There are, however, other related but less beautiful tales dealing with the relationship between a widowed father and his daughter, such as “The Handless Maiden” and “Allerleirauh” (“Many Furs”), which Bettelheim does not analyze, perhaps because they do not present such positive developments, at least not very convincingly. These stories are less famous than “Cinderella,” and for good reason. In “Allerleirauh” the widowed king wants to marry his daughter, who runs away, disguising herself as a kitchen maid. In “The Handless Maiden,” the king asks his daughter to let him chop off her hands in order to save himself from the Evil One, suggesting powerful evil desires that can be thwarted only by mutilation; the daughter submits and then flees her father.
In both of these fascinating stories, the father—like King Lear, whose story originates in a related legend—demands an excessive and unnatural love from his daughter. The Oedipal horrors—incestuous desire, abuse, and mutilation—are too obvious and frightening to make for entirely agreeable reading. Both stories end well: The Handless Maiden gets silver hands and then grows new ones, and both heroines marry kings—perhaps new father figures. But the happy endings seem unconvincing—especially the new hands!—and not fully adequate to the anxieties aroused by the original situations.
In another version of the Handless Maiden story, considered more authentic by the Grimms themselves, the girl’s father asks for his daughter’s hand in marriage and, when she refuses, has her hands and breasts chopped off. As usual, the most shocking details were deleted from the published version by the Grimms. In the words of the critic Peter Dettmering, “Faced with monstrously cruel mothers and with fathers driven by incestuous desires, they sought their salvation in the editing of texts” (quoted in Tatar, The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales, p. 37). Going back to the earlier versions of one of their tales is rather like the process Freud describes in interpreting a dream: The edited text, like the manifest dream remembered in consciousness, conceals a repressed forbidden content, often an unedited account of cruelty and incest.
Abuse of children is presented more openly where there is no explicitly sexual element. In dozens of tales children are starved, beaten, persecuted, or abandoned, mostly by their own fathers or (step)mothers. These tales do not always reach a hopeful resolution like that of “Hansel and Grethel,” which Bettelheim reads as an account of the “difficulties and anxieties of the child who is forced to give up his dependent attachment to the mother and free himself of his oral fixation” (p. 170). Oral needs could also be said to figure in “The Poor Boy in the Grave,” where a starving orphan boy, beaten and abused by his master, betrayed by the judge who might have protected him, gorges himself on stolen honey and wine in a last desperate effort to gratify his hunger before dying. The fire that destroys the home of the cruel master is no consolation to the reader of this bitter tale, which could have been taken from a real-life account in the newspaper, in the Grimms’ time or our own. Although a psychoanalytic interpretation in terms of children’s oral needs and fears could be worked out, it would serve only to minimize the real-life horror depicted here.
In “The Juniper Tree,” one of the most celebrated and moving tales, a little boy is killed by his stepmother, who tries to blame the crime on her daughter and then cooks the boy in a stew and feeds it to his father. The motif of the child fed to the father has a past in Greek mythology and could also be analyzed in psychoanalytic ways, like “Hansel and Grethel,” in terms of the child’s fears of its own unconscious cannibalistic impulses. But despite the fantastic ending, in which the mother is killed and the child resurrected, the acutely observed details of the mother’s behavior and feeling—her momentary remorse, her attempt to blame the daughter—give it a chilling realism and suggest the horror of adult malice rather than childish fantasy. Bettelheim does not comment on this story, perhaps because it fits less well his paradigm of the tales as representations of children’s unconscious conflicts and their resolution. His optimistic view works better with the more positive tales than with the darkest and most tragic ones, just as classical psychoanalytic theory works better with children’s typical sexual and aggressive fantasies than with instances of actual abuse. The tales, like all genuine works of art, are rooted in reality as well as in fantasy, and the reality of life among an impoverished peasantry meant that children were abandoned, abused, and murdered, even more frequently than in our own time and place.
Bettelheim scarcely mentions another disturbing aspect of the tales, evoked in the prefaces by the romantic idealization of the “pure” German folk and the concern with screening out “foreign” influences. This vocabulary suggests the racist strain in German nationalism, later to become murderous obsession. Of the three tales with Jewish characters in the Grimms’ collection, two—“The Jew Among Thorns” (included in this selection) and “The Good Bargain” (not included here)—are frankly anti-Semitic. In the third tale (also not included here), “The Bright Sun Brings It to Light,” a man who murders a Jew is actually brought to justice.
Sad to say, Nazi ideologues enshrined the Kinder- und Hausmärchen as virtually a sacred text, a special expression of the spirit of the Volk, as Maria Tatar points out, and even came up with a reading of “Little Red Riding Hood” as an allegory of the menace to the German people from the Jewish wolf (The Hard Facts, p. 41). The Grimms, long dead by then, were obviously not responsible for this interpretation, but they undoubtedly did real harm by including the two anti-Semitic stories in their collection and even, as Ruth Bottigheimer notes, in Grimms’ Bad Girls and Bold Boys (p. 140), reprinting them in a short edition for children. Thus the tales should not be idealized. They do enrich the mental lives of children, as Bettelheim shows, yet some of them evoke not universal psychological conflicts but dangerous prejudices in the culture from which they came.
