Take some of the meat which is inside and the bottle of wine on the shelf. Let me go outside. When the little girl was outside, she tied the end of the rope to a plum tree in the courtyard. Are you making a load? He followed her but arrived at her house just at the moment she entered. She is shrewd, brave, tough, and indepen- dent. Evidence indicates she was probably undergoing a social ritual connected to sewing communities the maturing young woman proves she can handle needles, replace an older woman, and contend with the opposite sex.
In some of the tales, however, she loses the contest with the male predator and is devoured by him. There is no absolute proof that the above synthetic tale pieced together by the astute French folklorist Paul Delarue was told in the exact same form in which he published it. Perrault revised some kind of oral tale that featured a young girl endangered by a predatory wolf to make it the literary standard-bearer for good Christian upbringing in a much more sophisticated manner than Egbert or oral storytellers.
Moreover, his fear of women and his own sexual drives are incorporated in his new literary version, which also relects general male attitudes about women portrayed as eager to be seduced or raped. In this regard, Perrault began a series of literary transformations that have caused nothing but trouble for the female object of male desire and have also relected the crippling aspect of male desire itself. What are the signiicant changes he made? First, she is donned with a red hat, a chaperon,56 making her into a type of bourgeois girl tainted with sin since red, like the scarlet letter A, recalls the devil and heresy.
Second, she is spoiled, negligent, and naive. Third, she speaks to a wolf in the woods—rather dumb on her part—and makes a type of contract with him: she accepts a wager, which, it is implied, she wants to lose. Fifth, she is swallowed or raped like her grandmother. Sixth, there is no salvation, simply an ironic moral in verse that warns little girls to beware of strangers, otherwise they will deservedly suffer the conse- quences.
Sex is obviously sinful. It was translated into English by Robert Samber in and into other European languages. The Grimms made further alterations worth noting. Here the mother plays a more signiicant role by warning Little Red Riding Hood not to stray from the path through the woods. Little Red Riding Hood is more or less incited by the wolf to enjoy nature and to pick lowers. Instead of being raped to death, both grandma and granddaughter are saved by a male hunter or gamekeeper who polices the woods.
Only a strong male igure can rescue a girl from herself and her lustful desires. What constituted its memetic quality? If memes are selish, as Dawkins has declared, the persistence of a story that presents rape relevantly in a discursive form to indicate the girl asked to be raped, or contributed to her own rape, can be attrib- uted to the struggle among competing memes within patriarchal soci- eties that tend to view rape from a male viewpoint that rationalizes the aggressive male sexual behavior.
Yet, it is not entirely negative as a meme, and it is a meme that has mutated, especially in the past thirty-ive years, under strong ideo- logical inluences of the feminist movement. Perrault did not dispute the fact that men tend to be predatory, but he shifted the respon- sibility of physical violence and the violation of the body to the female, and since his communication it the dominant ideology of his times shared by many women and perhaps ours , his story competed with all others and became the dominant meme and remains so to this day.
As dominant meme, it does not simply convey the notion that women are responsible for their own rape, but it also conveys a warning about strangers in the woods, the danger of violation, and an extreme moral lesson: kill the rapist or be killed. Used or transformed as a warning tale, it reveals that the tale is open to multiple interpretations and also has a positive cultural function. Certainly, it is very dificult to change sexual behavior. At times, Pinker minimizes the connection between sexual drives, social reinforcements, and social power that still enable males to exercise their domination in various ways, but he also fortunately recognizes the sig- niicance of the feminist challenge to the way rape is displayed, trans- mitted, and narrated in Western society.
If we have to acknowledge that sexuality can be a source of conlict and not just wholesome mutual pleasure, we will have rediscovered a truth that observers of the human condition have noted throughout history.
The great contribution of feminism to the morality of rape is to put issues of consent and coercion at center stage. The ultimate motives of the rapist are irrelevant. I want to close with some brief remarks about a remarkable ilm that relects upon the possibility for cultural transformation or change. She is picked up on a highway by a serial rapist and killer, and because she is so street smart, she manages to turn the tables on him, grab his gun, and shoot him.
She then takes his car but is arrested because the rapist miraculously survives. Two detectives interrogate her, but largely due to their male prejudices, they do not believe her story about attempted rape. In prison Vanessa succeeds in escaping while the two detectives follow leads from people they interview that convince them that the rapist was really lying. When she arrives, she bravely beats him to a pulp, and the astonished detectives, who had wanted to help her, show up only to witness how Vanessa can easily take care of herself.
