Cinderella in America: A Book of Folk and Fairy Tales. Book review

The title of this superbly edited book is misleading and yet accurate. At first glance, one might think that the book would be about the different versions of the tale “Cinderella” in America. This is not at all the case. Yet the title is apt, for the book is truly about a neglected and mistreated “Cinderella genre,” the wonder fairytale in America, in all its diverse oral and literary forms, and about how scholars and educated readers have tended to believe that the European tale types never took root in the early days of the founding of America. Some have even asserted that there is no such thing as an American fairytale.

McCarthy’s purpose is to prove them wrong. His goal, he states, is “to demonstrate the scope of the Old World repertoire as it settled into U.S. American culture, changing, developing, and acclimating inmuch the same way the tales of this repertoire have always settled and acclimated, wherever they have found themselves”(p. 8). Not only does he fulfil his goal, but he does it convincingly and with great erudition, thoroughness, and originality, and with a stunning collection of approximately two hundred tales from the eighteenth century to the present.

McCarthy’s anthology is divided into six parts and eighteen chapters and a helpful appendix about studying American folktales. The repertoire of the tales is generally Indo-European, and he provides the Aarne-Thompson-Uther tale-type index for those readers who want to compare the tales with similar ones in other cultures. The organisation of the chapters is based on geography and the particular connection that a region may have had to another European country. For instance, the headings of the parts read: (I) The Early Record; (II) The Iberian Folktale in the United States; (III) French Tradition in the Old Louisiana Territory; (IV) The British Tradition of the South; (V) Other People, Other Tales—which includes German traditions in Pennsylvania, Irish-American tales, tales from other communities, and European tales in Native American traditions; and (VI) A Case Study—which includes photographs of Betty Carriveau telling one of her father’s French-Canadian tales entitled “Angel Gabriel.”

McCarthy, a modest and meticulous collector, spent years scouring the country for the tales that he includes in his book—and he probably could have included a few hundred more from his archives. His sources are vast: chapbooks, almanacs, letters, early issues of the Journal of American Folklore and many other journals and magazines, oral recordings, tape-recordings and written recordings from the WPA project, oral tales written down and sent to him by colleagues and friends, translations, family records, and so on. It is obvious that McCarthy did not spare himself in his endeavour to establish how widely and diversely the wonder tale types were disseminated in America.

McCarthy’s editorial principles, presented in his introduction, are explicit, sound, and fair. His major goal is to “keep the tales as told, not as reimagined by the editor” (p. 15). Therefore, all the tales taken from print are reprinted as they were unless there were typographical errors.With regard to translations and tales based on recordings, McCarthy has tried to preserve the voice and oral style of the narrator as best he could. His careful explanations that follow each tale provide important historical information and clarification about the sources and informants.

Since nobody can define and decide what America or American means, McCarthy takes a historical and “existential” approach to designating what American folktales and fairytales are and to justifying the selection of the tales that he includes in this anthology.

All of the tales in the collection are American because they are based on the storytelling of storytellers whose families had been in America for generations, including tales from Native Americans, of course, and from all possible ethnic groups. What fascinates McCarthy, and what is fascinating about the “American” versions of the wonder tales from the Indo-European tradition, is how they express the American experience with clear traces of the Old World. One need only study the derivation of tale types such as “The Three Stolen Princesses” (ATU 301) or “The Boy Steals the Ogre’s Treasure”(ATU 328) in McCarthy’s anthology to sense how the British, German, or Irish sensibilities have been altered to address a different audience in another socio-cultural context. The tales are roughly hewn, in verse, humorous, and inventive. Their transformations delineate the adaptive practices and transformative experience of the narrators and people who kept them alive. It is to McCarthy’s great credit that he has resuscitated the “Cinderella” tradition of folklore in America with a profound understanding of what these tales meant and mean for American culture and with acute insights into the extraordinary diversity of American culture.