![]() ![]() From the BEAST to the BLONDE ON FAIRY TALES AND THEIR TELLERS MARINA WARNER FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX NEW YORK Copyright © 1994 by Marina Warner All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Originally published in 1994 by Chatto & Windus First American edition, 1995 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Warner, Marina. ![]() The frontispiece to Charles Perrault's collection Histoires ou contes du temps passe of 1697, might have been inspired by his own family. r ALSO BY MARINA WARNER Fiction In a Dark Wood The Skating Party The Lost Father Indigo The Mermaids in the Basement Non-fiction The Dragon Empress: Life and Times of Tzu’hsi 1835-1908 Empress Dowager of China Alone of All Her Sex: the Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary Joan of Arc: the Image of Female Heroism Monuments and Maidens: the Allegory of the Female Form Managing Monsters: Six Myths of Our Time (The Reith Eectures 1994) Wonder Tales (editor) Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2017 with funding from China-America Digital Academic Library (CADAL) Front the BEAST to the BLONDE Under the sign 'Mother Goose Tales', an old servant spins by the hearth, telling her fairy tales to the children of the family. As she suggests in her superb closing chapter, happy endings come only after stumbles and falls yet in some sense the story of tale-telling is never done. Warner’s fresh new interpretations show us how the real-life themes in these famous stories evolved: rivalry and hatred between women (‘‘Cinderella’’ and "The Sleeping Beauty"), the ways of men and marriage ("Bluebeard" and "Beauty and the Beast"), not to mention neglect, incest, death in childbirth, murder, and racial prejudice. The storytellers are frequently women (or were until men like Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, and Hans Christian Andersen started writing down the women's stories), and Marina Warner asks how changing prejudices about women affect the status of fairy tales: are they sources of wisdom and moral guidance, or temptations encouraging indulgence in romantic and vengeful fantasies? Fromjhe Beast to the Blonde considers old wives’ tales in all their luxuriant detail and with a strong sense of the historical contexts in which they developed. Now, in this richly illustrated and provocative new book, she looks at storytelling, at its practitioners and images in art, legend, and history-from the prophesying enchantresses who lure men to a false paradise to jolly Mother Goose, with her masqueraders in the real world, from sibyls and the Queen of Sheba to Angela Carter. IBEASTlBLONDEl MARINA WARNER $35.00 In 1976, Marina Warner exploded the boundaries of scholarship with her brilliant work on the cult of the Virgin Mary, Alone of All Her Sex. ![]()
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