English Studies Forum

The Forum Reviews

In Dreams

Zipes, Jack  When Dreams Came True: Classical Fairy Tales and Their Tradition.  Routledge, 1999. 238 pp.  $23.95.

By Heidi Strengell, University of Lapland

          From the very beginning, thousands of years ago, when tales were told to create communal bonds in the face of inexplicable forces of nature, to the present, when fairy tales are written and told to provide hope in world seemingly on the verge of catastrophe, adult men and women have been creators and cultivators of the fairy-tale tradition. In When Dreams Came True, Jack Zipes explains how these stories became so powerful and why.

           Zipes takes the concept of spells of enchantment as his starting point when listing the functions of fairy tales in Chapter One. Following Mircea Eliade, Bruno Bettelheim, and Joseph Campbell, he traces both oral and literary fairy tales to initiation rites. By simulating these rites-of-passages contemporary readers can prove bravery without risking their lives. According to Zipes, fairy tales tell the truth of our lives through allegory. On the one hand, the numerable and varied ways in which fairy tales can be interpreted open doors to worlds of imagination and allow each reader to apply them to his personal life in a specific manner. On the other hand, the multitude of interpretations can lead - and has actually led – to disciplinary wars on the primacy of different approaches. Zipes acknowledges feminist, psychological (Freudian and Jungian), and sociological angles, and subscribes to the latter. Whereas the feminist sociologist Maria Tatar blames Bettelheim’s neo-Freudian readings of fairy tales for their patriarchal labeling of the feminine, the equally sociologically-minded Marina Warner considers Campbell’s archetypal characters and his various stages of the hero’s journey somewhat dated and typifying of the male concept of the feminine. Zipes’ focus, however, remains on the role that the literary fairy tale has assumed in the civilizing process by imparting norms, mores, and aesthetic taste to all age groups. He underscores the culture-bound, sociological context of fairy tales by asserting that these tales were born out of humanity’s effort to humanize and tame the indifferent, merciless, and inscrutable forces of nature. In Zipes’ view, fairy tales are marks that leave traces of the human struggle for immortality. Therefore, they frequently feature children or teenagers as protagonists with willpower and youthful vitality.

           In Chapter Two, Zipes begins to explain the social life of the fairy tale, from the sixteenth century to the present. Up until the 1690s, the oral folk tale in France had not been deemed worthy enough of being transcribed and transformed into literature, that is, written down and circulated among the literate people. With courageous and pioneering writers like Madames D’Aulnoy, de Murat, du Maintenon, Mademoiselle de la Force, and Monsieur Perrault, the state of affairs was about to change. Far from being elitist fun for spoiled and bored upper-class citizens, fairy-tale writing became a serious, socio-critical discourse in the eighteenth-century France, and at the same time the fairy tale also assumed the status of a new literary genre. The steady increase of debt, taxation, and poor living conditions during Louis XIV’s reign resulted in extreme misery for the peasantry and an austere life for the bourgeoisie and aristocracy. Given the fact that writers were not allowed to criticize Louis XIV in a direct way due to censorship, the fairy tale was considered a means to vent criticism, and, at the same time, writers began cultivating it to project some hope for a better world. Significantly, almost all of the major fairy-tale writers of the 1790s were on the fringe of Louis XIV’s court and were often in trouble with him or his authorities. As Zipes points out, the reign, which had begun during the age of reason, turned reason against itself to justify the monarch’s desires, tastes, and ambition for glory. In the shadow of the national misery, the court writers continued to compete with each other on modern expressions and ironical imagery. Beyond the playful surface, however, a darker view of reality became all the more obvious; female writers in particulars voiced the desperation - often from personal experience - of forced marriages, child-bed mortality, and even incest.

           Many fairy tales have been spread about Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm. Although much of what had been believed has been disproved by recent scholarship, new rumors and debates about the Grimms' nationalism, racism, and sexism keep arising. Some literary scholars have found racist and sexist components in the tales gathered by the Brothers Grimm, whereas psychologists and educators battle over the possible harmful or therapeutic effects of the tales. More importantly, there has been a lively discussion of the way Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm have revised and edited German folklore. Whether it was Wilhelm who erased the sexist parts of the oral tales or Jacob who added scenes of violence seems somewhat irrelevant to Zipes, who makes use of the biographical method. In Chapter Three, he draws on the life experience of Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm when sketching the reality and context of the German fairy tale. The Grimm Brothers were born to wealthy parents and lived their childhood in the comfortable security of their bourgeoisie home. After their father’s sudden death, Mrs. Grimm supported her large family as a single parent, and Wilhelm and Jacob soon learned to take responsibility for their younger siblings and take low-paid jobs to support the family financially. Despite hardships in life, the brothers retained their basic trust in humanity and the dignity of human beings. Zipes notes that the two brothers were convinced that their tales possessed essential truths about the origin of civilization, and they revised them in the name of humanity and Kultur: the Grimms were German idealists who believed that historical knowledge of customs, mores, and laws would increase self-understanding and social enlightenment.

           If Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm were the first writers in the nineteenth century to distinguish themselves by remolding oral folk tales explicitly for a bourgeois socialization process, then Hans Christian Andersen completed their mission and created a canon of literary fairy tales for children between 1835 and 1875 in praise of essentialist ideology. Zipes argues that by infusing his tales with general notions of the Protestant ethic and essentialist ideas of natural biological order, Andersen was able to receive the bourgeois good housekeeping seal of approval. Son of a poor cobbler and a washerwoman, Andersen was embarrassed by his proletarian background and grew to insist on notions of natural nobility. Once he became the protégé of the wealthy Collin family and a successful writer, he rarely mingled with the lower classes. However, he cannot be dismissed as a class renegade who catered to the aesthetic and ideological interest of the dominant classes. Despite all the recognition by the nobility in the Western world, Andersen remained an outsider, who constantly traveled in his mature years. His wanderings were symptomatic of a man who hated to be dominated, although he loved the dominant class. In his writings, as Zipes never fails to underscore, Andersen was able to veil his self-denial (and proletarian roots) and present it as a form of individualism.

           In the following chapters, Zipes illustrates the historical development of fairy tales through individual writers. He preaches by the rule of E. D. Hirsch Jr., who convincingly argues that no logical necessity compels a critic to banish an author in order to analyze his text. As a whole, Zipes’ approach can best be defined as textual hermeneutics; in a hermeneutic circle, he draws conclusions of the fairy-tale phenomenon by focusing on individual parts or aspects at a time. In this way, Zipes explores Victorian fairy tales with Oscar Wilde as his traveling companion and then heads for Italy with a new companion, Carlo Collodi’s tragically comical Pinocchio. From there he takes the ship to the United States and visits L. Frank Baum’s imaginary monarchy of Oz. Finally, Zipes ends his explorations in Switzerland, where he confronts Hermann Hesse’s dystopian fantasies. Despite cultural differences in its content and presentation, the fairy tale can be traced to the wonder tale, as Zipes forcefully argues. In his vocabulary, the fairy tale is only one type of appropriation of a particular oral storytelling tradition, the wonder folk tale, which even today awakens our wonderment and enables us to project counterworlds to our present society. As such, it will serve a meaningful social and aesthetic function not just for compensation but for revelation: for the worlds portrayed by the best of our fairy tales are like magic spells of enchantment that actually free us. This assurance is Zipes’ premise, and this is his conclusion.

           With its enjoyable prose and logical argumentation, When Dreams Came True is a good pick for both scholars of literature and education and for the general audience, not to mention parents interested in their children’s bedtime stories.