[In the following review, Tatar discusses the diversity and “elasticity” of the fairy-tale genre and praises many of Lurie's choices for inclusion in The Oxford Book of Modern Fairy Tales.]

Some years back Roald Dahl pointed out that adults are unyielding in their efforts to civilize “this thing that when it is born is an animal with no manners, no moral sense at all.” The urge to enlighten, educate and regulate—to reduce the chances for moments of successful truancy—has inscribed itself with particular intensity on the literature we produce and read to children. Some authors, like Dahl in Mathilda or The Witches, resist the temptation to exercise disciplinary power by conspiring with the child against the adult; others, like Maurice Sendak (whose credentials for producing children's books include being a “former child”), are able to resurrect the child within as they write their narratives. Theirs are the books that celebrate those triple evils of childhood—disobedience, an idle imagination and curiosity—cheerfully extolling transgressive behavior and deviations from the social norm. In Don't Tell the Grown-Ups, Alison Lurie called these books “subversive children's literature,” for they challenge the rules set down by adults and endorse a rebellious spirit and spunky determination. Now, in The Oxford Book of Modern Fairy Tales, Lurie has collected forty stories that reveal how traditional fairy tales have been reshaped, rescripted and reinvented for the past 150 years by successive generations of writers (among them Hawthorne, Ruskin, Thurber and Malamud), with varying degrees of allegiance to the desires of the child.

Traditional fairy tales were, of course, never just for children. Who would want to tell a child the story of a French Red Riding Hood who provocatively asks the wolf what to do with her bodice, petticoat and stockings, then tricks the wolf into freeing her by asking if she can go outdoors to “make a load”? And what parent would dwell in detail (as a German tale does) on the increasing tightness of Rapunzel's clothes just a few months after the prince's first romp with her up in the tower? Adult versions of fairy tales may have depended on ribald jokes and irreverent witticisms for their survival, but there was no room for the good, if not always “clean,” fun of those stories in children's literature. To the contrary, Charles Perrault, the brothers Grimm, Joseph Jacobs and other collectors of tales went out of their way to identify stories that discouraged disruptive behavior and produced a body of texts that were heavily invested in disciplinary practices predating the more enlightened views of Locke and Rousseau on childrearing.

The case of Little Red Riding Hood reveals just how easy it was to impose a moral and behavioral agenda on stories that started out as adult entertainment. To teach a lesson to the child inside and outside the book, all you had to do was preface the girl's adventures with interdictions about straying from the path, picking flowers, breaking bottles of wine or (as the Grimms told it) being nosy and peeking into the corners of grandmother's house. We know from the Russian folklorist Vladimir Propp that every fairy-tale interdiction is followed by a transgression and punishment—hence the endless possibilities for disciplinary interventions, whether they take the form of ravenous wolves, duplicitous stepmothers, homicidal husbands or vindictive fairies. In some cases, the more extravagant the description of villainy, the more compelling the story became. The gory punishments visited on the careless, disobedient children of fairy tales, for example, often misfired in their effort to frighten and intimidate—scenes of surreal violence showing children with their clothes on fire, with their heads rolling and with their torsos in the jaws of wild beasts proved to be a source of unending fascination and riotous (if occasionally nervous) laughter for many young readers.

The opening text of Lurie's collection, “Uncle David's Nonsensical Story about Giants and Fairies” by Catherine Sinclair, leaves no doubts about what the mid-nineteenth century saw as the office of children's literature. At a time when corporal punishment and other disciplinary practices pertaining to the body were being disavowed and discredited, it became all the more important to produce tales that were meant to enlist the consciousness of the child in the project of self-discipline and social productivity. Master No-book, the tellingly named protagonist of Sinclair's story, is an “idle, greedy, naughty boy” who spends most of his time “lolling on his mamma's best sofa” with “nothing to do but to suck a few oranges.” When Master No-book makes the mistake of allying himself with the fairy Do-nothing, he falls into the hands of Giant Snap-'em-up, who hangs him by “a prodigious hook in the larder, having first taken some large lumps of nasty suet, forcing them down his throat to make him become still fatter and then stirring the fire, that he might almost be melted with heat, to make his liver grow larger.” The story's happy ending shows us Master No-book's rescue by fifty “active little boys” and his transformation into Sir Timothy Bluestocking, a model citizen renowned for his “extraordinary activity, appearing as if he could do twenty things at once.” “Though generally very good-natured and agreeable,” Sir Timothy is sometimes observed “beating little boys within an inch of their lives; but on inquiry, it appears that he has found them out to be lazy, idle or greedy, for all the industrious boys in the parish are sent to get employment from him, while he assures them that they are far happier breaking stones on the road than if they were sitting idly in a drawing room with nothing to do.”

