Review: Fairy Tale Mothers

 

Fairy Tale Mothers (1990) examines mothers, stepmothers, and mothers-in-law in Germanic and Scandinavian tales. The book has nine segments: preface, introduction, Grimm tales, the kind and unkind girls, stepmothers with stepsons, tales of spinning, mother-son bonds, birthing episodes, and a conclusion. Its author, Torborg Lundell, was a Professor of Swedish at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Having published articles about folkloristics and motherhood, Lundell's book revisits those topics, but it's a picayune contribution to fairy tale studies.

There are typos like "femininity" being misspelled as "feminity" (19) and split words like "foun tain" (84). Lundell also makes assertions without evidence: that the editorial changes the Brothers Grimm made to "Hansel and Gretel" were "a mechanism to impose guilt on all normal mothers who, even if they have enough food, sometimes while raising their children may often wish they would get lost for a while" (34 - 35). She also used the term "male fantasy" to describe three stories with implicit or explicit incest themes - "Snow White" (36), "Strong Hans" (45), and "Thousandsfurs" (54) - thus equating male heterosexuality and even fatherhood with perversion and abuse. R. J. Alexander noted the bigotry in a review: "many readers will be offended by the snide, quasi-chauvinistic remarks that mar the text from time to time" (103). 

Inger Lövkrona was more positive in her review; she found Lundell's analyses of tale types to be "convincing" (179) but critiqued her methodology, "I miss in her study a discussion of Jung's theories and their relevance to preindustrial peasant society and a thorough methodological demonstration of how to carry out the analysis. The ahistoric premise in psychological theory is problematic when it is applied to cultural and social phenomena that are historically determined and changeable" (179).

The book's strengths are its a representative sampling of European texts and occasional insights. In the former case, Lundell "read close to 2,000 tales" (1) and translated texts from German (53) and Swedish (57 - 59). She also included footnotes, a bibliography, and an index. Valuable comparative material. In the latter case, she highlighted details like stepmothers inadvertently helping their stepdaughters (44), spinning tales not showing women sharing stories as they would've historically (117), and lazy daughters receiving worse treatment than lazy sons (167). But none of that earns it a recommendation.

Link Roundup

England - The Land Without Folklore?

Folklore and Mythology Catalogue: Its Lay-Out and Potential for Research

Balkan and Carpathian Links of the Mythology of the Peoples of the Caucasus

Humor, Unlaughter, and Boundary Maintenance

Folk Research: A Query and a Critique

The Relationship between Oral and Literary Tradition as a Challenge in Fairy-Tale Research: The Case of Finnish Folktales

Female Warrior Ballads

 

Source: Historie der Engelsche zee-roovers (1725)

The Warrior Women Project is a database for English-language ballads depicting female combatants. Most of these texts are known to us because of Dianne Dugaw's extensive archival work for Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650-1850 (1989). As her book shows, this trope is flexible, appearing in all types of modes. A sampling of ballads proves this:

Mary Ambree is one of the oldest of these ballads. Three thousand enemy soldiers surround a troop. Amidst battle, the sergeant dies. His lover swears revenge, donning a helmet, grabbing a sword, and leading her men into the fray. She's betrayed by a member of her unit, but prevails.

The Valiant Virgin has an unusually strong homoerotic element between the disguised heroine and her lover. An heiress loves a farmer but her father wants her to marry a wealthy man. Dad has the farmer conscripted. The lovers become a soldier and a surgeon mate, respectively, aboard a vessel. After returning home, they learn her father is dead, and marry.

Susan's Adventures on a British Man of War skips the courtship period to jump into the action. A man is called to sea; his lover follows. They endure menial labor, harsh weather, and deadly battles until they return home.

William and Harriet is a largely romantic narrative with a tragic ending. A daughter and father argue over her romance with a farmer. The man decides to have the lad drafted. The lovers join the navy together, with the girl disguised as a boy. A shipwreck strands them on an uninhabited, uninhabitable island where they die.

The Female Cabin Boy, Or the Row Among the Sailors parodies the idea of a woman pretending to be a man. An adventurous maiden enters a year-long position on a boat. The captain learns the truth and gets frisky with her. She gets pregnant. Everyone celebrates.

