Grimm Realities
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
Writers & Writing GRIMM REALITIES BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL During the 1950s, when I was growing up, a public debate raged over the effects of fairy tales on the minds of young children. A number...
...Dummkopfs outsmart wiseacres, the Beast turns out to be more civilized than Beauty's father, a lovely queen's vanity corrupts her to evil deeds...
...Wilhelm Grimm expunged much sexual material, as Tatar documents...
...similar results could be obtained by examining, say, the influence of Charles Perrault on French novels...
...Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival, Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, Wagner's Sigfried, and Thomas Mann's Hans Castorp-to name only four-are all "guileless fools" whose innocence makes them heroes...
...But once the hero sets out in search of a distant ideal or finds himself obliged to take the road, events suddenly take on the color of the marvelous...
...Elsewhere, villains are boiled in oil, drowned in sacks, and worse...
...They teach us that our universe is too vast to control, that life can often be cruel, that some people turn to evil to accomplish their ends...
...However, in the Preface, Wilhelm made a further claim for the work...
...The unmasking of hidden wishes seems to have driven the '50s into a demythologizing frenzy, which culminated in the "God is dead" movement...
...The fairy tale motif is central to German literature...
...A concern that such depictions fostered brutality led the Allied Powers to ban Nursery and Household Tales in postwar Germany...
...He also submitted that fairy tales function as symbolic representations of the struggle for identity we wage against our parents (metamorphosed into monsters to avoid guilt), and that vengeful fantasies, harbored even by the young, can be safely dispelled through the enjoyment of just punishments inflicted on witches, giants or bandits...
...Over the centuries, folklore has taken on a religious and sociological aspect...
...The purported rediscovery of a primeval Volkpoesie was bound to appeal to the spirit of German nationalism, and helps explain why the Grimms' collection outsold its rivals all over Northern Europe and became synonymous with the genre itself...
...Even queens must continually work the spinning wheel to make flax into thread for cloth-a task that eventually deforms their hands and feet...
...Language was refined and shaped until the final products were somewhere between the literary fairy tales of Andersen or Oscar Wilde and genuine folklore...
...With hindsight, one can see several reasons for the sudden rush of uneasiness over this nursery classic...
...His triumph stems from his compassion, which wins him supernatural assistance-often in the form of a talking animal...
...Bettelheim's reputation as a child psychologist allowed him to make a commanding case, in contradiction to many of his colleagues, that children find release in seeing their fears externalized, then resolved...
...Tatar also highlights how fairy tales reverse common expectations...
...Hardly make-believe, these conditions reflected the experience of certain segments of society up through the Industrial Revolution...
...The Grimms' picture-book image of Germany as a land of enchanted forests with dwarfs smiling from beneath red and white mushroom caps, however, seemed too cruel a mockery...
...Because of the unfortunate homonym, the very name sounded somber and unpleasant...
...Jakob (1785-1863) and Wilhelm (1786-1858) published the initial edition of Nursery and Household Tales (Kinder- und Hausmärchen) in 1812 and spent the next 45 years revising it, producing seven editions in all...
...Kingdoms are tiny, and almost every valley is its own realm...
...The Freudian '40s had popularized the Oedipus complex to the extent that adults could hardly escape the implications of a hero who kills a giant and marries a princess, or a girl who outwits her stepmother to win a husband...
...Fairy tales, the author points out, are possibly the most ancient inheritance we possess-a link between us and every previous stage of human culture...
...One must recall this controversy to provide a proper context for Maria Tatar's The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales (Princeton, 227 pp., $19.95...
...While the Grimms disapproved of sexual material in fairy tales, they applauded the gruesome punishments concluding many of them as a boon to the moral education of children...
...The final paragraph of "Snow White" recounts the execution of the wicked queen, who must dance to death in red-hot iron shoes (the marriage of the heroine to her prince rates half a sentence...
...Their principal characters "are invariably introduced to us in dreary realistic settings utterly lacking the magical qualities associated with the genre...
...Women, whether heroines or witches, tend to outshine their men (who seldom even possess names): Gretel must rescue Hansel, Rapunzel restores sight to her blinded prince...
...In sum, observes Tatar, "the hard facts of fairy-tale life of fer exaggerated visions of the grimmer realities and fantasies that touch and shape the lives of every child and adult...
...The late Italo Calvino has argued that in contrast to the "continuous flow of blood" in Grimm, Italian folklore is marked by a more humorous spirit...