The contested representations suggest that there is another way of viewing desire, seduction, and violation. If there are really such things as memes— and I am convinced there are—and if memes can inluence us and be changed as our behavior is transformed, it is important that we take the theory of memes and fairy tales themselves more seriously. As we know, tales do not only speak to us, they inhabit us and become relevant in our struggles to resolve conlicts that endanger our happiness. Although there is some truth to these assumptions, they conceal the deep cross-cultural and multilayered origins and meanings of these pan-European tales that also have fasci- nating connections to northern Africa and the Orient, including the Middle and Far East.
Of course there can be no denying that the tales are culturally marked: they are informed by the languages that the writ- ers employed, their respective cultures, and the sociohistorical context in which the narratives were created. In this regard one can discuss the particular Italian, French, German, or English afiliation of a tale and also make regional distinctions within a particular principality or nation-state.
The truth value of a fairy tale is depen- dent on the degree to which a writer is capable of using a symbolical linguistic code, narrative strategy, and stereotypical characterization to depict, expose, or celebrate the modes of behavior that were used and justiied to attain power in the civilizing process of a given soci- ety. Whether oral or literary, the tales have sought to uncover truths about the pleasures and pains of existence, to propose possibilities for adaptation and survival, and to reveal the intricacies of our civilizing processes.
Historical Background For the past three hundred years or more scholars and critics have sought to deine and classify the oral folk tale and the literary fairy tale, as though they could be clearly distinguished from each other, and as though we could trace their origins to some primeval source.
As I have stated in the previous chapter, this is an impossible task because there are very few if any records with the exception of paintings, drawings, etchings, inscriptions, parchments, and other cultural artifacts that reveal how tales were told and received thousands of years ago.
In fact, even when written records came into existence, they provided very lit- tle information about storytelling among the majority of people, except for random information that educated writers gathered and presented in their works. Naturally, the oral folk tales that were told in many different ways thousands of years ago preceded the literary narratives, but we are not certain who told the tales, why, and how.
We do know, however, that scribes began writing different kinds of tales that relected an occupation with rituals, historical anecdotes, customs, startling events, miraculous transformations, and religious beliefs. The recording of these various tales was extremely important because the writers preserved an oral tra- dition for future generations, and in the act of recording, they changed the tales to a greater or lesser degree, depending on what their purpose was in recording them.
There is no evidence that a separate oral won- der-tale tradition or literary fairy-tale tradition existed in Europe before the medieval period. Graham Anderson has performed a great service for folklorists and serious scholars of the fairy tale by demonstrating how Greek and Roman myths contributed to the generic development of the literary fairy tale by studying oral and literary sources in the pre- Christian ancient world.
It does not seem that folktales, including fairy tales, are memorized in verbal detail but according as they deal with matters of concern to the community, and in terms of stereotyped characters and narrative patterns. The pattern has its own internal logic which does not necessarily depend on material probability or a plot with strict cause and effect, as does the novel, at least in theory. The general pattern must satisfy the common desire for a marvel and a satisfactory outcome.
How this occurred, where it occurred, and exactly when it occurred are dificult questions to answer with precision because the tales developed as a process largely through talk, conversations, and performances that caught the imagination of people from different social milieu and were gradually written down irst in Latin and then eventu- ally in different vernacular languages, when they became more accept- able in the late Middle Ages.
As more and more wonder tales were written down in Latin and vernacular languages from the twelfth to the ifteenth centuries, they constituted the genre of the literary fairy tale, and writers began establishing its particular conventions, motifs, topoi, characters, and plots, based to a large extent on those developed in the oral tradition but altered to address a reading public formed largely by the clergy, aristocracy, and the middle classes.
The tales that were told cut across different classes and segments of a particular society—rural, urban, and court. The threatening aspect of wondrous change, turning the world upside down, was something that these classes always tried to channel through codiied celebrations like Carnival and religious holidays.
This must mean that the Cocaigne mate- rial belongs to the oldest of oral traditions, otherwise it would not have been written down as soon as man started wielding the pen. Their ingredients—consisting of formulaic elements, individual motifs, and stock themes—are part of a widespread oral culture that has continued to the present day. In addition, details of this oral tradition continue to crop up in written literature, which then forms its own traditions, some- times—but not necessarily—interacting with the oral transmission of these same stories.
