Twice Upon a Time: Women Writers and the History of the Fairy Tale - Book Review

Folklore, Dec, 2003 by Leila Rasheed

By Elizabeth Wanning Harries. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001. 192 pp. Illus. 22.95 [pounds sterling]/$32.50 (hbk). ISBN 0-691-07444-5

Elizabeth Wanning Harries here describes and defines links between the French conteuses (aristocratic female writers and storytellers of the seventeenth century) and the predominantly female, late twentieth-century re-writers of the fairytale whom she sees as their counterparts. In providing new points from which to view these two incarnations of the fairytale, she provides a new history for the work of recent artists and also re-positions the framing devices used by the conteuses at the centre of the meaning of their tales. The first two chapters focus on how the conteuses wrote and why they were overlooked in the formation of the modern canon, the last two chapters on similarities between the conteuses and twentieth-century artists. In between is a history of the construction of the Anglo-American canon of fairytales.

Harries's modern subjects include the ubiquitous Angela Carter, but also some lesser known artists such as Adrienne Rich and Joseph Cornell. The conteuses include Mesdames d'Aulnoy, L'Heritier de Villandon, La Force and Bernard. Although these last few names will be familiar to many readers who have a background in folklore or children's literature, they will be wholly unfamiliar to the vast majority of casual consumers of fairytales around the globe. For most people, tales begin with Grimm and end with Disney. This is in part because, Harries argues, the fairytales which the conteuses produced and which were popular for many years have been written out of the fairytale canon. Because they belong to a different tradition from the tales of the Grimms or Perrault, they have been judged "unfairytale-like" and hence ignored. As Harries points out, "Canons tend to be self-validating": it is important to re-view and re-describe regularly.

She begins with a couple of familiar but still relevant questions: why do we still read fairytales? And why do they continue to be so popular? We are reminded that the comforts we seek in fairytales are false. The tales' perceived universality, transcending class, race and time, is brought into question when she reminds us that "all fairy tales have a history" and are often "imitations of what various literary cultures have posited as the traditional, the authentic or the non-literary." Lost in the postmodern jungle of words and implications, many of us hope for a true voice in fairytales. We long for a less sophisticated narrative, where once upon a time leads necessarily to happily ever after. Fairytales appear to offer us a story version of the magical, lie-detecting kiss. But the fairytale is a wolf in granny's clothing, as Harries reminds us by highlighting the "neglected tradition" of fairytales written by women: tales which reject the illusion of a simple folk narrative containing simple folk truths. She asserts that the fairytale has always been literary, has always subverted itself, has always been sophisticated, political and intellectually playful.

The main concept Harries deals with is the framing device popular with the conteuses. Frames are the strategies which set the tale in the world of the artificial and the literary, and which Harries analyses to divine how the conteuses saw themselves as social beings, as women and as writers. She discusses the importance of the frontispiece: whereas Perrault's tales portray an old, vulgar woman telling a tale (a "mother

goose"), the conteuses "represent them as sibyls, or as aristocratic storytellers, or Greek goddesses, not as spinning peasant women." Harries states that most of the conteuses's tales are "set within a conversational frame ... that often reproduces the milieu and the carefully formulated repartee that was part of salon culture ... The tales the women wrote-again in contrast to Perrault's--are full of references to a feminine, aristocratic, listening audience." Thus the conteuses also claim orality, but one different from Perrault's. Instead of mimicking a crude, illiterate voice, they rejoiced in their literacy and sophistication and made writing tales co-exist with telling them. The "oral" for them is not primarily naive and primitive, but rather a "highly charged, high-cultural event." "[T]hey see the tales ... as part of a concrete social milieu."

According to Harries, most of these tales have been in later editions "wrenched ... out of their conversational frame." Why, she asks, have readers and editors ignore and suppressed the framing device? In part she determines that the answer relates to set ideas about the "oral," in particular an equation of oral with illiterate and simple, which excludes the conteuses's tales. Once we accept oralities rather than orality, we are able to appreciate the frames, not as simple decoration or container, but as a full part of the fairytale tradition. By introducing the reader to twentieth-century "framers" of the fairytale, Harries stresses that there is nothing new under the sun: when we see the revisionary strategies of recent artists re-telling the fairytale as revolutionary, we forget that "play and critique" have defined the fairytale throughout its history.