Layla AbdelRahim
Major Field preliminary examination
Dept. Comparative Literature
University of Montreal
19th -26th July 2004
editing touches: June 2007

IN DEFENCE OF CHARLES PERRAULT: Beyond the Feminist Perspective of Jack (David) Zipes & his Associates.

Analysis of chapter 2 - Setting Standards for Civilization through Fairy Tales: Charles Perrault and his Associates in Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion: The Classical Genre for Children and the Process of Civilization by Jack Zipes.

Academic reviews on children’s literature and literary theory hail Jack (David) Zipes as one of the most important and prolific contemporary theoreticians on children’s literary theory from North America. He launched his career by applying a feminist analysis to the concepts of gender and civility in literary works for children. There is a major problem with his enterprise, however; namely, he fails to consider the cultural and economic parameters of the classificatory system on which he relies and whose definitions he takes for granted. These definitions are an integral part of the social and political capital and are the motor that formulates his thinking of children’s literature first and second direct the socio-economic construction of the genre itself shaping the practical employment of the “merchandise” (children’s books).

Zipes resorts to the classic scientific procedures of demonstration that apply to any scientific inquiry, be it “hard” science or social studies. In the case of Zipes it takes the following filling in the formula: 1. classify (in his case he offers new categories, those of gender); 2. define what is ‘right’ and what is ‘wrong’ (with the inherent good-bad values), e.g. Zipes says that the gender categories in Perrault are wrong and those of contemporary American feminist project are right; 3. based on the demonstration, the next logical step is to propose the use of what is ‘right’ and the rejection of what has been demonstrated as ‘wrong’: i.e. buy the latter American ‘feminist’ books and discard the former ’sexist’ ones.

However, this method, actually, works against his theory. First of all, the question of literature applied to specific social projects has been raised before him, sometimes much more convincingly, by such scholars of children’s literature as Simone de Beauvoir or Gillian Avery. Zipes developed the theme extensively infusing Gillian’s and de Beauvoir’s theses with his own agenda. I turn to Avery and de Beauvoir in more detail later.

In this paper, I set out to demonstrate that by critiquing the “civilizing project” of Charles Perrault and Associates, Zipes follows specific prescriptions for a “civilizing” project of his own, which in the final score, is not so different from that of his predecessor. He presents a limited and biased reading of the tales and excludes any inconvenient aspects. That is to say, his essay constitutes political propaganda; and yet it finds its way into “academia” and “theory” – fields that, we are told supposedly, convey some truth about what it is that we read or know.

To spell it out: in his critique of one project, Zipes depends on the strict categorical guidelines of the American democratic/capitalist/feminist model. In subsequent chapters of his book, with which we are not concerned here but which for clarity reasons I still need to mention, Zipes proposes specific fairy tales written by modern, mostly Anglo-Saxon authors, that fit his feminist/capitalist vision with all its prescriptions for a specific social model and he suggests that we should favour these tales over those of “Perrault and Assosiates”. Any such objective in itself constitutes propagandistic intentions.

Zipes proceeds by first demonstrating the context of Charles Perrault. He then offers a superficial discussion of Perrault’s tales. I choose to follow his order. First, I contextualise Zipes himself, drawing parallels between him and the critique that he directs at Perrault. Further, I discuss Perrault’s tales and demonstrate that Zipes’ reading is often inaccurate and curtailed by his own vision. To achieve this vision, he delineates specific gender characteristics and then conveniently “chops-up” the stories squeezing them into these categories. I argue that such categorising, in fact any categorisation, is problematic and manipulative. I resort to extensive examples from Perrault’s tales in order to reveal the problems of classification and Zipes’ (politically) skewed definitions. Finally, I question Zipes’ claim that Perrault’s tales in themselves had an important impact on the civilising project of France and on the perception of children, their gender roles and sexuality.

I organise my essay in the following way:

 

1. I situate Zipes within the context of the civilising project of American feminist capitalism and outline the inclusions and omissions that he allows in his project.

 

2. Analysis of Zipes’ agenda leads me to consider the role of the myth of individualism and how it can attribute a major social constructivist role to an author, in this case to Perrault, thus veiling other important driving forces. In this part, I draw a parallel between the ambitions and the social positions of Zipes and Perrault. This parallel reveals that Zipes’ criticism of Perrault can be interpreted as the battle for the elements and scope of social control.

 

3. I turn to Zipes’ reading of Perrault’s tales and contrast his interpretation with the tales themselves. This exercise exposes the elements of complexity that Perrault retained from the original folk versions If we only look at the text of Perrault’s tales, we can see that a more “global” reading of them is possible because they have been based on and contain centuries of folk experience and wisdom. Comparison of Perrault’s tales with Zipes’ interpretation of the same tales exposes the pitfalls of extreme simplification when an academic approaches his field of study through a priori learnt theory. Once again, this is a problem of categorical organisation of knowledge and data with all the socio-political implications that stem from the problem of definitions, logic and analysis. Classification and definition are the basic tools of analysis: in the specific project of Zipes and Associates and by extension in any scientific undertaking. After all, science and academia depend on organising and categorising data and information in order to “prove” the necessity to promote some kinds of knowledge over others.

 

4. In the last part, I offer conclusions and warnings of pitfalls to avoid in my own doctoral analysis of literary works. For reasons of space and time limitations, I shall confine my illustrations to Charles Perrault’s tales. The Associates will have to wait.

 

 

1. Inclusions and Omissions: Situating Zipes

 

In his work, Zipes distinguishes between what he refers to as ‘regressive’ and ‘progressive’ aspects of the power of fairy tales in order to understand the liberating potential of contemporary tales for children. The definitions at the basis of Zipes’ argument are politically inspired and his argument is thus manipulated and manipulative. It becomes necessary to break down the concepts of “regressive”, “progressive” and “subversive” first.

In order to situate the chapter chosen for my exam, I would first need to contextualise it within the scope of the project of the book and then to place the author himself. This “situating” or “contextualising” is crucial to my examination of the definitions and concepts, which form the basis of any work and point to the fundamental ways in which we formulate an argument and construct logic. This is an exercise in method, which is at the core of any (scientific) inquiry.

Zipes is a feminist American scholar. First, he is the product of a Democratic/Capitalist system that has incorporated a specific type of feminism to which he subscribes. Here I need to delineate this socio-economic model.

American or capitalist feminism is a political/theoretical endeavour. Like all political theories, it has its assets but is concurrently confined by its own agenda. Further, even though it acquired its modern form along the revolutionary strides of the romantic epochs seeking change and turbulence, in its American incarnation it came against a blind wall. This can be explained less by the inherent faults of the theory itself, and more by the fact that – like all political ideas – it is subject to the rules of the system of the status quo of the so-called social realities. In the context of the US, this system was organised for the benefit of the capitalist who relied upon labour in whatever form: categories of age, gender, faith or creed. In this way, we are able to speak of different feminisms, for example, in France, Sweden or Russia.

Zipes’ feminism is rooted in the context of American capitalism – a system known to disregard natural, biological, earthly, psychological, emotional, and other factors in the well-being of not only women but also of animals and plants, earth and space and forced the various living species to adapt and mutate to artificial, experimental conditions often disregarding the basic instinct and purpose of continuity of species¹. Illustrations abound in media, and in various anthropological or sociological research. However, since the theme of this essay is the socialising of children through fairy tales, it is appropriate to illustrate my meaning by citing the effects of the American “incorporation” of feminist “ideals” into the mainstream culture of childhood and pedagogical methods.

Conveniently, the desire of women to participate in the labour market coincided with the desire of the capitalist to exploit or the other way around, approximately like the merry axiom that for every sadist there is a masochist and vice versa. Feminism grew into the mainstream; an indicator of its solid place in social politics is that in the last decades it has become an important bone in the American academic curriculum. This case of “reclaiming” feminism by the masses resulted in the massive exploitation of female work-force while for their physiological labour the system offered only 3 months of paid maternity leave, which, of course, is still longer than the yearly vacation allowed the average labourer that comes to two weeks/year or three in rare cases. Since time is money, motherhood – even though needed to produce “human resources” – turns out to be more costly to all the parties concerned: parents, employers and those undefeatable and unrelenting “tax-payers”.