The establishment of literacy was, among other things, a way to police the use of language through schooling, religion, and legislation of laws. It is extremely dificult to describe what the oral wonder tale was because our evidence is based on written documents, and there are many types of wonder tales with diverse plots and characters, bound intricately with customs and rituals, that are often inexplicable.
Gen- eral theories about the origin and spread of the folk tales leading to the formation of the literary fairy tale were irst conceived at the beginning of the nineteenth century and have been elaborated and contested up through the twenty-irst century.
The Brothers Grimm believed that fairy tales were derived from myths that had been religious at one time, but storytellers had gradually discarded their religious connotations, and the tales became secular wonder tales. Their views were expanded by Theodor Benfey —81 , a scholar of Sanskrit, who argued in his introduction to the Indic Pantscha Tantra that the genre of the fairy tale originated in ancient India as an oral wonder tale and spread irst to Persia and then to the entire Arabic-speaking world.
Eventually, the oral wonder tales were transmitted to Europe via Spain, Greece, and Sicily through trade, migration, and the Crusades. The Grimms and Benfrey believed that there was one point of origin or one place of birth monogenesis that led to the formation of the folk tales. The notion of polygen- esis was also at the basis of the British anthropological scholars Edward Burnett Tylor — , Andrew Lang — , and James George Frazer — ,9 who maintained that, since the human species was similar throughout the world, humans responded to their environment in similar ways, giving rise to identical tales that varied only accord- ing to the customs they developed.
A common assumption made by almost all folklorists and anthro- pologists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was that the fairy tale was part of an oral tradition thousands of years old.
Instead, he argued that, despite the existence of oral folk tales in antiquity, there was no such thing as a fairy tale, and the fairy tale as a genre was really the creation of individual writers, who forged the genre in the ifteenth and sixteenth centuries and its basis is literary.
His ideas were soundly rejected and answered by, among others, the Danish folklorist Bengt Holbek, whose thorough and thoughtful work Interpretation of Fairy Tales demonstrates clearly that some forms of the fairy tale have existed in the oral tradition for millennia. Moreover, she tries to set up a false debate between so-called oral- ists and herself as though there were a clear divide, and argues that only published books provide accurate evidence for the origins, existence, and spread of fairy tales.
Her positivist approach to oral history recalls the elitist manner in which the upper classes treated popular culture and negated their customs and forms of entertainment.
Scholars who have used a more inclusive and expansive approach that focuses on the inter- action between elite and popular cultures and the interplay between orality and literacy reveal the narrow conines of her argument. Forms and Contents of the Or al Wonder Tale and the Liter ary Fairy Tale The debate about the origin and transmission of the fairy tale as oral wonder tale, while signiicant and productive, can be misleading and distracting when we consider that the spoken language existed long before writing systems were developed, and when we take into account that it is impossible to determine when and how certain types of tales evolved.
What we do know, as Jan Ziolkowski has pointed out, is that: Europe has had writing systems for thousands of years. Clay, stone, metal, bark, papyrus, wax, parchment, and paper are only a selection of the materials that have been used for this purpose. Tales have been told dur- ing those millennia, but most tellings have not been set down in writing or otherwise recorded. Part of the reason is the sheer practical one that it has been happily impossible to capture in writing all the words people have spoken.
Some types of literature were written down again and again, while oth- ers failed to receive oficial approval, either explicit or tacit, which was an indispensable prerequisite for being memorialized in literature. The plot gener- ally involves a protagonist who is confronted with an interdiction or pro- hibition that he or she violates in some way. Therefore, there is generally a departure or banishment and the protagonist is either given a task or assumes a task related to the interdiction or prohibition.
The protagonist is as-signed a task, and the task is a sign. That is, his or her character will be stereotyped and marked by the task that is his or her sign. In sociological terms, each character is to act out what Pierre Bourdieu calls a habitus,16 that is, the characters occupy the whole complex of thinking, acting, and performing of a position within the family and society: names are rarely used in a folk tale; characters function accord- ing to their status within a family, social class, or profession; and they often cross boundaries or transform themselves.
