Kimberly J. Lau’s Specters of the Marvelous: Race and Development of the European Fairy Tale (2024) traces the historical and cultural notions of race among canonical fairy tale collections from four European countries, analyzing Giambattista Basile’s The Tale of Tales (Italy, 1634–36), Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy’s Fairy Tales (France, 1697), Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s Children and Household Tales (Germany, 1812–57), and Andrew and Nora Lang’s Colored Fairy Books (Great Britain, 1812–57). Race, the book argues, has been an integral part of the evolution of fairytales since their development, but discussion of it has largely been ignored.
Specters of the Marvelous acknowledges different manifestations of race in the visual interpretations, adaptations, and performances of these stories — which were originally oral — but focuses on print versions. There are many things to appreciate about this book. Scholarship around fairytales has traditionally centered Whiteness; this book breaks with that by foregrounding people of color. It shows us very clearly that from the beginning, the worlds of these fairy tales were always centered around race. “They are white not by chance,” Lau writes, “but by design.” Whiteness dominates the genre by racially marking people of color as “other,” even in the ways they are named. For example, in “Two Little Pizzas,” from The Tale of Tales, one of the evil characters is named “Lucia,” which was among the two or three most common names assigned to enslaved females in Italy during the premodern period, and had come to serve as a generic term for them by Basile’s time.
Racial beliefs, the book suggests, not only played a crucial role in the emergence of the genre but affected its adaptations and reshaping over time and across different cultures and languages. Depictions of the titular character in Wilhelm Grimm’s editing of the various editions of “The Jew in the Thornbush” grew increasingly antisemitic, from the Jew being “old” in its first appearance in 1815 to having a “long goat’s beard” by 1839, associating the character with evil. In seeing these foundational texts in a new way and interacting with them in manners that go beyond the familiar, Specters delivers its promise of shifting our perception both of the genre and our interactions with it, no matter how disconcerting it might be.
A critical factor of untangling the systematic presence of race from the fabrication of these stories is to pay attention to the socio-political contexts in which they developed. The book addresses how European exploration figures into the cultural imaginary of these stories — d’Aulnoy, in fact, was a travel writer. In an early edition of the Green Fairy Book, the only non-European tales included are from China, which was seen as a “civilized” nation in the Victorian era. In later editions, tales are added from Armenian, Aboriginal Australian, and Bantu South African cultures, as well as other places, reflecting missionary and imperial contact. Lau therefore demonstrates how the paradoxical universalization of the European fairy tale — which attempts to collapse and assimilate stories from outside of Western Europe into its own imaginative perspective — mirrors the real-world building of empire. These texts, Lau argues, justify and normalize systems of power and privilege under the expansion of European imperialism. Decolonizing the genre means demonstrating the impossibility of “thinking about the fairy tale without thinking about race.”
Specters raises a number of important questions around gender politics that lie beyond its intended scope. An integral part of the circulation of these stories was the exchanging of experiences — who told them and where they told them was equally as important as plot. For example, the book alludes to the fascination for retelling folk tales that emerged among Parisian intellectual women in salons during the mid-17th century. Spinnstuben, or spinning rooms, were also spaces where unmarried women gathered in winter months to spin for their dowry or engage in other handcrafts. Spinning is, in fact, a common theme that runs across a number of Grimm’s tales — oftentimes referred to as “spinning tales” — symbolizing women’s aspirations for social productivity and advancement in society. While further studies on the intersection of space, race, and gender could stem from some of the foundational work Specters puts into place, this book opens our eyes to the largely unseen but crucial aspect of race in familiar fables, folk tales, and fantasies that have unknowingly influenced us for centuries.
Specters of the Marvelous: Race and Development of the European Fairy Tale (2024) written by Kimberly J. Lau and published by Wayne State University Press is available for purchase online and in bookstores.
