A new framework for understanding European fairy tales in the milieux in which they were created, bringing distant and ethereal worlds back to earth
Specters of the Marvelous
Race and the Development of the European Fairy Tale
by Kimberly J. Lau
Series edited by Anne E. Duggan
In stories retold for generations, wondrous worlds and magnificent characters have defined the genre of European fairy tales with little recognition of yet another defining aspect—racism and racialized thinking. Engaging four classic fairy-tale collections, author Kimberly J. Lau connects close readings of the tales to the cultural discourses, scholarly debates, and imperial geopolitics that established and perpetuated ideas about racial difference and white superiority. Within the tales of Giambattista Basile, Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy, the Grimms, and Andrew and Nora Lang, Lau teases apart and historicizes the racialized themes and ideologies embedded within fairy tales spanning the early seventeenth to early twentieth centuries. She contends that the European fairy tale is definitively marked, whether implicitly or explicitly, by whiteness, and given the genre's documented colonization of diverse narrative traditions over time, this specter of race is all the more haunting. This trailblazing work demonstrates the continuous evolution of racialized thinking that has informed the publication and dissemination of fairy tales. Here, Lau provides a new framework for understanding European fairy tales in the milieux in which they were created, bringing distant and ethereal worlds back to earth.
-
Picture yourself in a fairy-tale world. There you are, among the princes and princesses, peasants and paupers, among the wizened old ladies and roaming peddlers, the vile stepmothers and capricious fairies, among the dwarves and gnomes, witches and ogres, magical animals and enchanted beasts. You might share your last scrap of bread with a downtrodden fellow begging a bite to eat, ignore the arrogant and entitled firstborn making a hash of things, converse with a nearby cat. You might come across an entire village in deep slumber, a wolf charming a girl in the woods, a traveler about to pick a rose from a winter garden.
Perhaps you’re struck by a sense of deep familiarity, maybe even déjà vu.
Perhaps you’re struck by the ever-present marvelous, the quotidian magic, the ubiquitous, unremarkable fantastic.
Or perhaps you’re struck by the fact that everyone around you is white.
The astoundingly white world of the fairy tale is not simply a figment of your imagination. Just as the marvelous constitutes the world of the fairy tale, so too does whiteness. But while the marvelous has been understood as central to the fairy tale’s very essence, race has been almost entirely absent in considerations of the genre’s formation and development. Despite a long history of subsuming other storytelling traditions in its universalizing reach, “the fairy tale” is a predominantly European genre. As such, it is marked—or, more precisely, unmarked—by its whiteness, a whiteness established, naturalized, and perpetuated across centuries of narrative and visual accretion, bolstered throughout by a profoundly racialized otherness. Whether caricatured or metaphorized, patent or tacit, allusive or elusive, race is an ever-present specter haunting the European fairy tale, a haunting all the more disquieting given the genre’s colonization of diverse narrative traditions.
My goal is to bring these specters of the marvelous to light by tracing the historically and culturally specific ideas about race that manifest in the familiar worlds of canonical European fairy-tale collections, from Giambattista Basile’s early-seventeenth-century A Tale of Tales to Andrew Lang’s late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Colored Fairy Books. Beyond their canonicity, the collections at the heart of this study—Basile’s A Tale of Tales (1634–36), Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy’s Fairy Tales (1697–98), Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s Children’s and Household Tales (1812), and Lang’s Colored Fairy Books series (1889–1910)—are held together by intertextualities that suggest a literary genealogy of the European fairy tale. By situating race as a critical dimension of this genealogy, by tracking its presence across the collections, I argue that racial thinking is foundational to the very development of the genre as well as to the imperial impulses that anchor its universalizing tendencies.
PODCAST
ADVANCE PRAISE
“Fairy-tale studies has needed this book for a long time. With meticulous historical and narrative analysis, Kimberly J. Lau lays out a consummate reckoning of racism in the European tale tradition. The unmarked, naturalized, inevitable whiteness of the tales is thoroughly debunked. This is literary litigation at its finest. A world of assumptions unmasked by a scholar who is also an intrepid investigator working at the highest level of commitment to giving us new truths about the old stories that still shape our worldview.”
—Kay Turner, coeditor of Transgressive Tales: Queering the Grimms (Wayne State University Press), and founder of the What a Witch project
“Kimberly Lau’s Specters of the Marvelous is a groundbreaking work that represents the first book-length study on the ways in which race has played an important role in the development of the fairy-tale genre in Western Europe since the early modern period. In a genre that includes so many heroines lauded for their white skin, Lau’s study fills a significant gap by asking us not to take this whiteness for granted. Indeed, Lau follows how whiteness and blackness are constructed in different periods and national traditions, foregrounding how these constructions intersect with the histories of colonization and slavery. Her analyses are both creative and illuminating, shedding new light on the history of race within the genre of the Western European fairy tale.”
—Anne Duggan, Editor, The Donald Haase Series in Fairy-Tale Studies
“In eye-opening ways, Specters of the Marvelous: Race and the Development of the European Fairy Tale does for fairy tales what Ebony Elizabeth Thomas's The Dark Fantastic did for fantasy and Isiah Lavender III's Race in American Science Fiction did for science fiction. We do not have to agree with every one of Kimberly J. Lau's interpretations, but it is impossible after reading this carefully researched book to unsee the workings of racial ideologies and representations in foundational European literary collections of fairy tales, and it is clear how insisting on the power of non-Euro-American wonder genres counters that history—and matters today. This distinctive contribution to viewing fairy-tale history and intersectionality is a must-read in fairy-tale studies.”
