The first edition of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen had prefaces and scholarly notes, and was intended primarily for adults and for other scholars. It was the most ambitious and systematic collection of German folktales to have appeared, if not the first. The passion for folklore was one of the principal currents of German Romanticism, with its interest in origins and its love of the spontaneous and the natural. Moreover, the search for the roots of an authentic German literary and linguistic identity had intense political as well as cultural significance. When the Grimms began their research there was no unified German state and German lands were under French occupation; Jeéroôme Bonaparte, the younger brother of Napoleéon I, had established his court in the city of Kassel, where the Grimms then lived. In 1814, after the French defeat, Jacob was appointed secretary to the Hessian peace legation and went with it to Vienna, and later to Paris.
In the preface to the first edition, the Grimms celebrate the purely German and authentically oral and peasant origins of the tales. They had the good luck, they say, to find a village storyteller, Frau Viehmann, whose tales were “genuinely Hessian,” thus from a “rough-hewn” and relatively unchanged and isolated region.a The folktales, they write, “have kept intact German myths that were thought to be lost”; further search “in all the hallowed regions of our fatherland” would reveal other treasures. The German and oral roots are emphasized again and again: “Everything that has been collected here from oral traditions is (with the exception of ‘Puss in Boots’ perhaps) purely German in its origin as well as in its development and has not been borrowed from any sources.”
Actually, the character and provenance of the tales are much more complicated than this. As Jack Zipes explains in The Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forests to the Modern World (see “For Further Reading”), the Grimms did in fact get tales from peasants and lower-class people, but they also acquired them from other kinds of informants, including educated young women among their friends from upper-middle-class and aristocratic families. These women had heard some of their stories from peasant nannies or servants, but they had also read them in books and magazines. The Grimms themselves took “Jorinde and Joringel” and other tales from books; “The Juniper Tree,” written by the artist Philipp Otto Runge (1777-1810), first appeared in a magazine. The use of something other than oral materials is hinted at in the rather confusing sentence above referring to “Puss in Boots.” At least one of the Grimms’ young women informants came from a French-speaking Huguenot family and would have known the celebrated fairy tales of Charles Perrault, published in 1697, including “Le Maôître Chat, ou le Chat botteé,” the Puss in Boots story. According to the German philologist and Grimm scholar Heinz Roölleke, even Frau Viehmann, the Hessian storyteller, was actually the daughter of an innkeeper, of partly French Huguenot ancestry, and thus not quite the echt German peasant portrayed by the Grimms (McGlathery, ed., The Brothers Grimm and Folktale).
Apparently troubled by these issues, the brothers return to them in the preface to the second edition, where they write, “We have reviewed everything that seemed suspicious, namely what might have been of foreign origin. . . . ” They threw out “Puss in Boots,” but retained other tales almost identical to those of Perrault—among them “Cinderella,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” and “Allerleirauh” (“Many Furs”), which is essentially Perrault’s “Peau d’aône” (“Donkey Skin”). The Grimms knew the earlier collections well and even allude explicitly in the preface to the tales of Perrault, Giambattista Basile (1575-1632), Giovan Francesco Straparola (c. 1480-1557), and the collection of medieval Welsh tales known as The Mabinogion.
Although all of these works long antedated their own, indicating that some of the tales they were collecting must have derived from these earlier “foreign” sources, the brothers seem to have convinced themselves that their versions were separate German tales that somehow resembled the “foreign” ones or were even their true originals. Trying to account for the “widespread diffusion of the German tales,” they write, “we find . . . precisely these tales, throughout Europe, thus revealing a kinship among the noblest peoples.” Here, in their eagerness to praise the superiority of northern Europeans, they appear to be ignoring some obvious non-European sources, such as The Thousand and One Nights, the famous collection from Arab, Persian, and Indian sources, in which, to cite just one example, “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” contains elements that will later appear in the Grimms’ “Simeli Mountain.”
