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From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers. By Marina Warner. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995; Noonday paperback edition, 1996. Pp. xxv + 463, introduction, 26 color plates, black-andwhite illustrations, notes, index.)
From the Beast to the Blonde is an extraordinary book that works on many levels. As a historical comparativist, Marina Warner has creatively traced the intersecting and interwoven paths of certain tales and their tellers, and, as such, the book is not only fascinating for the general reader but also a solid reference, loaded with data. As a feminist and social critic, the author has situated, organized, and analyzed material that moves through literary, popular, -and folklore genres and visual media in a compelling and original manner, providing keen, new insights into well-known themes and tropes. As the author of works of fiction that themselves often draw from the stockpile of folkloric motifs, she writes prose that, although heavily researched and rigorously detailed, reads smoothly, elegantly, and enjoyably. It is because Warner is not a folklorist, per se. She is seemingly unconcerned with the more tedious arguments within the discipline (i.e., an insistence on pure "folklore," differentiated and disassociated from literary mediations; the objections to the term and category of "fairy tale, " based on narrow, etymological premises), and has taken on such an extensive study from a fresh and challenging perspective, however, that this book is valuable reading for all folklorists involved in the study of narrative.
Warner's inspiration is "the collection which inaugurated the fairy tale as a literary form for children: Charles Perrault's Histoires ou contes du temps passe, or Contes de ma Mere POye [Mother Goose], of 1697" (p. xvi). Perrault, together with his numerous (mostly female) literary contemporaries who were publishing the 41-volume Le Cabinet des fees during roughly the same period, along with the Grimms (Die Kinder-und Hausmarchen, 1812-57), later Hans Christian Anderson (1837-74), and, in the 20th century, their heir, Walt Disney, have, Warner argues, been instrumental in shaping a common body of knowledge in Western European and mainstream American culture concerning the "fairy tale."
This recognition of the collapsed and artificially contrived barriers between oral and literary forms of the fairy tale is a fundamental premise in Warner's work....