Showing papers in "Marvels and Tales in 2012"

The Princess and the Frog (review)

Abstract: The Princess and the Frog. Directed by Ron dements and John Musker. Performed by Anika Noni Rose and Bruno Campos. Walt Disney Pictures. 2009. DVD. The Princess and the Frog is Disney's first full-length animated fairy-tale film based on a specific tale type (ATU 440) in more than two decades, and it introduces the first African American to the highly marketed Disney Princesses series. The film begins in classic Disney style with both narration and a storybook. The storyteller is the protagonist Tianas mother, who is reading the story of "The Frog Prince" to Tiana and her friend Charlotte. The unlikely friends - a poor African American girl and a rich white girl in 1920s New Orleans - have disparate reactions to kissing a frog in order to marry a prince. Charlotte would do anything to marry a prince, but Tiana finds frog kissing gross and not worth the outcome. These early reactions shape the worldviews of the girls as they move into early womanhood - Charlotte continues to yearn for a royal wedding, whereas Tiana dreams of owning her own restaurant with no thought of marriage. Upon hearing of the arrival of Prince Naveen, Charlotte throws a costume party in the hopes of catching his eye. Naveen, however, has been changed into a frog by Dr. Facilier, thus allowing Naveens greedy servant to take his place. When Naveen sees Tiana dressed as a princess singing to shooting stars, he assumes her kiss will restore his human form, but because she is not really a princess, when she kisses him, she is changed into a frog as well. To ascertain a way to change them both back, the two journey through stereotypical New Orleans locales. No Disney film would be complete without singing animal helpers, and Tiana and Naveen enlist the aid of Louis, a jazz-loving alligator, and Ray, a Cajun lightning bug, to take them to Mama Odie to find a cure. Rather than offering straightforward answers, Mama Odie tries to get the frogs to "dig deeper" for what they need, not just desire, from life. Naveen realizes he loves Tiana, but Tiana is not yet willing to admit she needs anything besides her restaurant. Although Naveen initially plans to propose, he chooses instead to give Tiana her dream by kissing and marrying Charlotte, who is Princess of Mardi Gras, so as to transform them back into humans. However, neither Charlotte nor Tiana allows him to follow through because Tiana finally declares her love for him. Instead of remaining frogs indefinitely, the two become human again with their wedding kiss because Tiana has now become a princess and she is able to have both her prince and her restaurant. Disney clearly hoped The Princess and the Frog would propel them back onto the top of full-length animated films after years of falling in popularity to Pixar and Dreamworks. The film applies two of Disney's critical and market successes: hand-drawn animation and the fairy-tale princess. Tiana is clearly meant to fall in line behind Belle and Jasmine and their predecessors Snow White, Cinderella, and Aurora. The film itself even insinuates this marketability by showcasing Charlottes princess dresses and paraphernalia in the opening sequence, which closely mimic the gowns already available to wannabe princesses through Disney retailers. …

Enchanted Eloquence: Fairy Tales by Seventeenth-Century French Women Writers (review)

Abstract: Enchanted Eloquence: Fairy Tales by Seventeenth-Century French Women Writers. Edited and translated by Lewis C. Seifert and Domna C. Stanton. Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2010. With Enchanted Eloquence: Fairy Tales by Seventeenth-Century French Women Writers, Lewis C. Seifert and Domna C. Stanton offer a collection of eight French fairy tales translated into English; most have never been translated before. The book is divided into three main sections: the "Editors' Introduction," "Fairy Tales by Seventeenth-Century Conteuses," and the "Critical Texts on the Contes de Fees." Seven black and white illustrations are also included, mostly frontispieces and portraits. Even though only eight fairy tales are presented in this volume, the useful appendix lists the English titles of the sixty tales written at that time by Marie-Catherine le Jumel de Barneville, Baronne d'Aulnoy; Louise de Bossigny Comtesse d'Auneuil; Catherine Bernard; Catherine Bedacier Durand; Charlotte-Rose de Caumont de La Force; Marie -Jeanne LHeritier de Villandon; and Henriette-Julie de Castelnau, Comtesse de Murât. The "Editors' Introduction" presents an informative and well-researched summary of the fairy-tale genre with its cultural and literary context during the Louis XIV era, as well as an account of the voice and empowerment of the conteuses (female storytellers). The introduction also analyzes the critical reception of the tales across the centuries. General but nonetheless instructive, the introduction furnishes a wonderful overview of the fairy-tale genre in seventeenth-century France. The strength of the introduction lies in the analytic and enlightening manner in which the editors review and explore the literary fairy tale's vogue. The genre, Seifert and Stanton remind us, is primarily dominated by female writers, as two-thirds of the tales were produced by women (3). However, there was also a group of male authors, Charles Perrault being the most well-known (although his tales display a different style from his contemporaries). The editors reveal how the literary tales probably appeared in the mid-seventeenth-century salons and how this community of women created a new genre at a time when France was economically challenged and experiencing a return to religious piety. Often combining oral folklore and entirely new pieces, the contes de fees were the product of a fertile creativity from women who "invented a tradition with their own fairy tales" (15). Seifert and Stanton emphasize that this newly created literary production included elements of refined and privileged comportment belonging to an elite society, thus distinguishing the conteuses' tales from the popular and lowly milieu. Based on the marvelous, the contes also incorporate references to the upperclass society, such as theater, opera, and contemporary mores, thereby positioning the contes de fees as a modern genre. Indeed, the editors detail the context in which the seventeenth-century tales were created at the peak of the quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns. Far from being a recycled genre, the fairy tales were the voice of the conteuses affirming their belonging to a male-dominated society and their empowerment by means of their female characters, who were often active and in charge of their destiny. Noting that the conteuses called themselves modern fairies, Seifert and Stanton affirm that these "tales are both about and by fairies" (27). Through their leading female characters, the conteuses present alternatives and options for women in love, marriage, and governance, for instance. Seifert and Stanton conclude their detailed introduction with a section on the reception of the fairy tales. A few critics have commented on the vogue of this new literary genre led by women writers and their use of unrealistic elements in their stories. The editors inform us that Jean-Baptiste Morvan de Bellegarde, Pierre -Valentin Fay dit, and Abbe de Villiers were the main critics of the conteuses at the time. …

My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me (review)