In the preface to the second edition, the Grimms emphasize the “accuracy and truth” of their methods and condemn others who embellish folk materials. Yet they acknowledge their own editorial efforts: “Fragments have been completed, many stories have been told more directly and simply, and there are very few tales that do not appear in improved form.” Moreover, stories that “complemented each other” have been combined—sometimes producing, it must be said, awkward results. The Grimms also put into the stories rhymes and proverbs to give the sense of real peasant storytelling. Yet they write, “We did not add anything from our own resources,” but only sorted out “what is pure, simple, and yet intact from what is inauthentic.” “Authenticity,” then, was not a quality intrinsic to the tales as recorded, but rather an ideal to be striven for, something to be created in order to give the tales their true character.
The same kind of self-contradiction characterizes the Grimms’ attitude toward “certain matters.” As the tales became popular with children, parents complained about references to sex and other bodily functions. In the first edition, the brothers dismiss such criticism on the grounds that everything in the tales is natural: “Nature itself . . . has let these flowers and leaves grow in these colors and shapes.” In the second edition, however, after positing “the innocence . . . of a straightforward narrative that does not conceal anything wrong by holding back on it,” they go on to say, “nonetheless, in this new edition, we have carefully eliminated every phrase not appropriate for children.” Over the course of successive editions, many erotic and excremental references were cut out or toned down. In the first edition, for example, the donkey in “The Table, the Ass, and the Stick” emits gold from both ends, but later the gold comes only out of its mouth. In the first edition, after her nightly frolics with the prince, Rapunzel notices that her clothes are getting tighter; later editions delete any reference to this suspicious weight gain. The process of revision and editing to make the stories less offensive, more coherent, more “authentic,” and so on, went on continuously, beginning with the first handwritten transcriptions from oral sources until the final edition of 1857. In their attempt to find and record the authentic voice of the German folk—“the value of a voice speaking directly to the heart”—the Grimms seem to have ended up with all the ambiguities of writing.
The whole idea of a purely oral tradition of the tale has in fact been questioned. The French stories that made their way into the Grimms’ volumes were certainly written. They came, via Perrault and others, out of the French conte, a sophisticated mode of storytelling that had been a pastime and jeu d’esprit in aristocratic salons in France since the late seventeenth century. Some of these stories were invented by their upper-class authors, but others were acquired from peasant nurses and servants. It seems that tales passed in and out of print in France, as in the German lands and elsewhere. Just as upper-class writers heard tales from illiterate tellers and embellished and published them, so lower-class people heard stories from books, modified them, and passed them on, until eventually they made their way once again into print.
The distinction between oral and “literary” material is thus not clear. Nor is there a clear distinction between the conte de feées, the fairy tale that dealt mostly with aristocratic characters and marvelous events, and the folktale, with its real-life setting of farm and village. The Grimms’ collection contains tales of both kinds and many that are mixed, with the forest, which is both natural and full of mystery, functioning as a kind of intermediate sp
ace between the real world of peasants and farm animals and the fantastic realm of talking beasts and enchanted castles.
Whether oral or written, the modes of transmission and dispersal of the tales remain somewhat obscure. How do the same tales or motifs turn up in widely separated cultures? The farther these motifs are pursued through time and space, the more tangled the lines of possible influence and transmission. The German Sanskrit scholar Theodor Benfey proposed in 1859 in his preface to the Panchatantra, a collection of Indian tales, that the European tales had originated in India and spread from there. This theory of “monogenesis” was challenged in 1893 by French philologist and medievalist Joseph Beédier, who argued for “polygenesis,” the independent origins of tales found in different parts of the world. In the latter case the remarkable re semblances among tales from different times and places would have to be accounted for by fundamental similarities in the physical and psychological patterns of human life across cultures.
