Reviewed by: Twice Upon a Time: Women Writers and the History of the Fairy Tale Lisette Luton (bio) Twice Upon a Time: Women Writers and the History of the Fairy Tale. By Elizabeth Wanning Harries. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2001 In this provocative study of the origins of contemporary notions about fairy tales as an extension of the oral tradition, Elizabeth Wanning Harries flips current fairy-tale theory on its head. Addressing those who believe that the fairy tales of Perrault, the brothers Grimm, and others were transcriptions of ancient tales passed down orally by illiterate peasants, Harries immediately puts the reader on shaky ground by maintaining that "the history of fairy tales is not primarily a history of oral transmission but rather a history of print" (4). In the introduction, Harries begins by looking at ways in which fairy tales are usually defined, debunking popular myths about fairy tales along the way. For example, although the term fairy tale suggests that these stories are about fairies, Harries shows that most fairy tales do not actually include fairies. Additionally, fairy tales have long been thought of primarily as "children's literature"; Harries shows this to be a misconception. Chapter 1 deals with the canonization of fairy tales. Since canonization necessarily involves decisions regarding what to leave in and what to leave out, exclusions from the literary canon can be seen as indicative of various social and literary issues of the time period in which the exclusions occur. Harries points out that although most of the writers of fairy tales in the 1690s were women, only Perrault's tales have remained within the canon. Harries theorizes that Perrault's fairy tales were considered authentic because they claimed to be transcriptions of peasant storytelling and they were written in a simplistic way, reminiscent of the "folk." The Grimms, the abbé de Villiers, and C. A. Walckenaer propagated this image by praising Perrault for his naive style that they believed imitated or suggested the style of the oral, folk storyteller. In the case of Villiers, he not only praised Perrault but also dismissed the fairy tales written by women writers such as D'Aulnoy because of their length and complexity. I believe that the exclusion of women writers of fairy tales from the literary canon has less to do with Villiers' assessment of them than with a general gender bias that has occurred in the history of French literature. At a time when women writers were relegated to literary salons, most of the seventeenth-century fairy tales were written by women, yet only Perrault's have been canonized. In chapter 2, Harries shows impressive research as she explains how the image of the storyteller came to be associated with the peasant nursemaid "raconteuse" symbolized by "Mother Goose." She explores the work of several women fairy-tale writers of the 1690s whom she refers to as "conteuses." These include D'Aulnoy, Murat, and Lhéritier. She stresses that the conteuses chose to portray a different kind of orality from the peasant storyteller of Perrault. They placed their fairy tales in the context of the literary salon, making them the domain of educated upper-class nobles who told stories to amuse one another. [End Page 51] While Perrault claims to have taken his stories directly from the oral tradition, Harries demonstrates that he may have been influenced by the stories of the conteuses who actually published several years earlier than Perrault. The conteuses rarely made any reference to the peasant oral tradition, but instead admitted to have taken some of their stories from sixteenth-century texts by Straparola and early seventeenth-century texts by Basile, both written sources. Chapter 3 can be summed up by Harries' statement: "The history of the fairy tale in England is largely a history of translation" (80). The works of the Grimms, Perrrault, Andersen, and others were translated and circulated around England. For example, Perrault's "Little Red Riding Hood" and "Puss in Boots" were popular. The few truly English tales would include "Tom Thumb" and "Jack the Giant Killer." A curious phenomenon occurred somewhere along the way. Some of these tales translated from other languages came to be thought...