Customer Reviews

Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales, Children, and the Culture Industry

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I really disagree with the previous review of this book. Zipes doesn't distort the tales meaning at all. Instead he avoids the facile, obvious surface reading, and goes deeper into the many varied meanings of what any one tale can mean. I especially enjoyed the sections on how tales were twisted and edited to reinforce our ideas of childhood and what is appropriate for children to read. For instance, the Grimms' tales were heavily edited over time making them less violent, adding in strict moral messages, and generally making the female characters more annoying (see Bottigheimer's Grimms Bold Boys and Bad Girls for a great analysis of this). I highly reccomend this book.

I definitely didn't agree with a lot of what Zipes had to say - he was much too pessimistic and bitter for my tastes. Additionally, the idea of Disney-as-embodiment-of-all-things-evil is a little tired.

However, what I enjoyed about the book was how much it got me thinking about my own views on the material. Quite a few times I wished Zipes was in front of me so we could discuss and debate. That is always a sign of a good book to me - something that gets me thinking about my own belief system, whether I agree with the author or not.

A very interesting read.

The insights here are few and far between. Zipes labors much too hard twisting these tales to fit his own political agenda. In a typical chapter, Zipes tries to explain how fairy tales demonstrate that cats are better than people. Many better books have been written on the subject.