Abstract: My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me. Edited by Kate Bernheimer with Carmen Gimenez Smith. Foreword by Gregory McGuire. New York: Penguin, 2010.608pp. Totaling over 600 pages and 40 stories, Kate Bernheimer and Carmen Gimenez Smiths anthology of contemporary folktales, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me, displays a wealth of approaches to the form: realist, magical realist, absurdist; first-, second-, and third-person singular and plural; past and present; ahistorical or temporally defined down to the minute; geographically ambiguous or as precise as a rendezvous at the Getty Villa in Malibu, California. The editors give their contributors considerable latitude, refusing to rigidly define the genre, or indeed, define it at all. "When asked by some contributors what a fairy tale was," Bernheimer writes in her introduction, "I would answer: You already know. A fairy tale is a story with a fairy-tale feel, I told them. And we'd continue from there" (xxii). I can only assume that this circular definition was intended to assuage the disquiet of writers not entirely familiar with what is apparently more a feeling than a genre. The result is an inevitably uneven collection, which promises many disappointments but happily still more pleasures. Copious as it is, the volume proves rather insular in its geographic reach. Save for several brief if eventful sojourns to Mexico, Vietnam, and Japan, the stories keep to the bounds of Europe. That is, their origins are provisionally traced back to Europe, although as Bernheimer points out, the countries listed in the table of contents by no means hold exclusive rights to them. For all intents and purposes, the editors have placed the origins of these tales firmly in the subjective experiences of the volumes contributors. The artists subjectivity is the origin that anchors this book. Apart from devising one of the more arresting titles on bookshelves today, the editors present a convincing argument for fairy tales as a living tradition in the twenty-first century. As a record of neither a monolithic folk nor anonymous native informants, the stories collected in this anthology are not only signed but in each case augmented by the contributors postscript. These brief, fascinating addenda typically locate the tale within the authors autobiography; time and again writers describe reading fairy tales as children and, in turn, reading them to their children. In fact, by articulating fairy tales as experiences, the volume becomes less about the writing than the sharing of such stories. At once autobiography, literary criticism, and a window into the creative process, these postscripts also help structure a peculiar kind of communication between what are otherwise self-contained entries in an anthology We begin to see how Hans Christian Andersen's "Wild Swans" affected Michael Cunningham and Karen Joy Fowler in remarkably different ways and, indeed, resulted in two very different variants. Yet the tale remains a common point of reference, a common experience. My Mother She Killed Me is a book that puts the lie to fairy tales as mere escapism, showing that, without our realizing it, these tales have burrowed their way into us. Although sixteen of the tales were first printed elsewhere, several of them over a decade ago, the volume manages to give the impression of a collective effort. …

Glass Beauty: Coffins and Corpses in A. S. Byatt's Possession

Abstract: Glass is a paradoxical substance Its transparency allows us to see all that lies behind it, but we cannot touch what we see On the molecular level glass is unusual in that when it solidifies, it retains the random molecular structure that it had when it was a liquid, instead of cooling into the crystalline structure of a conventional solid (Klein and Lloyd 9) This accounts for the fragility of glass, because it lacks the strength of a more systematic structure Hard and impermeable as it may seem, it can be shattered in an instant Its message is, "Look, but don't touch" In this paper 1 trace the metaphorical transposition of this concept onto human beauty and the ways in which A S Byatt, in her 1990 novel Possession, reimagines and partly redeems a glassy beauty who is fragile, cold, and untouchable The metaphor of the glass coffin in Possession provides a key instance of the transformative reworking of beauty undertaken by much anglophone fiction since 1980 Many glass objects are blown using human breath, which often leaves tiny bubbles and swirling imprints In Victorian Glassworlds Isobel Armstrong describes these as "the congealed residues of somebody else's breath" (4) Yet the image of a person behind glass does not convey humanity but rather a cold, preserved inhumanity Warm flesh can take on a ghostly, unnatural sheen when viewed through glass These properties have made glass the perfect material to represent a chaste, unattainable type of human beauty It appears with striking consistence as a fairy-tale motif, one of many fairy-tale elements rewritten by contemporary novels, such as Possession Even after centuries of Snow White and Cinderella tales, glass continues to exert influence as a fairy-tale and literary metaphor Whether it is a beautiful princess placed at the top of a glass mountain, the glass castles that proliferate in seventeenth-century French fairy tales as luxurious prisons, the glass slippers, distaffs, axes, and keys that represent sexual virtue and beauty, or perhaps most significantly the glass coffins that confound life and death in their exquisite display of a motionless body, glass remains a prominent image, and always a beautiful one It is particularly associated with transformation and the desire to transcend the ordinary This may be due to the transformative nature of glass itself: it is a material of sublimation, changing from commonplace sand and ash into delicate, crystalline objects As a metaphor, it can effect the same kind of transformation in people Fairy tales are full of transformations As Max LUthi writes, "The folktale [or fairy tale] transforms the world; it puts a spell on its elements and gives them a different form" (24) Cinderella, for instance, is transformed from a ragged slave into a lovely princess, wealthy and royal - all by becoming beautiful Significantly, Cinderella rises from the ashes to become this delicate beauty, exactly mirroring the production of her glass slipper, glass being made with ash When she flees at midnight, it is the glass slipper she loses that comes to represent her exquisite beauty, further transforming her into an object of pursuit Isobel Armstrong writes that glass is both "medium and barrier" (7), providing visual access to beauty but denying all other access Concentrating Cinderella's beauty in her glass slipper makes that beauty unattainable and sublimates it into the realm of art as a metaphor It is precisely this process of rendering human beauty abstract through the metaphor of glass that 1 examine in this paper In particular, 1 look at how the process has been negotiated or challenged by Byatt In Possession we see the beautiful princess figure, Maud, learning to renegotiate her position as an object of pursuit and achieving this by modifying the image and signification of her own beauty In more practical terms Maud does not try to destroy the untouchable remoteness of her glassy beauty but instead makes room inside it for color, movement, and human connection …

Fearless Children and Fabulous Monsters: Angela Carter, Lewis Carroll, and Beastly Girls

