"New Wine in Old Bottles"

"New Wine in Old Bottles" Twice Upon a Time: Women Writers and the History of the Fairy Tale, by Elizabeth Wanning Harries. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001.

In "Notes from the Front Line," Angela Carter argues that "most intellectual development depends upon new readings of old texts. I am all for putting new wine in old bottles, especially if the pressure of the new wine makes the bottles explode" (69). Elizabeth Harries has taken Carter's comment as one of the guiding principles of her study of feminist fairy tale authors, Twice Upon a Time: Women Writers and the History of the Fairy Tale, as she examines the ways in which female storytellers from Perrault's time and the present have sought to adapt the form and structure of the "old bottles"-traditional fairy tales-to fit the "new wine" of their vision regarding social expectations and restrictions for women in Western society.

Harries begins her study by addressing the generally accepted notion that today's fairy-tale canon consists of printed versions of oral folktales, an idea which she points out is an assumption based in nostalgia-specifically, "nostalgia" as Susan Stewart uses the term (qtd. in Harries 4), meaning a desire for a mythical, pastoral cultural pastrather than fact. Instead, she observes, the fairy tales we know today are descended from a distinct literary tradition of French and German origin, one that was developed and championed by highly educated, mostly male, authors, editors, and literary critics and designed to fit a particular format. Harries's study is an attempt to rectify this modern perception of the genre through what she calls "feminist formalism," first by closely examining the "neglected tradition" of fairy tales developed by female writers during the 1690s in France, and then by comparing the narrative strategies of the tales to those employed by a variety of twentieth-century fairy tale authors.

The arguments in Twice Upon a Time progress systematically from the above premises. The short introduction lays the groundwork by examining the origins of the commonly held idea that fairy tales are short, simple texts that reflect the voice and style of an oral storyteller, a form favored by male authors such as Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm and later perpetrated by early twentieth-century theorists such as Walter...