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From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers, by Marina Warner
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In this landmark study of the history and meaning of fairy tales, the celebrated cultural critic Marina Warner looks at storytelling in art and legend-from the prophesying enchantress who lures men to a false paradise, to jolly Mother Goose with her masqueraders in the real world. Why are storytellers so often women, and how does that affect the status of fairy tales? Are they a source of wisdom or a misleading temptation to indulge in romancing?
- Sales Rank: #579915 in Books
- Published on: 1996-09-30
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 10.52" h x 1.38" w x 5.40" l,
- Binding: Paperback
- 492 pages
Amazon.com Review
One dare not even call it seminal, yet in this ground-breaking work, English novelist and historian Marina Warner casts herself as the female Joseph Campbell in a fascinating and lively book that opens with the observation that "storytelling makes women thrive -- and not exclusively women," and then lifts the veil on both tellers and tales ranging from Sibyl to the late, great Angela Carter, from Lot's daughters to Disney's "Little Mermaid." She finds a not-so-hidden history of women, sex, power, fear -- and even healing -- lurking therein. An eye-opening reworking of our common myth pool.
From Publishers Weekly
Notwithstanding the prominence of the Grimm Brothers and Charles Perrault, most narrators of fairy tales, asserts Warner, have been women?nannies, grannies, 18th-century literary ladies, sibyls of antiquity. In this richly illustrated, erudite, digressive feminist study, cultural historian Warner (Alone of All Her Sex) argues that instead of seeking psychoanalytic meanings in fairy tales, we must first understand them in their social and emotional context. In her analysis, "Bluebeard" and "Beauty and the Beast" reflect girls' realistic fears of marrige in an era when women married young, had multiple children and often died in childbirth. Her delightfully subversive inquiry profiles reluctant brides, silent daughters, crones, witches, fates, muses, sirens, Saint Anne (image of the old wise woman), the biblical Queen of Sheba and Saint Uncumber, who grew a beard to avoid marriage but was crucified for her rebellion. Angela Carter's fiction, surrealist Leonora Carrington's comic fairy tales, Walt Disney movies and French aristocratic fairy tales of veiled protofeminist protest by Marie-Jeanne L'Heritier and Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy provide grist for her mill.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
In this scholarly, original, and insightful study, Warner (Alone of Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary, 1983) explores the relationship between fairy tales and their historical and social contexts. She persuasively demonstrates that the teller of the tale-whether a prophesying enchantress luring knights to their doom or the jolly old beldame, Mother Goose-inevitably reflects the prevailing social prejudices for and against women. Warner first traces the "layered character of the traditional narrator" and the interconnections between storytellers and heterodox forms of knowledge. In the second half of the book, Warner takes up a sampling of tales and demonstrates in them such adult themes as the presense of painful rivalry and hatred between women (Cinderella). Finally, she explores the association of blondeness in the heroine with preciousness and desirability. Highly recommended for all readers who wish a deeper understanding of the fairy tales and cultural icons that have shaped us.
Marie L. Lally, Alabama Sch. of Mathematics & Science, Mobile
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
26 of 28 people found the following review helpful.
Required reading for folklorists and lovers of fairy tales
By Amazon Customer
Warner's text is huge, but thouroughly enjoyable, filled with cultural analises that range from obstetrics to hagiography and with equal respect for every approach between gynocriticism, materialism and psychoanalysis. The book is crammed with so much information and so many intersting details, that sometimes one wonders if these goodies are directly related to the topic, but the information is fascinating anyway, even when it does nothing to further her arguments. The first part concentrates on the tellers of fairy and wonder tales, who they were and under what conditions they told their tales. It also begins to explain the dual nature of fairy tales that will become the central issue of the second half of the book: how these tales, oral as well as literary, supported both subversive and consevative discourses, often within a single narrative. Potential readers should not presume that the only fairy tale studied is Beauty and the Beast, as the title seems to imply; many popular fairy tales have their own chapters devoted to them such as Donkeyskin, Bluebeard and The Little Mermaid. A few of the chapters, specifically the one on Angela Carter are a bit obscure, but the conclusion is brilliant, and the bibliography alone deserves special mention as an invaluable resource. The book is excellent for historians, folklorists, fairy/wonder tale scholars and feminists alike, but it will also enhance the enjoyment of those who read fairy tales only for pleasure.