Jack Munro gives roughly equal attention to wooing and warring. A girl in love with a sailor joins him in a war against Germany. She does well. She reveals her identity to her lover and they are married. When they return to England, she reunites with her parents and even the queen is amused by their situation.

The Transmogrified Witch

Tales about witches are popular in European folk narrative traditions. "Hansel and Gretel" tells of two abandoned children beset by a cannibalistic woman in a gingerbread house. Baba Yaga in "Vasilisa the Beautiful" is also a flesh-eating enchantress living alone within a dark forest. But there is an arguably more widespread story: that of the sorceress who morphs into an animal to make mischief.

Werewolf of Apchon (1590 - 1611)

The Severed Hand: I (1851)

The Severed Hand: II (1852)

Beer Cats (1863)

Auvergne Witch (1865)

The Witch Girl (1873)

Witches of Thurso (1877)

Hunted Hare (1879)

The Miller and the Cat (1883)

Witches of the Inn (1887)

Island Insect (1890)

Georgian Mill Witch (1894)

The Cat Which Lost a Claw (1896)

The Brothers who married Witches (1899)

The Doe Witch (1909)

The Weaver's Wife and the Witch (1911)

Various versions (1913)

Cat on the Lap (1914)

The Woman-Cat: I (1917)

Woman-Cat: II (1921)

Woman-Cat: III (1922)

Woman-Cat: IV (1923)

Sop, Doll, Sop (1925)

Cat Witches (1926)

Southern Witch (1926)

Witch of Laggan (1926)

The Witch and the Overseers (1928)

Vernon Castle Witches (1929)

Cats and the Occult (1933)

A Witch in the Form of a Black Cat (1934)

Swarm of Cats (1938)

The Witch-Cat Woman (1942)

Review: The Heroine with 1001 Faces

 

The Heroine with 1001 Faces is an examination of women and their stories from antiquity to the twenty-first-century. It has an introduction, six chapters, and a conclusion. Each chapter covers multiple, frequently overlapping topics, but the material can be divided into five broad categories: Joseph Campbell’s writings and legacy, female characters in classical texts (e.g., Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and Ovid’s Metamorphoses), the silencing and discrediting of women, curiosity (etymology, connotations, artistic representations, etc.), and female writers in fiction and real life. Maria Tatar, a Harvard professor of Germanic Languages and Folklore and Mythology, is theoretically well-equipped to write a monograph about heroines. In actuality, her work is of uneven quality given its broad subject matter.

For instance, Tatar possesses an impressive knowledge of literature and folklore; she identifies a direct reference to Homer in E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web (49), an allusion to The Thousand and One Nights in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (107), and draws parallels between Charles Perrault’s “Bluebeard,” and Jordan Peele’s Get Out (272 – 273). Her expertise extends to the biographical details of Anglophone writers. She quotes successful authoresses who were self-deprecating or disparaging of each other's work: Frances Burney, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, George Eliot, Sylvia Townsend Warner (136) and Agatha Christie (224). Tatar's educational background also enables her to notice the shortcomings of higher institutions. Harvard courses in English and American Studies excluded popular books like Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and L. M. Montogomery’s Anne of Green Gables (175) while the Oxford English Dictionary misidentified Raymond Chandler’s story, “Bay City Blues” (1937), as the earliest literary use of the term “private eye.” It was used earlier in Carolyn Keene’s 1930 novel, Nancy Drew: The Mystery at Lilac Inn (207 – 208).

Tatar's knowledge of Greek and Roman texts is less thorough. Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls and Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad are praised for retelling The Iliad and The Odyssey from female perspectives. Ovid’s Heroides did that centuries earlier and broached themes present in the retellings, like Penelope’s frustrations with Odysseus. Tatar doesn't mention Heroides, thus missing an opportunity for comparative analyses of all three and showcasing their unique features. Tatar also neglects to mention the “Homeric Question” – a longstanding debate about the authorship of the Iliad and the Odyssey. The topic is worth considering since she expresses concern about the “unsettling sexual politics and gender dynamics in myths, epics, and stories from times past” (15) and it might've influenced her thinking to know that multiple bards, across time, shaped the texts. Additionally, she may have had thoughts about Samuel Butler’s argument that a woman composed one of Western culture’s canonical poems.