What is interesting about this hybrid of cautionary story and fairy tale is its indulgence in carnivalesque violence and grotesque realism. Master No-book gets a good look at the bloated corpses of six other boys who have been fattened in fairy Do-nothing's garden; the cook who serves in Snap-'em-up's kitchen ponders whipping that “great hog of a boy” to death rather than merely goring him to death; and the “good large dish of scalloped children” that will constitute dinner for the giant is described in lavish detail. It is as if the intersection of children's literature with folk culture furnished the site for an explosive proliferation of spine-chilling effects, often so wildly hyperbolic in their grisly details that they entertained rather than alarmed.

This anthology makes legible a variety of nineteenth-century representational practices that positioned the child as an unruly, disruptive figure deserving punishment or death. The hair-raising German Struwwelpeter, which exhibited Pauline going up in flames after playing with matches and showed Conrad the Thumbsucker getting his thumb sheared off by a gigantic set of scissors, was by no means an isolated instance of a coercively cruel children's story that engaged generations of readers. In England, as Lurie shows us, we have Lucy Lane Clifford's “New Mother,” in which a “wild woman” tempts two small children to engage in ever more mischievous behavior until their mother can bear it no longer and abandons them. The figure of the title is a woman with glass eyes and a wooden tail—the children lose no time fleeing from her into the woods. Clifford concludes their story on a soberly pathetic note: “They are there still, my children. … Now and then, when the darkness has fallen and the night is still, hand in hand Blue-Eyes and the Turkey creep up near to the home in which they were once so happy, and with beating hearts they watch and listen; sometimes a blinding flash comes through the window, and they know it is the light from the new mother's glass eyes, or they hear a strange muffled noise, and they know it is the sound of her wooden tail as she drags it along the floor.” What makes this story even more poignantly disturbing is that the children's curiosity and sense of adventure get them into trouble, for the wild woman insists on bad behavior as a condition for seeing her beautiful toys.

After reading a story like this one, in which there is little comic relief and not a flash of redemptive hope, it is a real pleasure to turn to the twentieth-century reworkings of fairy tales in this anthology. But while many modern fairy tales are wonderfully inventive, playful and imaginative, others reveal how intent these stories can be on teaching lessons that ensure the self-subordination not only of children but of women as well. Sylvia Townsend Warner's 1940 sequel to “Bluebeard” features the daughter of Bluebeard repeating the sins of her mother, but learning to harness her curiosity to the service of her husband's scientific investigations: “To this day, though Bluebeard's daughter is forgotten, the wife of Kayel the astronomer is held in remembrance. It was she whose sympathetic collaboration supported him through his research into the Saturnian rings, it was she who worked out the mathematical calculations which enabled him to prove that the lost Pleiad would reappear in the year 1963.” This story may well be an improvement over Charles Perrault's “Bluebeard”—in which a wife's failure to obey her husband (a serial murderer) is treated as an act of delinquency or infidelity—but it is surely more interesting as a reflector of social arrangements and gender hierarchies in the United States during the first part of this century than as a cultural story for children today.

Although many of the texts collected by Lurie document the shifting fortunes of the classical fairy tale as it was reappropriated for adults, there are also stories for children in this collection. The most compelling are, not surprisingly, the contemporary ones—postmodern fairy tales, if you will, that play fast and loose with the traditional rules—inserting ironic reversals into the action, shifting perspectives and, in general, producing an unsettling effect through their playful irreverence toward folkloric and literary ancestors. Jeanne Desy's “Princess Who Stood on Her Own Two Feet” begins by elaborating on that quintessential fairy-tale virtue of sacrificing for love, then turns that notion on its head to end by enunciating the importance of (sometimes) refusing to sacrifice for love. Tanith Lee's “Prince Amilec,” whose hero ends by marrying the “pretty” and “clever” witch who helped him discharge impossible tasks set by an insufferable princess, uses a light touch to subvert our expectations about happy endings. These authors may be as didactic in their own ways as Perrault or Grimm, but they provide a provocative reversal of ground rules for the child familiar with fairy-tale conventions.