It is the transgression that makes the tale exciting; it is the possibility of transformation that gives hope to the teller and listener of a tale. Inevitably in the course of action there will be a signiicant or signifying encounter.
Depending on the situation, the protagonist will meet either enemies or friends. Sometimes there are at irst three different animals or creatures that test the protago- nist to see whether he is worthy of their help. Whatever the occasion, the protagonist must prove him- or herself and acquire gifts that are often magical agents, which bring about a miraculous or marvelous change or transformation. Soon after, the protagonist, endowed with gifts, is tested once more and overcomes inimical forces.
A miracle or marvelous intervention is needed to reverse the wheel of fortune. Fre- quently, the protagonist makes use of endowed gifts and this includes magical agents and cunning to achieve his or her goal.
The success of the protagonist usually leads to marriage; the acquisition of money; survival and wisdom; or any combination of these three. Whatever the case may be, the protagonist is transformed in the end. Never- theless, his theory helps us understand that the structure of oral tales depends heavily on memory, repetition, and resolution. The signii- cance of the paradigmatic functions of wonder tales and their distinct characters, identiied through their social class and habitus, is that they facilitate recall for teller and listeners.
Over hundreds of years they have enabled people to store, remember, and reproduce the plot of a given tale and to change it to it their experiences and desires because of the easily identiiable characters associated with particular social classes, professions, and assignments.
At the center of attraction is the survival of the protagonist under dificult conditions, and the tales evoke wonder and admiration for oppressed characters, no matter who they may be.
Wonder causes astonish- ment, and as marvelous object or phenomenon, it is often regarded as a supernatural occurrence and can be an omen or portent. It gives rise to admiration, fear, awe, and reverence. In the oral wonder tale, we are to marvel about the workings of the universe where anything can happen at any time, and these fortunate and unfortunate events are never really explained. Nor do the characters demand an explanation—they are instinctively opportunistic and hopeful.
They are encouraged to be so, and if they do not take advantage of the opportunity that will beneit them in their relations with others, they are considered either dumb or mean-spirited. The tales seek to awaken our regard for the miraculous condition of life and to evoke profound feelings of awe and respect for life as a miraculous process, which can be altered and changed to compensate for the lack of power, wealth, and pleasure that most people experi- ence.
Lack, deprivation, prohibition, and interdiction motivate people to look for signs of fulillment and emancipation. In the wonder tales, those who are naive and simple are able to succeed because they are untainted, naturally good, and can recognize the wondrous signs. They have retained their belief in the miraculous condition of nature, revere nature in all its aspects, and accept their own natural inclinations.
They have not been spoiled by conventionalism, power, or rationalism. In contrast to the humble characters, the villains are those who use words and power intentionally to exploit, control, transix, incarcerate, and destroy for their own beneit. They have no respect or consideration for nature and other human beings, and they actually seek to abuse magic by preventing change and causing everything to be transixed according to their interests. The marvelous protagonist wants to keep the pro- cess of natural change lowing and indicates possibilities for overcoming the obstacles that prevent other characters or creatures from living in a peaceful and pleasurable way.
The focus on the marvelous and hope for change in the oral wonder tale does not mean that all wonder tales, and later the literary fairy tales, served and serve a radical transforming purpose. Oral tales have served to stabilize, conserve, or challenge the com- mon beliefs, laws, values, and norms of a group. The ideology expressed in wonder tales always stemmed from the position that the narrator assumed with regard to the relations and developments in his or her community; and the narrative plot and changes made in it depended on the sense of wonder, marvel, admiration, or awe that the narrator wanted to evoke.
In other words, the sense of the miraculous in the tale and the intended emotion sought by the narrator are ideological.
Narra- tors sought to use language and the art of communication to make their utterances special and relevant so they would catch on and stick in the ears and brains of their listeners. In the last analysis, however, even if we cannot establish whether a wonder tale is ideologically conservative, radical, sexist, progressive, and so on, it is the celebration of miraculous or fabulous transforma- tions in the name of hope that accounts for its major appeal.
People have always wanted to improve or change their personal status or have sought magical intervention on their own behalf. The emergence of the literary fairy tale during the latter part of the medieval period bears wit- ness to the persistent human quest for an existence without oppression and constraints. It is a utopian quest that we continue to record through the metaphors of the fairy tale, even today.