If we disregard the stress and alienation that such societal organisation inflicts on mothers and infants – in fact “society” disregards rather well the fact that children need years of mother’s protection, milk and warmth, and any symptoms of malaise are immediately handled by professionals who blame the individual, her genes, chemical imbalances, even agony itself – anything in the individual rather than the conspiracy we call culture or society. So if we disregard all that, we find that economically this model serves the capitalist system well and that the three months of paid maternity leave, after all, pay back not only in cannon fodder but also in immediate dividends since coerced workers abandon their defenceless, tiny protegés to the unceasing claws of the products that they, themselves, slave to produce. Pharmaceutics produce the necessary synthetic life-force. Psychologists and medical personnel offer their services to groom and work on the birthing mother and birthed child, instructing her on her and her child’s nature and rights and most important tell her in that dooming voice of authority what to do and what not to do with her baby and herself. “Scientists” write the right and necessary books in support of psychologists and medics². Formula companies offer their chemical breast-milk substitutes for a profitable fee. Day-care accepts infants as young as a month of age. Transportation profits from the extra daily trips to day-care and back. And a multitude of other parent-substitute companies offer their tricks and traps.

Finally we arrive at the book industry, which sells itself into the heart and home and socialises in ways where any distinctions of emotional, physiological, or psychological characteristics have been effaced and caricatured. That is why the whole world is being bombarded by masses of American children’s books depicting flat, androgynous characters portrayed in flat, simplistic and flashy drawings. For an example, see any Disney book with its own “inventions” or its adaptations of “classics”. In a mass-culture society, in fact, any profound differences across any lines, except for race (here, statistics obsess) are being wiped out. The moral: women and men are constantly been told that they are the SAME.

The point that concerns us here is that, even though feminist theory itself is complex, nuancé, and multifaceted, the American feminist project transpires within the American capitalist framework that produces theory to fit its own agenda. The successful ones in this system are usually its good subjects, i.e. people who “see” or read expression of difference – as for example between the sexes – as “bad”, or “sexist” or “discriminatory”. Even though I realise that we live in a world that with each day seems to be getting further away from perfection, I nevertheless uphold that people and knowledge are much more complex than what the American feminist propaganda makes them out to be.

This is the model into which Zipes was born – as a scholar at least – and in which he fared well. This is the project that directs his work. And that brings me to my second point, namely that in order to integrate in any given socio-economic system, one needs to “play” by the rules. Zipes has been a professor of American Literature in Germany, of Germanic studies and comparative literature in the US. Presently, he is the Director for German and European studies at the University of Minnesota, teaching contemporary German literature with a focus on German-Jewish topics. In addition, he is the general editor for The Lion and the Unicorn journal on children’s literature. The book, from which the chapter for this exam comes, “was made possible by a Fulbright Grant from the International Exchange of Scholars which allowed me to spend a year at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt am Main, where I taught and conducted research” (Acknowledgments).

A Fulbright Grant, professorship, academic directorship and editorship – all this points to the fact that the person who receives these positions is rather in tune with the “civilizing” project of those in power (i.e. the elite) to dictate norms, curriculum, values and mores. We may therefore read Zipes as belonging not only to the “mainstream” academic milieu but also to the elitist academic circles of power where he can exercise control over his field. There is an inherent paradox in his criticism of other elitist projects.

This paradox, I argue would perhaps be less enigmatic, if Zipes had acknowledged that the motivation behind his critique is not simply to analyse what upper class “authority” constructs, but to participate in a battle for his own place in the war led by the American capitalist hegemony (intellectual too) over all. Perhaps he is not aware of this implication and that the American feminist model fails to go beyond its economic and political limits dictated by capitalism and inherent expansionism in which such problematic and political notions as those of activity, equality, passivity, intelligence, can be only culturally and politically defined. This failure to examine his own classifications as he applies them to analyse other models of social organisation and control remains Zipes’ major problem. As I state in my introduction, it is these categories and definitions at the basis of his gender critique that render the “gender” related “characteristics” such as “docile, “obedient”, “active”, “intelligent”, “beauty”, etc. problematic. In other words, these categories are politically defined and constructed to respond to specific purposes and to fit in controllable categories to be managed and organised.

Applied to my own research, Zipes serves almost a meta-theoretical purpose: I analyse the theoretical problem of definitions in light of my primary literary text. That is, I am reversing the usual roles (in the case of Zipes too) where traditionally theoretical writing is used to illuminate literary texts.

Regardless of whether Zipes is a genius or only a “children’s literature theory magnate” (usually the two go hand in hand, since the “magnates” pick out and label the “geniuses” and the “geniuses” are then inaugurated as “magnates” and “capitalists” in their field that often justifies the interests of the capital magnates and promotes the knowledge on which that justification grows), and regardless of whether one would want to work with Zipes’ theory or not – just as it happens when someone attempts to ignore the large corporations and finds that any possible choices for work and consumption have mostly to do with the corporations and thus choice has been brought down to naught – it is impossible to ignore him as he controls much of the academic writing on children’s theory in North America.

Due to the scant free resources on the English Internet and the nature of the academic field, I find myself coerced to rely on “authorised” publications. Most theorising on children’s writing in North America is published either in Zipes’ book series called Children’s Literature and Culture dating back to the 1980s (e.g. Natov, O’Malley, Nikolajeva, and others) or in The Lion and the Unicorn journal, which he edits (he and his wife even write children’s literature – he writes under a pseudonym). My search in the MLA listing of journals that publish theory on children’s literature yielded only 13 titles, most of which dealt with stories, book reviews and only 3 entries that dealt with theory, the two mentioned³ above and one other titled: Marvels and Tales - Journal of Fairy Tale Studies. My intuition told me to look for Zipes’ name and I was immediately rewarded: he is on the editorial board, publishes in the journal frequently, in fact one special edition features his work, his complete bibliography, contributions and all.

The money that is obviously pumped into the series (research grants, hard-cover editions sold at 100$ and more, excellent publicity with the resulting popularity and demand, among other indicators) speaks for the interests behind the so-called leftist and feminist perspectives. But apart from the North American socio-economic context, there is another important influence on Zipes – that of Gillian Avery. In his bibliography, Zipes includes Avery’s Childhood’s Pattern: A study of the heroes and heroines of children’s fiction 1770-1950 (1975)⁴. However, anyone who is familiar with Avery’s work on the British “project” for children’s literature would recognize her in Zipes’ project even before consulting his bibliography.

In Childhood’s Pattern, Avery offers a brilliant survey and analysis of how British children’s literature was written, published, and used to convince the poor to work for very little pay for the rich. Her survey spans the period from the end of 18^th century to mid 20^th and argues that British children’s literature came about as a specific civilising and moralising project. Her thorough research provides excellent illustrations to that argument. The message for the poor and lower middle-classes in Avery’s words entailed the following: be obedient, diligent, hard-working, honest and poor.

Zipes applies Avery’s thesis on the “civilizing” and “moralizing” “project” of children’s literature to continental Western European authored tales: “[I]t is not by chance that Perrault directed his energies in writing his fairy tales for the most part to civilize children and to prepare them for roles which he idealistically believed they should play in society” (14 - italics mine).

After having criticised the European civilising project, Zipes presents more recent literature to which he refers as the subversion of the sexist and bourgeois project that was authored by such writers as Hans Christian Andersen, The Brothers Grimm, or Charles Perrault. Zipes calls for the replacement of these authors by the “subversive” contemporary writers (mostly it turns out to be American or anglophone tales with a few European exceptions). What, both, Zipes and Avery fail to mention, however, is the effect of the Soviet “project” of children’s literature on both Avery and the “leftist” Western intellectual circles to which Zipes belongs.

In spite of the blatant pro-capitalist and a British chauvinistic bias to the point of inaccuracy, in between the bragging on “the Soviet lagging behind” the Very Great Britain, this is what The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature⁵ concedes to with regard to the role played by Russia and Soviet Union in formulating a new ethic and setting different standards for children’s literature:

 

… [C]hildren’s literature has been taken very seriously throughout the USSR since the Revolution. Maxim GORKY was in the forefront of those who first declared that juvenile books could greatly influence the future of the country.

… A comparatively early example of this attitude may be found in Moscow Has a Plan, the title of the English translation (1931) of a Soviet school-book by ‘M. Ilin’, a pseudonym of Ilya Yakovlevich Marshak, engineer and writer of BOOKS OF INSTRUCTION and brother of the celebrated Samuel Marshak … The book caused something of a stir in English left-wing circles, and encouraged Geoffrey TREASE to write radical literature for children.