...Snow White sleeps peacefully with the same glowing red colors of life on her cheeks as Snaefrid, the most beautiful woman of all, at whose coffin sits Harald Fair-Hair...
...Much of the arguments centered on Grimm's Fairy Tales...
...Initiative is never exalted...
...Significantly, little objection was raised against the Dane Hans Christian Andersen or the sugary Walt Disney treatments of the French tales " Cinderella" and "Sleeping Beauty" ("Snow White" was more worrisome...
...The archetypal youngest son begins as a nonentity, less clever or handsome than his brothers...
...They were by no means the first to collect fairy talesthat activity had been popular since the 17th century-nor were their versions so faithful to the oral stories as they claimed...
...Driven by necessity, men hunt for food in woods teeming with dangerous beasts of prey...
...The excitement generated by those two renowned names helped create a favorable reception for Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (1977...
...Her book can be considered the third installment of the rehabilitation of Teutonic folk tales for American children...
...Tatar disagrees with Calvino...
...A number of psychologists and educators claimed those stories aroused superstitious fears about witches and ogres, possibly promoting violent behavior later in life...
...The popular success of the Grimms' effort sprung from their title, which encouraged mothers and nannies to purchase a tome by scholars for bedtime reading to their charges...
...The first came in 1973 with The Juniper Tree and other Tales from Grimm, a collaboration between the late Randall Jarrell and Maurice Sendak...
...The women they encounter become examples of "the eternal feminine" drawing them onward...
...Tatar notes how many fairy tales have been shaped to show the good fortune of millers and farmers, stalwart members of the working class...
...Tatar builds on Bettelheim's interpretation by extending it from the psychological to the sociological and literary realms...
...The plethora of references to spinning, for example, makes sense once one discovers that the tedium of the wheel was often relieved by a story teller who entertained the " spinning room...
...As a professor of Germanic languages and literatures at Harvard, she knows the Grimm brothers not only as folklore collectors but as philologists...
...Indeed, it is this promise of adventure and enchantment that keeps luring us back to the pages of the brothers Grimm...
...An even deeper cause of anxiety over the tales may have been the shock World War II delivered to mature imaginations...
...Those that involve servants playing cruel practical jokes on their masters were likely to be omitted by the Grimms-this form of amusement being deemed ethically unfit for the trip from barn to nursery...
...In the course of tracing the origins and evolution of fairy tales, she demonstrates that cruelty is a universal element in them...
...Hunger becomes such a crucial problem that peasants abandon their own children to conserve food (vide "Hansel and Gretel...
...The audience alters and adapts its details somewhat to conform to changing conditions, while preserving the basic elements...
...Adults often remember fairy-tale heroes as daring and resourceful...
...These folk tales have kept intact German myths that were thought to be lost, and we are firmly convinced that if a search were conducted in all the hallowed reaches of our fatherland, long neglected treasures [would be discovered] and help found the study of the origins of our poetry...
...The illustrator's hauntingly cryptic engravings and the poet's evocative prose complemented each other superbly, putting new life into the stories by stripping away sentimental pictures and wooden language...
...Our parents and teachers conspired to preserve in us the innocence they had lost in battle or in facing up to the Holocaust...
...In "Aschenputtel" (theGerman "Cinderella"), the heroine's pet doves peck out the eyes of her stepsisters...
...Certainly extra efforts were taken to shield children of my generation from images of violence and evil...
...They are not...
...Other stories celebrate types clever enough to avoid hard labor...
...The world folk tales describe goes back to the dawn of civilization...
...Sanitized variants, according to Bettelheim, leave inner conflicts untouched and offer unrealistic expectations of happy endings...
...This textual tampering was the Grimms' attempt to make stories intended for an audience of adult peasants suitable for middle-class children...
...Evoking the notion of a Teutonic Homer that so fascinated the Romantics, he contended that fairy tales cast new light on lost poetry epics: "Briar Rose [Sleeping Beauty], who is put to sleep after being pricked by a spindle, is really Brynhild [Brunhilde] put to sleep after being pricked by a thorn...
...The moral emphasis on humility helped make these stories appropriate for transformation from adult entertainment to bedtime fare for children...
...Tatar is particularly interested in the impact the Grimms' collection has had on the German novel...
...Nursery and Household Tales was published "just when folk tales were moving out of barns and spinning rooms into the nursery...
Vol. 71 • February 1988 • No. 3