Abstract: Angela Carter's various revisions of "Little Red Riding Hood" lay open the violent, alluring, and often distressing reality of adult sexuality Although the relationship between Carter's stories and the earlier tale has been ably analyzed,1 relatively little attention has been paid to the figure of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Carter's work on "Little Red Riding Hood." I would argue that Alice is an important figure in and that Carroll's work is a vital intertext to Carter's short story "Wolf-Alice" and the film The Company of Wolves. Carter's stories are about the animalistic, exploitative potential of human sexuality, whereas Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Loofang-Glass and What Alice Found There use animals to remind us of the seemingly arbitrary, nonsensical rules of the adult world. Both stories concern active girls exploring a world that is dangerous because of its unfamiliarity and the power of adults. By invoking both Alice and Little Red Riding Hood, Carter is able to present a more complex vision of female sexual awakening under patriarchy, its pleasures as well as its genuine risks and sufferings. "Wolf-Alice," a short story that appeared in the collection The Bloody Chamber, is the tale of a girl raised by wolves who has been taken from her wolf-mother by the same hunters who killed that mother. She is trained to perform simple tasks by a convent of nuns and is placed as a servant in the castle of a duke who is a sort of werewolf-vampire composite. Here Carter gives us an Alice who grows up, unlike Carroll's, and her sexual maturation brings her and the beastly duke with whom she lives into humanity. Alice, like most children, begins her story as a beast, and like many children, she makes her home in the house of a monster, an incomprehensible adult. Raised by wolves, she lives in the castle of a man who may or may not be a werewolf, who may or may not be a vampire, but who most definitely is a ghoul, eats the dead, and does not cast an image in the mirror. In Carters story, it is the man and not the girl who finds himself on the wrong side of the looking glass: "[His] eyes open to devour the world in which he sees, nowhere, a reflection of himself; he passed through the mirror and now, henceforward, lives as if upon the other side of things" (Carter, "Wolf-Alice" 222). To live on the wrong side of the mirror, for both Carroll and Carter, is to become a monster. The duke eats corpses and wears a wolf's pelt. When Carroll's Alice goes through the looking-glass, she finds that she is the fantastic beast: "This is a child!" the White Kings messenger tells the Unicom. The Unicom responds by exclaiming, "I always thought they were fabulous monsters!" The Unicorn then introduces Alice to the Lion by crying out, "Its a fabulous monster!" Subsequently, Alice is addressed as "monster" throughout the rest of the chapter (Carroll, Annotated Alice 228-31). Both Carter and Carroll emphasize the affinity between children and monsters: Carter by allying Wolf-Alice with a man who masquerades as a wolf-man and Carroll by emphasizing the relative nature of the category of monster. To be a monster is to be out of ones own place, to be on the wrong side of the mirror. Like Alice at the beginning Looking- Glass, Wolf-Alice is fascinated by the mirror, and in the beginning of their stories, neither girl seems to have quite grasped the purely imitative, two-dimensional nature of the glass. Although Alice remains in this childlike state, Wolf-Alices realization of the meaning of reflection is connected to her menarche and maturation. Wolf-Alice initially understands her reflection as a playmate: "She rubbed her head against her reflected face, to show that she felt friendly towards it, and felt a cold, solid, immovable surface between herself and she" (Carter, "Wolf-Alice" 225). Carter's confusing syntax reflects Wolf-Alice's own confusion about the nature of her reflection and thus about her own identity, a confusion that is reminiscent of Alice's introspective meditations on her identity. …

The Grimm Reader: The Classic Tales of the Brothers Grimm (review)

Abstract: The Grimm Reader: The Classic Tales of the Brothers Grimm. Edited and translated by Maria Tatar. Introduction by A. S. Byatt. New York: W. W. Norton, 2010. xxxix + 325 pp., illustrations. Although Maria Tatar states in her introduction that the aim of The Grimm Readeris to provide "a hotline" to the tales of the Brothers Grimm, "unencumbered by introductions and annotations [and not] cooked at the fires of the academic hearth" (xxii), this book includes not only a selection of stories from the Kinderund Hausmarchen (Children's and Household Tales) in a (new) translation by Tatar but also a wealth of peritextual material that one would normally expect in a more academic edition. This may be because this reader is a companion piece to Tatar's magnificently scholarly Annotated Brothers Grimm (2004) and follows its structure of offering two introductions, a biography of the Grimms, Wilhelm Grimm's introduction to their first edition, and a collection of quotations on "the magic of fairy tales." In her elegantly written introduction, A. S. Byatt talks about what real fairy tales mean to her, differentiating authored stories with their psychological terror from authentic, orally derived tales, which "are older, simpler, and deeper than the individual imagination" (x). She lightly covers the different approaches to folklore study: the universal nature of fairy tale motifs; the relationship of fairy tales to myth; Freudian analysis of the psychological purpose of fairy tales and the original motivation for their collection as a gesture of German cultural identification; Luthi's ideas on the "true" fairy tale's fundamental lack of character, depth, and psychological development; and how Wilhelm Grimm's editorial input shaped the tales. Byatt touches on some of the nastiness of the collection and its reception, concluding that "true" fairy tales do not moralize and do not manipulate but are the "narrative grammar of our minds" (xvii). Tatar's own introduction continues with a discussion of the constitutive elements of fairy tales: everyday magic that is encountered without shock; wish fulfillment that may turn into a wish for survival; a happy-ever-after that is not necessarily linked to acquisition of wealth, although precious objects abound and are often crucial plot drivers; and beauty and graphic horror that is described in specific, abundant, morbid anatomical detail and for which Tatar provides a number of examples and direct quotations from the tales. She eloquently describes their development from the savagery of the "childhood of culture" (xxiv), surviving and evolving through many different variants, versions, adaptations, and transadaptations with their function to entertain and guide. She lightly touches on the main debates in Grimm scholarship by identifying "national pride and scholarly ambition" as the motivating factors for the Grimms to "create a cultural archive of German folklore" (xxvii), although this was not recognized in reception, which focused more on the children's element. Tatar links the success of the collection to the tales1 timeless content and universal appeal, perpetually appropriated, adapted, revised, and rescripted (xxvii). The power of this cultural legacy is the rationale for providing a new translation; to review the role of the stories whose main function, despite their morally conflicted pleasure, lack of parentally approved role models, and distinctly un-PC standards, is to allow children/readers to reflect on cultural and historical differences "and for figuring out how to survive a world ruled by adults" (xxix). …