—Cristina Bacchilega, professor emerita, University of Hawaii at Mānoa, and coeditor of Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies (Wayne State University Press)
Q&A ABOUT SPECTERS WITH KIMBERLY J. LAU
Most of us see fairy tales as part of our childhood—fanciful stories passed down from one generation to the next. What do you see in them that compelled you to write SPECTERS OF THE MARVELOUS and explore their more harmful elements?
I think it was really the weird, random-seeming details in the stories that inspired SPECTERS OF THE MARVELOUS. Because fairy tales are so formulaic and so dependent on everyday magic, it’s easy to just accept their strange elements as part of the fantastic world in which they’re set, but in rereading the tales I was struck by those oddities and the ways I felt they often resonated with both historical and contemporary ideas about race.
As I discovered in the course of my research, many of the peculiar aspects of the stories aren’t so random after all, and if we read the tales in their broader social, political, and historical contexts we can begin to make sense of some of the details that we simply accept, on first read, as part of the fairy-tale world, and this helps us see the ways that ideas about race were fundamental to the development of the European fairy tale.
What are some examples of tropes in fairy tales that have helped exacerbate or create racist stereotypes over the centuries?
Two that come to mind right away are animal transformations and blackness as an accursed state. And, perhaps not surprisingly, the two are often intertwined. There are two versions of the Beauty and the Beast story in Basile’s early 17th-century collection, for instance, and in both cases the beast character is cursed to be a black slave; in later French versions of the tale, which are the ones that we’re most familiar with today, the beast obviously takes on a range of animal forms that were associated with Black slaves of the period. In these cases, the curse of blackness is metaphorized into animality, which we know is a longstanding association in western thinking. Of course, we also see examples of blackness as an accursed state distinct from animal transformations and animal transformations distinct from blackness in European fairy tales, but I would argue that those two tropes can very often be understood as exacerbating racist stereotypes and beliefs.
This book focuses on how European fairy tales have impacted racial views centuries later. What about non-European fables and folklore? Do they have their own problematic tropes, or is this influence largely or uniquely European?
I’m not an expert in non-European folk narratives, but I feel safe saying that most cultures have stories of outsiders who pose a threat to the group and such stories very likely invoke problematic “othering” tropes to describe such threats.
While this is not exactly the same thing, in the final chapter of SPECTERS, I look at a range of non-European responses to the implicit racism of well-known European FTs. For instance, along with other critics, I read Nalo Hopkinson’s short story, “The Glass Bottle Trick” as a rewriting of “Bluebeard” that foregrounds Afro Caribbean creole narrative traditions and, in doing so, marginalizes the European fairy tale as the story’s primary inspiration. Bolu Babalola’s short story collection Love in Colour is another text I include because of the way it responds to the highly Eurocentric nature of “tales of world” anthologies by reframing the very conceptualization of “the world.”
Examples like these have inspired me to think of this final chapter as a commencement rather than a conclusion in order to try to capture the richness of contemporary writers who are challenging the very centrality of the European fairy tale to understandings of the genre itself.
Beyond race, the book also delves into gender, as in the damsel-in-distress trope, and antisemitism, particularly in the stories of the Brothers Grimm. How did these tales come to define the roles of women and Jews in European culture?
I think the relationship between fairy tales and cultural beliefs and expectations is really a reciprocal one. Fairy tales were legible to their contemporary audiences because they drew on commonly recognized ideas about gender, class, and the boundaries of society and community, i.e., who belonged and who didn’t. At the same time, fairy tales also perpetuated and probably further entrenched many of those ideas by rewarding normative ideals about gender, about beauty and bodies, and about proper behavior generally. In that sense, they contributed to an ongoing cultural process that defined roles for “others” such as women and Jews.
The book examines four texts in the centuries-long European fairy tale canon. What drew you to these particular stories, and what are their similarities regarding race? What is the throughline between a 17th-century Italian work and a story from 19th-century England?
The four collections that I focus on are generally considered to constitute the European fairy tale canon; there are, of course, some scholarly debates about exactly which collections define the canon, and I address this in the book, but I chose to focus on these four collections in particular because they are important works in the history of the European FT and because there are also clearly established lines of literary influence from collection to collection. The crux of my argument in SPECTERS is that ideas about race are a driving force, the throughline if you will, in the development of the European fairy tale across time, although those ideas obviously change according to the specific historical and cultural contexts of each collection.
The example of the Beauty and the Beast tale that I mentioned earlier illustrates this nicely: in Basile’s 17th-century collection, the beast character is literally a black slave; in the later French collections, the character then takes on various animal forms; characters cursed to live animal lives continue to be racialized in the Grimms’ 19th-century collection, and these tales are taken up, edited, and anthologized for British audiences in Andrew Lang’s late 19th- and early 20th-century volumes.
There was outrage on the Right when Halle Bailey, a Black actress, was cast in Disney’s The Little Mermaid. For many, the reaction to the outrage was bemusement, “Who cares who stars in a Disney movie?” and second, bewilderment at the idea that a mythological creature had to be white. What did that episode mean to you, and how did it inform the writing of this book?
These sorts of reactions are really telling in terms of the enduring assumption, for many people, that the European fairy-tale world is a white world. Halle Bailey’s casting is a great example, as is the current controversy around Rachel Zegler’s casting as Snow White in Disney’s forthcoming live action version of the film. These cultural conversations and their assumptions reiterate, for me, the importance of highlighting the ways that ideas about race not only exist in the European fairy tale but also the ways that such ideas actually structure our understanding of the genre itself.