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Fairy Tales, Myth, and Psychoanalytic Theory: Feminism and Retelling the Tale. By Veronica L. Schanoes. Surrey, England: Ashgate, 2014. 143 pp.
In Fairy Tales, Myth, and Psychoanalytic Theory Veronica Schanoes uses her experience with fairy tales and feminist psychoanalytic theory to "draw out and analyz[e] the connections between the two genres" (3). Schanoes explains the need for a fresh psychoanalytic examination of fairy tales because the 1970s and 1990s "were a time in which both artists and psychoanalytic theorists were concerned with issues of how a woman's sense of self is constructed and how it develops; only by examining these texts in light of one another can we fully understand the answers they arrived at" (5). In her examination, Schanoes demonstrates what can be learned by applying feminist psychoanalytic theory to fairy tales and presents interesting correlations among the tropes of mother-daughter dyads, revisions, and mirrors in the tales.
Schanoes begins with the trope of mother-daughter relationships and explains how the daughter is often a younger version of the mother. In the first chapter Schanoes explains that in many tales the daughter goes through the same trials as the mother, but in the case of the mother, the trials are generally implicit rather than explicit. Schanoes applies feminist psychoanalytic theory to a wide selection of examples of revised tales from the 1970s and 1990s to cover mothers and stepmothers who are good, bad, and dead in order to show how many of these depict the child as a...