Aimee Bender's Fiction and the Intertextual Ingestion of Fairy Tales

Abstract: When Aimee Bender's fiction is described, the designation "fairy tale" frequently appears along with recurring descriptors: magical, surreal, phantasmagoric, bizarre. One critic refers to Bender's short stories as "contemporary fairy tales, cushioned by goofy humor and a deep tenderness for her characters" (Press 14), and another writes that her first novel "reads like a Brothers Grimm fairy tale overlaid with the futuristic alienation of Philip K. Dick" (R. Johnson 36). 1 Bender herself acknowledges her affinity with fairy tales, often citing the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen as formative literary influences. In 2004 she told an interviewer, "1 feel like somewhere along the line 1 ate fairy tales, 1 ingested and digested them, and now they're part of my whole person" (S. Johnson 22). Yet Bender's work - two novels, An Invisible Sigi of My Own (2000) and The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake (2010); two short story collections, The Girl in the Hammable Shirt (1999) and Willful Creatures (2006); and miscellaneous stories - does not overtly call attention to its kinship with the fairy-tale tradition. Readers expecting stories that deliberately evoke and subversively rework familiar tale types along the lines of Angela Carter, Robert Coover, Margaret Atwood, or A. S. Byatt will not find them in Bender's fiction. This late twentieth-century group of writers, the "Carter generation" as Stephen Benson refers to them, signal blatantly that they are entering fairy-tale territory through their titles, direct revision of familiar plot and character types, or explicit interfacing with previous fairy-tale iterations. Bender's work, on the other hand, is Imbued with a fairy-tale ethos, but its presence is more obliquely felt, The fairy-tale works of Bender's predecessors offer, for example, a radically feminist Uttle Red Riding Hood, an ecocritically alert revision of "Beauty and the Beast," and a sexualized and predatory Snow White, but these wildly innovative challenges to the politics and aesthetics of canonical tales nonetheless remain firmly within the circumscribed and recognizable realm of the fairy-tale genre. Benders agenda is different: her purpose is not to parody fairy-tale cliches or to interrogate its ideological underpinnings, particularly in the areas of gender and class. Rather, Bender frequently but sporadically appropriates fairy-tale motifs and structural patterns to explore how humans negotiate their strange and incomprehensible worlds: a magical dress serves as a cover for a woman~ insecurity and self-loathing, an amputation points to a character~ emotional fragility, a child born with a grotesque malformation becomes an occasion for exposing cruelty and alienation. Because Bender is a relative newcomer in contemporary fiction, literary criticism of her work has not yet caught up to her broader acclaim. In his recent Relentless Progress, Jack Zipes mentions Bender as an emerging writer who deserves more attention, and he credits her with avoiding the trap of producing formulaic fiction "for the market" like so much adaptive fairy-tale writing. Zipes describes Bender as a writer for whom "the fairy tale has become more charged with neurotic intensity and more layered" and whose short stories combine "elements of the folk tale, magic realism, the grotesque, and the macabre that ruptures readers' expectations" (130). In this essay I further explore the "neurotic" and "layered" additions that Bender makes to the fairytale corpus. These additions fall into four broad categories: appropriation of conventional form; intertextual use of common themes and motifs; an exploradon of the fairy tales paradigm of the family dynamic; and the invention of fresh autonomous tales. In these ways Bender reworks familiar fairy-tale elements into fiction that charts the emotional disconnection her characters experience in an overwhelming and absurd postmodern landscape. The Fairy Tale and Conventions of Form Benders stories invite immediate association with the fairy tale because they appear to emulate its formulaic conventions: her tales are typically brief, they eschew complex characterization, and they posit their sense of the fantastic squarely and unapologetically within the realm of fairy-tale logic. …

Tough Magical Nuts to Crack: Cristina Campo's Reflections on Fairy Tales

Abstract: Fairy tales play an essential role in the prose writings of the Italian poet, essayist, and literary translator Cristina Campo (1923–1977). As she writes in her only overtly autobiographical piece, fairy tales are like those magic walnuts that, once cracked, rescue their bearer at the moment of greatest danger. Although critics have commented on Campo’s theories of fairy tales, in this essay I provide a more systematic exploration of the meaning of fairy tales in each of Campo’s essays collected in Gli imperdonabili . Emphasis is given to Campo’s Christian interpretation, the influence of Simone Weil’s philosophy, and the recurring themes of suffering, hope, and transformation.

Fairy Gold: The Economics and Erotics of Fairy-Tale Pantomime

Abstract: For nearly two centuries the English theatrical tradition of Christmas pantomime has served as a significant medium for the transmission of fairy tales. Highly profitable and erotically charged, pantomime complicates received histories of the genre. By the late nineteenth century a select number of tales had emerged as panto standards—the vast majority of which originated in French print traditions. In a print domain increasingly dominated by field-based collections and a new breed of literary tale, pantomimes maintained cultural centrality while simultaneously providing a vocabulary with which Victorian commentators would criticize French literary fairy tales.

Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture (review)

Abstract: Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture By Peggy Orenstein New York: Harper Collins, 2011 Peggy Orenstein's Cinderella Ate My Daughter is a fast-paced and articulate, if not always rigorously scholarly, indictment of the "girlie-girl" culture of twenty-first-century North America It is not, though, particularly about fairy tales Orenstein, like many journalists who write pop culture critiques, carefully balances personal narratives, such as her 3-year-old daughter's consumerculture requests (for Barbie dolls, pink clothes, and Disney Princess toys) and her own internal struggles with both hyperconsumerism in general and pinkprincess-girliness specifically (she also occasionally includes her husband's takes on the struggle), with statistics, studies, and interviews Some of those narratives, such as the preschool that is deliberately reinforcing positive crossgender interactions between children, are fascinating Others, such as the description of the study that purports to show that male rhesus monkeys prefer "boys' toys" while the females prefer feminine items, are patently ridiculous, implying not only that objects (such as toy police cars) are inherently gendered but that monkeys recognize a cooking pot as (a) a cooking pot and (b) for female use (If this is true, then Planet of the Apes is a documentary, and we have some explaining to do about our zoos and laboratories) A good journalist offers both sides of an argument, though, and Orenstein is a good journalist She talks about Jay Giedd, of the Child Psychiatry Branch of the National Institute of Mental Health, who argues that statistically there is as much difference within the genders as there is between them in terms of both interests and competence (71) It is a flaw that Giedd's words, which come after such a lot of data (using that term loosely) on inherent sex differences, seem more like a throwaway comment than an effective rebuttal As a mother trying to fight against a current social construction of femininity that treats girls as hypersexual objects, Orenstein occasionally undermines her own arguments against essentialism and consumerism, as when she admits to having spent a ridiculous sum of money on a "research" trip to the American Girl doll store I picked up the text partly because I had been hearing a lot about it from family members with young children and partly because I was thinking about offering the book as a course text for upper-year undergraduates in a children's studies program It worked relatively well there, with students experienced enough to question some of the more problematic references to sex work, socioeconomic status, the entertainment industry as a monolith, and so on Cinderella Ate My Daughter might work in an introductory course in fairy-tale studies if excerpts were used rather than the entire book, primarily because the volume is much less about fairy tales than it is about the Walt Disney Corporation's fairy tales and really more about Disney's marketing campaigns and consumer goods than it is about the tales themselves But Disney Ate My Daughter might have been too risky a title Orenstein does get into interesting fairy-tale territory when she leaves the Disney Store behind and explores the Brothers Grimm tales, sharing an English translation with the aforementioned 3-year-old as bedtime reading; this takes up, however, only one chapter of the book …

Anti-Tales: The Uses of Disenchantment (review)

