Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale by Marina WarnerOxford University Press, 2014

The subtitle is no joke: this book is short, just 201 pages including the index and an extensive list of books for further reading, and its length was part of what made me pick it up, but may also have kept me from totally loving it. The thing is, Warner isn’t writing primarily about the history/chronology of fairy tales, though she does spend time on key figures like Charles Perrault and the Grimm Brothers. Rather, she starts by defining fairy tales and then talks in more detail about various aspects of them and about their place in various forms of (American and European) culture and cultural discourse. So she talks about Bruno Bettelheim and psychoanalytic interpretations of fairytales, and about Anne Sexton and Angela Carter and feminist revisions/subversions of fairytales, and about how genres like satire or polemic or magical realism can interact with fairy tales, and about fairy tales in the worlds of ballet, opera, and film. This approach sometimes feels scattered, and makes me think I might like one of Warner’s longer books more.

But there is a lot to like here: Warner’s writing is generally clear, sometimes matter-of-fact, sometimes really graceful. I love this, from her prologue, talking about how one of the defining characteristics of fairy tales is that “the scope of fairy tale is made by language,” and about what fairy-tale language is like:

its building blocks include certain kinds of characters (stepmothers and princesses, elves and giants) and certain recurrent motifs (keys, apples, mirrors, rings, and toads); the symbolism comes alive and communicates meaning through imagery of strong contrasts and sensations, evoking simple, sensuous phenomena that glint and sparkle, pierce and flow, by these means striking recognition in the reader or listener’s body at a visceral depth (glass and forests; gold and silver; diamonds and rubies; thorns and knives; wells and tunnels). (xix)

I mean, I am always a sucker for sentences incorporating lists, but that’s really great, right?

Also, this: “In fairy tales, want stalks everyone, and the word’s double meaning matters: both desire and lack” (78).

Also, this book makes me think I should really really really read some Angela Carter. I mean, I’ve been meaning to, but this book makes me wonder why I haven’t yet.