From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers

Warner understands that much of our mythic wisdom is feminine wisdom -- and, like Jung, she appreciates that "feminine" and "masculine" are words that describe aspects of what is universally human, not contradictory or competing factions in society.

All human intellectual disciplines involve story-telling and myth. History, for instance, is filled with mythic twists on "true" stories. (See Warner's own book on Joan of Arc, for example.) Similarly the Western chronicle of scientific achievement is a collection of metaphors ("Newton's clock," "Superstrings") that are useful for a while, then get discarded. Accordingly, the literal-minded should pause to consider exactly what they mean by "truth": Iris Murdoch has suggested that: "You may know a truth, but if it is at all complicated you have to be an artist not to utter it as a lie."

The legacy of stories we have inherited were usually first told by women, often to children, in a world where both of these groups of persons lacked real power. The stories, unsurprisingly, reflect the concerns and fears of people in such circumstances, as well as the general interests and universal dreams of human beings always and everywhere.

We need them. We cannot live without them -- both stories and women, that is.


Excellent   May 26, 2001
 7 out of 8 found this review helpful

Marina Warner's _From the Beast to the Blonde_ is a wonderful and engaging work concerning the cultural history of fairy tales. Warner explores the "stock characters" and stories of traditional tales, and in the process creates an excellent work of scholarship and criticism in an area of literature that has been relegated to the nursery, but didn't start there.