Abstract: Anti-Tales: The Uses of Disenchantment. Edited by Catriona McAra and David Calvin. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011. Anti-Tales: The Uses of Disenchantment reflects the ubiquity of the fairy tale in contemporary culture and the diversity of approaches to the genre, although the ambition of the editors is questionable: Catriona McAra and David Calvin seek to revive the old-fashioned label of anti-tale coined by Andre Jolies in Einfache Formen (1929). in the past decades many international fairy-tale scholars have documented the diversity and complexity of the genre, and of fairy-tale history itself, against simplistic universalizing and essentializing definitions and classifications. Although seductively simple, the attempt to establish "a clearer typology" (3) of tale versus anti-tale (displayed over two columns) contradicts the methodological and critical imperative to consider individual tales in context, as leading fairy-tale scholars have consistently argued and demonstrated. For Jack Zipes, "There is no such thing as the fairy tale. However, there are hundreds and thousands of fairy tales" (Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales, 2000). Ironically, the quotation from Cristina Bacchilega used as an epigraph to the volume also stresses that "the anti-tale is implicit in the tale." In their turn several contributors express doubts about the pertinence of the binary model in light of the history of the genre and because antitales "relate to the idea of the tale itself rather than to their content," as Helen Stoddart puts it (13 1). An uncritical return to the notion of the anti-tale glosses over differences to produce a static and ahistorical image of the genre and confuses actual tales with their stereotype. As a result, generalizations about "the essential formal elements of the genre," which are belied by a knowledge of its complex development from antiquity to the present, abound in the volume. Tellingly, each contributor comes up with a different idea of the anti-tale, sometimes with and used in quotation marks to signal its inseparability from the genre, but more often than not the term is naturalized and used to schematically contrast the "classic" tales with their contemporary revisions. The anti-tale is variously associated with subversion, inversion, darkness, amorality cruelty, and abjection but also with social critique, satire, rebelliousness (progressive, as in postcolonial and feminist revisions, or nostalgic, escapist, and reactionary), intertextuality selfconsciousness, and parody as well as antinarrative drives, intermediality and sensoriality realism, antirealism, disenchantment, reenchantment, and generic hybridity. 1 would be prepared to argue that these characteristics apply equally to the so-called classic versions and even to their manifold sources. Although it is essential to examine how, why, and to what effect artists revisit the fairytale tradition (or received ideas about the genre), such an inquiry is best conducted with a good knowledge of what exactly they are responding to and reacting against. Anti-Tales is divided into several sections: "History and Definitions," "Twisted Film and Animation," "Surrealist Anti-Tales," "Sensorial Anti-Tale," "Black Humour," "Inverted (Anti-) Fairy Tales," and "(Post)Modern AntiTales," each including two to four short essays. The book begins with a solid contribution by Laura Martin that calls the validity of the concept of Antimarchen into question in light of the German Romantic literary tradition, which indeed exhibits many of the traits that other contributors associate with the anti-tale. The so-called dark shadow of German Romanticism is inseparable from the genre, and its influence on British fantasy and the modern fairytale tradition has been well documented by Bill Gray. Far from being "provocative" (to quote the editors), Martin's essay is grounded in fairy-tale scholarship, notably Heinz Rolleke's important work on the Grimms (see also Ruth B. …

Over the Rainbow: Queer Children's and Young Adult Literature (review)

Abstract: Over the Rainbow: Queer Children's and Young Adult Literature. Edited by Michelle Ann Abate and Kenneth Kidd. Ann Arbor: University oj Michigan Press, 2011. Over the Rainbow, a collection of seventeen critical essays edited by Michelle Ann Abate and Kenneth Kidd, arrives at a pivotal moment in American political culture. Spurred in part by recurring incidents of homophobic violence against youth who exhibit sexual and gender nonconformity and in part by the disproportionately high suicide rate among LGBTQ adolescents, many families, schools, and communities are now seeking ways to address the needs of young people whose experiences of embodiment, eroticism, and gender identity do not adhere to heterosexual norms. At the same time a large segment of American society, in particular, the powerful religious right, is bent on perpetuating what Abate and Kidd call "the homophobia and erotophobia surrounding (often structuring) the discourses of youth" (1), insisting on abstinence-only approaches to sex education and attacking public health initiatives aimed at making safe-sex information and condoms available to minors. In such a conflicted climate the essays gathered in Over the Rainbow offer a range of arguments for the capacity of literary texts, and by extension the teaching of literature, to affirm the passions and address the vulnerabilities that shape the lives of young people today. With the exception of Andrea Wood's "Choose Your Own Queer Erotic Adventure," an informative essay on the American reception of Japanese "boy's love" computer games, Over the Rainbow is made up of reprints of previously published articles, some of which first appeared in the early 1990s. Abate and Kidd mitigate the datedness of these earlier materials by framing the volume as a historical overview of critical work on children's and young-adult texts that depart, wittingly or not, from dominant conceptions of sexuality and gender. The editors' introduction elegantly situates the collection within the historical span between the emergence of gay and lesbian studies in the early 1970s and present-day scholarship informed by the multifarious concept of queer. Both Abate and Kidd are leading figures in the field of children's literature, to which Abate's Raising Your Kids Right: Children's Literature and American Political Conservatism (2010) and Kidd's Freud in Oz: At the Intersections oj Psychoanalysis and Children's Literature (2011) are significant recent contributions. Their concise yet deeply informed account of the disciplinary transition from gay or lesbian to queer adds considerable value to their project. The editors have made judicious selections to achieve a broad historical coverage and a diversity of topics. In the collection's first essay, Claudia Nelson offers a detailed investigation of "homoemotional" relationships in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century boarding school stories in British boys' magazines; the final two essays, Catherine Tosenberger's "Homosexuality at the Online Hogwarts: Harry Potter Slash Fanfiction" and Wood's "Choose Your Own Queer Erotic Adventure," deal with twenty-first-century textual production and consumption on the Internet. Among the literary texts treated throughout the collection, works with male protagonists are carefully balanced with those featuring young women. Two essays, Jody Norton's "Transchildren and the Discipline of Children's Literature" and Jes Battis's "Trans Magic: The Radical Performance of the Young Wizard in YA Literature," directly address transgender issues, an important domain that is likely to receive more attention in future scholarship and, ideally, future stories for young readers. In the midst of the collection's diversity, a number of intriguing topical intersections emerge. Nelson's discussion of boys' boarding school stories resonates with Tosenberger's examination of fans' queer matchmaking among students at J. K. Rowling's Hogwarts, and both Robin Bernstein's "Queerness of Harnet the Spy" and Sherrie A. …

Critical and Creative Perspectives on Fairy Tales: An Intertextual Dialogue Between Fairy-Tale Scholarship and Postmodern Retellings (review)

