Grimm Fairy Tales
lucy...@geocities.com
The Arts and Leisure section of the N.Y. Times had a wonderfully
detailed article about the adult nature of fairy tales, especially
those of the Brothers Grimm. Here's the reference, followed by
the link (which should be active for the next few days, I believe -
if not, I'll post the article).
November 29, 1998
It's Time for Fairy Tales With the Bite of Reality
By MARIA TATAR
http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/artleisure/grimm-fairy-tale.html
lucy anne
lucy...@geocities.com
(BTW, does anyone know whether or not their was a Dream character in
the Hans Christian Anderson tales that opened umbrellas in the heads of
the sleepers to bring them their dreams?)
--
Living vicariously sucks.
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Mariane Desautels
>
> Slightly off topic, but thought the group might be interested.
> The Arts and Leisure section of the N.Y. Times had a wonderfully
> detailed article about the adult nature of fairy tales, especially
> those of the Brothers Grimm. Here's the reference, followed by
> the link (which should be active for the next few days, I believe -
> if not, I'll post the article).
>
> November 29, 1998
> It's Time for Fairy Tales With the Bite of Reality
> By MARIA TATAR
> http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/artleisure/grimm-fairy-tale.html
Registration's required. Can't get the article.
Mariane
John W. Leys
> Registration's required. Can't get the article.
>
> Mariane
Then register. It's free and almost entirely painless ;)
--
Alba Gu Brath!
John W. Leys, J.S.P.S., F.L.S.
__
The Lord Byron HomePage -
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/8916/byron.html
The Leys Family HomePage -
http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Prairie/7934/
(Researching: Leys, Ross, Lang, Doyle, Tinsley, et al)
"There is something Pagan in me that I cannot shake off.
In short, I deny nothing, but doubt everything."
- George Gordon Noel, Lord Byron (1788-1824),
In a Letter to Francis Hodgson dated 4 December 1811.
Mariane Desautels
>
> Mariane Desautels wrote:
>
> > Registration's required. Can't get the article.
> >
> > Mariane
>
> Then register. It's free and almost entirely painless ;)
I'll show you painless... I had to retry about 6 times before they found
my entry suitable...
I hate Big Brother. He won't even lend me any money.
Mariane
John W. Leys
> John W. Leys wrote:
> >
> > Mariane Desautels wrote:
> >
> > > Registration's required. Can't get the article.
> > >
> > > Mariane
> >
> > Then register. It's free and almost entirely painless ;)
>
> I'll show you painless... I had to retry about 6 times before they found
> my entry suitable...
>
Well, I did say "almost" .. If I remember right I had similar problems with
it myself. Never did quite understand the point of having people registering
anyway ...
> I hate Big Brother. He won't even lend me any money.
I hear ya..
lucy...@geocities.com
Damn. Must've had a cookie on my system.
Welcome to the wonderful world of cut and paste, then...
-lucy anne
--
November 29, 1998
It's Time for Fairy Tales With the Bite of Reality
by MARIA TATAR
FEW children have been treated to what the novelist Margaret Atwood calls
"the complete Grimm," that unexpurgated collection of "The Nursery and
Household Tales" in which "every blood-stained ax, wicked witch and dead
horse is right there, where the Brothers Grimm set them down, ready to be
discovered by us." Our cultural definition of fairy tales as bedtime
reading forchildren has blinded us to what was at stake when these
stories were first told.
Once upon a time, fairy tales -- now ubiquitous in a holiday season
offering us everything from "The Nutcracker" to "Peter Pan" to the Young
Vic in their hard-edged "Grimm Tales" -- were adult entertainment.
These narratives, with their cruel and ribald touches, enlivened long
winter evenings devoted to repairing tools, mending clothes or
spinning yarn. To keep everyone awake, folk raconteurs relied on
earthy realism, blood-curdling melodrama, comic excesses and
bawdy humor. They appealed directly to their listeners' imaginations by
indulging in fantasies of romance and revenge to undo some of the
oppressive anxieties of everyday life and the tedium that marked the
realm of work.
When Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm started collecting folk tales in the early
part of the 19th century, they saw their effort as a way to build German
national identity byncapturing the "pure" poetic voice of the common
people, or Volk. Somehow, they neglected to note that scenes charged with
sadistic violence might not reflect so well on the character of that Volk.
Snow White's stepmother, for example, dances to death in red-hot iron shoes;
doves peck out the eyes of Cinderella's stepsisters; Gretel shoves the
witch into the oven, bolts the door and listens to the old woman's howls
as she "burns miserably to death."
The Grimms took special pride in "The Juniper Tree," a story in which a
woman decapitates her stepson, chops up his corpse and cooks the pieces
into a stew devoured with gusto by the boy's father. Its "happy" ending
culminates in the murder of the stepmother, who is crushed by a millstone.
Leafing through the graphic descriptions of murder, amputation,
cannibalism and torture in the Grimms' tales can make a reader hesitate.
How could "The Nursery and Household Tales" come to rank, after the Bible
and Shakespeare, as one of the Western world's best-selling books? It is
not necessary to read far into the collection to understand why these
stories have so powerful a hold on the imagination. As homespun versions
of myths, they display the passionate intensity of Homer, without the epic
grandeur and narrative play.
What is Thumbling's slaying of the ogre but a repetition in miniature of
David's killing of Goliath, Odysseus' blinding of the Cyclops or Siegfried's
conquest of Fafner? What are Cinderella and Cap o' Rushes if not sisters
under the skin with Shakespeare's Cordelia? Bringing myths down to earth -
inflecting them in human rather than heroic terms -- fairy tales are up close
and personal, telling us about the quest for romance and riches, for power
and privilege and, most importantly, for a way home.
The Brothers Grimm give us myth and cultural history in a single, compact
package. Putting a familiar spin on conflicts that inspire the stories in
the archive of our collective imagination, the tales are also culturally
symptomatic, at times even eerily prescient. Stories in "The Nursery and
Household Tales" may reflect fears that beset all of us, but they also
show how certain anxieties can take a sinister, local turn. The Grimms'
virulently anti-Semitic story, "The Jew in the Thornbush,"glorifies a
stalwart, guileless Teutonic lad and demonizes Jews as grasping, depraved
monsters, deserving prolonged, cruel punishments. It is no accident
that some historians trace the roots of Nazi ideologies to the generation of
Romantic writers to which the Grimms belonged -- writers who, in a curious
cultural twist, also produced and inspired the most celebrated artistic works
of the 19th and 20th centuries.
If our fairy-tale anthologies are heavily edited and censored, giving us
cooked rather than raw versions of the Grimms' tales, it is not only
because of Disney's hold on them. Most of us want to tell children
bedtime stories filled with hypnotic beauty, whimsical humor, exotic
enchantments and romantic mystery. We rightly worry that children will
not be able to manage the violent conflicts enacted in the earlier
versions and that high body counts will translate into even higher
anxiety. Yet the child psychologists all tell us not to fret, for those
older, uncensored fairy tales open up the imagination rather than shut it
down. Like the Grimms' "Golden Key" (the title of the last tale in the
collection), or like Jung's "hidden door," Bruno Bettelheim's "magic
mirror" and Joseph Campbell's "secret opening" to the subconscious, fairy
tales engage us in a double quest: the hero's and our own. The smallest
nursery fairy tale, Campbell reminds us, has the power "to touch and
inspire deep creative centers."
Is it any wonder that we have tried to salvage some of the force of fairy
tales by, among other things, establishing that annual holiday ritual of
attending performances of "The Nutcracker" with our children? The E. T. A.
Hoffmann story on which the ballet is based may not be an authentic fairy
tale, but it has a powerful imaginative charge, capturing the high drama
and passionate conflicts of the folk genre. This is Richard Wagner's
Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art, translated into theater for children.