For reasons that doubtless have more to do with copyright laws than with quality control, Lurie has not included some wonderfully successful examples of recently published fairy tales. In Jon Scieszka's The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales, we meet Little Red Running Shorts, who beats the wolf to granny's house and taunts him with the words “My, what slow feet you have.” “A. Wolf,” author of The True Story of the Three Little Pigs, insists that he only wanted to borrow a cup of sugar from the pigs whose homes he inadvertently destroyed with his uncontrollable sneezes. And The Frog Prince Continued features a hero hopping off happily ever after with the princess he has transformed into a frog with a kiss. There are also Roald Dahl's Revolting Rhymes, in which Little Red Riding Hood sports a new fur coat after her encounter with the wolf—Stephen Sondheim's Broadway musical Into the Woods must have been inspired by these hilarious spoofs of the old tales. Dahl's Red Riding Hood also ends up with a second wolfskin coat and a handsome pigskin traveling case after racing to “rescue” the last of the three little pigs.

Scieszka, Dahl and others have taken the measure of our cultural stories, interrogating, challenging and contesting their “timeless and universal truths” and thus liberating adult and child from the dreary predictable lessons and humorless prose of many printed versions, engaging them in a series of playful disruptions and critical challenges to cultural traditions. Scieszka's books and Dahl's rhymes give us unfinished texts, stories that destabilize fairy-tale conventions and remind us that there is nothing sacred about the printed word, especially when it comes to stories derived from an oral culture that produced endless variations on themes through interactions between teller and audience. By revealing the cultural gap that separates the stories we construct from those produced in other times and places, many of the authors represented in Lurie's collection create an opportunity for engaging children in the process of storytelling, authorizing them to work with the adult reader to negotiate relevant meanings. If this suggests yet another not so hidden agenda for children's literature, it also reveals the degree to which all storytelling is invested in a subtle microphysics of cultural power.

For centuries now, we have worked hard to foster an utterly passive relationship between children and the texts produced for them. First there were the accounts of pious children's deaths—most notable among them James Janeway's seventeenth-century Token for Children: Being an Account of the Conversion, Holy and Exemplary Lives, and Joyful Deaths of Several Young Children—all of which end in the cemetery and seem intent on ensuring that children will long for the grave. Theological indoctrination gave way in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to moral instruction that dictated relentless self-improvement, discipline and social accommodation. This was the age that gave birth to the British New Game of Virtue Rewarded and Vice Punished, whose game board was covered with such attractive scenes and figures as “The Stocks,” “The House of Correction,” “Faith” and “Prudence.” (Our Chutes and Ladders—which rewards those who land on pictures of children mowing the lawn, sweeping the floor or baking a cake and penalizes those who land on pictures of children eating candy, reaching for cookies or scribbling on walls—is its direct descendant.)

While it is difficult to determine exactly what is at stake for our time and place in the production of children's literature, it is not hard to divine a conspicuous need to position the child as the target of social acculturation and therapeutic interventions. Characters are exposed to adult agendas about friendship, manners and feelings, or they must work through what are perceived to be typical anxieties and hostilities to provide a cathartic experience for the child reading the book. The notion of bibliotherapy for children is epitomized in a succinct formulation from Bruno Bettelheim's highly acclaimed Uses of Enchantment: fairy tales help children “master the psychological problems of growing up—overcoming narcissistic disappointments, oedipal dilemmas, sibling rivalries, becoming able to relinquish childhood dependencies; gaining a feeling of selfhood and self-worth and a sense of moral obligation.”

What all of these programs—whether theological, moral or therapeutic—have in common is a belief in the need to improve the reprobate child. Tainted by original sin, marked by sloth and disobedience or disabled by transgressive desires, the child emerges as a monster that must be redeemed, reformed or rehabilitated through the stories told by adults. If our own age seems more benevolently tolerant of children and of their behavior than earlier times, we need only take note of how Bettelheim, in the space of a few pages, accuses Hansel and Gretel of “denial and regression,” “destructive desires,” “uncontrolled craving,” “oral greediness,” “unrestrained giving in to gluttony,” “cannibalistic inclinations,” “untamed id impulses” and “uncontrolled voraciousness.”

Lurie's collection reminds us of just how elastic the fairy tale is as a genre (accommodating didactic stories, cautionary tales, gags, parodies, urban folklore and supernatural thrillers) and how it thrives on persistent subversion of its ground rules. Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde, Robert Louis Stevenson, James Thurber, Angela Carter, Jane Yolen—each of these writers reveals the vibrancy and vitality of the tradition even when it has been removed from oral settings to a culture of the printed word. These authors, along with the many others in Lurie's collection, reveal that fairy tales have as much to gain as to lose in making the transition from folktales to their literary elaborations.