If women are the ones who tell fairy tales, why do fairy tales paint such ugly pictures of women? Or, as Marina Warner puts it, 'If and when women are narrating, why are the female characters so cruel? ... Why have women continued to speak at all within this body of story which defames them so profoundly?' Or again, what sort of woman would tell that sort of story about that sort of woman? The traditional proto-feminist answer to this question has been: 'Not a woman at all, a man, that's who, buster.' And indeed, most of our ancient texts (Greek, Hebrew, Sanskrit), and even dominant modern tellings (Perrault, the Grimms, Disney), have been transmitted by men in one way or another. But Warner demonstrates beyond doubt that the proto-feminist answer is no longer valid, that the old wives' tale about old wives is true, that women often were the tellers of the tales. And if the storyteller in the story speaks as a mother, what sort of a mother is she?

LRB 23 March 1995 | PDF Download