The New York City Ballet is presenting George Balanchine's version, through
Jan. 3 at Lincoln Center.
"Grimm Tales," at the New Victory Theater on West 42d Street, also through
Jan. 3, offers a riskier alternative. Just as children were around when
peasants told tales in earlier centuries, children are welcome at these
performances by the Young Vic Theater Company of London, which provides
entertainment with an edge. (The two-hour program of six tales, including
"Cinderella," "Little Red Riding Hood" and "The Golden Goose," is recommended
for children ages 6 and up.)
Replicating and enriching the storyteller's craft, theater turns out to be
the perfect latter-day medium for traditional tales, because the players
tell the stories as they enact them, striving to move seamlessly from
narration to dramatization. Embracing minimalism with spare sets and
homely peasant costumes, the Young Vic players resist the temptation to
estheticize these stories, to weave a spell that will dull our critical
capacities and deaden us to what Auden saw as the fairy tale's power to
produce "symbolic projections of our own psyche."
In "Little Red-Cap" (the Grimms' title for "Little Red Riding Hood") the
wolf, a Hannibal Lecter look-alike, engulfs the heroine and her grandmother
in yards of black fur. Performances in London reportedly produced shrieks
as well as giggles, a strange mix of emotions that reminds us of how
powerfully these stories tap into primal anxieties and desires. As we
watch the woodsman open up the wolf's belly, fill it with a boulder and
sew it back up, we feel in the presence of something bloody, savage and
primitive, yet also eerily familiar. Whether we side with feminists and
read this story as a parable of rape, align ourselves with psychoanalysts
and their theories about the pleasure-seeking Oedipal child, or imagine
the cutting open of the belly (as does the poet Anne Sexton) as a kind of
Caesarean section, we can still experience the raw power of the folk tale.
If there is any mystery to fairy tales, it is that virtually everyone is
able to engage with them. Late in life, Charles Dickens confessed that
Little Red Riding Hood was his "first love": "I felt that if I could have
married Little Red Riding Hood, I should have known perfect bliss." The
novelist Angela Carter recalled how her grandmother used to impersonate
the wolf, making her granddaughter, who played the victim, "squeak and
gibber with excited pleasure." Like Dickens, Luciano Pavarotti was completely
enamored of Little Red Riding Hood. But rather than wanting to marry her,
he identified with the hooded girl and was fascinated by her ability to
emerge whole from the belly of the wolf, even in the face of death's
finality. "I dreaded her death," he notes in the introduction to an
illustrated version of the story, "or what we think death is. I waited
anxiously for the hunter." Accommodating virtually every reader and
listener, fairy tales have a remarkable cultural elasticity that allows
them to be twisted and pulled in all directions without losing their
basic critical mass.
Despite a determination to respect the savage turns of plot that endow
fairy tales with powerful affective energy, the Young Vic players keep
the morals added by the Grimms to successive editions of their "Nursery
and Household Tales." Once the two brothers recognized that their volume
had captured the imagination of a broad audience, they decided to turn it
into a child-rearing manual and worked hard to add lessons and morals to
stories that often veered off into the surreal and preposterous. The brutal
events in the Grimms' "Little Red-Cap" end with Red-Cap solemnly vowing
that she will never "wander off the path into the woods" when "mother has
warned me not to." Will that really make a difference the next time she
encounters a wolf in the forest?
Excessive fidelity to the letter of the Grimms' version means some missed
opportunities to take advantage of folk versions that position the heroine
as feisty young girl who escapes falling victim to the wolf and instead
joins the ranks of trickster figures. The humorist James Thurber inserted
himself into that tradition when the heroine of his "Little Girl and the
Wolf" takes an automatic out of her basket and shoots the wolf dead.
"Moral: It is not so easy to fool little girls nowadays as it used to be."
