Beyond the Glass Slipper: Ten Neglected Fairy Tales to Fall In Love With (eBook)

SKU:
$5.99
$4.99
$4.99
On Sale
Unavailable
per item
Some fairy tales everyone knows—these aren't those tales. 

Introduction and Annotations by Kate Wolford
Fairy Tales / Folklore
Release Date: April 16, 2013

eBook
Anthology: Approx. 160 pages
Also available as a trade paperback

Find it Online:
Amazon
Barnes & Noble
Books-A-Million
Goodreads
Independent Bookstores
Kobo

Wholesale: Ingram or direct: World Weaver Press

eBook purchases through World Weaver Press website include downloads of both Mobi (for Kindle) and ePub (for most other ereaders).

Description 

Some fairy tales everyone knows—these aren't those tales. These are tales of kings who get deposed and pigs who get married. These are ten tales, much neglected. Editor of Enchanted Conversation: A Fairy Tale Magazine, Kate Wolford, introduces and annotates each tale in a manner that won’t leave novices of fairy tale studies lost in the woods to grandmother’s house, yet with a depth of research and a delight in posing intriguing puzzles that will cause folklorists and savvy readers to find this collection a delicious new delicacy.

Beyond the Glass Slipper is about more than just reading fairy tales—it’s about connecting to them. It’s about thinking of the fairy tale as a precursor to Saturday Night Live as much as it is to any princess-movie franchise: the tales within these pages abound with outrageous spectacle and absurdist vignettes, ripe with humor that pokes fun at ourselves and our society.

Never stuffy or pedantic, Kate Wolford proves she’s the college professor you always wish you had: smart, nurturing, and plugged into pop culture. Wolford invites us into a discussion of how these tales fit into our modern cinematic lives and connect the larger body of fairy tales, then asks—no, insists—that we create our own theories and connections. A thinking man’s first step into an ocean of little known folklore.

Excerpt from the Introduction to Beyond the Glass Slipper

A pretty girl sleeps on and on. We wonder if she dreams. An angry little man makes gold from straw. We wonder why he barters for a child. Seven dwarfs live in a cottage. We want to name them. A fish girl longs for a land man. We want her to land him. A vegetable touches the clouds. We want to climb it. A wheezing beast stares longingly at a beautiful girl who nervously tries to eat. We hope she will find a way to love him, tusks and all.

Images from classic fairy tales inspire and compel audiences the world over and have done so for centuries. “Sleeping Beauty,” “Rumpelstiltskin,” “Snow White,” “Jack and the Beanstalk,” “Beauty and the Beast”—all are integrated into our cultural DNA. We ramble on about rescue fantasies and evil stepmothers and five magic beans, because the twenty or so fairy tales that define the genre are so popular that they obscure the joys of the thousands of other fairy tales from across the world and time.

The allure of the major tales is pretty potent, and the supremacy of the big ones in popular culture is understandable. But serious fairy tale lovers know there is undiscovered treasure in the pokey corners of public libraries and on the internet, where hardcore fairy tale fans and dedicated scholars labor to unearth, read, and discuss neglected tales. Those of us who dig, discover that many fairy tales do not feature Princes Charming, that as many as half of fairy tales have male protagonists, that fairies don’t show up all that much in “fairy” tales, and that bad behavior is rewarded nearly as often as good behavior.

Although this book will deal with European fairy tales, fascinating fairy tales can be found the world over. The most popular fairy tales emerged from Western Europe, but their prevalence says more about what the market forces than about the diversity or even quality of fairy tales in general. Popular fairy tales are the result of demand by audiences. “The Little Mermaid” by Hans Christian Andersen, is not a more entertaining story than “The Girl Who Trod on the Loaf,” also by Andersen. Yet people who bought and read fairy tales, over time, clearly liked the story of a mermaid who yearns for a man and a soul more than the story of a vain little girl who spends countless years as a statue in the Devil’s waiting room. Both stories revel in horrible detail about the tortures the two young girls endure, and both reflect Andersen’s moral and spiritual beliefs. But the mermaid, who is a suicide for love in Andersen’s version, is one of the most famous fairy-tale heroines in the world, and has been for generations. The girl with the loaf is a curiosity that, in the United States, at least, is not well known outside of fairy tale circles. The public made the choice to love one more than the other.

Here’s the thing about the fairy tales we have made popular: We shape them at least as much as they shape us. No one made people flock to Disney’s Snow White in the 1930s or the 40s or the 90s and beyond. Disney did not lasso people into theaters to watch a film that in many ways is very different than the tale the Brothers Grimm set down. Disney did make a film that changed the dwarfs from very tidy men with no names to the famously-monikered gang that fears soap the way the Evil Queen fears laugh lines, but audiences endorsed it and cemented it into popular culture. Snow White as a housekeeping dynamo with a super-maternal spirit is a twentieth-century American creation, not a nineteenth-century German one.

More Is Better

We lament the messages fairy tales send, yet we lap them up. Feminist critics have found fairy tales to be a rich hunting ground for examining the truths and burdens placed on women by a patriarchal society. Who can blame them? Fairy tales do endorse patriarchy and retrograde notions about women and their behavior. In this volume, we see fairy tales that caution against women being pretty, too witty, too talkative, and too flirty—in just one tale. We also see princesses married to men they do not know and who could not possibly truly care for them. In “The Dirty Shepherdess,” the heroine boldly and honestly proclaims her love for her father in a way that displeases him, yet she meekly leaves when he orders her to. In “The Loving Pair,” a ball (a toy), which is female, remains forever in a rain gutter because she is apparently too damaged to be of worth. The message in “The Loving Pair” is clear: When a woman is “ruined,” that’s the end.

