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Marina Warner looks at storytelling, at its practitioners and images in art, legend, and history - from the prophesying enchantresses who lure men to a false paradise to jolly Mother Goose, with her masqueraders in the real world, from sibyls and the Queen of Sheba to Angela Carter. The storytellers are frequently women (or were until men like Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, and Hans Christian Andersen started writing down the women's stories), and Marina Warner asks how changing prejudices about women affect the status of fairy tales: are they sources of wisdom and moral guidance, or temptations encouraging indulgence in romantic and vengeful fantasies? From the Beast to the Blonde considers old wives' tales in all their luxuriant detail and with a strong sense of the historical contexts in which they developed. Ms. Warner's fresh new interpretations show us how the real-life themes in these famous stories evolved: rivalry and hatred between women ("Cinderella" and "The Sleeping Beauty"), the ways of men and marriage ("Bluebeard" and "Beauty and the Beast"), not to mention neglect, incest, death in childbirth, murder, and racial prejudice. As she suggests in her superb closing chapter, happy endings come only after stumbles and falls; yet in some sense the story of tale-telling is never done.… (more)
User reviews
I have to admit that it took me a couple of years to read this, but that has more to do with the weight of the book than anything else. With it being printed (to the credit of Vintage!) on high-quality glossy paper throughout, you need pretty hefty muscles to manage this in your lap or in bed, but the paperback is too floppy to sit comfortably on a lectern. Still, it's worth that minor inconvenience for the many illustrations, which are unusually well integrated into the text.
Her focus is almost exclusively on the Western
As fascinating as I find From the Beast to the Blonde, though, I do have plenty of criticism for the book. It is big and attempts to be all-encompassing, but that makes it dense and difficult to read. While it can be a little too academic in parts, the biggest detraction was Warner's burying of each section's thesis. The book is arranged thematically, which is often also chronological, but the result is long chapters that wander here and there without a lot of cohesion, and there might be one or two paragraphs scattered throughout but buried that tie the entire section together. It was frustrating, because while the subject was interesting, I couldn't always figure out on my own what one thing had to do with another until many pages later, and then I had to go back and read again with the unifying thesis in mind - this caused the book to take quite a long time to get through, and it's already fairly long.
The book is organized in two parts - the first is about "Tellers" and looks at the history of storytelling and fairy tales from the Greeks and the Sibyl tradition through the respectable recording of tales by Perrault or the Grimms. The second part looks at certain elements of the stories and what they reveal about the context of when they were told. While great in theory, I found that the delineation of the two parts was very fuzzy and resulted in covering the same ground multiple times. The chronological history of fairy tales also seemed to progress without being divided into two, so that many of the later chapters discuss modern interpretations and contexts of specific fairy tale elements without looking at the earlier examples, though they didn't arise only in modern times (surely there are elements of The Little Mermaid, the focus of the last chapter, long before Andersen wrote his version!). This odd chronological progression also means that nearly all of the last couple chapters are hyper-focused on sexual interpretations of fairy tales, which seems to be the most popular literary criticism this century, though I'm not sure it is always the best.
Just like the wrangling of the fairy tale elements to fit the sexual interpretations of recent literary criticism, though it isn't necessarily the best reading, Warner tends to force most of the context and facts to fit her personal theories throughout the book. I don't find this a problem, and in fact think a lot of what she has to say is interesting or at least worth considering, except that she ignores aspects of folklore or tradition that don't fit. I noticed that when she talks about storks in nursery rhymes and what they what they represent to the societies that created them, she has a very limited view and doesn't even mention several other major things the storks symbolize. When she talks about the hagiography of saints like Bridget or Genevieve in later chapters, she presents very narrow interpretations that don't fit very well with everything I know of them, as someone who grew up on saint stories in a Catholic household. There is also a point where she talks about "monsters" and attributes an etymology to the word which is outright incorrect and is a bit of an overreach in any case.
Because it was obvious to me in several places that Warner has either a very narrow interpretation, or else allows her pov to be too broad, I am skeptical about many of her other claims. But I don't think she's outright wrong, and I do find her history and interpretation of fairy tales (and their tellers) to be worth considering and reading. I just wish it were differently organized with more acknowledgments of where Warner is being loose with what she presents or where she is neglecting alternate and equally - or more - valid interpretations.