January 13, 2022 29
Wonderful Warnings
Rivka GalchenRaymie Nightingale
by Kate DiCamillo.
Candlewick, 263 pp.,
$16.99; $7.99 (paper)
Louisiana’s Way Home
by Kate DiCamillo.
Candlewick, 227 pp.,
$16.99; $7.99 (paper)
Beverly, Right Here
by Kate DiCamillo.
Candlewick, 241 pp.,
$16.99; $7.99 (paper)
Marina Warner’s scholarship has long
demonstrated how fairy tales can trans-
mit female secrets. An older woman
communicates something to a girl that
can be said only in the code of stories.
Think of a tale like “Beauty and the
Beast” being told to a child who may
one day find herself married off to a
brute. Or consider the harsh destinies
of the unkind stepsisters in “Cinder-
ella”: in some versions they cut off their
own toes or heels, and pigeons peck out
their eyes. A story of female revenge is
perhaps most wisely told in the privacy
of the nursery.
In From the Beast to the Blonde: On
Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (1994),
Warner tracks the term “old wives’
tale” back as far as Plato’s Gorgias,
where it was used to disparage stories
told for the purpose of amusing, fright-
ening, or consoling children. “It is still,
in English, an ambiguous phrase,”
she writes. “An old wives’ tale means
a piece of nonsense, a tissue of error,
an ancient act of deception, of self and
others, idle talk.” And yet, she argues,
“although male writers and collectors
have dominated the production and
dissemination of popular wonder tales,
they often pass on women’s stories
from intimate or domestic milieux.”
Charles Perrault, whose Tales of
Mother Goose (1697), Warner writes,
“inaugurated the fairy tale as a literary
form for children,” gathered his ma-
terial from his grandmother and ser-
vants. Hans Christian Andersen said
his stories were based on those told
to him as a child by the old women in
his village. For the Grimm brothers,
too, their “most inspiring and prolific
sources were women”—including an
old woman in an almshouse who was
famous for her stories but would not
speak with the brothers. They hired a
little girl as a secret intermediary; she
asked the woman to tell her tales, and
then retold them to the Grimms.
The enduring power of fairy tales
lies in the way they can be retold and
retailored, their elements forming
what Warner calls “an Esperanto of
the imagination.”^1 Carlo Collodi’s Pi-
nocchio presents a remarkable exam-
ple. Collodi was a Florentine political
journalist and satirist who, in 1875, was
invited to translate Perrault’s French
fairy tales into Italian. Those stories,
though complex and contradictory,
are distinguished by the assured mor-
als that end them. “Little Red Riding
Hood” concludes with this message:
“Children, especially well-bred young
ladies, should never talk to strang-
ers.” At the end of “Puss in Boots,” the
reader is told, “There is great advantage
in receiving a large inheritance, but dil-
igence and ingenuity are worth more.”
When Collodi began to write chapters
of Pi nocchio for a children’s weekly in
1881, he imported Perrault’s fairy-tale
morals but changed their placement
and function. They are no longer end-
ings; instead they are bits along the way.
Remember the conscientious cricket
who urges the wooden puppet to study
and not run away from home? In Collo-
di’s text (though not in the Disney film)
Pinocchio crushes him early on with a
mallet. The dead cricket later returns
as a ghost and pleads with Pinocchio
not to be deceived by the Fox and the
Cat, a pair of archetypal con artists who
have convinced him that if he buries his
gold coins in the Field of Miracles, they
will multiply five hundred times over.
“My boy,” the cricket says, “never trust
people who promise to make you rich
in a day. They are generally crazy swin-
dlers.” Sure enough, when Pinocchio
goes by moonlight to bury the coins,
the Fox and the Cat attack him, hang
him from a tree, and leave him for dead.
The story originally stopped there—a
moralistic ending, arguably, or even
a covert condemnation of charming
tales: the Fox and the Cat were better
storytellers than the good Geppetto
and the cricket; their tall tales won. But
readers complained, so Collodi wrote
more chapters, reviving Pinocchio
with the magic of the Blue Fairy. The
wooden puppet may be a liar, but his
lies are not like those of the Fox and theCat, who use their charm to take what
little belongs to others weaker than
they are. Pinocchio’s lies are those told
by an innocent—defensive, exuberant,
or wishful in nature, they help him to
clumsily navigate peril and power.Kate DiCamillo has written more
than twenty-five books for children.
Some of them—including her newest,
The Beatryce Prophecy,^2 about a young
girl in the Middle Ages whose mind is
crowded with mesmerizing stories—
are written in a fairy-tale mode. But be-
fore The Beatryce Prophecy she wrote
a trilogy of lyrical, goofy, very moving
novels set in the South during the 1970s:
Raymie Nightingale (2016), Louisiana’s
Way Home (2018), and Beverly, Right
Here (2019). Though realistic, they
are still laced with fairy-tale elements.
Each focuses on a different young girl
who assembles her own story out of
the scraps of tales she gathers from her
surroundings, making something new
out of them. The trilogy is marketed
toward middle-grade readers, but its
bright, buoyant sadness reminds me of
Joy Williams; its dark optimism and
playful language recall Stevie Smith.
Raymie Clarke, Louisiana Elefante,
and Beverly Tapinski are ten years old
in the first book, twelve in the second,
and fourteen in the third. At the start of
Raymie Nightingale, Raymie’s father,
who owns a small insurance business
in the fictional Florida town of Lister,
has just run off with a dental hygienist.
Raymie gets the idea that if she can
win a local contest called Little MissCentral Florida Tire, her father will see
her photograph in the newspaper and
return home. This is the quest that fate
seems to have assigned Raymie—and
the one she ultimately has to reimagine
in order to survive. But first she needs a
talent for the pageant. She signs up for
baton-twirling lessons, and that’s where
she meets Louisiana and Beverly.
DiCamillo grew up in Florida, hav-
ing moved there in 1969 at the age of
five with her mother and older brother.
Her father was expected to join them
there but never did. In interviews, she
has said that she did not set out to write
an autobiographical novel, or a trilogy;
her initial idea simply involved a young
girl who wants to win the Little Miss
Central Florida Tire contest. But then
she wondered: What was this girl’s mo-
tivation? She found herself writing that
it was to regain the attention of a father
who had left. DiCamillo is, in a sense,
the archetypal older female storyteller,
recounting a tale to her younger self
about how one might handle or survive
such an abandonment.
Raymie, Louisiana, and Beverly are
all white girls from households of mod-
est to no means. None of them, it turns
out, has a father at home. As in a fairy
tale, they have a series of tasks to per-
form, obstacles to overcome. They must
rescue Louisiana’s cat, Archie, whom
her grandmother claims to have taken
to a place she calls the Very Friendly
Animal Center because they can’t af-
ford to feed him. They also must steal
a baton from their instructor Ida Nee’s
house, as it rightly belongs to Bever-
ly’s mother, herself a former champion
baton twirler and beauty queen. And
they must retrieve a library book aboutMargaux Williamson: Painting to Moby Dick, 2006Margaux Williamson/McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Kleinburg, Ontario(^1) Marina Warner, “How Fairytales
Grew Up,” The Guardian, December
12, 2014. See also her Fairy Tale: A
Very Short Introduction (Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2018).^2 Candlewick, 2021.