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.”

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