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 revisits those topics here, but her contribution to fairy tale studies is picayune.

The primary flaw is her psychoanalytical framework. Inger Lövkrona mentioned this in her review, stating "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). 

Lundell's inadequate contextualization of the stories led to unsubstantiated conclusions. For instance, she claimed that the 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). But Yseult de Blécourt argued the tale "can be seen as a collaboration between the Hassenpflug sisters and Dortchen Wild, orchestrated, as it turns out, by Marie Hassenpflug" (41).

Her imputation of malicious intent is a reoccurring issue. She used the term "male fantasy" to describe three tales with incestuous themes: "Snow White" (36), "Strong Hans" (45), and "Thousandsfurs" (54). Lundell's unjustified equating of male heterosexuality and even fatherhood with perversion and abuse was so blatant that R. J. Alexander noted it in a review: "many readers will be offended by the snide, quasi-chauvinistic remarks that mar the text from time to time" (103).

The book even suffered from basic grammar and typographical errors. "Femininity" was misspelled as "feminity" (19), "fountain" was split as "foun tain" (84), and a "material confront" wrongly substituted for "material comfort" (172). In fairness, her editors deserve blame for missing these gaffes.

Despite the above, Lundell's work has value. It examined a representative sampling of European texts - "close to 2,000 tales" (1) - it included translations of German (53) and Swedish (57 - 59) texts, and it made interesting observations likee how stepmothers inadvertently helped their stepdaughters (44), spinning tales didn't depict women sharing stories as they would've historically (117), and lazy daughters receiving harsher treatment than lazy sons (167). But none of that earns it a recommendation.

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 book broadly covers Joseph Campbell’s writings and legacy, female characters in classical texts, 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 an excellent monograph about heroines. In actuality, her work is of uneven quality.

On the positive side, Tatar possesses an impressive knowledge of literature and folklore. She found a 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 parallels between Charles Perrault’s “Bluebeard,” and Jordan Peele’s Get Out (272 – 273). Her expertise is so thorough that she can correct authoritative works like the Oxford English Dictionary, which misidentified Raymond Chandler’s “Bay City Blues” (1937), as the earliest literary use of the term “private eye,” when Carolyn Keene used it in her 1930 novel, Nancy Drew: The Mystery at Lilac Inn (207 – 208). She even went so far as to confess that her colleagues in Harvard's English and American Studies departments excluded popular books like Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and L. M. Montogomery’s Anne of Green Gables (175). Between that and highlighting successful authoresses who were self-deprecating or disparaging of each other – Frances Burney, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, George Eliot, Sylvia Townsend Warner (136) and Agatha Christie (224) – Tatar fulfilled her objective to "acknowledge, credit, and memorialize women, real and imagined, from times past" (288).

On the negative side, the book suffered from omissions that would've nuanced some of its points. Tatar mentioned the #GamerGate controversy of the 2010s, which involved debates about whether video games were sexist, but no video game characters were discussed. Moreover, Tatar expressed concern about the “unsettling sexual politics and gender dynamics in myths, epics, and stories from times past” (15) but neglected to address the “Homeric Question” – a longstanding debate about the authorship of the Iliad and the Odyssey – and Samuel Butler’s argument that a woman composed one of Western culture’s canonical poems. She also praised Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls and Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad for retelling The Iliad and The Odyssey from female perspectives, but didn't acknowledge how Ovid’s Heroides did that centuries earlier. And despite her admission that trans and nonbinary identities were becoming mainstream (268) and her extensive analyses of Ovid's Metamorphoses, sex-shifting characters like Tiresias, Iphis, and Caeneus went unmentioned. She even included a section titled “Warrior Women” (257 – 262) which examined Disney characters like Queen Elsa and Moana, but strangely excluded Mulan and non-Disney fighting women such as Banu Goshasp, Li Chi, or Bradamante.

Another problem was Tatar's outdated sociopolitical biases. She mentioned that women were only 15 of the 116 Nobel prize winners for literature (136), citing that as proof of women's marginalization as writers, but in that same year, women comprised 74% of the American publishing industry. Tatar also demonstrated an uncritical attitude towards the #MeToo movement - a stance that would be difficult to maintain following the controversial Depp vs. Heard trial and the conviction of Ghislaine Maxwell for her role in trafficking girls to Jeffrey Epstein's island. Both events occurred a few years after the book's release.

It's worth noting that the book was written during the COVID-19 lockdowns and published a year later, so some of the issues it has may be a consequence of a stressful environment coupled with a rushed publication. However, those circumstances don't fix Heroines many flaws and it's hard to recommend it.

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 it.

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.

Shortcomings aside, 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.