There is a whiff of perverse cruelty in many tales, not only in the frightening ordeals undergone by heroes and heroines, but also in the inventively sadistic punishments meted out to villains, who have to dance in red-hot shoes, get their eyes pecked out by birds, are rolled down hills in barrels studded inside with nails, or are thrown into vats containing boiling oil, poisonous snakes, or both. Adults tend to be more unnerved than children by these elements of the German Gothic imagination; at one public reading an audience of children found “The Juniper Tree” not horrifying but “hilarious” (Tatar, p. 21). In any case the grisly cruelty in the tales comes out of the same amoral source that generates their vital narrative energy and imaginative richness, and the pleasure they afford is not entirely innocent. The sense of an unacknowledged darkness beneath the surface is part of what makes them both disturbing and compelling.
This mysterious and somewhat perverse vitality may also prevent the tales from truly fulfilling the function of moral instruction, for either good or ill. They have been used for that purpose in the German school curriculum, and William Bennett, the conservative moralist, has included several of them in his Book of Virtues: A Treasury of Great Moral Stories (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), a volume of improving literature for children. There is, of course, absolutely nothing wrong with this, but it probably doesn’t work. To be sure, virtue is presented movingly in the tales, as in “Star Dollars,” where in an act of radical Christian charity a little girl gives her last rag of clothing to another child in the snowy forest, or in the self-sacrificing love of the many siblings who try to rescue each other from harm. In more typical examples, virtue is rewarded with wealth and position, as in the best middle-class Protestant morality. Kindness to beggars, for example, pays off, these unattractive characters usually turning out to be wealthy and powerful beings under enchantment who reward good behavior handsomely.
But it is not clear that children actually respond to this pattern as the moralist might hope, as suggested by the unpredictable laughter at “The Juniper Tree.” By the same token, the tales may not really function, as Jack Zipes fears, to perpetuate an unjust social order by instilling bou
rgeois virtues of industry, obedience, and submission to patriarchal authority. There is great variety among the tales and a great range of meanings and morals; some apparently have no moral at all beyond a good laugh. Among the 200 in the Grimms’ final edition, there are romantic stories of love, enchantment, and rescue, but also tall tales, animal fables, crime stories, funny stories about spectacularly stupid people, and bawdy fabliaux like “The Wedding of Mrs. Fox,” in which all but the youngest child will sense a dirty joke. In many cases the hero wins out through the virtues of courage and perseverance, but in others cunning and deceit carry the day.
The tales embody and gratify many desires, some of them contradictory: desires to have terrifying adventures, to know the cruelty of the world, to survive danger through one’s own cleverness and beauty, to see one’s enemies harshly punished, and finally to be recognized as king or queen and paired forever with a royal mate. Yet human beings also desire suffering, as history demonstrates all too well, if only to feel more intensely. Indeed, we want experience, although some varieties—such as the horrors of war, torture, and rape, the grisly murders and mutilations that both terrify and fascinate—are best had vicariously, as in reading “The Feather Bird” and “The Robber Bridegroom.” Here the moral lessons, if there are any, tend to be overshadowed for the reader by the sensational violence of the content. Taken together, the tales seem animated by a kind of anarchic energy that finally overwhelms moral and social lessons.
The patriarchal pattern is often undercut in the same way. In “The Shoes Which Were Danced to Pieces,” for example, the twelve princesses who defy their father by slipping out of their locked bedroom every night are finally reined in by an old soldier, who follows them to their underground dance hall and is rewarded by the king with the hand of the eldest princess; thus the authority of the father-king is reestablished. But the most memorable elements of the story are the thrilling secret staircase under the bed, the underground lake and castle, and the trees with leaves of silver, gold, and diamond. The brilliant fantasy world of the rebellious girls is far more important to the reader than the actions of the king or the old soldier.
Another rebellious princess, in “King Thrush-Beard,” mocks all her suitors until her father forces her to marry a beggar and work as a serving maid. But in the end things turn out well for the choosy girl, who discovers that her beggar husband is actually a king. The Jungfrau Maleen, in the tale of that name, refuses the marriage arranged by her father, who walls her up in a tower. After digging her way out with a bread knife, the determined Maleen tracks down her true love and wins him back from a counterfeit bride, who loses her head for her evil deeds. Even Rapunzel, the quintessential imprisoned maiden, manages to find a lover and get him into her tower at night by using her hair as a ladder, then survives for years in a desert as the single mother of twins. It is not the prince who rescues her, but she who saves him, by curing his blindness with her tears.
There are many examples of clever, active, and even heroic young women. In “The Robber Bridegroom,” the heroine tricks a cannibalistic murderer and brings him to justice, and in “The Feather Bird” another heroine rescues herself and her two sisters from a wizard who is really a serial sex killer. In a number of moving tales, a sister protects or rescues her brothers, as in “The Six Swans,” “The Seven Crows,” and “The Twelve Brothers,” where the sister offers her life for those of her brothers.