Object lessons and pithy morals may appeal to parents, but children seem
to prefer bodily torture. When Snow White's wicked stepmother dances to
death wearing red-hot iron clogs in the Young Vic production, we should
not be surprised that her frenzied gyrations and chilling screams are
punctuated by the sounds of children laughing, delighting in fantasies of
revenge.
In most performances of Humperdinck's "Hansel and Gretel" -- in the New
York City Opera version presented this fall, Manhattan was the setting,
with Central Park as the forest -- there is spontaneous applause when
Hansel and Gretel shove the witch into the oven. In the Grimms' tale, the
two children take off after stuffing their pockets with pearls and jewels.
The opera version involves the liberation of other captive children, who
sing and dance in delight once the witch, transformed into a gingerbread
snack, is taken out of the oven and distributed among them. Linda Gray
Sexton, the daughter of Anne Sexton, has written a heart-rending account
of childhood with an abusive mother and persuasively endorses the therapeu-
tic value of learning about those punishments. A passionate reader of the
Grimms' tales as a child, she would quietly sip the soup she had made for
herself in the kitchen, reading fairy tales and savoring the "child's
triumph over the adults around him," all to the sounds of her mother's
typewriter. The daughter late selected the tales from the Grimms that the
mother rewrote in verse for a heady volume of poetry called "Transformations."
"Of all the comforts that nature can offer, one of the loveliest and most
comforting is the unrestrained laughter of children," wrote one critic
about a 1956 British production of J. M. Barrie's "Peter Pan." (A revival
of a musical version of the play, with Cathy Rigby in the title role, is
now at the Marquis Theater on Broadway, through Jan. 3.) The reviewer was,
of course, contemplating something quite different from the effect produced
by performances of the Grimms' tales.
What fascinated him about "Peter Pan" was its ability to cast a soothing
magic spell, drawing the child into the enchanted region of Neverland
with its fairies, pirates and politically incorrect "redskins." Like
Lewis Carroll's Wonderland, Neverland is a stand-in for the child's rich
and vivid imagination. It may have room for adults and it may be construct-
ed by an adult author, but it is still the province of children, who must
perpetually defend themselves against the aggressive interventions of those
unruly creatures known as adults.
For adults, the pleasure afforded by a performance of "Peter Pan" is
doubled in observing the spellbound child in the audience as well as the
boy who will never grow up, on the stage. Even as "Peter Pan" reminds us
of the gulf separating what its author called "gay and innocent and
heartless" children from adults, it invites child and adult to suspend
disbelief for just one night, to clap hands and save Tinkerbell, to
escape to Neverland and re-experience the magic of childhood. Former
children get to pretend that they can be transported back into the
extravagant world of the child's imagination. Is anyone surprised then
that Steven Spielberg, with his sense of wonder about the child's sense
of wonder, would seize on "Peter Pan" and use it as a source of inspiration
for his sequel to it -- "Hook"? Written to be performed as a Christmas
pantomime in 1904, "Peter Pan," like "The Nutcracker," stands as a rite of
passage in our culture. We watch performances of both with our children, in
part with the hope that they will lose themselves in the beauty of the
performance, but in part also to repair our own damaged sense of wonder as
we contemplate the children on stage and off.
That the Victorian cult of childhood innocence, along with the Edwardian
cult of the boy child, has a sinister side to it has been supremely
evident ever since Morton Cohen drew our attention to Lewis Carroll's
photographs of half-naked little girls and challenged us to think hard
about the investment of adult authors in writing stories for children. A
LOOK at the splendid exhibit "Victorian Fairy Painting" now at the Frick
Collection, confirms exactly what was on the minds of most painters of the
time who embraced the simple pleasures of fairy kingdoms in an effort to
escape the pathologies of urban life. With the typical Victorian flair for
excess that belies the era's reputation for repression, the painters in
this exhibit eroticize and estheticize the "innocent" antics of fairy life.
These sexually charged paintings (Lewis Carroll went to the trouble of
counting the 165 naked creatures in Joseph Noėl Paton's magnificent "Quarrel
of Oberon and Titania") are symptomatic of the volatile mix in the Victorian
era of innocence, beauty and sensuality, a combination that has found its
way into what children, as well as adults, see and read.