 

The Soviet project produced an artistic and literary children’s culture of amazing beauty, variety and depth. In some spheres, such as animation, theatre, puppetry, and still-image slide shows producing one the largest collections of international folk tales, the scope of the project and the quality of the works remain unrivalled to this day.

The childhood project was equally seriously taken in Nazi Germany and Zipes being a Germanic scholar makes references to the Reich’s choice of themes, language and illustrations and its reliance on German folk literature.

As to the general direction of the book, Zipes squeezes Avery’s global (British) thesis into a narrower feminist perspective on the disequilibrium and differences in the portrayal of male and female roles in fairy tales. What Avery attributes to class subjugation, i.e. docility, diligence, and industry for the poor and the lower middle classes in general, Zipes takes to be socio-feminine characteristics and thus misses the point that the overall underlying message in any hierarchical society is that all “citizens” who are designated by the “boss” to perform specific tasks need to be docile, diligent, and industrious, regardless of gender or race. As for Perrault, he succeeds in subverting, both, class and gender messages by sneaking in ruse and cunning into the tales. Thus, even though Zipes sometimes makes interesting observations, his analysis fails when one attempts to see beyond his lumped illustrations and shady categories.

Zipes commits yet another interesting omission. Even though he almost quotes Simone de Beauvoir verbatim, he omits any discussion in his critique of Perrault and Associates of this important feminist’s contribution to the criticism of French and other European tales. This is what de Beauvoir in The Second Sex⁶ writes on Charles Perrault’s adaptations of folk-tales:

 

Woman is the Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Snow White, she who receives and submits. In song and story the young man is seen departing adventurously in search of a woman; he slays the dragon, he battles giants; she is locked in a tower, a palace, a garden, a cave, she is chained to a rock, a captive, sound asleep: she waits.

 

And in some abstract way, de Beauvoir’s observation makes sense to us; for, living in a post-de-Beauvoirian, feminist age this knowledge has almost become our instinct. For comparison, let us consider what Zipes⁷ says about the male and female roles in these same tales:

 

The male acts, the female waits (page 25).

The composite male hero of Perrault’s tale is strikingly different from the composite female … Unlike the fairy tales dealing with women where the primary goal is marriage … [t]he heroes are active, pursue their goals by using their minds, and exhibit a high degree of civility (page 26).

In Perrault’s literary fairy tale, Cinderella is changed to demonstrate how submissive and industrious she is (page 30).

 

The similarity between Zipes’ and de Beauvoir’s characterisation of French literary tale gender roles is striking: submission, lack of action attributed to female roles, agency and movement to male roles. Yet, he never mentions her in his analysis. He accepts, unquestioningly, the “leftist” and “feminist” agenda, and even though he purports to be critical of the White House and the Corporations’ vile and perilous lies⁸, Zipes never ventures as far as demolishing and redefining the pre-set capitalist definitions of his own semantic references and logical categories. Perhaps we never can fully escape our pre-defined definitions and logic. But since my own definitions have been formed outside of Zipes’ context, I can, at least, offer a curious juxtaposition to him. This I set out to demonstrate.

 

 

 

2. Jack Zipes’ Agenda

 

One of the things that I find fascinating in my own reaction to Zipes’ book is the discrepancy between what appeared to me as “common sense” and at the same time I was stricken by the lack of coherent illustrations of his “theory”. Perhaps, the generalised appeal to my “common sense” is due to the fact that I have assimilated 20^th century feminist theory whether from the Soviet reality or my American experience and, although the two are different in their nuances, I can still share Zipes’ “meaning” and “definitions” on a general level, while the lack of coherence between his examples and generalisations stems from the fact that he does not go far enough with his analysis and stops at a conveniently safe line where his study would not lead to a serious questioning of the status quo of acceptable definitions in North America.

Unlike the findings of Avery and later of the Canadian scholar Andrew O’Malley, who both argued that British literature written specifically for young audiences was aimed at socialising the poor and the lower middle classes within the work ethic (e.g. at first through the cheap peddler chapbooks and later through “literature”), Zipes says that in France it was the other way round. The literary authors of the late 17^th century took the poor people’s tales and adapted them to the civilising project of the rich in which everyone, including the poor and the lower middle classes were “brain-washed” to accept the upper class standards of civility, manners and general values. “At first the fairy tales were adapted from the oral tales of nurses, governesses and servants of the lower classes and then refined to be told in courtly circles (14)”.

He later says that “[m]ore than he realized, Perrault was responsible for the literary ‘bourgeoisification’ of the oral folk tale, and he paved the way for founding a children’s literature which would be useful for introducing manners to children of breeding (27)”. He then proceeds to demonstrate the differences between the original and the adapted versions of the folk tales.

Avery and O’Malley argue that the British literary project took place in a specific social effort funded by and programmed from above, i.e. by those in power. In this light, literary authors responded to the possibilities that were made available by the specific interests of the elite. It was not authors who single handedly created a new dogma or set of standards.

My question here concerns Zipes’ categorical certainty that it is through the tales that the manners and breeding took place and not mainly through “upbringing” which perhaps could only be reinforced by the “right-kind-of-literature”. Hence, the first part of the citation that follows makes sense, while its second part has never been proven beyond any doubt – neither by Zipes, nor by the various sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, and other scientists of the human and social mystery.

 

In other words, Perrault amalgamated folk and literary motifs and shaped them in a unique way to present his particular bourgeois view of social manners. In doing this Perrault shifted the narrative perspective of the popular folk-tale genre from that of the peasantry to that of the bourgeois-aristocratic elite. This may not seem so significant at first, but viewed in terms of the socialization of children, it had dire consequences on the way children came to perceive their own status, sexuality, social roles, manners and politics (27-28).

 

Even though reading affects us⁹, Zipes’ confidence in that it is the ‘Perrault phenomenon’ that “had dire consequences on the way children came to perceive their own status, sexuality, social roles, manners and politics” is erroneous. First of all, he overlooks the fact that literacy was not an important and widely spread phenomenon in those days and did not play the role it plays today, namely as a substitute for parental and human contact. As Zipes writes in this essay, the folk versions of the stories have been circulating at the time and continued to do so among the illiterate “poor” masses for a while. Perhaps, his contention was more accurate with regard to the upper classes, where mothers replaced themselves with nurses and parental education was replaced by hired teachers who sometimes lived on the premises. But then it was not Perrault who set the standards in those upper classes, rather the other way round. Children’s status, sexuality, social roles, manners, politics and self-perception varied from experience to another, mostly across economic and social ranks and was worked out by those “conspiring”¹⁰ to make that experience manageable and most profitable for the owners.

To spell it out, if not Perrault or his associates, then any other candidate with the right vision and ambitions would have done the job of contributing to the monarcho-capitalist programme. Simply, anyone questioning this project would have been denied access to print and the dissemination of “questionable” ideas.

Zipes’ commits his major error, though, because he takes for granted the American myth or faith in the power of the individual. This is the myth that a more sensitive and responsible scholar would question. This is exactly what Andrew O’Malley does in his brilliant study on The Making of the Modern Child where he demonstrates how it was precisely this (Protestant) myth that was used – consciously – in Britain to subjugate the poor by having them believe that their misery was due to their own “choice” and “failings” and that their material and other salvation in this or any other world depended solely on themselves and on their will and capacity to work.

The implication of such belief is to have the poor always toil, till last breath. But as economic and political statistics show, no matter how hard, how much, and how long the poor work, they only get poorer – in terms of food, other helpful matter, health, time, years of life, etc. This myth worked itself into “official” culture with the help of the historian poets or the poetic historians, who used their authority as persons of “knowledge” to establish specific figures to whom they attributed great mytho-historical powers, manipulating them to illustrate individual achievement in the history of humankind. As an example, take any “important” historical, political, literary or other figure that you know of and believe that he or she has changed the course of history, literature, politics, art, or whatever: Did Napoleon win or lose his wars or was it actually the merit of all the people who did the killing and the dying on his behalf? Did Kazimir Malevich change the history of art of the 20^th century or were the art critics allowed to pay attention to “unrealist” depictions of “reality” and promote his boxes and squares as fine art? Did Solzhenitsyn, Baryshnikov, Brodsky do anything independently or were they the product of Soviet opportunities in education and the desire of Western countries to “open the market” (i.e. expansionist economic interests) that crashed against the Iron Curtain of the Cold War – forces that used these artists for propaganda purposes advertising the myth of the possibilities of the West that cashed on their performance but spent nill on their education? How many immigrants had the same possibilities? How many ballet dancers and artists from non-West were denied entry after the West claimed victory in this war? The examples are endless.

