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.