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Fairy Tales in Contemporary American Culture: How We Hate to Love Them

2023; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 136; Issue: 539 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5406/15351882.136.539.15

1535-1882

Jeana Jorgensen,

Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices

Kate Christine Moore Koppy's Fairy Tales in Contemporary American Culture: How We Hate to Love Them starts with the intriguing premise that fairy tales have become a sort of “secular scripture” in recent years, replacing biblical scripture as a significant, meaning-laden set of intertexts. As secular scripture, fairy tales maintain and disseminate cultural values, which for many Americans, includes the love affair with rags-to-riches stories.The monograph is structured in three parts: an introductory section with definitions and explanations of concepts such as secular scripture, a section focusing on “Cinderella” specifically, and a section devoted to contemporary pastiche forms of the fairy tale. In true fairy-tale fashion, each of the three sections has three chapters. The first section does the most heavy lifting in terms of getting readers on board with Koppy's main premise, while the middle and latter sections are likely of most interest to folklorists wanting to engage with Koppy's analysis of specific fairy-tale texts.Koppy's main premise emerges clearly in the book's second section, which provides an overview of “Cinderella”/ATU 510A tales while placing them in the American context to account for their popularity here. Koppy makes sure to give some historical background of the tale type, mentioning touchstones of early comparative scholarship like Marian Roalfe Cox and Anna Birgitta Rooth, as well as the related tale type ATU 510B/“The Dress of Gold, Silver, and of Stars” that has not maintained the same popularity in current US retellings. Counter to scholarly tradition, Koppy considers ATU 706/“The Maiden without Hands” to be a 510/Cinderella subtype, because “these tale subtypes are all concerned with how the hero responds to her own abjection and how she eventually regains both her station and her ability to be a fully functioning member of her society” (p. 68). This perspective dovetails with the psychoanalytic linking of these tales that Alan Dundes proposed decades ago, though Koppy's approach is decidedly not psychoanalytic.Rather, Koppy engages in cultural criticism informed by fairy-tale scholarship, and after delving into the history of tale type 510A and its related tale types, she asserts that 510A is fundamental to an American worldview precisely because of its relationship to larger social systems: when Cinderella acts disobediently, making her way to the ball, this “is subversion in response to decay within the system, not subversion that seeks to overthrow the system itself” (p. 69). Koppy gives an overview of important 510A texts throughout (Western) history, noting that many of them are restoration tales rather than rise tales. Early iterations of the tale type, such as texts by Giambattista Basile, Charles Perrault, and the Grimms, tend to focus on the initially high station of the protagonist and righting the wrong done by her stepfamily. In contrast, contemporary adaptations showcase “a trend toward lowering Cinderella's initial station in life relative to her stepfamily and the prince along with a foregrounding and extension of the period of her abjection and her work” (p. 81). This is a significant contrast to note, as it demonstrates Koppy's overarching claim about the relevance of fairy tales to an American worldview: nowadays, Cinderella figures have more to gain when they work hard and climb the social ladder, a message that resonates within the current neoliberal atmosphere. In analyzing Cinderella retellings from Ella Enchanted (1997) by Gail Carson Levine, to the various Disney films, to Ash (2009) by Malinda Lo, Koppy emphasizes the degree to which these Cinderellas work within an exploitative system rather than escaping it: “The way out of abjection, Cinderella's story tells us, is to keep working hard within it” (p. 92).The pastiche section focuses on two films: Ever After (1998) and Brave (2012), and the workings of intertextuality and gender politics therein. Koppy incisively notes that the marginalization of the fairy-tale genre “means that a fairy tale is also a ludic space open to experimentation even when a new pastiche is not intended for children” (p. 101). This would have been a phenomenal observation to develop further (since both texts analyzed were primarily aimed at children), but given the space constraints of a monograph, there was clearly not the possibility of exploring every avenue.Koppy ends the book with a plea to study more of these marginalized genres of the fantastic, arguing for their relevance to the modern American worldview. The core conundrum of trivialized cultural topics remains: “Even as the United States is producing and consuming fairy-tale texts in vast quantities, we are also denigrating their value and questioning their truthfulness” (p. 140). As a brief aside, I wonder if this is the inspiration for her subtitle, How We Hate to Love Them, with “them” referring to fairy tales, because otherwise I did not perceive much of a tie-in for the subtitle. In general, though, this magic trick that fairy tales and other folklore genres play—holding up a mirror to us while hiding in plain sight—definitely deserves more scholarly attention.While the monograph contains some markers of Koppy's disciplinary training in comparative literature rather than folkloristics, as well as some markers of its evolution from dissertation to published book, it is overall an engaging and relevant addition to the body of critical fairy-tale studies. Koppy's careful attention to issues of citation practice and social justice, for instance, as well as her small hints about the impact of precarity on one's scholarship, give the impression of an insightful and perceptive mind at work, one that I hope we get to see more of in folkloristic circles.