Zipes, though, does not question his own belief in this myth and states that Charles Perrault - almost single-handedly (with the occasional help of his Associates) – set the standard and by implication has influenced the course of French civilisation and the future of manners and tastes not only in France, but also in all those places that depended upon France for various instructions. It is as if Zipes disregards that he has placed Perrault in the upper classes and that he characterises this author as an ambitious social-ladder-climber (like Zipes himself) who accepted the elitist project at face value and who participated (but only as a screw among others) in its reaffirmation (the other screws being the teachers, the upper class parents, the priests, the commerçants or the bourgeoisie, among others).

Zipes’ observation regarding the transformation of the fairy tales begins to make sense when we turn to Perrault’s stories themselves: the theme is mostly royalty and nobility, the language as Zipes says has been refined, the aspirations without exception geared towards the accumulation of wealth. Wealth here may be material or social, aesthetic or intellectual (for example the almost 90% of control over the “production” (i.e. editorship) of theory on children’s literature on the North American “market” makes the “producer” or the “editor” a billionaire on the “market” of “knowledge”).

Indirectly and probably not intending to make a parallel with himself, Zipes sheds light on this connection in his essay: “… one could speak of authors who did in fact trivialize the fairy-tale genre by grossly imitating the more skilled writers just to become a social or what we would call today a commercial success” (16 - italics mine). In other words, “social”, “financial”, “material” or in contemporary American parlance “commercial” success indicates access to power and resources. In this sense, we see that Zipes’ personal agenda coincides with Perrault and Associates’ even if it takes place in a different geo-historical space.

There are contrasting perspectives on wealth in literature, as, for example, found in Tove Jansson’s books in which she invented a perfect world to where we (at least she) could escape from war, where there would be no money, no greed, where all do as they please without hurting each other. Here’s a perfect example on a “commercial” interaction between Moomintroll and Co. with a tiny old lady, owner of a store from her second book, Comet in Moominland.

The company walked into the store. Moomintroll and Snork Maiden exchanged gifts, Sniff drank lemonade and Snork got a notebook to make notes for the group, while Snufkin tried on some trousers but declined to take them because they were too new. Then the moment has come to pay.

 

None of them even had pockets except for Snufkin, and his were always empty. … Not one of them had a single penny!

“That’ll be 1 3/4 d. for the exercise book, and 3d. for the lemonade,” said the old lady. “The star is 5d. and the looking-glass 11d. because it has real rubies on the back. That will be 1/8 3/4d. altogether. Nobody said anything [they began to put back the things on the counter, except for Sniff who had vomited his lemonade].

The old lady gave a little cough.

“Well, now, my children,” she said. “There are the old trousers that Snufkin didn’t want; they are exactly 1/8d., so you see one cancels out the other, and you don’t really owe me anything at all.” (122).

 

After debating among themselves whether that was correct, the old lady realised that she “still owed” them 3/4d. and gave them lollipops. The “commercial” exchange that takes place here is not of “accumulation” of set prices, but rather the anarchist slogan of “each according to her need”: Moomintroll and Snork Maiden needed to give each other gifts (in this case valuables, such as rubies, are valuable because they are gifts and the old-shop-owner gives them away to facilitate the exchange between Moomintroll and Snork Maiden and make them happy), Sniff needed to drink, Snork needed a notebook to write important tactics of how to confront the impeding disaster, and Snufkin didn’t need anything at all because “possessions are dangerous”.

In the case of the Moomins, ideas, possessions, et al are relative concepts and if in one case they might be deemed important by one character, they are completely disregarded by others. For example, Snork believes that it is important to possess a notebook in order to write down ideas that were supposed to help them avoid the comet and its havoc. No one argues with him and they let him have his notebook. However, no one really pays attention to Snork’s notes and it is obvious that it is not his “intelligence” and “ideal production” that is going to save them, but some miracle beyond any comprehension and outside the scope of their control. Yet, in some mysterious way, this notebook with the jotted down ideas do help Snork, perhaps by making him at peace with himself and his surroundings. In this way, even though what is good for Snork may or may not be good for all. Most important, he is not the sole monopolist of the “right” knowledge or ideas.

Such characterisation of knowledge, possessions, authority (or rather lack of it) in Jansson’s books stands in bright contrast to Perrault’s characterisations in his fairy tales but also to Zipes’ characterisation of Perrault. Needless to say, it stands in as much contrast to Zipes’ own career.

To return to Zipes, his “foremost concern is how fairy tales operate ideologically to indoctrinate children so that they will conform to dominant social standards which are not necessarily established on their behalf” (18). Here and throughout the text, Zipes does not specify how he defines “child” (children), ideology, and civilisation (or civilising). Yet, these terms are political terms and are not self-evident. Is a child “passive”, “sensitive”, “active”, “discriminating”, “all-absorbent”…? He makes only one reference to a definition of what the child “has become” and that is when he cites Philippe Ariès’ thesis that the child was suddenly begun to be viewed as “innocent” in the 17^th and 18^th centuries.

He omits other important considerations in his claim that literature moulds society and childhood; for example, what has the greater influence on the child, the fairy tale or the “drive” that guides her to seek particular meaning and to make specific sense of tales and experience? Where does this drive come from? Parents? Ancestors? Books? How do other written or oral literatures and their kaleidoscope of perspectives work? Does the type of family relationships or the general education that a child receives play a more dominant role in prompting specific interpretation of the books or do the books really have this tremendous civilising potential that they will influence the family relations, the interpretation and one’s own character and life? How much do the economic and social conditions dictate values and norms? For example, if one really wants to eat and doesn’t have access to food, eloquence and good manners fail to procure bread; on the other hand roughness, violence or cunning might be the more effective tools and despite the widespread programme of civilité are still commonly used.

In other words, my question is whether the authors who, Zipes tells us, developed Perrault’s themes and his “standards”, did not follow the general social structure already there and whether the fairy tales are not only one element of many that reflect what is already there in a culture – by culture I mean the specific method of dealing with meaning and civilising. In this way then, the “civilizing” meaning that Jack Zipes can seize reveals where he comes from and, in fact, his meaning can only stem from his own culture, where parents along with the medical and pedagogical sectors, have civilised him so that he would derive that particular meaning from the tales.

All this is to urge the exercise of great caution with hasty categorisations, definitions and meaning. However, this is not to deny that books do contain what the author imbued them with. And Perrault, as Zipes illustrates, belonged to the upper class. He frequented their circles and admired their manners. Probably, like most authors, he wrote about what he knew best and here Zipes is right to point out that folk tales in Perrault’s hands were converted into a linguistic and stylistic literary venture meant to please no lesser than kings and queens. However, it is not Perrault who influenced the royalty and the rest of them with his books, rather it was they who allowed him to exist and entrusted him with the job, because he catered well. Plus, he was entertaining. In this, Perrault served exactly the same purpose as the authors of the British civilising project in Gillian Avery’s research.

In fact, any writer who gets published is usually chosen to “fit” in the “need”: this need can be defined as “demand” or in whatever other fashionable terminology, but it always obeys the established patterns of the social “project” imposed from the top, including the one in Zipes’ own land. For example, here’s what one of the major American writers’ manuals¹¹ offers as advice:

 

This is the part, as creative artists, we don’t want to hear. “I’m a writer, not a businessman,” we protest. Alas, if you want to be published regularly, you’re going to have to grasp the fact that publishing is a business. At the most basic level, publishers simply supply products to consumers. In turn, you, as the writer, supply the product to the publisher….

OK, now pay attention; here’s the key part: You must supply product that a publisher can use to satisfy the demands of its consumers, and you must do it in a businesslike way (p.14, stress is mine).

