Fairy Tales Kinder- und Hausm ärchen

1. Fairy TalesKinder- und Hausmärchen • Jakob Grimm (1785-1863) and his brother Wilhelm (1786-1859) wrote the best-known book in the German language. • Romanticism: project of discovering the true spirit of the German nation, which resided in the language and literature of the people. • Approx. 1795-1830. Age of Goethe and Napoleon.

2. Kinder- und HausmärchenWho were the Grimm brothers? • Their father is a respected court official, but dies young, thrusting the family into poverty. • Jacob and Wilhelm, the two oldest children, become overachievers to provide for their family. • Study of law in Marburg brings them to Friedrich Karl von Savigny, professor of law. • Savigny an important Romantic, believes in the unification of Germany. Teaches the Grimms to study German culture through the history of its laws.

3. Kinder- und HausmärchenWho were the Grimm brothers? • Savigny introduces the Grimms to the older circle of romantic poets in the area. • 1806 Jacob decides to make a living as a scholar of philology and literature instead of law. • 1806-1807 a job in the War Commission until the country is defeated by Napoleon. • 1808 Jacob and later Wilhelm become Royal Librarians in Kassel. First scholarly publications. • 1812 publication of Kinder- und Hausmärchen.

4. Kinder- und HausmärchenWho were the Grimm brothers? • 1829 they resign their positions in the library due to a denied promotion and disgust with local politics. • 1830 they both accept positions at the University of Göttingen. Gifted and stimulating teachers. • 1837 they and five colleagues protest the restoration of absolutistic rule and are dismissed. • Grimms blacklisted because of their liberal views. • 1841 Savigny and Bettina von Arnim get them positions in the University of Berlin. • 1848 Grimms representatives in the National Assembly in Frankfurt. Failed March Revolution in Germany.

5. Kinder- und HausmärchenWho were the Grimm brothers? • Jacob retires from politics and teaching (but not from research and writing). • The brothers spend their final years working on a complete historical dictionary of the modern German language. They make it to the word “Frucht” (fruit). • The project is assumed by other scholars upon their deaths – it is completed only in 1960, with teams from both East and West Germany working in collaboration.

6. Kinder- und HausmärchenWhy did they collect folklore? • In 1806, Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano publish a collection of German folk songs, Des Knaben Wunderhorn, which inspires the young Grimm brothers. • Through their mutual friend Savigny, the Grimms are asked to collect tales for a third volume of The Boy’s Wonder Horn. • Grimms see the project as a scholarly contribution to discovering and recording German cultural artifacts. Early form of cultural anthropology.

7. Kinder- und HausmärchenWhy did they collect folklore? • Contrary to legend, they did not travel the countryside in search of the tales. • Most tales told to them by family friends, mostly upper-middle-class women, some with a French background. • Wilhelm married one of their primary sources, Dörtchen Wild. Wilhelm was the primary editor for the later editions of this book. • Two brothers collaborated on most of their projects, always on extremely close terms with each other.

8. Kinder- und HausmärchenWhy did they collect folklore? • They send Brentano a copy of their tales, but he neglects the text and later donates the manuscript to a monastery (discovered only in the 20th century). • When Volume III of Des Knaben Wunderhorn does not materialize, the Grimms publish an edition of tales with many scholarly footnotes (1812). • Unexpectedly, the book is a popular success, and the brothers prepare Vol. II (1814).

9. Kinder- und HausmärchenWhy did they collect folklore? • In their lifetime, Kinder- and Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Tales) sees seven editions. • After they realize the popularity of the book, they delete the scholarly commentary and sought to “improve” the tales for children: less moral ambiguity in later editions. • Their work inspired collections of fairy tales in other national cultures in 19th century.

10. Kinder- und HausmärchenWhat else did the Grimm brothers do? • In addition to fairy tales, the Grimm brothers were the first scholars to do groundbreaking research in a number of areas. • In fact, they were two of the first professors of German literature ever, and helped shape the academic discipline as it is know today. • Most of the topics discussed in thiscourse –Eddic poetry and Norse mythology, Germanic languages, Germanic history and legends –were first studied by the Grimm brothers!

11. Kinder- und HausmärchenWhat else did the Grimm brothers do? • Grimm Brothers’ selected publications: • 1813-1816 Collections of Essays on Germanic folklore • 1815 Lays of the Elder Edda, edited volume • 1816 German Legends • 1819-37German Grammar(Jacob) • 1821 On German Runes (Wilhelm) • 1829 The German Heroic Legend (Wilhelm) • 1835-54 German Mythology (Jacob) • 1848-53 History of the German Language (Jacob) • 1852-1960 Historical Dictionary of the German Language

12. Kinder- und HausmärchenHistory of Fairy Tale Studies Important Dates in Fairy Tale Studies: 1697 Charles Perrault's Histoires ou Contes du temps passe, (Mother Goose Tales) is published. 1812 & 1814 Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm publish volumes I and II of Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Tales). 1835 Hans Christian Andersen publishes Fairy Tales Told for Children, some based on traditional folklore, including ‘The Wild Swans’ and ‘The Princess on the Pea.’