Two more important points should be made about the oral tradition of transmission that concern the magical contents of the tales and the mode in which they were disseminated. During the Middle Ages, most people in all social classes believed in magic, the supernatural, and the miraculous, and they were also smart enough to distinguish between probable and improbable events. On the contrary, they were told and retold because they had some connection to the material condi- tions and personal relations in their societies.
To a certain degree they carried truths, and the people of all classes believed in these stories, either as real possibilities or parables.
Magic and marvelous rituals were common throughout Europe, and it is only with the gradual rise of the Christian Church, which began to exploit magic and miraculous sto- ries and to codify what would be acceptable for its own interests, that wonder tales and fairy tales were declared sacrilegious, heretical, dan- gerous, and untruthful. However, the Church could not prevent these stories from being circulated; it could only stigmatize, censure, or criti- cize them.
This is true of all organized religions and continues to be the case today. The magical tales of the Bible and religious texts have always been compelled to compete with the secular tradition of folk and fairy tales for truth value. If women were regarded as the originators and disseminators of these tales, then the texts themselves had to be suspicious, for they might relect the ickle, duplicitous, wild, and erotic character of women, who were not to be trusted.
Thus, their stories were not to be dismissed as trivial. Inci- dentally, this association was often coupled with children, that is, the folk were regarded as simple children, and their tales were thus belittled as simplistic, ignorant, and crude by the upper classes and the clergy. Tales were told in walks of life in the Middle Ages and during the Enlightenment, as they are today, and both sexes contributed to and continue to contribute to the tale-telling tradition.
Troubadours, professional court storytellers, kings, queens, merchants, slaves, servants, sailors, soldiers, spinners, weavers, seamstresses, wood- cutters, tailors, innkeepers, nuns, monks, preachers, charcoal burners, and knights carried tales as did children.
It would be an exaggeration to insist that everyone in society told tales or that they were good and interesting tale tellers. These tales were often embellished, or they were ritual tales that brought the members of a community closer together. But one factor is clear: the folk were not just made up of the peasantry or the lower classes.
The great majority of people in the Middle Ages up through the beginning of the nineteenth century were nonliterate, and thus everyone participated in one way or the other as teller or listener in oral traditions. They are apparent in Indian, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman col- lections of tales, myths, and legends and in the texts that constitute Oriental and Occidental religions. However, they were never gathered or institutionalized in the short forms that we recognize in the West until the late Middle Ages.
Then male scribes began recording them in collections of tales, epics, romances, and poetry from the tenth cen- tury onward. Most of the early work was in Latin, and the interactions between the Church and lay people and between orality and literacy help us understand how the fairy tale evolved and was disseminated. As Rosmarie Thee Morewedge has maintained: [W]e must rely on the wealth of tale collections that have come to us from medieval and pre-medieval sources, that were told by the tale-tellers; it must be remembered that tales did not stop being part of an oral tradi- tion just because they were written down by vagrants, preachers, mer- chants, crusaders or other literati.
Which talented priest would not want to serve the missionary thrust of the church by collecting tales heard in childhood, read in school, heard on travels and in various monasteries? In general, Oriental tales were spread in Europe both through oral retellings and translations into various European languages. It is interesting to note that one of the tales in the Gesta Romanorum probably spawned the oral and literary dissemination of the remarkable Fortunatus c.
In brief the tale concerns a young man named Fortunatus on the island of Cyprus. After he joins the entourage of the Earl of Flanders, he travels to Flanders and wins a tournament, but jealous rivals and the threat of castration cause him to lee to London, where he leads a life of decadence and then returns to the Continent.
Destitute, he wan- ders about Brittany and becomes lost in a forest. A kind fairy or Dame Fortune takes pity on him and grants him either wisdom, strength, long life, wealth, health, or beauty. He must select one of them. Fortunatus chooses wealth, and she gives him a magic purse that will always provide money for him. After wandering about Europe for a while, he returns to the island of Cyprus and inds that his parents are dead.
However, with his magic purse, he is able to restore the family name and marries a young lady from a noble family. After two sons are born, he begins traveling again and eventually procures a magic cap that transports him to any place he wishes once he puts it on his head. Before he dies as a respected member of society, he bestows his gifts on his two sons who lose them because of their greed and carelessness.
There were many variations of this plot, and sometimes, instead of just one hero named Fortunatus, there were three young protagonists and three fairies.
