The Cinderella-Makers: Postwar Adolescent Girl Fiction as Commodity Tales Amanda K. Allen The Lion and the Unicorn, Volume 33, Number 3, September 2009, pp. 282-299 (Article) Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/uni.0.0479 For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/uni/summary/v033/33.3.allen.html Access provided by Wayne State University (24 Feb 2014 13:00 GMT) 282 Amanda K. Allen The Cinderella-Makers: Postwar Adolescent Girl Fiction as Commodity Tales Amanda K. Allen No matter how your heart is grieving, if you keep on believing, the dream that you wish will come true. (David et al.) The 1950 release of Disney’s Cinderella liltingly informed girls across the United States and Canada that their dreams would come true—if they kept on believing. The release of the film echoed a Cinderella zeitgeist already prevalent within the booming American postwar economy. What it also echoed, however, was a newly developing fairy tale novel—relatively forgotten today—that was produced and distributed by a powerful female network, and aimed specifically at the newly-minted postwar/Cold War teenage girl consumer. I call these novels “commodity tales.” This article is an attempt to articulate the parameters of these postwar/ Cold War commodity tales. My argument falls into three parts. The first culls from the sociohistorical work of two folk and fairy tale scholars, Jack Zipes and Elizabeth Wanning Harries, in an attempt to situate commodity tales as late capitalist tales within the fairy-tale genre. The second part of this article focuses on two representative commodity tales, Going on Sixteen (1946) by Betty Cavanna, and Rosemary (1955) by Mary Stolz, and examines them as Cinderella case studies. Going on Sixteen focuses on one year in the life of Julie Ferguson, a farm girl with a passion for art and dogs who feels alienated from her high school society. Rosemary revolves around high school graduate Rosemary Reed’s attempts to as- similate into the college society from which she has been continually excluded. I couple these Cinderella case studies with Pierre Bourdieu’s theories of taste and distinction to reveal the magical power embedded in the commodity tale protagonists’ purchase of and belief in the “Right The Lion and the Unicorn 33 (2009) 282–299 © 2009 by The Johns Hopkins University Press Postwar Adolescent Girl Fiction as Commodity Tales 283 Dress.” The third part of the article turns to Luce Irigaray’s theory of women as commodities to demonstrate that the inclusion of the “Right Dress” within these commodity tales fosters both a female rivalry and a paradoxical alternative to patriarchy. “Breaking the Spell”: Zipes and Harries In numerous studies, Jack Zipes proposes that the method for grasping the meaning of folk and fairy tales is to break the “magic spell of com- modity production” (20), and to scrutinize tales in relation to the myriad sociohistorical forces that generate them. While the folk tale may feign timelessness, Zipes proposes that it is an aspect of a “pre-capitalist people’s oral tradition” (27) and, as such, depicts the struggles and contradictions of feudal society. The fairy tale, conversely, conveys a transition from feudalism to early capitalism by applying folk tale characteristics to new tales, thereby reflecting the customs, ethics, and civilizing needs of a rising bourgeois class. By appropriating elements of the folk tale, the fairy tale becomes a wholly new genre that expresses the struggles and ideology of early capitalism. This movement from folk to fairy tales is by no means as simple as my brief summary of Zipes’s argument suggests, nor does it operate in one direction only. Still, the myth of timelessness that surrounds folk tales continues to affect our reading of fairy tales today. In Twice Upon a Time: Women Writers and the History of the Fairy Tale, Elizabeth Wanning Harries argues that there are two types of fairy tales: “compact tales,” the well-known, canonical forms based on the writings of Perrault and the Brothers Grimm; and “complex tales,” the noncanonical, forgotten tales that were written by seventeenth-century society women—the conteuses—and which have existed as long as the canonical tales. Intriguingly, Harries’ explanation for the exclusion of complex tales from the fairy tale canon stems from both the gender of the writers and the orality of folk tales. She refuses the convention, forwarded by the Brothers Grimm in particular, that fairy tales are written records of the folk tales of a preliterate tradition, and instead argues that the supposed orality of compact tales is an invented simulation. Thus, unlike their famous male counterparts, the conteuses who first popularized the complex tales refused the nostalgia inherent in transcribing a mythical folk tale tradition. Instead, they created their own tales, focusing on their present historical moment, and including subplots and frame narratives. As a result, “the style, length, and timeliness of their narratives do not fit the