Illustrator unknown
182 pages
Published 1854
Read from December 6 to December 8
Rating: 2 out of 5
It’s that time of the year again: time to cram antique kids books to pad out my reading numbers.
Aside from a Reader’s Digest Condensed Classics bastardization of Little Women, this is my first book by Lou Alcott. It’s a bundle of six fairy tales (plus some poems) Alcott wrote as a teenage tutor for young Ellen Emerson, daughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson. For those of us more used to the predatory nature of the little folk in old folklore and modern fantasy alike, Alcott’s fairies are disorienting in their sweetness. These are gentle fantasies of singing flowers, insect infirmaries, and magical dew drops. Even the mean Frost King melts under their ministrations.
Knowing what we know of Lou Alcott’s feelings of gender and sexuality, it’s interesting to examine the heavily gendered worldview developed in these early stories. The fairies are exemplars of girlish virtue, as it was conceptualized at the time. Purity, humility, industry, universal love, and dutiful care are emphasized over and over again, in direct opposition to pride, corruption, and willfulness. The only masculine main characters are cruel and selfish, like the Frost King and Thistledown (except, of course, the Father god, who is benign but remote). It’s up to women to repair the harm men cause, and to redeem their wayward souls for them. One might read between those lines.
Or it could just be what teenage Alcott felt was expected of stories for the young daughter of a Transcendentalist. It’s also uncomfortably close to the assumptions behind modern Evangelical gender constructs, even if, for Alcott, they may have been rooted in aversion.
Still, I’m glad I read Fables. It’s fascinating to see the way fairies were romanticized this early. I’m looking forward to reading Alcott’s more mature output, though.
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