Sometimes the gifts are different. Fortunatus also makes use of an invisible cloak. In a signiicant essay about the origins of Fortunatus, Luisa Rubini has shown that the German folk book of For- tunatus was more than likely preceded by Spanish and Italian versions.
Lively economic and cultural relations, contacts and exchange between southern Germany and northern Italy are amply documented for that period, and the presence of Italian lit- erature, both serious and popular also in the form of cheap prints in German libraries provides further evidence. Another good example is the wonder tale about the grateful dead that can be traced to pre-Christian antiquity and spread widely throughout Europe in the medieval period.
The novella, also called conto, was a short tale that adhered to principles of unity of time and action and clear narrative plot. The focus was on surprising events of everyday life, and the tales inluenced by oral wonder tales, fairy tales, fabliaux, chivalric romances, epic poetry, and fables were intended for the amusement and instruction of the readers.
Before Boccaccio had turned his hand to writing his tales, the most famous collection had been the Novellino written by an anonymous Tuscan author in the thirteenth century. But it was Boccaccio who set a model for all future writers of this genre with his frame narrative and subtle and sophisticated style.
It was Boc- caccio who expanded the range of topics of the novella and created unforgettable characters, which led to numerous imitations by writers such as Ser Giovanni Fiorentino, Giovanni Sercambi, Franco Sachetti, Piovano Arlotto, and Matteo Bandello, to name but a few.
We only have information from the irst volume of Le pia- cevoli notti that he was born in Carvaggio and that he was the author of another work Opera nova de Zoan Francesco Straparola da Caravazo , a collection of sonnets and poems, published in Venice. Nor are we certain of his death in Most likely he had moved to Venice as a young man, and it is clear from his collection of novellas, which he called favole fairy tales , that he was very well educated.
He knew Latin and various Italian dialects, and his references to other literary works and understanding of literary forms indicate that he was versed in the humanities.
Whoever Straparola may have been, his Piacevoli Notti had great success: it was reprinted twenty-ive times from to and translated into French in and and into German in The allure of his work can be attributed to several factors: his use of erotic and obscene riddles,26 his mastery of polite Italian used by the nar- rators in the frame narrative, his introduction of plain earthy language into the stories, the critical view of the power struggles in Italian society and lack of moralistic preaching, his inclusion of fourteen unusual fairy tales in the collection, and his interest in magic, unpredictable events, duplicity, and the supernatural.
Similar to Boccaccio, Straparola exhib- ited irreverence for authorities, and the frame narrative itself reveals a political tension and somewhat ironic if not pessimistic outlook on the possibilities of living a harmonious happy ever-after life. He takes his daughter, Signora Lucretia, a widow, with him, and since her husband had died in , it can be assumed that the setting for the Nights is approximately some time between and The bishop and his daughter lee irst to Lodi, then to Venice, and inally settle on the island of Murano.
They gather a small group of congenial people around them: ten gra- cious ladies, two matronly women, and four educated and distinguished gentlemen. Since it is the time of Carnival, Lucretia proposes that the company take turns telling stories during the two weeks before Lent, and consequently, there are thirteen nights in which stories are told, amounting to seventy-four in all.
Each night there was a dance by the young ladies. Then Lucretia would draw ive names of the ladies from a vase, and those ive ladies would tell the tales that evening. But before the storytelling, one of the men had to sing a song, and after the song a lady told a tale followed by a riddle in verse. Most of the riddles were exam- ples of the double entendre and had strong sexual connotations, espe- cially those told by the men. The object was to discuss erotic subjects in a highly reined manner.
During the course of the thirteen nights, the men were invited every now and then to replace a woman and tell a tale. In addition, Lucretia herself told two tales. To a certain extent, the ictional company on the island of Murano can be regarded as an ideal representation of how people can relate to one another and comment in pleasing and instructive ways about all types of experience.
The stories created and collected by Straparola are literary fairy tales, revised oral tales, anecdotes, erotic tales, buffo tales of popular Italian life, didactic tales, fables, and tales based on writers who preceded him such as Boccaccio, Franco Sacchetti, Ser Giovanni Forentino, Giovanni Sercambi, and others. In the second volume he translated and adapted many Latin tales that he passed on as his own. In the fairy tales, as well as in most of the other narratives, Straparola focuses on power and fortune.