Tatar also falters with regard to gender-nonconforming figures. Female warriors like Joan of Arc, Scáthach, Judith of Bethulia, and the Amazons are referenced (26) but assessed collectively rather than individually, resulting in errors like her assertion that Amazons are chaste and virginal, despite Queen Hippolyta marrying and having a son, Hippolytus. Other fighting women -  Mulan, Banu Goshasp, Li Chi, and Bradamante - go unmentioned even in a section titled “Warrior Women” (257 – 262). Likewise, transgender characters like Tiresias, Iphis, and Caeneus appear in Ovid's Metamorphoses, yet Tatar never mentions them despite discussing the text extensively and her admission that trans and nonbinary identities are becoming mainstream (268).  

The epilogue describes the book as an effort to "acknowledge, credit, and memorialize women, real and imagined, from times past" (288). From that perspective, Tatar covers an adequate number of characters and people. But the omissions in Heroines prevent it from being a representative study.

Link Roundup

 Are Folklorists Studying the Tales of the Folk?

Sensationalist Scholarship: A Putative “New” History of Fairy Tales

The Teacher and the Taught: Structures and Meaning in the "Arabian Nights" and the "Panchatantra"

Folklore's Nature and the Sun's Myth

Some Unpublished Correspondence Between William Forsell Kirby and William Alexander Clouston

Review: Fearless Girls, Wise Women, and Beloved Sisters: Heroines in Folktales from Around the World

Kathleen Ragan’s anthology is a triumph of folktale scholarship. She compiled 100 individual tales (rescuing some from obscurity), adhered to folkloristic standards by faithfully reproducing the content and wording of the texts, and provided cultural context in the endnotes. That said, the anthology has multiple oversights that hinder its full potential.

Ragan lamented the "dearth of South American Indian stories," citing the limited availability of English language materials as the cause. However, the sole SAI tale she included - "The Magic Eagle" - came from Genevieve Barlow's Latin American Tales, which featured another female-centered story: "The Search for the Magic Lake." Moreover, Johannes Wilbert and Karin Simoneau published a twenty-four volume series called Folk Literature of South American Indians, which was completed six years before Ragan's anthology debuted.

Another shortcoming is the inconsistent content of the commentaries. Sometimes they summarize the plots while highlighting aspirational traits the protagonists have. Others give short biographies of historical figures. Occasionally, they contain personal anecdotes or describe Ragan's feelings about a story. This could've been remedied by focusing on folkloristics. For instance, "Whuppity Stoorie" provided an opportunity to discuss the AT Index (later ATU) and other variants of tale type 500 like "Rumpelstiltskin" and "Tom Tit Tot." Similarly, "The Pigeon's Bride" could've mentioned Motif D350, "Transformation: bird to person." Information about the tradition-bearers (name, age, gender, context, etc.) could also have been added whenever such data was available.

The inconsistencies extend to the tales themselves, which infrequently contradicted Ragan's motive for creating the anthology: "In the scarcity and poor quality of heroines my daughter was constantly told 'you don’t exist, you’re not important.' I love my girl too much to let her listen to that." Thus, she sought folktales in which “The main characters are female and they are worthy of emulation.” If so, then why include abusive protagonists? “The Three Sisters and Their Husbands, Three Brothers,” depict women manipulating and publicly humiliating their spouses; "The Fortune-Teller," cons men into paying for a fraudulent prediction; “The Innkeeper’s Wise Daughter,” violates her prenuptial agreement and abducts her unconscious husband; “Molly Cotton-Tail Steals Mr. Fox’s Butter,” centers a thief, who encourages violence against her patsy, and causes a years-long family feud; “The Close Alliance: A Tale of Woe,” the protagonist accuses her husband of laziness, insults his intelligence, and dismisses his fear of the tiger; "A Calabash of Poi" has a goddess ruin a household's crops because the residents offended her; and in “Moremi and the Egunguns,” the protagonist escalates nonviolent raids into a war and commits human sacrifice. While these characters are outnumbered by heroic ones, Ragan never acknowledges how they are incompatible with her standards.

Despite these shortcomings, the book is among the best folktale anthologies ever published. It's representative sample of international folktales is rivaled by few other books and this alone make the book required reading for general readers and folklorists.