![]() ![]() Those stories, though complex and contradictory, are distinguished by the assured morals that end them. Collodi was a Florentine political journalist and satirist who, in 1875, was invited to translate Perrault’s French fairy tales into Italian. The enduring power of fairy tales lies in the way they can be retold and retailored, their elements forming what Warner calls “an Esperanto of the imagination.” 1 Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio presents a remarkable example. They hired a little girl as a secret intermediary she asked the woman to tell her tales, and then retold them to the Grimms. For the Grimm brothers, too, their “most inspiring and prolific sources were women”-including an old woman in an almshouse who was famous for her stories but would not speak with the brothers. ![]() Hans Christian Andersen said his stories were based on those told to him as a child by the old women in his village. ![]() “An old wives’ tale means a piece of nonsense, a tissue of error, an ancient act of deception, of self and others, idle talk.” And yet, she argues, “although male writers and collectors have dominated the production and dissemination of popular wonder tales, they often pass on women’s stories from intimate or domestic milieux.”Ĭharles Perrault, whose Tales of Mother Goose (1697), Warner writes, “inaugurated the fairy tale as a literary form for children,” gathered his material from his grandmother and servants. “It is still, in English, an ambiguous phrase,” she writes. In From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (1994), Warner tracks the term “old wives’ tale” back as far as Plato’s Gorgias, where it was used to disparage stories told for the purpose of amusing, frightening, or consoling children. A story of female revenge is perhaps most wisely told in the privacy of the nursery. Or consider the harsh destinies of the unkind stepsisters in “Cinderella”: in some versions they cut off their own toes or heels, and pigeons peck out their eyes. Think of a tale like “Beauty and the Beast” being told to a child who may one day find herself married off to a brute. An older woman communicates something to a girl that can be said only in the code of stories. Marina Warner’s scholarship has long demonstrated how fairy tales can transmit female secrets. ![]()
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