13. Kinder- und HausmärchenHistory of Fairy Tale Studies 1845 Norwegian Folk Tales, collected by Peter Christen Asbjornsen and Jorgen Moe appears, includes ‘East of the Sun and West of the Moon’ and ‘The Three Billy Goats Gruff.’ 1870-1910 The Golden Age of Illustration for Childrens’ books – Walter Crane, Gustave Dore, Arthur Rackham, Warwick Goble, et al. 1866 Aleksandr Afanasyev collects and publishes his first volume of Russian fairy tales.

14. Kinder- und HausmärchenHistory of Fairy Tale Studies 1890 Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky's ballet The Sleeping Beautypremieres in St. Petersburg. 1893 Engelbert Humperdinck's opera,Hansel und Gretelpremieres. 1937 Walt Disney releases his first feature length animated film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. 1945 The premiere of Sergei Prokofiev's ballet, Cinderella. In the following decades, new print, television, and film versions of fairy tales appear regularly.

15. Kinder- und HausmärchenWhat is a Fairy Tale? • Grimm’s collection contains many kinds of stories, including the magical (or wonder) tales, humorous tall tales, animal fables, and realistic folk tales. • Originally oral folk tales, with countless variants throughout Europe. • There are no “original” versions of tales, only earlier and later variants of tales. • Social context of tales changed when they were transformed into written literature.

16. Kinder- und HausmärchenWhat is a Fairy Tale? • Short stories in prose, originally for adults, but commonly for children nowadays (a development begun at the time of the Brothers Grimm). • A peasant perspective, quite unlike the aristocratic perspective in heroic legends or middle-class perspective of early modern legends. • Unlike legends, which deal with ostensibly historical events, fairy tales are set in avaguely medieval,indeterminate time and place. • Plots and images common in different lands.

17. Kinder- und HausmärchenWhat is a Fairy Tale? • Fairy tales typically have no character development – strong contrasts between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ characters are typical. • Use of magic and magical items is common. • Familial setting is typical, often dysfunctional or incomplete nuclear family setting. Many tales present a child’s perspective of the action. • Family tensions tend to play important roles. • Strong reliance on stock characters and very well-known motifs and plot structures.

18. Kinder- und HausmärchenWhat is a Fairy Tale? • A few common fairy tale motifs: • Triumph of the youngest, laziest, dumbest, weakest, most oppressed, least promising, etc. • Triadic structure, circuitous journey with reversal of fortune • (Familial) adversaries – establishment of improved and secure familial structure at end • Helping figures, with magical objects and creatures • Rewards in the form of honor, wealth, spouse, power • Talking animals – animate world, with enchanted cosmos • Happy end, poetic justice, reward and retribution

19. Kinder- und HausmärchenWhat is a Fairy Tale? • What are fairy tales not? • Morally unambiguous tales a product of the modern concern for proper child-rearing. • “Original” versions of many fairy tales contain a lot of sex and violence. • Protagonists can be active or passive, male or female, successful or unsuccessful. • Tales may be innocent or cynical in tone. • Difficult to generalize about fairy tales…

20. Kinder- und Hausmärchen How does one interpret fairy tales? • A Historical Approach to fairy tale research is very complicated. • “Origins” of fairy tales extremely difficult to trace, since motifs are common in Europe and even beyond – Cinderella stories are found everywhere. • Unlike many legends, there is absolutely no factual historical basis for folk tales. Actually, there are no truly realistic plots in any of the tales.

21. Kinder- und Hausmärchen How does one interpret fairy tales? • A Psychological Approach • Bruno Bettelheim argues that fairy tales present an internalpsychological truth: “In a fairy tale, internal processes are externalized and become comprehensible as represented by the figures of the story and its events.” • Some Common Topics: Power and class relations, Freudian sexual fantasies, Jungian archetypes, cultural images, Christian and pagan ideologies and rites, collective class consciousness, etc.

22. Kinder- und Hausmärchen How does one interpret fairy tales? • A Cultural Approach • Robert Darnton argues that “Folktales are historical documents, each colored by the mental life and culture of its epoch.” • Different variants of tales in one country or in different countries point to regional or cultural differences. • Details in fairy tales are often very arbitrary, depending on the interests of a particular audience.

