Tatar – The hard facts of the Grimms fairy tales
Preface
Compelling in their simplicity and poignant in their emotional appeal, fairy
tales have the power to stir long-dormant childhood feelings an d to
quicken our sympathies for the downtrodden. They also offer wit and
wisdom in the trenchant formulations of the folk. (xiii)
Folklorists are quick to point out that fairy tales were never really meant
for children’s ears alone. Originally told at fireside gatherings or in
spinning circles by adults to adult audiences, fairy tales joined the canon
of children’s literature (which is itself of recent vintage) only in the last two
to three centuries. Yet the hold these stories have on the imagination of
childhood is so compelling that it becomes difficult to conceive of a
childhood without them. Growing up without fairy tales implies spiritual
impoverishment, as one writer after another has warned. (xiv)
By meditating on the conflicts acted out in fairy tales, he [Bettelheim]
emphasizes, children can find solutions to their own specific problems and
thus stand to gain powerful therapeutic benefits from the stories. (xv)
I Children’s literature?
1. Sex and violence – The hard core of fairy tales
What the brothers found harder to tolerate than violence and what they
did their best to eliminate from the collection through vigilant editing were
references to what they coyly called ‘certain conditions and relationships.’
Foremost among those conditions seems to have been pregnancy.
Pregnancy, whether the result of a frivolous wish, or of an illicit sexual
relationship was a subject that made the Grimms uncomfortable. (7)
When a tale was available in several versions, the Grimms invariably
preferred one that camouflaged incestuous desires and Oedipal
entanglements. (9) (Like the girl without hands, where) the original
introduction detailing the father’s offences was deleted from the tale and
replaced by the less sensational account of a pact with the devil. (10)
But lurid portrayals of child abuse, starvation, and exposure, like fastidious
descriptions of cruel punishments, on the whole escaped censorship. (10-
11)
Wilhelm Grimm saw to it that the story (Rapunzel) was rewritten along
lines that would meet with both critics’ approval. Jacob Grimm may have
responded to criticism by asserting that the collection had never been
intended for young audiences, but his brother was prepared to delete or
, revise tales deemed unsuitable for children. (18)
Wilhelm Grimm, eager to find a wider audience, set to work making the
appropriate changes. (19)
Eliminating references to unwanted pregnancies, introducing marriage
before displaying the marriage bed, and explicitly condemning deviant
behavior must have gone a long way toward silencing critics and
appeasing parental objections to the first edition of the Nursery and
Household tales. It clearly made good commercial sense to move along
those lines. (20)
The more Hansel, Gretel, Cinderella, and Snow White are victimized by the
powers of evil, the more sympathy they elicit and the more captivating
they are for children. Wilhelm Grimm’s editing procedures here again
succeeded in making the Nursery and Household Tales more rather than
less attractive to young audiences (21).
For the Grimms, the process of recasting folktales unfolded in three
stages. First, as audience or addressees, they influenced the telling of a
tale simply by their physical presence. Their social standing, age, sexual
identity, and body language worked in concert on their informants. (25)
They were, furthermore, never able to capture anything other than the
verbal dimension of a performance. Intonation, gesture, facial expression,
along with all the other vital components of a live performance, escaped
their recording efforts.
In a second, even more fundamental fashion, the Grimms altered the
texture of the tales narrated to them. Like the early collectors of folktales,
particularly those working before the age of the portable tape recorder,
they could not resist the temptation to improve on what they heard, to
render readable what might be pleasing to the ear alone. (26)
The Grimms seized nearly every available opportunity to emphasize the
virtue of hard work and made a point of correlating diligence with beauty
and desirability wherever possible.
Rather than allowing the various figures of the tale to reveal their traits
through their actions (this is one of the hallmarks of a folktale), Wilhelm
Grimm felt obliged to stamp the tale’s actors with his own character
judgments and thus shaped his readers’ views of them (30)
In most cases, however, it is easy to account for changes made from one
edition to the next. In addition to wanting to produce a volume appropriate
for children and attractive to parents, the Grimms wanted to give the
public a document of German folk culture in its most admirable form. (31)
Proverbs were added to give the collection a more folksy texture, and the