Though wicked people are punished, it is clear that moral standards are set only by the people in power. Thus Gale- otto can kill his brides at will, and fathers can seek to punish or sleep with their daughters at will. The majority of the tales center on active male protagonists who are heroic mainly because they know how to exploit opportunities that bring them wealth, power, and money.
Stra- parola begins most of his tales in small towns or cities in Italy and sends his protagonists off to other countries, realms, and, of course, into the woods or onto the seas.
His heroes are adventurers, and there is a sense that the fairy tales have been gathered from far and wide. It is apparent in almost all his tales that he was inluenced by oral storytelling and social rituals. There were tumultu- ous changes throughout Europe, and the motif of transformation, com- mon in many folk tales, was emphasized even more in the fairy tales of Giambattista Basile.
In the literary fairy tale, this motif had to pass the test of censors, and the metaphors and language had to be honed to meet audience expectations. If Straparola did indeed spend most of his life in Venice, it would not be by chance that the tales he read and heard came to this port city from far and wide and that he was obliged to hone them to meet the expecta- tions of the reading public.
Venice was a thriving and wealthy city in the sixteenth century,27 and Straparola would have had contact with foreigners from all over Italy, Europe, and the Orient. Or he would have had news about them. Though there are no records of how his tales were disseminated, they would have been read aloud at courts and in reading societies and repeated, and, of course, they were reprinted several times in the course of the sixteenth century.
The quasi- acceptance of the genre—quasi because the censors did not fully accept it—enabled numerous writers to experiment and produce highly origi- nal fairy tales. According to Zipes, fairy tales are "a polygenetic cultural artifact," a set of similar ideas that emerge in multiple locations p. Although they start out as similar responses to shared human experiences, these tales then go through what Zipes calls "miraculous transformations" according to the changing cultural variables of their local environs p.
In terms of genre, "the literary fairy tale is similar to a special biological species" p. Zipes holds that fairy tales have "stuck" in people's minds because they have purposefully evolved in order to remain relevant. Zipes tacitly acknowledges that biological evolution exists within a historical continuum and concedes that there is no evidence for a pres existence of the kinds of wonder tales that form the core of his subject.
It is, he writes, "next to impossible to know [how the literary fairy tale was formed]" p. Similar statements of the absence of foundational evidence appear repeatedly, including recurring phrases such as "we are not certain," "very few if any records," "written records provide very little information about storytelling," "difficult question to answer with precision," and "it is impossible to determine when and how certain types of tales evolved.
Sometimes such an approach offers researchers the only feasible path for reconstructing past events and conditions, and when this is so, grounding can be provided by a foundation of secure fact. In this case Project MUSE promotes the creation and dissemination of essential humanities and social science resources through collaboration with libraries, publishers, and scholars worldwide. Forged from a partnership between a university press and a library, Project MUSE is a trusted part of the academic and scholarly community it serves.
It is only in chapter 3 that he actually begins with the examination of specific tales and gets to the heart of the book as suggested by its title. His interest is in looking at modern-day variations of the best-known folktales to show how they have been adapted to twentieth- and twentieth-first-century lifestyles.
For readers interested primarily in children's literature, one caveat should be offered: many of his examples are drawn from adult literature, including story writers, playwrights and novelists, and many [End Page ] are drawn from the cinema, the opera, and the ballet.
The purpose of this eclectic mix seems to be to illustrate the breadth and depth of the cultural influence of the traditional folktales—a fairly widely accepted notion. What Zipes brings to the study is his own wide reading in the fairy tales and his well-known political and social viewpoints.
So Cinderella is seen as a tale of the personal conflict that faces people when placed in situations requiring them to act contrary to their natural biological drives—as, for example, when a stepparent is asked to nurture another's child. This, Zipes sees, as an unnatural situation, one that threatens to undermine the stepparent's own self-interests which would be to favor his or her own child, no matter how unpleasant that child may be.
Zipes concludes that Cinderella "became contagious and stuck. Whether one agrees with Zipes or sees his conclusions as overreaching, his discussions are filled with thoughtful and provocative observations. Chapter 3 closes with a review of several modern adult versions of Cinderella, including one featuring a gay prince charming, one with a lesbian Cinderella Project MUSE promotes the creation and dissemination of essential humanities and social science resources through collaboration with libraries, publishers, and scholars worldwide.
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