Abstract: Critical and Creative Perspectives on Fairy Tales: An Intertextual Dialogue Between Fairy-Tale Scholarship and Postmodern Retellings. By Vanessa Joosen. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2011. Although there are many works that explore intertextuality among folktales, fairy tales, and retellings, few critical works examine the intertextual relationship between fairy-tale criticism and fairy-tale retellings. Vanessa Joosen deftly takes on this gap in her exceptional book Critical and Creative Perspectives on Faiiy Tales, which examines, as she puts it, "the critical impulse in literature, in the retellings" (35). Joosen begins by calling attention to an overlap in the concerns of fairy-tale criticism and retellings noted by other scholars, such as Stephen Benson and Jack Zipes. Joosen argues that retellings interpret traditional fairy tales just as criticism does, and their authors respond not just to the traditional fairy tales but to the criticism about fairy tales as well. In much the same way that criticism turns to retellings to discuss the concepts and ideology of traditional tales, retellings respond to critical concepts in remaking fairy tales. Joosen's primary argument is that "retellings and criticism participate in a continuous and dynamic dialogue about the traditional fairy tale" (3). What makes Joosen's book unique is that she centers her study on the criticism, not the retellings, and traces a complex web of intertextual references to that criticism. Joosen's case studies focus on three well-known and influential works of fairy-tale criticism: "Some Day My Prince Will Come," by Marcia Lieberman (1972); The Uses oj Enchantment, by Bruno Bettelheim (1976); and The Madwoman in the Attic, by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar (1979). In Joosen's view writers of retellings need not have read the criticism to reference it. Some criticism is so well-known, even outside fairy-tale studies, that writers can be familiar with the critical concepts through popular versions without having read the work itself. For example, Bettelheim's psychoanalytic interpretations of fairy tales and his basic premise that fairy tales function therapeutically for children have so pervaded popular culture that it is unsurprising that many retellings incorporate similar themes. In Chapter 3 Joosen examines how several of Bettelheim's arguments appear in retellings, such as his ideas on Oedipal desire that are picked up in Denise Duhamel's "Sleeping Beauty's Dreams" and Francesca Lia Block's "Beast." In both cases Joosen shows how the writers use and challenge Bettelheim's interpretation. Joosen also explains that this kind of intertextual dialogue can occur when writers of retellings and criticism are interested in the same issues concerning fairy tales and come to similar conclusions independently. This is particularly evident in Joosen's discussions of such retellings as Anne Sexton's Transformauons and Robert Coover's "Dead Queen," which precede the critical texts yet come to similar conclusions about the core issues at the heart of the traditional tales. Joosen's primary focus is on these types of indirect intertextual links as opposed to direct references to criticism by the writers of retellings, although she provides notable examples from those who do allude explicitly, such as Dorothea Runow, whose retelling of "Little Red Riding Hood" is a critique of Bettelheim's interpretation of the same tale. The retellings that Joosen analyzes span the past thirty years and are based on a small subset of popular fairy tales: "Snow White," "Cinderella," "Sleeping Beauty," "Hansel and Gretel," "Little Red Riding Hood," and "Beauty and the Beast." Because each chapter focuses on a critical work, Joosen analyzes several tales related to the critical concepts that predominate in that work. For example, in Chapter 2 she mingles analysis of retellings of "Snow White" ("A Taste for Beauty," by Priscilla Galloway), "Cinderella" ("The Ugly Stepsisters Strike Back," by Linda Kavanagh), and "Sleeping Beauty" (Sleeping Ugly, by Jane Yolen) in her discussion of the "beauty contest" (65), a concept critical to Lieberman's argument. …

"You Must Kill Her": The Fact and Fantasy of Filicide in "Snow White"

Abstract: No quarrels ... are so bitter as family quarrels. -William Alcott, The Young Husband (1846) Psychologists Geoffrey R. McKee and Steven J. Shea have asserted, "Few crimes generate greater public reaction than the intentional murder of children" (678). Given prevailing views about the innocence and defenselessness of young people, the slaying of a boy or girl is seen as particularly heinous. Although individuals can imagine an array of reasons that an adult might kill another adult, they cannot fathom what could possibly prompt an adult to murder a child. As Marianne Szegedy-Maszak has written on the subject, "Both the crime and the motivations defy easy comprehension" (28). As a result, the killing of an infant, toddler, or adolescent is regarded as shocking as it is senseless. Given the condemnation associated with child murder, it is surprising how commonly this act is featured in fairy tales. Many of the homicides depicted in some of the most beloved stories are acts of filicide, neonaticide, or infanticide. The Wolf's consumption of Little Red Riding Hood, the witch's similar attempt to bake and eat young Hansel and Gretel, the ogre's slaughter of his seven daughters in "Little Tom Thumb," and the stepmother's brutal decapitation of her stepson in "The Juniper Tree" are just a few representative examples. Of all the fairy tales that depict the murder of a child, arguably the most well-known is "Snow White." As Linda Degh has observed, "The common knowledge of the [narrative] is so profound, so deeply ingrained, that, even without the story being told in full, a reference or casual hint is enough" for readers to recognize the plot (102). Although the story of "Snow White" exists in numerous forms, the telling by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm has risen to prominence. As Maria Tatar has written, "Today, adults and children the world over read the Grimms' tales in nearly every shape and form: illustrated and annotated, bowdlerized and abridged, faithful to the original or fractured" (Hard Facts xv). The Grimm Brothers' version of "Snow White" is not only the most popular but also the most homicidal. The jealous stepmother in the tale kills the beautiful title character not once but three times: first, by suffocating her with staylaces; next, by brushing her hair with an enchanted lethal comb; and, finally, by feeding her a poisoned apple. Moreover, these murders occur only after an initial unsuccessful attempt on Snow White's life. In a passage that is as famous as it is gruesome, the evil Queen instructs the Huntsman to take Snow White deep into the woods and "kill her and bring me her lungs and liver as proof of your deed" (Grimm 84). Demonstrating the centrality of murder to the story, even in Walt Disney's highly sanitized animated film version of the Grimms' "Snow White," the title character is murdered: after the Huntsman is unable to kill the little girl, the evil stepmother draws on her magical powers to transform herself into a crone, concoct a poisoned apple, and murder the young girl herself (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs). In this essay 1 seek to account for the ongoing fascination, timeless appeal, and mass popularity of "Snow White" in general and the version by the Grimm Brothers in particular. 1 argue that the story endures not in spite of its depiction of a heinous queen who engages in the horrific act of child murder, but because of it. As Bruno Bettelheim famously argues in The Uses of Enchantment (1975), the story of "Snow White" is the product of the repressed feelings, hidden desires, and forbidden feelings of its juvenile readers. In Bettelheim's reading the tale is not about a stepmother who is jealous of her daughter but about a daughter who is jealous of her mother. In what has become an oft-quoted passage, Bettelheim asserts: Snow White, if she were a real child, could not help being intensely jealous of her mother and all her advantages and power. …