The Grimms' tales and even "Peter Pan" originally may have been meant for
adult audiences, but they have made the transition from the parlor to the
nursery almost effortlessly.
The Young Vic's "Grimm Tales," like the collection on which it is based,
shares many grown-up secrets, but in a way appropriate to the
child. After engaging with the dramatic conflicts in "Peter Pan" and "The
Nutcracker," children will return with a renewed sense of wonder about
their own world and perhaps with a touch of trepidation about what it will
be like to turn into a former child.
Blacktech
Great article, Lucy Anne.
I have a copy of "Grimms Grimmest" and it's wonderful.
I also HIGHLY recommend (and I know this sounds squishy and femmy and all that,
but it really isn't in the least) "Women Who Run with the Wolves." Dr. Estes
takes the "rawest" versions of fairytales and explains their psychology. She
even rats on the Grimms where they changed fairytales to suit their own needs.
Really, really interesting (and useful) stuff.
Best,
Maria
Souls do not have eyes, but rather consumption and digestion -- their diet of
other souls. Blindly they eat. Blindly they know. Blindly they love...
Adeheathen
In article <19981201001511...@ng-cc1.aol.com>, blac...@aol.com
(Blacktech) writes:
>Great article, Lucy Anne.
>
>I have a copy of "Grimms Grimmest" and it's wonderful.
>
>I also HIGHLY recommend (and I know this sounds squishy and femmy and all
>that,
>but it really isn't in the least) "Women Who Run with the Wolves." Dr. Estes
>takes the "rawest" versions of fairytales and explains their psychology. She
>even rats on the Grimms where they changed fairytales to suit their own
>needs.
>Really, really interesting (and useful) stuff.
>
Marina Warner's books are very good along similar lines.
I just finished reading six lectures she did for The Reith Lectures (annually
on BBC radio) about roles of the family. There's lots of cross-referencing with
fairy stories and modern stories like "Childs Play" (!)
******************************************************************************
;:%:!8:-) [The Eyeball Kid]
BRIT POP IS DEAD !
come to http://members.aol.com/adeheathen/salamanda.html
Blacktech
>I just finished reading six lectures she did for The Reith Lectures (annually
>on BBC radio) about roles of the family. There's lots of cross-referencing
>with
>fairy stories and modern stories like "Childs Play" (!)
VERY cool. I'll have to check that out. :-)
Morgana
8< snip >8
>I also HIGHLY recommend (and I know this sounds squishy and femmy and all that,
>but it really isn't in the least) "Women Who Run with the Wolves." Dr. Estes
>takes the "rawest" versions of fairytales and explains their psychology.
Oooh..along those lines, may I suggest reading, "Happily Ever After :
Fairy Tales, Children, and the Culture Industry" by Jack David Zipes.
The history and psychology of fairy tales and their impact on the
socialization of children from the 16th century to modern times.
Great stuff. :)
---
Morgana.
"I close my eyes and the world drops dead, I lift my lids and all is born again."
Sylvia Plath "A Mad Girl's Love Song"
Remove "spam.off." from e-mail address.
Blacktech
>Fairy Tales, Children, and the Culture Industry" by Jack David Zipes.
>The history and psychology of fairy tales and their impact on the
>socialization of children from the 16th century to modern times.
>Great stuff. :)
I've heard before that's really good. More great reading to catch up on. :-)
Morgana
>>Oooh..along those lines, may I suggest reading, "Happily Ever After :
>>Fairy Tales, Children, and the Culture Industry" by Jack David Zipes.
>>The history and psychology of fairy tales and their impact on the
>>socialization of children from the 16th century to modern times.
>>Great stuff. :)
>
>I've heard before that's really good. More great reading to catch up on. :-)
>
Uhhuh...and then there's waiting for your stuff to come out. *grin*
Blacktech
>>>Fairy Tales, Children, and the Culture Industry" by Jack David Zipes.
