We think we know the story of Snow White from DS and the Brothers Grimm. But acclaimed folklorist Maria Tatar reveals dazzling variations from across the globe.The story of the rivalry between a beautiful,innocent girl and her equally beautiful and cruel mother has been endlessly repeated and refashioned all over the world. In Switzerland you might hear about seven dwarfs who shelter a girl,only to be murdered by robbers. In Armenia a mother orders her husband to kill his daughter because the moon has declared her "the most beautiful of all."The Brothers Grimm gave this story the name by which we know it best,and in 1937 Walt DS sweetened their somber version to make the first feature-length,animated fairy tale,Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Since then the DS film has become our cultural touchstone-the innocent heroine,her evil stepmother,the envy that divides them,and a romantic rescue from domestic drudgery and maternal persecution. But,as every fan of the story knows,there is more to Snow White than that. The magic mirror,the poisoned apple,the catatonic sleep,and the strange scene of revivification are important elements in the phantasmagoria of the Snow White universe.Maria Tatar,an acclaimed folklorist and translator,brings to life a global melodrama of mother-daughter rivalries that play out across countries and cultures.
Publisher: Harvard University PressISBN: 9780674238602Dimensions: 235 x 156 mm
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Tilt the magic mirror this way,that,and you'll find in The Fairest of Them All nearly two dozen reflections,each dazzling,of the ur-fairy tale known as Snow White. With her trademark brio and deep-tissue understanding,Maria Tatar opens the glass casket on this undying story,which retains its power to charm twenty-one times,and counting.A fascinating volume...Far from demystifying fairy tales,Tatar's analysis has the effect of deepening an appreciation for their magic...The Fairest of Them All delivers a trove of forgotten fairy tales to readers and returns the Snow White of DS and the Brothers Grimm to her international context-as but one version in a strange,beguiling history of stories about beauty,jealousy,and maternal persecution.Is the story of Snow White the cruelest,the deepest,the strangest,the most mythopoeic of them all The answer must be yes. Maria Tatar trains a keen eye on the appeal of the bitter conflict between women at the heart of the tale,unearths retellings from far and wide,and spreads a feast of rich thoughts on the tale's remarkable aesthetic migrations into literature and film. The Fairest of Them All is an exciting and authoritative anthology from the wisest good fairy in the world of the fairy tale.The Snow White tales that Tatar presents here are not as slick as the confections of the Grimms and DS... What Tatar urges in her deft and thoughtful introduction is that we read each variation,whether it is from West Africa,Afghanistan or China,with equal attention... This provides a way of thinking about how fairy tales reveal more than the essentially early 20th-century upper bourgeois insights of Freudian psychoanalysts. There are plenty of examples of mother-daughter rivalries in these tales to be sure,but there is so much more of the material and temporal world-food,hunger,disease,and war-too.(A) fascinating collection of tales...Shocking yet familiar,these stories of regeneration and transformation even when written down retain the secret whisper of storytelling. This is a properly magical,erudite book that follows Snow White's trail into the darker forests of the human psyche in which she originated.Going to the root of a story is a journey to the very core of the soul. Reading across the world,the inimitable Maria Tatar offers us a maze of mothers and daughters and within that glorious tangle an archetype with far more meaning than we imagine when we say'Snow White.'
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