Nabokov's Ada and The 1001 Nights

Abstract: In his Arabian Nights; A Companion, Robert Irwin calls Nabokov one of the few writers who have not been influenced by the 1001 Nights (291);1 and although the Arabian Nights Encyclopedia lists the names of almost all the major writers for whom the Nights has been a source of inspiration, Nabokov's name is not there. Nabokov scholars, on the other hand, who have sporadically elaborated on his use of allusions to 1001 Nights, have never considered these references a part of Nabokov's prolonged engagement with the Nights. Most such analyses and annotations are taken as passing allusions based on the assumption that Nabokov draws on these stories as just another aspect of his polyglot fiction. Traces of the Nights can be found in almost all of Nabokov's major novels. In Lolita, for instance, Humbert alludes to himself as "a sultan . . . helping a callypygean slave child to climb a column of onyx" (134), and Arabian Nights is one of a number of books that Humbert mentions buying for Lolita during the course of the novel. In Pale Fire the narrator of the Zemblan story is associated with Shahrazad (96) and "the huge terracotta vases in the garden" remind Disa, Charles Kinbote's queen, of "forty Arabian thieves" (170). In Speak Memory Nabokov explains how as a young man he "felt all the pangs of exile" when he encountered the "Baghdadian" environment of Gaspara in southern Crimea, where "the whole artificial scene struck me as something in a prettily illustrated, albeit sadly abridged, edition of The Arabian Nights" (244).2 However, in no other novel does Nabokov allude so numerously to the Nights as in Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle. In almost all the important parts and aspects of the novel, Nabokov references, whether explicitly or implicitly, this collection of Oriental stories, and, as we argue here, he draws on the Nights as a key subtext in the cultural mosaic of his novel by extrapolating its storyline and characters and recontextualizing it in his own favor. He adapts the character relationship of its frame story and, in a few cases, other stories as an analogy to illuminate the intricate web of relationships in Ada. In his adaptation Nabokov chooses a narrator who is mostly focused on the relationship of the royal couple in the Nights and observes Van, Ada, and Lucette Veens erotic relationships in the light of the erotic and magical mood in these Oriental stories. On the other hand, as the author, Nabokov calls attention to the other aspects of the Nights, especially the role of the third party, that is, Dunyazade, who is absent in the narrators adaptation of the story The discrepancy between the views of the narrator and the implied author brings about an ideological tension that can be discussed in terms of what narratologists call the unreliability of the narrator. According to Gerald Prince, in his Dictionary ofNarratology, an unreliable narrator is a narrator whose norms and behavior are not in accordance with the implied authors norms; and the narrator whose values (tastes, judgment, moral sense) diverge from those of the implied author; a narrator the reliability of whose account is undermined by various features of that account. (101) In this definition both the moral norms and the veracity of the narrators account of the story are gauged against the norms, values, and account of the story presented by the authorial intention behind the narrators back. In practice, however, it is difficult to distinguish a narrators possible unreliability and the norms and values of the implied author, although narratologists have offered a variety of models. To reconceptualize the phenomenon, Ansgar E Nunning proposes two sets of models or "frames of reference" to "gauge a narrators possible unreliability" (98); "the frames of reference derived from everyday experience - what we call referential frames - and those that result from knowledge of the literary conventions" (98). The latter set of models includes "general literary conventions; conventions and models of literary genres . …

Eastern Dreams: How the Arabian Nights Came to the World (review)

Abstract: Eastern Dreams: How the Arabian Nights Came to the World. By Paul McMichad Nurse. Toronto: Viking Canada, 201 0. 242 pp. For years, scholars have grappled with the questions of which stories actually constitute the 1001 "Arabian" Nights and where they originated. In Eastern Dreams, Paul McMichael Nurse follows in the footsteps of British scholar Robert Irwin and tries to untangle these mysteries for a lay audience, translating decades of scholarship into readable, jargon-free prose. Scholars will find little new in this book, but for the general reader and fan of the Nights, Nurse tells a compelling story. Because the questions of origin and provenance of the Nights remain unanswered to this day, despite centuries of speculation, Nurse makes choices about which theories to highlight and which to identify as untenable, but overall his approach is evenhanded. This tactic means, of course, that readers finish the book with no more answers than they started with, but at least the rich context of the mystery has been laid out before them in generous detail. Nurse also embeds synopses of the frame story as well as some of the tales to remind us of the general plot lines. One of the greatest values of this book for the general reader is Nurses discussion of the many analogs to the tales as well as the many sequels, re -imaginings, and paths of influence of the 1001 Nights. More than twenty years after Peter Caracciolo's excellent Arabian Nights in Engiish Literature (Macmillan, 1988), Nurse adds many more contemporary authors and texts to the vast list of those influenced by the Nights. He also provides brief discussions of postcolonial descendants of the work, such as Mahfouzs Arabian Nights and Days and Salman Rushdies Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Because the sphere of influence of the 1 001 Nights has become so broad, Nurse convincingly makes the case that the work, although clearly "Arab" in many ways, has also become a classic of "world" literature. So many literary traditions have taken ownership of some version of the text in one way or another, "parented by multinational sires and a Muslim mother - literally, in Scheherazade's case - [that] the Nights may owe at least part of its longevity to its development at a time and a place acting as a crossroads between cultures" (49). Nurse maintains, however, that most of this cultural exchange took place in the form of written texts passed back and forth, and he largely discounts the possible oral provenance and dissemination of the stories. And, what indeed, constitutes the 1001 Nights? Although Nurse holds out a note of optimism at the end that we may one day know, the idea of a single, authentic text remains a folly. Nurse clearly prefers the more comprehensive collections based on the Calcutta II manuscript to the more limited ones based on the medieval Syrian manuscript edited by Muhsin Mahdi (1984). Nurses argument is that the identity of the 1001 Nights lies in, at least partly, cal the tales that have been attached to it over the years. Translator Husain Haddawy, recognizing this same situation, followed his excellent translation of Mahdi's edition (1990) with a second volume, The Arabian Nights II: Sindbad and Other Popular Tales (1995). For an Arabian Nights scholar, the more intriguing parts of Eastern Dreams might very well be where Nurse wanders away from explaining provenance and goes into more creative directions, such as drawing parallels between the Nights and Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: Or perhaps as literary works, the Arabian Nights and Gibbon's Decline and Fall are not as far apart as we might suppose. …