ideology of the fairy tale as it has been constructed in the last three centuries” (Harries 24). Harries thus cracks open the folk 284 Amanda K. Allen and fairy tale canon to allow for versions that have been forgotten or excluded. This opening, coupled with Zipes’s emphasis of the temporal nature of the folk and fairy tale continuum, allows for the exploration of a twentieth-century fairy tale: the “commodity tale.” American Commodity Tales: 1940s–1960s Commodity tales—the American fairy tales of the late capitalist period—are a subgenre established in the young adult literature of the postwar/Cold War era that appropriates earlier folk and fairy tale elements to advance a formula of consumerism. Commodity tales were novels aimed specifically at white, American, teenage girl readers during the 1940s to late 1960s. The most representative of these texts include novels by Maureen Daly (Seventeenth Summer, in particular, may be cited as the wellspring for this genre), Rosamund Du Jardin, Anne Emery, and Amelia Walden. While contemporary book reviews and journal articles esteemed texts written by Mary Stolz as the critics’ preferences, library surveys focusing on a teenaged girl readership suggest that novels by Betty Cavanna were the readers’ favorites.1 Like much young adult fiction intended for females, commodity tales function to teach girls how to become women. Many of the novels pos- sess similar characteristics, most notably an attractive female teenage protagonist, loving but lenient parents, a complexly hierarchical high school social sphere, and a “first love” encounter with implied future marriage. Unlike their series novel contemporaries (Nancy Drew, Donna Parker, etc.) commodity tales do not adhere to a strictly predetermined framework of characters and plots. Moreover, while many of the series novels were produced through a male-run, Henry Ford-style production line, the community that produced the commodity tales was almost com- pletely female-run. As a twentieth-century variation of Harries’ conteuses, the commod- ity tale community was a now mostly-forgotten network of professional women, embodying what Betsy Hearne calls a “matriarchal enclave within a patriarchal system” (773). This female network was composed of authors, editors, illustrators, literary agents, librarians, booksellers, and critics, all of whom worked together to produce and distribute their commodity tales. Their power was paradoxical: they had little to no control over the supposed female “suitability” to service occupations or to work with children, yet those very elements enabled them to attain their positions. The devaluation of children’s literature and its accompanying services, coupled with the gender of its practitioners, allowed these women to retain a power contrary Postwar Adolescent Girl Fiction as Commodity Tales 285 to their subservient status. What allowed them to create the commodity tales was the structure of their professional community: it was not linear, it was not a movement from author to editor to librarian to teenager. It was, instead, a network of interaction, in which each movement made by a member (whether she was an editor, an author, or a librarian), created a reverberation perceived by other members of the community. That the network was comprised almost exclusively of women does not necessarily mean that it was feminist. Its heyday occurred in the lull between first- and second-wave feminism, during that postwar time in which women were reminded of their “duty” to return to their homes. Still, the network may be considered as generally pro-women, employing and mentoring an essentially female publishing sphere and distributing doz- ens of books aimed specifically at teenage girls. For the purposes of this paper, I will focus specifically on two representative texts from the many commodity tales created and distributed by this network: Betty Cavanna’s Going on Sixteen (1946) and Mary Stolz’s Rosemary (1955). Cinderella: A Commodity Tale Case Study To demonstrate the dominant tropes of the commodity tale genre, I will examine Going on Sixteen and Rosemary through a case study of the Cin- derella tale. Iona and Peter Opie claim that Cinderella is “the best-known fairy-story in the world” (117), possessing at least seven hundred variants (121). Dominant tropes inevitably emerge from these many versions to form a Cinderella “essence.” Jane Yolen summarizes these dominant Cinderella motifs as “an ill-treated though rich and worthy heroine in Cinders-disguise; the aid of a magical gift or advice by a beast/bird/mother substitute; the dance/festival/church scene where the heroine comes in radiant display; [and] recognition through a token” (298). Disney’s 1950 film, Cinderella, likely the most influential twentieth-century version of the tale, certainly includes each of these tropes: a Cinderella as a servant girl, saintly in her friendships with birds and mice; a magical “bibbidi bobbidi boo”-ing fairy godmother; a royal ball; and a tiny glass slipper.