In the blurred logic of their prefaces, the Grimms seem to be struggling with all of these problems, and with the ambiguous and heterogeneous nature of their material. In their search for the purity and simplicity of the German oral tradition, they found both less and more than they sought. The tales—natural “flowers and leaves” supposedly plucked from pristine country lanes—turn out in many cases to be complex hybrid blooms whose genetic structure and inheritance are still not fully understood.
The study of folk and fairy tales has given rise to many theories and schools of interpretation. Anthropological and mythical interpreters find in the tales allusions to primitive rituals, especially initiation rites, as well as prescientific and mythic representations of natural phenomena, such as the change of the seasons. For Freud, fairy tales reveal unconscious fantasies like those in dreams. The psychoanalytic approach is most fully developed in a study by Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, which contains interpretations of many of the Grimms’ tales. Under the influence of the theories of Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, sees in the hero of the tale and his trials archetypes of the collective unconscious, the timeless reservoir of universal human experience. In Morphology of the Folktale, the Russian formalist critic Vladimir Propp classifies tales according to a limited number of functions performed by the characters, always in a fixed sequence. The historical-geographic method of the Finnish folk lorist Antti Aarne and the American Stith Thompson traces tales back through variants to their presumed places of origin. Feminist critics try to show how fairy tales reflect and perpetuate patterns of male domination and female subjection and passivity, an argument incorporated into a broader Marxist critique focused on the political and social dimension of the tales by Jack Zipes, a scholar and translator of the tales.
No single theory can account for the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, a complex, multidimensional work made up of more than 200 smaller works of varying type and quality, with many layers of intention and meaning. Although the Grimms selected, edited, expanded, revised, and generally imposed their own sensibility on the tales, giving them a certain unity of tone, they did not invent them. The tales come from different times and places and retain the traces of their origins—oral and written, primitive and sophisticated, peasant, middle class, and aristocratic—all filtered through the particular historical and class consciousness, the moral ideals, and the unconscious wishes and fantasies of the brothers themselves. Thus they present difficult problems for criticism. A comparison of two of the most interesting approaches—the Marxist analysis of Jack Zipes and the psychoanalytic explication of Bruno Bettelheim—may cast some light on these problems and on the tales themselves.
Jack Zipes focuses on the social and historical context and consciousness of the Grimms and their work. In Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion, he asserts that in the early folktales “the main characters and concerns of a monarchistic, patriarchal, and feudal society are presented, and the focus is on class struggle and competition for power” (p. 8). Although injustice and oppression are temporarily overcome to produce the usual happy ending, this happens through magical means, leaving relationships of power fundamentally unchanged. Zipes argues that the Grimms adapted the old tales to the ideals of nineteenth-century capitalism, with the goal of socializing children to bourgeois society:
The male hero learns to be active, competitive, handsome, industrious, cunning, acquisitive. His goal is money, power, and a woman (also associated with chattel). His jurisdiction is the open world. His happiness depends on the just use of power. The female hero learns to be passive, obedient, self-sacrificing, hard-working, patient, and straight-laced. Her goal is wealth, jewels, and a man to protect her property rights. Her jurisdiction is the home or castle. Her happiness depends on conformity to patriarchal rule (p. 57).
The child reader, in Zipes’s view, is being indoctrinated unconsciously to accept these bourgeois ideals. The tales are particularly apt for this purpose just because they are thought of as timeless classics outside the real world of history, politics, and class conflict.
In Fairy Tale as Myth, Myth as Fairy Tale, Zipes says that the best-known tales have become myths, thereby taking on a quasi-religious authority that disguises their roots in a particular historical and political context. Following the ideas of the French literary critic and theorist Roland Barthes (1915-1980), Zipes claims that this mythification of the tale makes what is contingent, political, and ideological appear natural, true, and universal. In this way, the classic tale has become “dehistoricized, depoliticized to represent and maintain the hegemonic interests of the bourgeoisie” (p. 6). In a chapter entitled “Rumpelstiltskin and the Decline of Female Productivity,” Zipes analyzes the tale of the miller’s daughter who spins straw into gold with the aid of a tyrannical gnome in the context of changes in the manufacture of linen after the invention of the spinning machine in 1764: “The Grimms were making a social-historical statement about the exploitation of women as spinners and the appropriation of the art/craft of spinning by men” (p. 55).
