By Shantell Powell
Gender Swapped Fairy Tales is exactly what it sounds like. The stories are culled from Andrew Lang’s Fairy Books, an anthology series published for children between 1889 and 1913. Aside from the gender swapping, the stories are virtually identical to their predecessors. These stories are familiar to most folks in the western hemisphere and include such classics as “Jacqueline and the Beanstalk,” “Gretel and Hansel,” “Mr. Rapunzel,” and “Frau Rumpelstiltzkin.”
A few spurious claims are made in the authors’ notes. According to Karrie Fransman, Lang’s Fairy Books “collected the very best tales from all over the world.” This is not true: there are at least a couple of continents’ worth of nations and cultures whose folktales were not considered for inclusion. The stories within are primarily European in origin. I also take umbrage with the statement, “most cultures divide gender into ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine.’” Gender does not work this way for many non-Western cultures. For example, in the Anishinaabemowin language, the genders are not male and female, but animate, inanimate, and sacred. The authors describe nonbinary genders as a strictly modern phenomenon, and in doing so, demonstrate a colonial bias.
That being said, it’s interesting to read these European fairy tales with their strong male/female binary flipped. The gender-swapping of the stories was achieved by means of an algorithm programmed by creative technologist Jonathan Plackett. Lang’s text (which is in the public domain) was fed into the program, and with a bit of tinkering to change dresses to suits and Jacks to Jacquelines, was published without being otherwise rewritten. Unfortunately, the book reads like a rush job. There are a few spots where the gender-swapping is incomplete and the sentences do not make sense. Take, for example, an exchange in Handsome and the Beast which goes as follows:
However, as she did not seem at all ferocious, and only said gruffly:
“Good evening, Handsome,” he answered cheerfully and managed to conceal his terror. Then the Beast asked him how he had been amusing himself, and he told her all the rooms he had seen.
I read this several times and am still confused as to who is saying “Good evening, Handsome.” Is there a missing sentence? There are both a she and a he saying it, and nonbinary characters do not make an appearance in any of the stories….or do they?
In Jacqueline and the Beanstalk, a nonbinary cow makes an appearance. For whatever reason, instead of swapping in a bull for the cow, the cow is instead referred to as “he.” I also noted typographical errors, including hyphenated words which should not be hyphenated, likely hold-outs from copied-and-pasted text.
Despite these problems, the illustrations and design work are top notch. The typeface is easy to read, and the layout is spacious and clean. The watercolour illustrations by Karrie Fransman have a bright and modern palette yet retain the timeless quality of the fairy tales. It is unfortunate that more care was not taken with the proofreading and editing, because the book itself is a thing of beauty.
Thank you, Publishing Group Canada, for the complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review!