23. Kinder- und HausmärchenHow does one study Fairy Tales? • A Comparatist Approach • 1961 Stith Thompson expands and translates Finnish scholar Antti Aarne'sThe Types of the Folktale(1910) into English in 1961. • The Aarne-Thompson Classification System becomes the most widely used for classifying Indo-European folktales, cataloging some 2,500 basic plots and over 10,000 motifs. • There are dozens or hundreds of variants for all of the Grimm fairy tales.

24. Kinder- und HausmärchenHow does one study Fairy Tales? • A Structuralist Approach • Vladimir Propp (1928) publishes Morphology of the Folktale (English translation 1958). He emphasizes the recurring structural features of folk and fairy tales. • Both the Aarne-Thompson classification system and Propp’s structural models are considered essential tools for the current study of folk tales. • Oral folk literature is difficult to interpret; a flexible, holistic method is probably best.

25. Kinder- und HausmärchenHow does one study Fairy Tales? • Fairy Tale structure as Wish Fulfillment • Frame with circuitous journey. • Dysfunctional family in opening frame. Suffering, helplessness and victimization of protagonist. • Adventures and tests in supernatural realm • Reversal of fortune, reward of marriage or power • Vengeance or punishment of villains – suffering projected onto the former oppressors. • Nearly everyone capable of cruelty and vengeance.

26. Kinder- und HausmärchenFairy Tales and Wish Fulfillment • “The Fisherman and his Wife” is a good example of wish fulfillment. • A fisherman catches a talking flounder that is really an enchanted prince, so he lets him go. • His wife, however, makes repeated requests from the fish, since he now has an obligation to the family: cottage, castle, king, emperor, pope, God. • Enchanted flounder grants all their wishes, which eventually bring them back to the hovel in which they began. Be careful what you wish for!

27. Kinder- und Hausmärchen What makes the Grimm tales unique? • Lukewarm reviews of the first edition led Wilhelm to edit the tales, with increasing changes in final editions. Further removed from peasant origins. • Transmission of tales often involves censorship or bowdlerization. • Violent subject matter was actually increased in many fairy tales (unlike U.S. versions!). • “Certain conditions and relationships” were deleted as inappropriate material for children: • Premarital sex incest pregnancy

28. Kinder- und HausmärchenCensorship and Fairy Tales Disney’s Tangled (2011). Good example of editing and revising of a fairy tale for new audiences. Disney interpretation of Rapunzel as repressed adolescent desire. Girl empowerment.

29. Rapunzel • Husband and wife have been wishing for a child for years, finally the wife gets pregnant. • They live in a house which borders a beautiful garden that belongs to a sorceress. • One day the wife stands at the window and beholds some rapunzel-lettuce that grows there and develops a craving for it. • Craving the rapunzel-lettuce, the wife falls ill with grief, so that the husband has to enter the garden to steal some of it. • Once the wife has tasted the lettuce, her craving increases, so the husband has to climb the wall once more.

30. Rapunzel • This time, the sorceress catches him. He explains his wife´s condition and the sorceress allows him to take as much lettuce as he wants – if she can have the child! • In fear, the man complies. • The child grows up to be a beautiful girl, named Rapunzel • Rapunzel is taken way to a tower in the forest when she is twelve years old (cite 43). • A few years later, a young prince happens by and watches the sorceress climbing the tower with the help of Rapunzel´s hair • At night, he calls “Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair for me!”

31. Rapunzel

32. Rapunzel • Rapunzel is shocked to find the first man she´d ever laid eyes on in her bedroom at night!!! • The prince proposes to her and she sighs, “YES!” • They make a plan to rescue Rapunzel: The prince will bring a skein of silk and she will weave it into a ladder, then they would ride away. • But Rapunzel blurts out the secret and the sorceress (mother Gothel) takes away the girl to a far off land. • She lays an ambush for the prince and tells him that he will never see Rapunzel again (cite 45) • Prince jumps off the tower in despair, is blinded by landing in thorns, lives in misery for years.

33. Rapunzel • Happy ending: On his ramblings, he meets Rapunzel by chance. As she weeps for joy, her tears fall into the prince´s eyes and his eyesight returns. • They return to the prince´s kingdom and live happily ever after. They pass their “test” and are rewarded. • The Grimms added the marriage proposal to the original version, which dealt (obviously) with premarital sex. • In the original version, it is her pregnancy that gives her away to the sorceress. • The twins are retained, but the context has been changed to obscure the parents’ indelicate behaviour.

34. Kinder- und HausmärchenAnimal Bridegrooms • The Frog King, or Iron Heinrich (2-5) • A good example of differences in versions of a fairy tale! • English version, the • princess kisses the frog • who turns into a prince, • and they live happily • ever after…

35. Kinder- und HausmärchenAnimal Bridegrooms • The German version presents more violence! • The Frog wants more attention from the princess than just a kiss (2). • The Frog follows the princess everywhere, even into her bed! (Freudian projection?!) • The girl is afraid of the Frog, so she dashes him against the wall (3).