Like Jack Zipes, Bruno Bettelheim also sees folk and fairy tales as influencing the child’s development and relationship to society, but in quite a different way. In The Uses of Enchantment, Bettelheim is concerned not with the historical and political dimensions of the tales, but rather with their representation in symbolic form of the child’s inner life, which he sees as essentially timeless rather than rooted in a particular historical context. “By dealing with universal human problems, particularly those which occupy a child’s mind, these stories speak to his budding ego and encourage its development, while at the same time relieving preconscious and unconscious pressures” (p. 6). The reality of the fairy tale is not that of the external world, says Bettelheim: “No sane child ever believes that these tales describe the world realistically” (p. 117). The fairy-tale kings and queens, with their arbitrary power, are not the unjust authorities of the world of history and politics, but rather the monarchs of the child’s daily life, the father and mother. The prevalence of evil stepmothers in fairy tales is attributed by Zipes and other critics to the frequency in earlier centuries of death in childbirth, which left widowers to take new wives hostile to the first wife’s children. Bettelheim, however, sees the evil stepmother character not as a product of actual historical conditions, but as a psychological stand-in for the cruel, angry, or rejecting side of the real mother, who can then be idealized, in the person of the dead biological mother, as all good and loving. This interpretation is substantiated by the fact that after the first edition, Wilhelm changed mothers to stepmothers in “Snow-White and the Seven Dwarfs” and “Hansel and Grethel.”
The extremes of absolute good and evil in the tales, according to Bettelheim, appeal to the tendency to polarization on the part of the immature ego, which cannot yet tolerate the mixed and ambiguous nature of real mothers and of reality generally. Dragons, giants, and demons also correspond to aspects of the child’s inner life—
anxieties, hatreds, sadistic fantasies. In these frightening creatures, the child meets and conquers “the monster he feels or fears himself to be, and which also sometimes persecutes him” (p. 120).
One of Bettelheim’s most sustained analyses is of “Briar Rose,” the Sleeping Beauty story; which he reads as an account of adolescence and sexual maturation. In this story a king, having been told by an evil fairy that his daughter will prick her finger on a spindle and die, tries to avert the curse by banishing all spinning from the castle. Yet inevitably, at the age of fifteen, the princess manages to find a spindle, pricks her finger, and begins to bleed, inheriting the prophesied “curse” of menstruation. She falls into an enchanted sleep—the narcissistic trance of adolescence—protected against premature sexual encounters by a thorny hedge, until wakened to mature sexual love by the prince’s kiss.
Zipes, who attacks Bettelheim’s interpretations on the grounds that they ignore historical and social contexts, reads the Sleeping Beauty story very differently, as “a bourgeois myth about the proper way males save . . . comatose women” (The Brothers Grimm, p. 152). The charge of sexual stereotyping in the tales, however, does not concern Bettelheim: “Even when a girl is depicted as turning inward . . . and a boy aggressively dealing with the external world, these two together symbolize the two ways in which one has to gain selfhood: through learning to understand and master the inner as well as the outer world” (p. 226). Bettelheim believes that children are able to relate a story to their own experience regardless of the main character’s sex.
Bettelheim explores the psychological richness of the tales in fascinating detail, opening up endless possibilities of understanding and interpretation. But he does tend to idealize them, emphasizing their beauty and their healing properties. In a detailed analysis of “Cinderella,” for example, he argues that the tale deals with the hidden sexual and aggressive tensions within the family and finally resolves them in a positive way: “ ‘Cinderella’ sets forth the steps in personality development required to reach self-fulfillment, and presents them in fairy-tale fashion so that every person can understand what is required of him to become a full human being” (p. 275).
Grimm's Fairy Tales (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Page 3