 

Key words: MUST, business, product, consumers, demand. Extensive anthropological, sociological, cultural critique and other research has demonstrated convincingly how demand can be “conspired” and imposed by the powerful capitalists by “educating” the “masses” achieving their subordination by eliminating choice yet making them believe in the illusion that they make their own choice and are masters of their fate. The conditions that the capitalists create on the market allow only those who are persistent and with the right “background” to “break” through, i.e. they tell the handful few to follow the rules and the prescriptions spelled out by the writers’ guide above and to persist in the game, once again as screws.

Here’s what another American writers’ manual says about the rate of “success” in the field of writing: “Please be realistic. For every published writer, there are, at minimum, several thousand waiting in line to get published. “Many are called, but few are chosen” ” (p.713)¹².

Key word here is: CHOSEN! and the tiny percentage of them. Yet, in the next paragraph the author contradicts the passivity of the word ‘chosen’, which means that someone chooses you if you cater the right thing. Instead the author indulges in the individualist myth: “It’s completely within your power to maximize your chances of getting published” (713). Key words here are: COMPLETELY within your POWER.

However, if we believe the author’s own statistics above, then the probability of one’s power that yields success is between 0.001% and 0.0001%.

This little deviation to today’s market regulations of Zipes’ publishing reality is to reiterate the point that today just as it was in Perrault’s time, the “successful” author catered and SERVED the pre-defined project. He/she was CHOSEN by those who had the power to choose among hundreds and thousands and more. To return to Zipes, he says the following about Perrault and the key word here is “servant”:

 

Perrault was among the fortunate members of the haute bourgeoisie to be honored by the court. He was a high, royal civil servant, one of the first members of the Académie Française, a respected polemicist, and a significant figure in literary salons. Moreover, he endorsed the expansive political wars of Louis XIV and believed in the exalted mission of the French absolutist regime to ‘civilize’ Europe and the rest of the world. Perrault supported the ‘manifest destiny’ of seventeenth-century France not only as a public representative of the court but privately in his family and was also one of the first writers of children’s books who explicitly sought to ‘colonize’ the internal and external development of children in the mutual interests of a bourgeois-aristocratic elite (20).

 

Thus, Perrault as an obedient servant to the King, with due passion described such qualities as obedience, aspirations (to riches), beauty, intelligence, and ruse. What is interesting and what Zipes fails to mention, is the fact that Perrault chose not to invent his own aristocratic tales and instead relied on folk (mostly peasant) tradition. This detail speaks of the incredible, never to be admitted¹³, dependence of the rich classes on peasants not only for food and dress, but also for the culture of spirit and thought. That is why, in light of Zipes’ subscription to the American feminist agenda that calls for ALL, regardless of gender, sexual, ethnic, or religious creed, to be active and work for the benefit of capitalism (sometimes referred to as democracy), his critique of Perrault appears as a double standard.

Moreover, his description of the supposedly “docile”, “obedient”, and “stupid” female said to be figuring in Perrault’s tales applies more appropriately to all those people who obediently serve unjust and exploitative systems only because they themselves aspire to a delicious piece of the pie at the expense of everyone’s ultimate peril (Perrault, and ehem, included). Perrault’s wisdom (aren’t we all wise after all) lies precisely in the fact that he grounds his tales on folk wisdom, an aspect that interweaves endless levels of complexity into his tales and which does not easily yield to a simplistic and choppy analysis.

At this point, it is appropriate to turn to the comparative (Zipes/mine) analysis of the fairy tales themselves.

 

 

 

3. The real forces behind

 

Zipes approaches Perrault’s tales in a general, sketchy manner In other words, he does not analyse the whole complex of characters of each tale and then of all the tales together, rather he splits them into two categories: those that he believes are geared at boys and those at girls by the title or the main character. Such categorisation chops up the stories and lumps them into abstract groups – abstract, because in real life, tales are not told in a vacuum or to strictly segregated groups. Boys and girls, women and men have all known and been exposed to – not only the variety of Perrault’s tales but also to – the immense folk heritage that offered complex patterns, guidelines, descriptions, problematics, and what not. Moreover, identification with main characters occurs regardless of gender, otherwise, for example, how could male readers of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina identify with her as the main character and empathise with her suffering and pain? Of course one might say that Tolstoy was a misogynist and that he had written Anna Karenina explicitly for women in order to have their gushing brains splattered under rushing trains. Everything is possible. And so here Zipes groups “Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood, Blue Beard, The Fairies, and Cinderella as aimed directly at females; Puss in Boots, Ricky of the Tuft and Little Thumb address males” (p. 23). After that he focuses on “the exemplary qualities, which distinguish the heroines from the heroes” to expose the notions of civilité in the “fabric of [Perrault’s] tales”.

Narrowing down the factors leads to the simplification and disregard of other possible influences on the complexity of rendering gender. For example, the real forces behind the failure and success of almost all the characters in Perrault’s tales – with the exception of Red Riding Hood (a bad-ending caution tail), Puss in Boots (with Puss being the active agent), and Blue Beard (with Blue Beard’s wife as the main actor) – are fairies, mother-fairies, grand-mother-fairies, et al. The power of these female characters evokes different states and emotions in mortals such as trust, love, and fear. In any society that values power and equates fear with respect (for example, the monotheistic faiths ask to fear and respect God), entities who instil fear are also respected. When we examine the real forces behind Cinderella, Ricky of the Tuft, Blue Beard, The Fairies, and The Sleeping Beauty (with the exception of Red Riding Hood) – i.e. the stories that Zipes comments – we find that they are not as straightforward as they may seem to Zipes in terms of their gender problematics.

Zipes begins his textual analysis with Sleeping Beauty who, he says,

 

is actually endowed with the following ‘gifts’ by the fairies: beauty, the temper of an angel, grace, the ability to dance perfectly, the voice of a nightingale, and musicality. In other words, she is bred to become the ideal aristocratic lady. Further, she is expected to be passive and patient for a hundred years until a prince rescues and resuscitates her. Her manner of speech is such that she charms the prince, and he marries her. Then she must demonstrate even more patience when her children are taken from her by the ogress. Such docility and self-abandonment are rewarded in the end when the prince returns to set things right. Perrault then added a verse moral which sings a hymn of praise to patience (p. 24 - tress mine).

 

While it is true that Perrault lavishes his descriptions of royalty and the upper classes with endless admiration and seems to highly value the indefinable “grace” and “beauty”, yet even Zipes admits in the paragraph above that whatever “gifts” the princess possessed was the works of fairies. In this sense, whatever they do – the king, the queen, the prince or whoever, the fairies’ decisions remain unquestioned and in power, even other fairies cannot undo them – only modify a little. “Alors le roi, qui était monté au bruit, se souvint de la prédiction des fées et, jugeant bien qu’il fallait que cela arrivât, puisque les fées l’avaient dit…” (Perrault [French], p. 14). In fact, the princess does not sleep alone for a hundred years. Except for the King and the Queen, everyone in the castle, women and men, conk out to await the untangling of events.

If anyone is really active in these tales, it is the fairies. When the princess gets hurt with the spindle, Perrault attributes this to the fact that “comme elle était fort vive, un peu étourdie, et que d’ailleurs l’arrêt des fées l’ordonnait ainsi” (Perrault [French], p. 12). Thus, whatever happens, it is because these little, magical, feminine, powerful and wilful creatures have so ordained. This aspect of the fairy tales and their gender dynamics remains emphasised throughout the tales, including in the rhymed moral at the end of Sleeping Beauty, which Zipes says “sings hymn of praise to patience”¹⁴:

 

… Now, our story seems to show

That a century or so,

Late or early, matters not;

True love comes by fairy-lot.

Some old folk will even say

It grows better by delay.

 

Yet this good advice, I fear,

Helps us neither there nor here.

Though philosophers may prate

How much wiser ’tis to wait,

Maids will be a-sighing still—

Young blood must when young blood will!

 

The moral reiterates that even though “philosophers” may advise, patience is not a convincing argument for “young blood”. In addition, “true love”, as all else,”comes by fairy-lot”. After all, it was not the prince who woke up the princess; rather he was brought there at the appropriate hour because the fairies had already sealed his fate. It was not something over which he had any control: he was drawn to the enchanted palace and was enchanted by it prior to seeing or knowing of Sleeping Beauty. Zipes, however, falsely reads it as: “Her manner of speech is such that she charms the prince, and he marries her” (ibid).

