FOLKLORE AND FEMINIST THEORY

FOLKLORE AND FEMINIST THEORY

Susan Tower Hollis, Linda Pershing and M. Jane Young, eds., FEMINIST THEORY AND THE STUDY OF FOLKLORE. University of Illinois Press, 1993. 414p. bibl. $44.95, ISBN 0-252-02009-X; pap., $18.95, ISBN 0-252-06313-9.

Joan Newlon Radner, ed., FEMINIST MESSAGES: CODING IN WOMEN'S FOLK CULTURE University of Illinois Press, 1993. 309p. bibl. $39.95, ISBN 0-252-01957-1; pap., $18.95, ISBN 0-252-06267-1.

Jack Zipes, ed., DON'T BET ON THE PRINCE: CONTEMPORARY FEMINIST FAIRY TALE IN NORTH AMERICA AND ENGLAND. Routledge, 1986. 270p. bibl. $25.00, ISBN 0-416-01371-6; pap., $12.95, ISBN 0-415-90263-0.

Once upon a time, everything was understood through stories.... The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once said that 'if we possess our why of life we can put up with almost any how.'...Stories always dealt with the 'why' questions. The answers they gave did not have to be literally true; they only had to satisfy people's curiosity by providing an answer, less for the mind than for the soul."

Long past our "once upon a time," we have routinely disregarded stories as unacceptable in our quest to understand life. Physicians, scientists, and scholars have dismissed personal accounts as "anecdotal," scornfully relegating them to the trash heap while they cite statistics and studies ("factual, objective accounts," "hard data") as the only reliable ways to understand the world.

Yet the observation of folklore will reveal a society's beliefs, its mores, and its attitudes. Stories are told through folklore, through forms that have come to be classified as the oral tradition or verbal art of myth, folktale, riddle, joke, and the like; fairy tales, presented in written literary form, evoke images etched into our minds as children; patterns of thought and behavior are illuminated through material culture in such things as costume, housing, quilts, and the bodies of beliefs and practices concerning food. Increasingly, storytelling is gaining fresh acceptance; increasingly, feminist folklorists are expanding the boundaries of what is considered folklore.

Two of the three books reviewed contain essays redefining the scope and significance of folklore from feminist perspectives; the third book presents a delectable sampling of unusual fairy tales, along with several essays of literacy criticism; all of the books are compelling, absorbing works that repay many times over the reader's time and careful attention.

Both the Hollis, Pershing, Young book...