Peasant women are often presented as bold and cunning. In “The Peasant’s Wise Daughter,” the girl gives her father practical advice, rescues him from prison, figures out a riddle, marries the king, saves a poor man from the king’s cruelty, escapes a death sentence, and finally brings her difficult husband to heel. Clever Grethel, in the story of that name, eats and drinks the food and wine she had prepared for her master’s dinner party, then covers up her misdeed by sending him off in pursuit of his guests armed with a carving knife. In “Old Hildebrand,” a wife conspires with her lover, the village parson, to get rid of her gullible husband by sending him on a pilgrimage.
Even though there are not really enough adventurous heroines to go around, the female reader can easily identify across the barrier of gender with the male hero, as in reading a novel. If this were not possible, women would be barred from access to more than half the world’s great literature. In reading stories such as “The Golden Bird,” the girl imagines herself into the skin of the adventurous male protagonist rather than withholding her interest until a princess with whom to identify appears on the scene.
There are numerous contemporary attempts to write fairy tales with correct messages, some of them charming and successful. But many suffer from the imaginative flatness produced by good intentions; they have no subtext, only a text, and the provocative richness and ambiguity of the Grimm stories is lost. Those who want to subvert the originals often fail to notice the extent to which they subvert themselves. “Little Red Riding Hood,” for instance, contains an explicit moral—don’t stray from the straight path, don’t talk to strange wolves—that has been applied in a variety of contexts by parents, teachers, mythologists, feminists, even Nazis. In all cases it is clearly a parable about how to avoid danger by following the instructions of those in authority. Yet does it really work that way? The most exciting part of the story, the bit children like to hear over and over, is the sly dialogue between wolf and girl, culminating in the terrifying moment when the hairy beast leaps out of bed and grabs her. Referring to the Perrault version, in which Petit Chaperon Rouge actually undresses and gets into bed with the wolf, the American writer Djuna Barnes (1892-1982) commented, “Children know something they can’t tell; they like Red Riding Hood and the wolf in bed!” (quoted in Bettelheim, p. 176).
In such richly symbolic material, imagination and desire seize what they will, in spite of social and moral lessons. Above all, the imagination responds to the sense of another dimension of experience. Most of the tales, even those set in the real world of farm or village, open up suddenly into a magical space of adventure. This may happen through the encounter with a powerful being (a witch, a giant, a talking animal) or through some apparently ordinary object (a comb, a mirror, a hat) that is suddenly revealed to have unexpected powers. Through such beings or objects the hero or heroine gains entrance to another world existing within that of ordinary reality, a magical space like the lake and castle under the bed in “The Shoes Which Were Danced to Pieces” or the cavern inside the mountain in “Old Rinkrank.”
These enchanted places suggest the freedom of the imagination itself, existing within the real world of history, class conflict, and politics and yet always escaping it, claiming some degree of autonomy. The reader of the tales, child or adult, gains access to this other dimension, the realm of structured fantasy that is the source of literature and art, where the creative power of the mind itself offers at least partial freedom from the real world of conflict and oppression, and even the hope of one day transforming it.
Elizabeth Dalton is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Barnard College. She is the author of Unconscious Structure in “The Idiot” (Princeton University Press, 1979), a psychoanalytic study of Dostoevsky’s novel, and has published fiction and criticism in The New Yorker, Partisan Review, Commentary, and The New York Times Book Review.
The Frog Prince1
I n the olden time, when wishing was having, there lived a King, whose daughters were all beautiful; but the youngest was so exceedingly beautiful that the Sun himself, although he saw her very often, was surprised whenever she came out into the sunshine.
Near the castle of this King, lay a large and gloomy forest, and in the midst stood an old lime-tree, beneath whose branches flowed a tranquil brook; whenever it was very hot, the King’s youngest daughter ran off into this wood, and sat down on the bank of the cool stream; and, when she felt dull, would often divert herself by throwing a golden ball up in the air and catching it. And this was her favourite amusement.
Now, one day i
t so happened, that this golden ball, when the King’s daughter threw it into the air, did not fall down into her hand, but on the grass; and then it rolled past her into a little fountain. The King’s daughter followed the ball with her eyes, but it disappeared beneath the water, which was so deep that no one could see to the bottom. Then she began to lament, and to cry louder and louder; and, as she cried, a voice called out, “Why weepest thou, O King’s daughter! thy tears would melt even a stone to pity.” And she looked around to the spot whence the voice came, and saw a Frog stretching his thick ugly head out of the water. “Ah! you old water-paddler,” said she, “was it you that spoke? I am weeping for my golden ball which has slipped away from me into the water.”
“Be quiet, and do not cry,” answered the Frog; “I can give thee good advice. But what wilt thou give me if I fetch thy plaything up again?”
“What will you have, dear Frog?” said she. “My dresses, my pearls and jewels, or the golden crown which I wear?”
The Frog answered, “Dresses, or jewels, or golden crowns, are not for me; but if thou wilt love me, and let me be thy companion and playfellow, and sit at thy table, and eat from thy little golden plate, and drink out of thy cup, and sleep in thy little bed,—if thou wilt promise me all these, then will I dive down and fetch up thy golden ball.”
Grimm's Fairy Tales (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Page 4