Thus, even though I see why Zipes, and before him de Beauvoir, saw the princess as passive, I argue that it is not the main aspect of the story. For, there are other interesting details that Perrault takes pains to repeat. One is the fact that the prince was from an unrelated family. Perrault makes several references to this “unrelatedness”. This detail could be stressing the importance of ignorance of the history of this clan but also can be interpreted as the necessity to “clean” the blood, since royalty mostly marry within closed circles.

It is as if the princess needed to be severed from her family and not only as a punishment for having disrespected the old fairy, but also as a primordial necessity. “[T]he king and queen kissed their dear child, without waking her, and left the castle. … [W]ithin a quarter of an hour there grew up all round the park so vast a quantity of trees big and small, with interlacing brambles and thorns, that neither man nor beast could penetrate them” (Johnson, p. 9). Further down the page, Perrault says that “At the end of a hundred years the throne had passed to another family from that of the sleeping princess” (ibid). The prince does nothing active on his part, except for taking a walk and doing what the fairy had ordained. The trees have stepped aside to let him in, “he drew near and went on his knees beside her. At the same moment, the hour of disenchantment having come, the princess awoke” (ibid). Hence, in addition to being useless and helpless without the fairies, the prince is ignorant and a stranger and these seem to be his most important qualities. In reality, he really had no option.

Zipes is right, however, that the descriptions of speech and charm in Perrault’s tales confirm Norbert Elias’ thesis on the new ethics and manners of the “civilized” Europeans. Yet, even that Perrault contradicts a few sentences after he had praised speech. “The less there is of eloquence, the more there is of love” (Johnson, p. 15).

Another, even more important, detail which Zipes fails to mention in his feminist analysis is that the events in Sleeping Beauty’s kingdom were the result of the terrible wrath evoked by the disregard to the old fairy, a symbol of matriarchal wisdom and power which Charles Perrault adopted from folk tradition and which does not seem to conflict with his “royal mission”. Added to that is the stupidity of the prince who knew that his mother was an ogress and had hidden his family from her for years, yet, all of a sudden “entrusted his wife and children to her care” (ibid, p. 17).

Once again, we see that in this story the battling forces of nature are femininity and the war is between the feminine forces of good and evil (and even those are never clear-cut) – male forces are absent. If anything, Perrault shows the necessity of the prince to trust his wife and not entrust her to someone else, particularly his own mother. Zipes’ analysis totally ignores these important elements of the tale and thus offers a partial and biased interpretation.

A similar problem of interpretation occurs in Blue Beard. Here, Zipes says that “the wife of Blue Beard is saved because she realizes her error and says her prayers” (p. 24). However, in the story itself her “signs of a true repentance for her disobedience” (Johnson, p. 38) fail to soften the “heart harder than any stone” – that of Blue Beard – and do nothing to save her.

 

“You must die, madam,” he said; “and at once.”

“Since I must die,” she replied, gazing at him with eyes that were wet with tears, “give me a little time to say my prayers.”

“I give you one quarter of an hour,” replied Blue Beard, “but not a moment longer.”

When the poor girl was alone, she called her sister to her and said:

“Sister Anne” —for that was her name—”go up, I implore you, to the top of the tower, and see if my brothers are not approaching. They promised that they would come and visit me today. If you see them, make signs to them to hasten” (p.38).

 

After that she spent her time – not praying as Zipes claims – but hurrying her sister to spot her brothers and rush them to her rescue. Of course contemporary American animation or a special effects’ film would probably depict a super-empowered female somersaulting around the room, chopping off heads right and left. In comparison with such unrealistic images of empowered violence, Blue Beard’s wife may appear a wimp. However, in the realistic possibilities that are available to her, seeking empowerment through social networking and group work (such as her sister and brothers) happens to be the most rational decision that proves her activity in solving her problems. Here, Zipes’ characterisation of female roles in Perrault’s tales as passive and restrained once again fails the test.

Even in Blue Beard, which at a superficial glance may seem to be more of a “straightforward” message of the wife getting punished for prying into her husband’s affairs, Perrault offers two contradictory morals at the end, one in which the wife is told that she does not need to know everything and the second looks like a feminist message in which the husband as master and lord is of the days of yore; today he needs to consult with his Missus because “Madam” has a say and right to her own opinion:

 

1. Moral

Ladies, you should never pry, —

You’ll repent it by and by!

‘Tis the silliest of sins;

Trouble in a trice begins.

There are, surely —more’s the woe! —

Lots of things you need not know.

Come, forswear it now and here —

Joy so brief, that costs so dear!

 

2. Another Moral

You can tell this tale is old

By the very way it’s told.

Those were days of derring-do;

Man was lord, and master too.

Then the husband ruled as king.

Now it’s quite a different thing;

Be his beard what hue it may —

Madam has a word to say!

 

In fact the ending of the story itself favours the second moral. The wife has partied, made a mess of things, her brothers have come to her rescue, but finally it was she who paid for her sister’s wedding and purchased “a captain’s commission for each of her brothers. The rest formed a dowry for her own marriage with a very worthy man, who banished from her mind all memory of the evil days she had spent with Blue Beard”.

The last sentence suggests that Blue Beard was in fact not a worthy man and therefore we may all doubt the sense of his whimsical interdiction that hid the ghastly aspect of his temper. The happy ending states blatantly that Blue Beard was evil and that therefore - even though it almost cost her life – his wife in fact did the right thing and with her curiosity, wit and enterprise found happiness and took herself a better husband.

Once again, this challenges the statement that “Perrault argues for the total submission of the woman to her husband” and that “the heroines of the tales are very pretty, loyal, dedicated to their household chores, modest and docile and sometimes a little stupid insofar as it is true that stupidity is almost a quality in women for Perrault. Intelligence could be dangerous” (Mourey, Lilyane in Zipes, p. 25). In reality, Blue Beard’s wife partied, had fun, was curious and saved herself by applying her resourcefulness and ruse and nowhere does the tale condemn her for doing so. In fact, she gets even more fun after she tricks then rids of her husband.

Another example of such problematic reading of the tales can be found in Zipes’ analysis of Cinderella. This is how he reads the story:

 

In the fairy tale named after her, Cinderella is described as sweet, gentle, and diligent. Later, when she is properly dressed as a type of fashion queen, she is also the most beautiful woman in the world. Her ‘excellent’ qualities are recognized by the prince who marries her, and the moral praises the bonne grace of Cinderella, which accounts for her winning ways (p. 25).

or

 

“For instance, Cinderella’s transformation from ’slutty/maid’ to ‘virtuous/princess’, accomplished by the fairy godmother, was in part an exercise in fashion design” (27).

 

Now, this is what Perrault says in his story: “Cependant, Cendrillon, avec ses méchants habits, ne laissait pas d’être cent fois plus belle que ses soeurs, quoique vêtues magnifiquement” (Perrault [french], p. 71).

Hence, it is not the fashion that makes Cinderella “beautiful” but her specific inner beauty. This is reiterated in the moral at the end and once more problematised by the fact that the real forces in the story are not the character’s actions but the magical work of fairies. In other words, inner beauty stems from harmony and agreement with the fairies, who incidentally are there not to punish but help.

 

1. Moral

Beauty is a treasure rare.

Who complains of being fair?

Yet there’s still a something more

That good fairies have in store.

‘Tis that little gift called grace,

Weaves a spell round form and face,

Of each word makes magic, too,

Lends a charm to all you do.

 

This it was — and nothing less —

Cinderella’s fairy dress! …

 

2. Another Moral

Godmothers are useful things

Even when without the wings.

Wisdom may be yours and wit,

Courage, industry, and grit—

What’s the use of these at all,

If you lack a friend at call?

 

Contrary to Zipes’ claim that Perrault’s tales summon females to work hard and submit, the second moral spells out that hard work and subordination, in fact, mean nothing if you don’t have a friend (in the Western world it’s called “letters of recommendation” i.e. profitable connections or when applied to the “third world” it’s called “corruption”). The tale demonstrates that people have treated Cinderella unjustly: she worked hard, was abused, with no one on whom to count for help. She had only her father but was afraid to complain to him because he was totally ruled by his wife. “La pauvre fille … n’osait se plaindre à son père, qui l’aurait grondée, parce que sa femme le gouvernait entièrement” (Perrault [French], p. 71).

