelling. This is a weighty tome in several ways—delving deeply into psychology, historical scholarship, and literary theory, it is also replete with a multitude of footnotes and a lengthy bibliography. At times, impeded by a less-than-facile writing style, the narrative is bogged down with paragraph-long lists of titles that might better be relegated to notes or the bibliography. Some readers will undoubtedly find the jargon a bit off-putting. And there are signs of careless editing, such ascribing the work of Perrault and Mme. d'Aulnoy to "1790" and "eighteenth century" when it surely should have read "1690" and "seventeenth century"—and the error is repeated several times across two pages, causing at least momentary confusion (68–69). On another occasion, he shifts the spelling of a character's name from Morrell to Morel (182–83). In a work so filled with minutiae, such oversights are bound to occur—of course, one wonders how many others went unheeded. The initial chapters review the history of what Zipes calls the literary fairy tales—which, in his definition, includes any tale that has been committed to the written page (he goes back to Boccaccio and earlier), as opposed to a tale that is the original creation of a writer, as it is so often defined. His conclusion is that it is impossible to find a pure "fairy" tale or pure "folk" tale, since all have been "contaminated" through "cross-cultural and intercultural exchange" producing a myriad of variants (43). These cultural variants are what chiefly concern him in this study. Much of this material he has covered elsewhere—as he himself points out. In chapter 1 he resurrects a discussion of "Little Red Riding Hood," then provides a survey in chapter 2—"The Evolution and Dissemination of the Classical Fairy Tale." It is only in chapter 3 that he actually begins with the examination of specific tales and gets to the heart of the book as suggested by its title. His interest is in looking at modern-day variations of the best-known folktales to show how they have been adapted to twentieth- and twentieth-first-century lifestyles. For readers interested primarily in children's literature, one caveat should be offered: many of his examples are drawn from adult literature, including story writers, playwrights and novelists, and many [End Page 299] are drawn from the cinema, the opera, and the ballet. The purpose of this eclectic mix seems to be to illustrate the breadth and depth of the cultural influence of the traditional folktales—a fairly widely accepted notion. What Zipes brings to the study is his own wide reading in the fairy tales and his well-known political and social viewpoints. So Cinderella is seen as a tale of the personal conflict that faces people when placed in situations requiring them to act contrary to their natural biological drives—as, for example, when a stepparent is asked to nurture another's child. This, Zipes sees, as an unnatural situation, one that threatens to undermine the stepparent's own self-interests (which would be to favor his or her own child, no matter how unpleasant that child may be). Zipes concludes that Cinderella "became contagious and stuck . . . because it was addressing issues of child abandonment, family legacy, sibling rivalry, and parental love" (115). Whether one agrees with Zipes or sees his conclusions as overreaching, his discussions are filled with thoughtful and provocative observations. Chapter 3 closes with a review of several modern adult versions of Cinderella, including one featuring a gay prince charming, one with a lesbian Cinderella...