Clearly, people who worry about the messages fairy tales send to women have good reason to think the way they do. But fairy tales that uphold old-fashioned gender roles can also send important messages about strong women. Women are the sole focus in “Fairy Gifts,” which is also in this volume. The Flower Fairy has the power. The princesses the heroine visits have their own royal courts, even if they also have some deplorable personal traits, like being too talkative. Women are what matters in this tale, and in many fairy tales, women may get burdensome messages, but they also get the lion’s share of attention. Men may have most of the power in life and in fairy tales, but women get a lot of attention and the word count in life and in fairy tales.

Take “Kisa the Cat,” an Icelandic fairy tale adapted by Andrew Lang in the late 1800s and featured here. Kisa is strong, wily, decisive, caring, and focused. She’s a human princess enchanted into cat form who takes on a giant and reattaches a princess’s chopped-off feet via magical surgery. She and the human princess she cares for, Ingibjorg, have a friendship that transcends species and Ingibjorg’s marriage. Sure, both women get married, but that was the career path open to royal women. What the two princesses have as friends is clearly what’s important in the story. Princes? They are an afterthought. A necessary, but trivial, detail.

Feminist criticism is only one exciting and vital area of fairy tale scholarship. Historical, science-based, sociological, and psychoanalytical criticism have all flourished or continue to. There’s room in fairy tale scholarship for myriad approaches and that’s what makes it fun and challenging. Beyond the Glass Slipper is not a scholarly work, so forms of criticism will not be in the spotlight. Yet, in nearly ten years of using fairy tales to teach college writing, I have found that male students love fairy tales, but don’t necessarily believe they have any stake in fairy tale study and culture.

That’s not the fault of any school of criticism. No area of fairy tale criticism I've encountered tries to marginalize any group of readers. That men don’t feel much connection with fairy tales may be the result of Disney princess culture, but it may also be the result of fairy tales being assigned to children’s literature. Almost all of my students are shocked to find that many fairy tales were not written specifically for children. They are appalled, both men and women, when I “ruin” decent, innocent children’s stories by discussing earlier texts of classic fairy tales. Shame on me! Yet, wrongly, I think, children’s literature and by extension, fairy tales, are considered less important than adult literature. And since women have traditionally raised children, fairy tales and children’s literature are thought to be solely women’s work by many students, male and female.

Why worry about men and fairy tales at all? After all, men have always been in fairy tale studies. Right at the forefront, and I don’t just mean the Brothers Grimm and Bruno Bettelheim. Men not only criticize and study fairy tales, they rewrite them and create new fairy tales, as do women. Yet my audience both in the classroom and at Enchanted Conversation, the online blogazine I publish, is largely female, and I don’t think it’s just because more college students are women and women read fiction more than men. The most famous fairy tales are women centered. There’s “Snow White,” “Sleeping Beauty,” “Rapunzel,” “The Little Mermaid,” and “Beauty and the Beast.” “Aladdin” is certainly famous, as is “Jack and the Beanstalk,” but the most popular and culturally influential tales are about girls. Even so, many young women avoid reading fairy tales because the most popular fairy tales carry a lot of baggage about the messages they send women

People want to read stories about people who are like them, with ideas about life that speak to them, specifically. People also get sick of reading the same stories over and over again. The great news is, many fairy tales aren’t just about princesses under the sea and in towers. Fairy tales take place in gloomy underground passages, people turn into animals and have adventures, ghosts show up in fairy tales, nasty people sometimes win in fairy tales. Soldiers are popular characters in fairy tales, as are millers’ sons. Kings get deposed and pigs get married and turn into gorgeous princes. And, while fairy tales appear to endorse business as usual in terms of power and social order, much sly subversiveness takes place before authority reassumes command—if it does.

Beyond the Glass Slipper features ten fairy tales that are largely invisible to fairy-tale lovers who are not deeply immersed in the field. Much of my professional life is focused on fairy tales, and I was unfamiliar with some of the stories before starting this project. They are wildly different from many well-known tales, and because of their scope and unfamiliarity, give readers a solid view of the diversity of fairy tales (and these are only a few European ones).

Readers will, perhaps, also see how flexible fairy tales are in terms of message and content, which in turn, will show them that fairy tales are for everyone. They are for little kids, old folks, teenagers, kids in the city, farmers, hipster dudes, college students, kids who love anime and people who just love fantasy. Fairy tales are magical and funny and beautiful. They are for everyone, but not everyone knows that.

Few fairy tales are love stories, but the point of Beyond the Glass Slipper is to make readers fall in love with obscure, strange, even twisted fairy tales. For those of us who passionately love these stories, fairy tales are not optional in life, because they are human life in its many crazy manifestations. I am evangelical on fairy tales because they continue to expand my view of how life may be lived. I read their messages, even the preachy, annoying ones, and develop my own ideas about love and power and money, and the way fairy tales mix things up gives me new perspective every time I read a new tale.

About Kate Wolford

Kate Wolford is editor and publisher of Enchanted Conversation: A Fairy Tale Magazine at fairytalemagazine.com. She teaches first-year college writing, incorporating fairy tales in her assignments whenever possible.

Praise

"I have lost count of the books I've read presenting a collection of fairy tales but I can guarantee I've rarely enjoyed reading any collection like I did Beyond the Glass Slipper."  — Fairy Tale News

"A great read... and an especially helpful collection to those who have been overwhelmed by the sheer number of fairy tales out there. For those who’ve lost their taste by the over-done, you’ll find renewed interest in stories about fairies themselves (rarely seen in fairy tales), ghostly companions, true friendship, less than perfect endings, and even a vampire!"
— Twice Upon a Time
World Weaver Press | Books | About | Contact | Blog | Press

© 2012-2024 World Weaver Press