![]() The second part of Warner's book analyzes the tales themselves. While some connections seem stretched, for the most part these threads blend smoothly. Thus reweaving our understanding of the cultural unconscious, Warner draws on psychoanalysis, on philology, and on a trenchant feminism. ![]() In a tour de force of scholarly speculation, Warner links the Queen of Sheba, whose riddles were the stuff of legend and who was known for her singular deformity of a webbed foot, to Mother Goose herself. Saint Anne, the mother of the Virgin Mary, turns out to be the patron saint of gossips her attributes survive in fairy tale figures (e.g., fairy godmothers). Reviled by some, the crones whom Warner spotlights nevertheless appear in formidable guises. Warner begins by arguing for the centrality to European fairy-tale culture, since ancient times, of old women, both as the oral historians who have passed it on and as key characters in its iconography. ![]() Novelist and scholar Warner (Indigo, 1992 Monuments and Maidens, 1985 etc.) avows her sympathy for the fairy tales and tale-tellers on whom she focuses her keen feminist lens. ![]() Fabulous erudition marks this intricate study of the classic tales of wonder. ![]()
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