>>>The history and psychology of fairy tales and their impact on the
>>>socialization of children from the 16th century to modern times.
>>>Great stuff. :)
>>
>>I've heard before that's really good. More great reading to catch up on.
>:-)
>>
>
>Uhhuh...and then there's waiting for your stuff to come out. *grin*
>
>---
>Morgana.
>
>"I close my eyes and the world drops dead, I lift my lids and all is born
>again."
> Sylvia Plath "A Mad Girl's Love Song"
>
Oh, Morgana. :-D You rule.
I'm hoping within the next few days to have my Evil Christmas Story ("Coming
Home") up on my web site. Trouble is I've lost my ftp info, so I can't upload
anything! Hopefully that will be rectified tomorrow. :-)
Morgana
8<snip>8
>>>I've heard before that's really good. More great reading to catch up on.
>>:-)
>>>
>>
>>Uhhuh...and then there's waiting for your stuff to come out. *grin*
>
>
>Oh, Morgana. :-D You rule.
Would you please inform the rest of the world?
Every time I say that, people laugh and pinch me cheeks. ;)
>I'm hoping within the next few days to have my Evil Christmas Story ("Coming
>Home") up on my web site.
Someone agrees with me... yes...Xmas is evil.
I can hardly wait.
> Trouble is I've lost my ftp info, so I can't upload
>anything! Hopefully that will be rectified tomorrow. :-)
Oh no! :o
I know we have a whole slew of technomages around these parts if you
need help. Sadly I'm not one of them, but they're here.
---
Morgana.
"I close my eyes and the world drops dead, I lift my lids and all is born again."
Sylvia Plath "A Mad Girl's Love Song"
Remove "spam.off." from e-mail address.
Esther_W...@yahoo.com
Mist and Fairy Tales published by Heineman is a very good series of essays on
the pschology of fairy tales and how the symbols fit dreams and real life. ]
Theres also a book called a dictionary of symbols, that is superb. I would
really reccomend this as a directory of symbology from christian, celtic,
chinese and aisian understandings of the symbols.
Blacktech
>
>Would you please inform the rest of the world?
>
>Every time I say that, people laugh and pinch me cheeks. ;)
OKAY LISSEN UP EV'RYBUDDEE. MORGANA RULES!
(My personal credibility notwithstanding.) :-D
>>I'm hoping within the next few days to have my Evil Christmas Story ("Coming
>>Home") up on my web site.
>
>Someone agrees with me... yes...Xmas is evil.
>
>I can hardly wait.
I figured out what happened. The webmaster changed the IP address and didn't
tell anyone. Also, he took away our personal passwords and accounts and made
it a generic account. ARGH. I might not be handless much longer for those
guys. But I should have the story up before the end of the weekend (in between
madly working on something new).
Christmas can be evil, indeed...
;-)
Best,
Morgana
>>>Oh, Morgana. :-D You rule.
>>
>>Would you please inform the rest of the world?
>>
>>Every time I say that, people laugh and pinch me cheeks. ;)
>
>OKAY LISSEN UP EV'RYBUDDEE. MORGANA RULES!
You hear that people?!!
>
>(My personal credibility notwithstanding.) :-D
*sigh*....I'll take what I can get...hehe...
>I figured out what happened. The webmaster changed the IP address and didn't
>tell anyone.
Say what?! :o
Isn't there some cardinal rule that says it's a felony to screw with
someone's internet access? And if so, isn't that somewhat akin to
capital murder or something?
> Also, he took away our personal passwords and accounts and made
>it a generic account. ARGH.
Yikes! Da nerve!
Hell, I'm ready to start a petition drive. Lets tar and feather this
guy like they did in the good ole days of yore!
Hmm... on the other hand, back in the good ole days of yore, I'd be
worth two donkeys and a sack of grain. Oh well, it's the thought that
counts. ;)