THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 7, 1996 TAG: 9601110542
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: DIANE SCHARPER
LENGTH: Medium: 84 lines
FROM THE BEAST TO THE BLONDE
On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers
MARINA WARNER
Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 463 pp. $35.
Fairy tales evoke our deepest feelings of loss and love. Perhaps because of this, they have been poked and prodded by philosophers, psychologists, historians and others.
Marina Warner's latest book, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers, adds a feminist perspective.
A British writer and a feminist scholar, Warner has written four novels and several books for children. But she is best known for her female cultural histories. Her critical works include studies on the Virgin Mary, Joan of Arc, Queen Victoria and the Chinese Empress, Tz'u-Hi.
In From the Beast, Warner tries to figure out what fairy tales say about women's history. She doesn't look at the stories so much as who told them and why. The book could have been titled Fairy Tales From A Women's Studies Perspective.
With 26 pages of notes - double-columned, single-spaced and in small type, From the Beast is well-researched. It has a bibliography of nearly 300 books and articles, and it is profusely illustrated.
Warner tries to analyze the motives of women seen in fairy tales: the good mothers, the good mothers-in-law, the godmothers and the bad mothers (whose badness can be excused). She discusses their speech (the sibyl said ``By my voice I shall be known''; so did the sirens) and their silence (the little mermaid exchanges her voice for human form). She even explains that blonde hair was preferred because it represented virginity.
Known as old wives' tales, the stories were passed on by women as they spun, cooked and assisted at childbirth. Some of the tales were cautionary; some were bawdy. All were enthralling, although Warner makes little of this.
Her point, or her agenda actually, is that all fairy tales reveal a speaker who refused to be silenced and who was, therefore, dangerous. As Warner explains, Eve sinned by mouth; she bit into the apple; she spoke to the serpent; she was in consequence cursed.
The first part of the book looks closely at the tellers of fairy tales: from the sibyls to the sirens to the Queen of Sheba to the old wives and to Mother Goose. Warner makes several interesting points, as when she explains that the stork was originally favored by Greek goddesses. Gradually the stork's long neck was transformed into the goose ridden by Gammer (grandmother) Grethel, a prototype of Mother Goose.
The second part examines the history of individual tales. ``Cinderella,'' for instance, evolved from a Chinese story in which the heroine's foot was bound. This explains why the small foot was a sign of Cinderella's beauty. ``Beauty and the Beast'' came from a long line of beast-bridegroom stories, beginning with the Greek ``Cupid and Psyche,'' and later in Indian tales such as ``The Girl Who Married a Snake.'' ``Little Red Riding Hood'' is a variation of the beast-bridegroom tale.
Warner wrote her book partly as an answer to Bruno Bettelheim's now classic 1976 study of fairy tales, The Uses of Enchantment. Looking at fairy tales through Freudian sexual theory and Jungian archetypes, Bettelheim wanted to see how fairy tales helped children find meaning in their lives.
But Bettelheim did not paint the whole picture, according to Warner. He studied the hero of the tales and the child/listener. He ignored the tellers - the stuff of Warner's book.
Yet Warner also does not paint the whole picture. The picture she does paint is often fogged with redundancies and wordiness. At book's end, one feels only the weight of the effort it took to get through it. The weightless enthrallment of the stories themselves is missing. MEMO: Diane Scharper teaches memoir writing at Towson State University in
Maryland and is the author of ``The Laughing Ladies,'' a collection of
poetry. ILLUSTRATION: Drawing
Warner explains the importance of the voice in many fairy tales. The
voice of the characters is significant: The little mermaid exchanges
her voice for human form. And the tellers were women who refused to
be silenced.
by CNB