Once again, this shows the helplessness of most people, whether they are men or women, before the forces of good and evil. Of course there are some exceptions, such as Blue Beard’s wife or Little Tom Thumb where smart and sly women and men can solve their own problems. In the case of Cinderella, though, Zipes is right in one thing: Cinderella does not actively do anything to counteract the injustice, someone else does it for her. Yet, it would be unjust to characterise her as less active than her male counterparts in this or other tales and the forces that both abuse and rescue her are in fact feminine.

Another injustice to which Cinderella was subjected was the name Cucendron given to her by the less “honest” or the more “spiteful” members of the household. “Lorsqu’elle avait fait son ouvrage, elle allait se mettre au coin de la cheminée, et s’asseoir dans les cendres, ce qui faisait qu’on l’appelait communément, dans le logis, Cucendron. La cadette, qui n’était pas si malhonnête que son aînée, l’appelait Cendrillon. Cependant, Cendrillon, avec ses méchants habits, ne laissait pas d’être cent fois plus belle que ses soeurs, quoique vêtues magnifiquement” (Perrault [french], p. 71).

Now, I’ll repeat what Zipes says about Cinderella: “For instance, Cinderella’s transformation from ’slutty/maid’ to ‘virtuous/princess’, accomplished by the fairy godmother, was in part an exercise in fashion design” (27). What Perrault attributes to the speech of unworthy, spiteful, envious, known to lie characters, Zipes takes at face value and ascribes to be the nature itself of Cinderella who, he believes, transforms into a virtual princess only after her clothes become fashionable. Now, if Perrault makes it clear that fashion and clothes are the obsessions of the spiteful gang that mistreats Cinderella, how can anyone attribute these values to Cinderella herself who, Perrault tells us, is different from the rest? Zipes again disregards the story and the morals offered by Perrault.

There are at least two translations of the story into English with two different versions of the name Cucendron. Johnson, the earlier translator, who is also the naughtier, gives a more complete translation of the tales overall including all the morals in lively, humorous verse. He translates Cucendron as Cinder-slutt, whereas Bierrhorst offers, in my opinion, the more accurate translation of the name as Cinderbottom. Regardless of the interpretation of Cucendron, though, Perrault’s point is precisely that it does not matter what people say about or do to a person, since it is neither what these people say nor how the person is clad that defines the individual in the end.

Finally, throughout the tale, the subjugation of Cinderella was explicitly painted as unjust and the only obedience that was defined positively was obeying the fairy godmother: to bring her the pumpkin and mice in order to make it possible for Cinderella to go to the ball and then to obey the curfew set by the godmother. Even though Cinderella’s disobedience, as she failed to depart promptly before midnight from the ball, almost cost her fun, her punishment turns out to her advantage in the end: she is discovered as the owner of the lost crystal slipper, marries her prince and we get the two morals at the end where dress is not what really counts, rather it is the fairies’ grace (whatever that may be) and that it is smarter to be friends with godmothers¹⁵ than with whoever else – even dads can be stupid enough to be led astray and forget their kin and blood. Basically, this monarchic and royalist hymn of praise can surprisingly be construed as: Women Unite!

Thus, the tale lacks active characters, regardless of gender, with the exception of Cinderella and we know that her activity is the result of forced injustice and abuse. The “love” that the prince and Cinderella exchange is something abstract, indefinable, and, as in the case of Sleeping Beauty, magical. Neither the prince nor Cinderella do anything in particular to provoke it. They are just “wonderful” people we are told and it so happens that wonderful people are drawn towards one another. It is here that we see Perrault’s bias: the royal prince is good because a prince can never be bad and Cinderella has the “royal” “grace” whatever it may be and it is good because it is noble and royal. Yet, even here, Perrault manages to subvert his own royalist “project”, since in the end it doesn’t matter what social or economic class Cinderella comes from, since the first moral spells out that her magic dress was nothing “real” except for the reality of her inner being that shone even when smudged with hard work and cinder.

Zipes’ reading of the rest of the tales is equally problematic and Perrault’s tales are equally complex. For the purpose of balancing my discussion of “female-audience” tales, I now turn to the problems of reading the tales that, according to Zipes, Perrault intended for a male audience.

In the story of the Puss in Boots, which Zipes categorises as a “male” story, he reads the cat as “the epitome of the educated bourgeois secretary who serves his master with complete devotion and diligence. He has such correct manners and wit that he can impress the king, and he uses his intelligence to dispose of an ogre and arrange a royal marriage for his low-born master. Thus, he can end his career by becoming a grand seigneur” (Zipes, p. 25-6). Earlier in the same paragraph, Zipes says that all that the main feline character needs is “the proper implements (a pair of boots and a pouch) to serve his master.

The main character of this story is not “really” “male” – a feline is a gender ambiguous figure. It is an animal and it is a charlatan who tricks and lies. The major male character here is as passive as the princesses of the stories discussed above. In fact, he is more passive than Cinderella and the wife of Blue Beard. The difference between him and Sleeping Beauty is that he is not asleep, but almost. He is neither rich, noble, nor royal. Actually, he is extremely poor. Like Cinderella who obeys her godmother, he is obedient and does everything the cat tells him to do. The charlatan cat lies to the king and the ogre. It steals the riches from the latter and marries off the passive “master” to the king’s daughter.

All the guy has to do is as he is told: get undressed, get dressed. His nature was shy, timid and passive. “The king received the marquis with many compliments, and as the fine clothes which the latter had just put on set off his good looks (for he was handsome and comely in appearance), the king’s daughter found him very much to her liking. Indeed, the marquis of Carabas had not bestowed more than two or three respectful but sentimental glances upon her when she fell madly in love with him” (Johnson, p. 50). It is obvious that all the “marquis” needed was fancy clothes and good looks. It isn’t even he who does the falling in love. The princess decides that such a dressed up, timid and sentimental beauty is worthy of her.

Here, the main human/male character realises himself through marriage and, therefore, it would be unfair to claim that for Perrault only women find their meaning in matrimonial bliss. Perrault, yet again, subverts his royalist project and intermarries the classes. Where he serves the project though, is when he first needs to make the poor man rich. Here, like in Blue Beard, a story supposedly aimed at women, trickery is viewed as positive. However, unlike the active woman in Blue Beard who liked to party and chose her own happiness in the end, this poor fellow is married off at his cat’s whim.

The morals, further subvert the story. Here Zipes almost captures the essence of the two morals: “one stresses the importance of possessing industrie et savoir faire, while the other extols the virtues of dress, countenance, and youth to win the heart of a princess” (Zipes, p. 26). Although, dress is once again disqualified by Perrault, the second moral does praise youth and countenance and spells out that it was not important that the groom was a miller’s son.

The more dangerous moral of the story, as well as of its “feminine counterpart” Blue Beard, unfortunately remains uncommented: namely, the lying and pretending to have accumulated riches, and, in fact, the actual deceitful accumulation of capital (symbolic, sexual, material) is not only approved, it is encouraged. And neither Zipes nor Perrault see that capital, in itself, is problematic, regardless of whether it is acquired by means of “deception” or “honestly”.

Even Ricky of the Tuft – a highly ambiguous tale in terms of gender – has interesting and “subversive” morals. Zipes paraphrases them as follows: “Mind wins over matter, and both short morals underline the virtue of good sense” (p. 26). However, I did not find any mention of “good sense” in these rhymes (neither in the original nor in the translation):

 

1. Moral

Here’s a fairy tale for you,

Which is just as good as true.

What we love is always fair,

Clever, deft, and debonair.

 

In other words, ugliness and beauty are whimsical qualities of the heart.

 

2. Another Moral

Nature oft, with open arms,

Lavishes a thousand charms;

But it is not these that bring

True love’s truest offering.

‘Tis some quality that lies

All unseen to other eyes—

Something in the heart or mind

Love alone knows how to find.

 

Here, Ricky of the Tuft shares parallels with Beauty and the Beast and a Russian fairy tale by the name of Tsarevna Frog. Of course, it is striking that patriarchal versions of beast/beauty stories render the male as the beast and the female as the one who learns how to love him. In the Russian version, which is matriarchal, it is the youthful tsarevich, the prince who falls in love with a frog only to learn that she is a princess. In whatever version, these bestiality tales have other important underlying morals, namely those of loyalty and dependence. The beast usually is under the control of the lover, the beast is vulnerable and depends with its life on the loyalty of the one who promises to love. Once that promise of loyalty is broken, the beast perishes.