24 of 28 people found the following review helpful.
The Truths in Fairy Tales
By A Customer
Why do people pass on fairy tales from generation to generation? The tales are violent and seem sexist to modern eyes. Warner's book sets the truth about fairy tales into an historical perspective.
This contrasts with Bruno Bettelheim's "The Uses of Enchantment" which suggests that there is an opportunity for psychological exploration within each fairy tale if we identify with the various characters. In other words, there is a wicked stepmother, a forlorn orphan and a powerful prince etc within each of us. I found his ideas enjoyable and useful but I think Warner's historical analysis is more realistic.
She tackles such contentious issues as that of the wicked stepmother, pointing out the complex situation that was created for a woman marrying a widow who already had children. The temptation to treat those children badly in favour of her own children was quite real because of her financial dependence on her new husband. Hence the need for tales that warned against women behaving like that. There is a lot of other fascinating material in the book, such as the development of the image of St Anne (reputed to be Jesus' grandmother) into the image of dear Nan, from which we get the name Nana for grandmothers and for nannies as well. I didn't agree with Warner's analysis of the little mermaid and have posted my own one on the Amazon site for Hans Anderson's Fairy Stories.
Those interested in this kind of book might also like to read A.D. Hope's book " A Midsummer Eve's Dream". It is surprising how few fairies and elves there are in regular fairy stories - a case of art imitating life perhaps! But there are some, and Hope's book helps us to understand how the idea of fairies developed in England. It seems that it was the suppression of gods and goddesses by Christianity that gave rise to miniaturised images of them in the form of fairies. Hope regrets this but, from the number of descriptions he gives of midnight cavorts around fairy mounds, followed by sexual excesses of various sorts, I think the fairies were probably doing a lot to promote sexually transmitted diseases!
A book that I've lost but was invaluable was Catherine Brigges? Bigge? "A Dictionary of Fairies". It told you everything you needed to know about the subject. Should you thank a fairy? Not if you ever wanted to see it again. What is glamor? It's one thing with film stars and another with fairies. Planning a visit to fairy land? It's a more dangerous place than most realise. However if you love to wander in the fairyland of our collective imagination, then consider Warner's book or any of the other books that I've mentioned. They are useful guides to help you find your way around.
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
Well-written but difficult
By Theresa
There are many books about fairy tales-- from tomes specializing in psychoanalysis to texts focusing on the changing meaning of the tales we all know and love (or hate), fairy tales provide rich fodder for psychoanalysts, Freudians, folklorists, feminists, and specialists of all sorts.
That said, with From the Beast to the Blonde, Marina Warner really does bring something different to this already crowded table. Her book focuses upon fairy tales and myths (or wonder tales, as they are sometimes called) as cultural projections. Warner argues here that the frequently occurring archetypes in fairy tales tell us a great deal about their tellers, which in turn reveal a great deal about the societies from which these tales and their narrators spring.
Warner specifically focuses here on stories and storytelling, and how these activities reflect the lives of women in their societies. According to Warner, storytelling is a particularly female art. Though many of the fairy tales that have come down to us today-- the famous Brothers Grimm, Perrault, the tales of Andrew Lang, and others-- Warner notes that the original stories themselves often originated from females. These stories often sprung from the lips (and the minds) of females; the Brothers Grim et. al. merely committed them to paper.
From the wealthy courtier ladies who amused themselves in their ample free time by spinning (or merely repeating) fairy tales to the gnarled old rustic ladies (Juliet's nurse, mother goose, and countless others are, if Warner is to be believed, sprung from this archetype) who maintained their usefulness and societal value by spinning tales in a society that had little use for them, fairy tales were often a female prerogative. Marina Warner reflects how stories and other forms of female communication-- including old rhymes, chants, even common gossip-- were both central to female survival and a sort of subtle subversion for women. (She includes one horrifically misogynistic tale from medieval France in which, fed up with their wives wicked gossiping and even more infernal backtalk, the menfolk of one village contrive to have all of their women's heads chopped off. The man selling the beheading services advertises the headless bodies of these women-- devoid of brains and the ability to talk back-- as "the perfect wives.")