Antonio Buero Vallejo's Almost a Fairy Tale: A Gloss of Perrault, in Three Acts

Abstract: Introduction Beginning with our earliest recollections of childhood, fairy tales are at the core of our shared human experience. Disney has halt a commercial empire on them, and well-known aiusions such as a "Cinderella story" or a "Beauty and the Beast relationship" evoke universal recognition. Because of this communal nature, when these stories are adapted, transformed, revised, or visited from a new perspective, the result is often profound, startling, and even disturbing. Such is the case with Antonio Buero Vallejo's play Casi un cuento de hadas, translated here as Almost a Fairy Tale. Buero is recognized as the greatest Spanish playwright of the second half of the twentieth century. His death in 2000 closed an era and brought down the final curtain on his dramaturgy known as buerismo. The critic Sergio Nerva has defined buerismo as ni doctrina, ni tesis, ni consigna. En todo caso, una manera de ser y de entender los problemas de nuestro tiempo. Enfin de cuentas, una manera de combatir en favor de un mundo mejor, donde no sea posible la injusticia y donde el hombre, liberado de su angustia vital, de su inconformismo, avance, confiado y seguro, en busca de la perfeccion comun. (3) (neither a doctrine, thesis, nor slogan. At any rate, a way of being and of understanding the problems of our times. Finally, a way of struggling in favor of a better world where injustice is impossible and where man, freed from his vital anguish, can advance with confidence in search of mutual perfection.) In the most general terms, the majority of Buero's works are either of an enhanced, realistic slice-of-life tendency, such as Historia de una escalera (Story of aStairway, 1949), El tragaluz (The Basement Window, 1967), and Caiman (Gator, 1981), or historical allegories, such as Las Meninas (I960), El sueno de la razon (The Sleep of Reason, 1969), and La detonacion (The Shot, 1977). In three early plays, however, Sitero molds and transforms the conventional meaning of known texts into something fresh, touchingly human, and provocative. These works are Palabras en Ia arena (Words in the Sand, 1948), based on the biblical story of the Pharisees and the adulteress, La tejedora de suenos (The Dream Weaver, 1949), inspired by a theme from Homer's Odyssey, and Almost a Fairy Tale (1953), adapted from a story by Charles Perrault. In each, Buero's point of departure is a familiar framework within popular culture on which he constructs his own interpretation. This reinvention of the familiar is an effective technique against complacency, and it awakens a new awareness in the spectator by subverting the standard message of the original source. The typical theater of Spain in the early 1 95Os was dominated by works supporting the conservative ideals of the Franco regime, revivals of old stand-bys, and comedies or escapist jlights of fantasy that offered temporary relief from the limitations and dreariness of everyday life. From its title, Casi un cuento de hadas - which had its premiere in Madrid's Alcazar Theater on January 10, 1953 - would seem to be of this last type, were it not for the word casi ("almost"). A loose adaptation ofPerrault's "Riquet a la houppe" ("Riquet with the Tuft"), the play not only explores issues of human personality and perception versus reality but also depicts a kingdom in which all is not well. For example, we have political intrigue with conniving chancellors, resentful siblings, and a calculating aueen. When scandal threatens, the inept king's immediate reaction is to demand silence to protect the appearance of stability. Catherine O'Leary observes in her book, The Theatre of Antonio Buero Vallejo, that the kingdom is, like Franco's Spain, a land "of pomp without glory, where the court's obsession with protocol hides myriad injustices" (133). Princess Leuda, the female protagonist, while beautiful, is considered dull and dim-witted. Her twin sister, Laura, has the opposite characteristics - she is clever but markedly homely. …

Angela Carter's Fairy Orientalism: "Overture and Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night's Dream"

Abstract: In a 1985 interview with John Haff enden, Angela Carter said that her intention in rewriting fairy tales in The Bloody Chamber and Other Tales (1979) was "not to do versions . . . but to extract the latent content from the traditional stories and to use it as the beginning of new stories" (Haffenden 84). Carter's new tales were an exercise in imaginative writing predicated upon a critical understanding, and what they exposed and reconfigured was the "patriarchal world" of the traditional stories (Day 133). It is a comparable world that Carter, in Overture and Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night's Dream," partly focuses on in the fairy plot of Shakespeare's play What makes "Overture and Incidental Music" important, however, is that Carter's inquiry into the gender dispositions of A Midsummer Night's Dream involves at the same time an exposure of what she identifies as an early imperialist element in the fairy-tale dimension of the play. "Overture and Incidental Music" was first published in the magazine Interzone in 1982, a few years after the appearance of Edward Said's Orientalism (1978). The question of the influence of Said's work on Carter has been raised by Charlotte Crofts, who, in a perceptive essay published in 2006 ("The Other of the Other': Angela Carter's 'New-Fangled' Orientalism"), disagreed with an argument that had been put forward by Guido Almansi in his 1994 article "In the Alchemist's Cave: Radio Plays." Almansi had been particularly exercised with "Come Unto These Yellow Sands," one of Carter's radio plays first broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on April 7, 1979, and published in 1985. He took the view that the play betrays "the distant echo of a perfunctory reading" of Said's Orientalism (Almansi 228). Against this view, Crofts noted that "Come Unto These Yellow Sands" in fact displays "an explicit engagement with postcolonial discourse" (91). Crofts extends her discussion into a consideration of "Orientalist" or "postcolonial" perspective in what Loma Sage has identified as a possibly autobiographical piece of writing, "Flesh and the Mirror," which sprang from Carter's experiences in Japan between 1969 and 1972 (Angela Carter 27). In the present essay I focus on the hitherto unexamined ways in which Carter's "Overture and Incidental Music" inquires simultaneously into the patriarchal biases and the Orientalism that pervade the "latent content" of the fairy story that lies at the heart of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Carter's recognition in her story of imperial propensities in Shakespeare's play connects with her interest in the imperial in "Come Unto These Yellow Sands" and in her last novel, Wise Children (1991), both of which allude to A Midsummer Night's Dream and to which I refer in the course of my discussion. Although "Overture and Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night's Dream" was collected in the Black Venus volume of her short stories (1985), the piece is not a conventional story. It involves a narrative voice, effectively Carter's, that resuscitates various characters from Shakespeare's play and allows them a kind of semi-independent existence, where they do and say things that they do not do or say in the play itself. They both speak in their own voices and are described by the narrative voice. Linden Peach observes of "Overture and Incidental Music" that "an Overture' is normally an introduction, which reverses the chronological relationship between . . . two texts, and does not have to have a close relationship in style to the main piece of music" (146). Carter's prefacing of "Overture and Incidental Music" amounts to a kind of speculative, imaginatively phrased critical perspective on Shakespeare's play, in a manner that parallels Carters simultaneously fictional and analytical procedure in her retelling of the traditional fairy tale in The Bloody Chamber. To discuss Carter's perspective in "Overture and Incidental Music," I must first outline certain key elements in the play itself. …