Zipes has a point when he says that the one who is asked to be loyal and responsible is the one who is asked to exert self control. Yet Perrault does not provide enough parallel or contrast in terms of male characters to rule this as a specifically female characteristic.

In Ricky of the Tuft this moral is not so dramatic. Ricky does not die, yet the idea is present but once again it is much more complex than the simple thesis of female docility and male ugly superiority or superior ugliness.

In conclusion of this section, I would like to point out that, although Perrault bought into the “royal” project of his “civilization”, he nevertheless manages to subvert it with complex themes, elusive characterisations and contradictory morals, which I don’t see Zipes doing.

Thus, although Zipes demonstrates in his essay that Perrault approached his work seriously and imbued it with morality and civility, he fails to acknowledge that this writer drew heavily on folk traditions. These traditions are grounded in the diverse and rich historical experience of common people whose wisdom still lives in whatever form Perrault has given the tales adding other dimensions to his project and reflecting Perrault’s sense of humour and awareness of the complexities of literature and life.

 

 

 

4. Conclusion

 

To recapitulate: I set out to highlight the problems of analysis that can arise when one applies ready-made or pre-set political or academic (i.e. theoretical) categories. In his work, Zipes starts with a theme from feminist theory: women in sexist or patriarchal societies are usually depicted as passive and stupid and men as active and smart. Further, he takes Elias’ and Avery’s theses on manners and ethics and applies them to his gender categories: the civilising potential of the fairy tale plays into the hands of sexist profiteers such as Perrault to fashion docile and stupid females and active and smart males. He appoints Perrault as the emissary – even source – of this devious civilising project, which, he says, Perrault successfully implements through his literary fairy tale. Zipes further applies this analysis to the subsequent “readings” and “rewritings” of Perrault’s tales that he attributes to Perrault’s “Associates in the civilizing project” and says that by having influenced those writers, he has set his “project” in motion.

However, I hope that I succeeded to demonstrate that Zipe’s own project is problematic because his analysis is based on politically biased and culturally defined premise that compels him to exclude any complex data that would hurt his categories – an exercise that leaves his analysis faulty and incomplete. The terms “regressive”, “progressive” and “subversive” which he uses to categorise the various books for children become political tools through which he directs the users of literature in order to make specific economic and therefore political choices: Perreault and Co., according to this terminology, fall into the “regressive” category.

Zipes’ analysis speaks to us in the voice of authority on children’s books to point out the bad ones and recommend what he believes to be the new, good, non-sexist literature, i.e. the “progressive” and even the “subversive”. The whole procedure reveals – to those who still doubt – the political and economic (i.e. propagandistic) nature of scholarship. Furthermore, not only does he get in a position of academic power, he and his wife write the good type of books for children; i.e. they have vested interests in controlling the theory “market” and promoting what they sincerely believe to be the best for society. In fact, many people in power sincerely believe that “society” IS happier when they themselves are happy. Of course their intimate, private society of family and friends may be happy indeed. And who knows, their satisfaction might be a source of happiness for many, since we don’t know what form their revenge would have taken had they not been made happy. In any case, to return to writing books for children, of course, Zipes does not call for the simplistic assembly-line stories to dominate the readings of today’s children. He values the assets of the more complex and more literary books. But regardless of their quality, the procedure of chopping up knowledge in order to promote some structures over others remains the job of a propagandist.

Finally my exercise exposes that the trajectories of both Zipes and his victim share parallels: Zipes has grown and made his career within the context of American/feminist/capitalism, whereas Perrault catered for his monarchic model. Both have served the purpose of those in power in their respective societies. And it seems that, more than Perrault – who often made fun of morals and sense – Zipes takes the definitions and categories of his own society’s more seriously. Thus, he is held hostage to the socio-economic system discussed in my introduction, processing his information through the prism of that specific model. All the while, Zipes conveniently ignores the dangerous aspects of Perrault’s stories, i.e. the values of servitude, commerce, cunning and cruelty that breed misery in millions of broken lives, regardless of gender, age, or race. Unfortunately, these values continue to have too many proponents.

This exercise was to show how an analysis of a text is inevitably tainted by the values and meanings we attribute to various concepts. Unbroken down definitions will ultimately haunt our own text and incorporate the “project” to which we are all submitted in one way or another. In other words, although Zipes could have had point in discussing the problematics of gender and class categories infused in children’s literature, he hurts his own analysis because he does not venture beyond the definitions provided to him by the civilising project of the American 21st century capitalist system.

Finally, this exercise helps my own dissertation research in several ways. First, Zipes, being a magnate in the field of children’s literary theory, succeeded to impose a specific perspective on the “market” of literary thought and I found it hard to ignore. At the same time, this perspective has its value for it points to ways of manipulating texts. I am not only being ironic here, this perspective exposes the forces at the basis of context in any socio-economic framework. In my own doctoral dissertation, the three children’s books, that I chose as three paradigms of social organisation and knowledge, offer different political and economic (in the case of Jansson even aneconomic) relations and structures. Yet, the gender dynamic is always present even if the differences between the genders are conceptualised in different ways with various highlighted elements, some of which are rooted in the variation of physiological experience while others develop as social or personal traits. For, in order to make sense of any experience, be it literary or anthropological, it would help to look beyond the words and to pay attention to how characters (real or imagined) act, experience, and feel about their reality first and then analyse our own interpretation of the character’s experience. That is, in my own undertaking, I hope to venture beyond the theory of the word.

 

5. Bibliography:

 

 

Avery, Gillian. Childhood’s patterns: A study of the heroes and heroines of children’s fiction 1770-1950. Hodder & Stoughton: London, Leicester, Sydeney, Auckland: 1975.

 

Bierhorst, John translator. The Glass Slipper: Charles Perrault’s Tales of Times Past. Four Winds Press; New York: 1981.

 

Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction

 

_______ Les Regles de l’Art. Editions de Seuil; Paris:1992.

 

Brewer, Marilynn B. and William D. Crano. Social Psychology. West Publishing Co. Minneapolis/St. Paul, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco: 1994.

 

Brogan, Kathryn S. editor and assistant editor Robert Lee Brewer. 2004 Writer’s Market. Writer’s Digest Books; F&W Publications; Cincinnati, OH: 2003.

 

Carpenter, Humphrey and Mari Prichard - editors. The Oxford Companion to Chilren’s Literature. Oxford University Press; Oxford, New York: 1984.

 

Hermman, Jeff editor. Guide to Book Publishers, Editors, and Literary Agents 2004. The Writer Books; Kalmbach Publishing Co.; Waukesha WI: 2003.

 

Jansson, Tove. transl. Elizabeth Portch. Comet in Moominland. Farar Straus Giroux; New York: 1959.

 

Johnson, A.E. translator. Perrault’s Fairy Tales. Dover Publications, Inc.; New York: 1969.

 

Kolbenschlag, Madonna Kiss Sleeping Beauty Good-Bye: Breaking the Spell of Feminine Myths and Models, Bantam Books; Toronto, New York, London, Sydney: 1977 (citing Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex).

 

Martin, Emily. The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction. Open University Press/Miltson Keyness; Buckingham, MK UK: 1989, 1993, 1996.

 

Morton, Miriam - editor. A Harvest of Russian Children’s Literature. University of California Press; Berkeley and Los Angeles: 1968.

 

O’Malley, Andrew. The Making of the Modern Child: Children’s Literature and Childhood in the Late 18th Century. Routledge; New York, London: 2003.

 

Zipes, Jack (David). Setting Standards for Civilization through Fairy Tales: Charles Perrault and his Associates in Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion: The Classical Genre for Children and the Process of Civilization. Wildman Press; New York: 1983.

 

 

Internet sources:

 

Interview with Jack Zipes, by Ken Bannerman conducted by e-mail over the month of April, 2002.

http://www.bitingdogpress.com/zipes/zipes.html

 

1 What I take as the highlights in the definition of contemporary capitalist system: The philosophy of capitalism is “profit”. The profit is based on “product” and the product does not necessarily belong to the producer or the one who makes it but to the owner who owns the “product”, “production process” and the profit. Pay in this system is not based on an exchange principle (i.e. so many u