Though storytelling a other forms of communication have been important for women of all ages in all levels of society, Warner argues that the most prolific and famous storytellers are often aged women of the lower classes. Perpetuated positively as Mother Goose and far more negatively as nasty old crones and gossips, old ladies often protected, amused, and honored themselves for spinning tales for those around them, including their younger and often richer employers.
One way fairy tales became all the rage in Paris during the 17th century was because, Warner informs us, many of the upper class French men and women spent most of their childhood isolated from their true parents and cared for a nurse of the lower classes, often an older lady. How did was time spent between these nurses and their charges? Often in the telling of the countless fairy tales and wonder tales so well known to us today, Warner argues.
Warner also illustrates how fairy tales reflected the reality of women's lives and their situations. Is the inordinate amount of blame and vitriol directed at evil queens, wicked stepmothers, and usurping lady servants really inspired by fear against some sort of universal smothering mother, as psychoanalysts have argued in the past? Warner argues that this is not the case; and that the frequent misogyny in fairy tales can more accurately be attributed to the messy reality of women's lives in the past. Oppressed by their patriarchal society, many women were forced to unfortunately persecute and compete against each other. Not for nothing does the evil stepmother occur, again and again. With limited resources in rural areas and the high mortality rate attached to childbirth, young stepmothers nearly as young as the children they were looking after was a recurring common place. The fact that these women were all too often prone to favoring their own offspring in matters like inheritance and patrimony is proof of not so much wickedness, but maternal devotion and severely limited resources.
Split into two sections--focusing both on the tellers of fairy tales and how the tales themselves reflected the lives and situations of these tellers--this book explores both the people who tell the tales and the recurring themes and motifs within the tales themselves. For instance, why is the heroine always blonde, and why is blondeness something that is often focused on and pivotal to the plot? Why do wicked stepmothers so often show up? Why is the tale of a young beauty and her romance with an ugly or beastly male a commonplace throughout so many disparate cultures and time periods? Where are the mothers in most fairy tales, anyway?
All these questions and more are answered by Warner, as she gives us the background behind various storytellers, and uses recurring archetypes and themes found throughout fairy tales to illustrate the realities they revealed about women's life in the past. This book is filled with erudite information and little known facts; and presents a splendid overview of fairy tales and their cultural meaning and context.
So why only the three stars? Simply put, this is a difficult book. Dense in every respect, it is chalk full of information and ideas, which, while well organized and presented thematically, can sometimes get confusing in their author's presentation of them. Warner's prose style is similarly dense, even somewhat gnarled and knotty. A wonderful fabulist and cultural critic, Warner is a somewhat less than stellar prose stylist. The sheer weight of information conveyed in her dense prose can sometimes weigh down the reader, and make the ideas she has just communicated unclear. (Personally, I found rereading certain passages once or twice to be necessary for full comprehension.)
This book is also very specialized. Fairy tales have become en vogue as of late; there are numerous books focusing on the cultural or psychological meaning of these tales. Some of these books--such as Catherine Orenstein's brief, racy and fun Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked--make for such light reading that they could be safely recommended to anyone, even those without a firm interest in the subject of fairy tales.
However, Warner's work here is not such a book--though deeper and more profound and in many ways better than the light, fast paced work of Orenstein and others, it is also complex and makes for heavy reading. In order to enjoy this book, I'd wager that most people would have to have a fairly strong initial interest in the subjects that it explores--namely fairy tales, and their meaning and history. I myself have a deep interest in these subjects and enjoyed this book immensely, yet even I had some trouble getting all the way through it. It took me a month to complete it, rather than the general 4 to 7 days it takes me to finish most books. Over the course of that month, I put aside the book several times, always coming back to it eventually. In the end, it was well worth the effort for me, however, those uninterested in the subjects the book covers--fairy tales, feminism, stories and storytelling, folklore, and history--might not feel the same way.
In the end, if you are looking for a light, easy, or suspenseful read, look elsewhere. If, however, you are looking for a complex, intricate study that gives unique new perspectives on fairy tales and their meaning and history, you should given From the Beast to the Blonde a try.
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