36. Kinder- und HausmärchenAnimal Bridegrooms

37. Kinder- und HausmärchenAnimal Bridegrooms

38. Kinder- und HausmärchenAnimal Bridegrooms • “When he fell to the ground, he was no longer a frog but a prince with kind and beautiful eyes…” (3). • Her father gives his blessing, they become “dear companions” and get married. • In the manuscript version: The frog “falls down into her bed and lies there as a handsome young prince, and the king’s daughter lies down next to him.” • Wilhelm Grimm inserted the chaste scene with the father and the marriage, erased the sexual content.

39. Kinder- und HausmärchenAnimal Bridegrooms • “Beauty and the Beast” • “The Singing Springing Lark” • Adolescent heroines perceive their bridegrooms to be bestial and dangerous – monsters, wild animals – but succeed in rescuing or transforming them into attractive men. Domestication fantasy? • Psychological reading of the text emphasizes the transformation in the girl’s perception of masculinity rather than the physical transformation of the beast. • Adolescent anxiety with maturity and sexuality.

40. Kinder- und HausmärchenProhibition, Transgression, Punishment • In “Bluebeard,”(or variant “Fitcher’s Bird”), the bridegroom is a monster in human form. • The bride is given a key (or egg) for safekeeping, but her curiosity leads her to open a forbidden door and discover a monstrous secret. • Key/egg falls into blood; the stain is a mark of guilt. • The forbidden chamber represents “carnal knowledge” – the blood-stained key hints perhaps at loss of virginity or at marital infidelity.

41. Kinder- und HausmärchenProhibition, Transgression, Punishment • Oddly, narrators (and later editors) condemn curiosity more than serial murder!? • Stories seem to deal with adolescent fear of adults’ secrets, of maturity, marriage, and sexuality. • In both “Bluebeard” and “Fitcher’s Fowl”, the heroine defeats the would-be bridegroom and returns to her family and to her brothers. • In effect, she returns to her childhood existence and no longer has to worry about confronting the horrors of marriage or sexuality.

42. Kinder- und Hausmärchen Review of Interpretative Difficulties • Interpretation of fairy tales is complicated: • Many different versions of fairy tales. • No one “original” authoritative text. • Details of versions are especially arbitrary. • 4. Supernatural events invite interpretation. • 5. “Simple” tales encourage allegorical readings. • 6. Many interpretations tell us more about the anxieties of the interpreter!

43. Fairy TalesLittle Red Cap 101-105. • Tame Americanversion is well known. • In a Frenchversion, the heroine unwittingly consumes the flesh and blood of her grandmother, is called a slut by her cat, and performs a slow striptease for the wolf. • In an Italianversion, the wolf kills the mother, makes a latch cord of her tendons, a meat pie of her flesh, and wine from her blood.

44. Fairy TalesLittle Red Cap 101-105. • The German Version is slightly different: • Cake and Wine for grandmother. • Wicked Wolf tempts the “juicy morsel’ with flowers and birds to distract her. • Wolf gobbles up the grandmother. • Big ears, big hands, terribly big mouth… • Wolf gobbles up Little Red Cap and snores. • A huntsman happens by, hears odd snoring…

45. Fairy TalesLittle Red Cap

46. Fairy TalesLittle Red Cap

47. Fairy TalesLittle Red Cap • The Huntsman wants to shoot the sleeping wolf, but fears harming grandmother. • He cuts open the belly, and out jump Little Red Cap and grandmother. • They fill his belly with large stones – he leaps up and falls down dead.

48. Fairy TalesLittle Red Cap • Wilhelm Grimm added a short epilogue: • Huntsman gets the fur of the wolf. • Grandmother gets the cake and wine. • Little Red Cap gets an admonition never to stray from the path her mother has given her. • This nice little fairy tale has led to some surprising interpretations…. • Some actual interpretations:

49. Fairy TalesLittle Red Cap • Tale records contact with actual werewolves. • Little Red Cap represents the burning sun setting forth on her westward journey home. • Wolf represents male pregnancy envy, killed ironically by stones, symbols of his sterility. • Wolf is a projection of Little Red Cap’s pubertal sexual desire. • A parable of rape and female helplessness. • Usual reading: Girls should be wary of wolves.

50. Kinder- und Hausmärchen Gender Roles in Fairy Tales • Strictly defined gender roles created by the Brothers Grimm (originally more variation). • Boys use luck (and and sometimes) wits to achieve power and wealth. Hard work never makes boys wealthy or successful! • Girls use obedience and willingness to work to achieve a proper marriage. • All girls are beautiful – but industry and obedience make them desirable (e.g. Rumpelstiltskin).