The Fairest of Them All: Snow White and 21 Tales of Mothers and Daughters

by Maria Tatar

Overview

“With her trademark brio and deep-tissue understanding, Maria Tatar opens the glass casket on this undying story, which retains its power to charm twenty-one times, and counting.”
—Gregory Maguire, author of Wicked

The story of the rivalry between a beautiful, innocent girl and her cruel and jealous mother has been endlessly repeated and refashioned all over the world. The Brothers Grimm gave this story the name by which we know it best, and in 1937 Walt Disney sweetened their somber version to make the first feature-length, animated fairy tale, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Since then, the Disney film has become our cultural touchstone—the innocent heroine, her evil stepmother, the envy that divides them, and a romantic rescue from domestic drudgery and maternal persecution. But each culture has its own way of telling this story of jealousy and competition. An acclaimed folklorist, Maria Tatar brings to life a global melodrama of mother-daughter rivalries that play out in unforgettable variations across countries and cultures.

“Fascinating…A strange, beguiling history of stories about beauty, jealousy, and maternal persecution.”
—Wall Street Journal

“Is the story of Snow White the cruelest, the deepest, the strangest, the most mythopoeic of them all?…Tatar trains a keen eye on the appeal of the bitter conflict between women at the heart of the tale…a feast of rich thoughts…An exciting and authoritative anthology from the wisest good fairy in the world of the fairy tale.”
—Marina Warner

“The inimitable Maria Tatar offers us a maze of mothers and daughters and within that glorious tangle an archetype with far more meaning than we imagine when we say ‘Snow White.’”
—Honor Moore

“Shocking yet familiar, these stories…retain the secret whisper of storytelling. This is a properly magical, erudite book.”
—Literary Review

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674245808
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	04/07/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
File size:	40 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Maria Tatar is the author of Enchanted Hunters, the editor and translator of annotated editions of works by Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm, and the editor of an annotated edition of J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. She is the John L. Loeb Research Professor of Folklore and Mythology and Germanic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University, as well as a Senior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows.

Table of Contents

Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Contents Preface Introduction������������������� Color Plates Little Snow White The Young Slave���������������������� The Death of the Seven Dwarfs������������������������������������ Maroula and the Mother of Eros The Enchanted Stockings������������������������������ Princess Aubergine������������������������� Snow-White- Fire- Red The Magic Slippers The World’s Most Beautiful Woman Silver-tree and Gold-tree King Peacock The Beautiful Daughter The Mirror of Matsuyama The Girl and the Dog��������������������������� The Unnatural Mother and the Girl with a Star on Her Forehead The Hunter and His Sister The Witch’s Daughter Nourie Hadig Blanca Rosa and the Forty Thieves���������������������������������������� The Wonder Child The Jealous Mother Bibliography Credits��������������

Editorial Reviews

Is the story of Snow White the cruelest, the deepest, the strangest, the most mythopoeic of them all? The answer must be yes. Maria Tatar trains a keen eye on the appeal of the bitter conflict between women at the heart of the tale, unearths retellings from far and wide, and spreads a feast of rich thoughts on the tale’s remarkable aesthetic migrations into literature and film. The Fairest of Them All is an exciting and authoritative anthology from the wisest good fairy in the world of the fairy tale.

Marina Warner

A fascinating volume…Far from demystifying fairy tales, Tatar’s analysis has the effect of deepening an appreciation for their magic…The Fairest of Them All delivers a trove of forgotten fairy tales to readers and returns the Snow White of Disney and the Brothers Grimm to her international context—as but one version in a strange, beguiling history of stories about beauty, jealousy, and maternal persecution.

Wall Street Journal

[A] fascinating collection of tales…Shocking yet familiar, these stories of regeneration and transformation even when written down retain the secret whisper of storytelling. This is a properly magical, erudite book that follows Snow White’s trail into the darker forests of the human psyche in which she originated.

Literary Review - Lucy Lethbridge

Tilt the magic mirror this way, that, and you’ll find in The Fairest of Them All nearly two dozen reflections, each dazzling, of the ur-fairy tale known as Snow White. With her trademark brio and deep-tissue understanding, Maria Tatar opens the glass casket on this undying story, which retains its power to charm twenty-one times, and counting.

Gregory Maguire

The Snow White tales that Tatar presents here are not as slick as the confections of the Grimms and Disney… What Tatar urges in her deft and thoughtful introduction is that we read each variation, whether it is from West Africa, Afghanistan or China, with equal attention… This provides a way of thinking about how fairy tales reveal more than the essentially early 20th-century upper bourgeois insights of Freudian psychoanalysts. There are plenty of examples of mother–daughter rivalries in these tales to be sure, but there is so much more of the material and temporal world—food, hunger, disease, and war—too.

The Guardian - Kathryn Hughes

Going to the root of a story is a journey to the very core of the soul. Reading across the world, the inimitable Maria Tatar offers us a maze of mothers and daughters and within that glorious tangle an archetype with far more meaning than we imagine when we say ‘Snow White.’

Honor Moore

As a study of perhaps the best known of all fairy stories, this one is original and thought-provoking.

The Spectator - Susan Hill