Book #58: Grimm's Fairy Stories

Book #58: Grimm's Fairy Stories by Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm

November 21, 2013


This is not the YA book that I referred to in my last post. I've been overlapping books lately; that other one will be my next entry. This book, a public domain classic that I downloaded on my Kindle, has been my, uh, "bathroom book" for about the last month. Of course, I don't just read it while in the bathroom. I have it on my phone, too, so when I've had a few free minutes, I've taken it out and gotten one of the stories at least partially read. Okay, that was probably more information than anyone needed to know...

Anyway, it should be pointed out that Grimm's Fairy Stories should not be confused with the full-volume editions of Grimm's Fairy Tales. The book that I read was probably more of a "greatest hits" sort of collection. A couple of things that I know about the Grimm brothers stories are this: first off, many of these stories are the basis of the well-known Disney princess and fairy tale stories that are so well loved; secondly, that the original stories were often controversial, viewed as not necessarily being appropriate for children, though that was the intended audience. I didn't find a whole lot in this collection that was what you would call disturbing, but some of the characters did meet gruesome (if not graphically described) fates.

I can understand how these stories have captured the imaginations of people around the world for generations. The stories are whimsical, and feature characters who are in the happiest or lowliest of circumstances. Characters who are snotty or evil meet their deserved ends, and characters who are kind and virtuous win the day. A happy ending for many lovely but poor girls is to marry a prince or a king. These are some of the original stories that set the standard.

And yet, there is some darkness about them, as magical stories in today's popular culture always seem to have at least a hint (or more) of darkness. Jealousy is often a motivating factor behind wicked actions. Stepmothers (often actually mothers in the original editions, but I read that the brothers changed it in later additions) abusing and starving and abandoning and killing their children. Call me cynical, but wouldn't it make the stories more real to keep the originals? After all, mothers are not always sweet and good. I've seen the evidence that there are terrible mothers out there, so why pretend that it isn't the case? But I digress...

I don't really feel like there's much to say about this collection of stories. They were sometimes delightful, sometimes boring, never too shocking or gruesome. The stories in this book continue to have a profound impact on popular culture today, so it's interesting to get a real feel for the source. I've never been a huge fan of Disney, or fairy tales, or anything of that sort. When I took a course on feminism during my undergraduate days, I bought in to the idea of fairy tales being sexist. I mean, I definitely believe that the brothers Grimm were biased against women. I can't think of many evil male characters in the book (at worst, foolish or vain or greedy), but almost every other story had a female character. The most evil male was the Evil One, the devil, who showed up in a story or two. Beauty in these stories is synonymous with virtue, and ugly girls were also evil, of course. Christ.

So, quite frankly, I would recommend reading this book with a frame for culture, but these are not stories that I would expose to my own children. Nor would I buy into much of that Disney commercialism crap, either. I would be a really awful mother in the 21st century, but I'm pretty sure I wouldn't run my children into the woods to die or throw them out of windows into rivers. Then again, I often wonder if it's possible to raise children in the world that we live in today.

This is old, but I thought it rather appropriate, considering that three of the six princesses shown here were in the Grimm brother's stories that I read: Sleeping Beauty (Briar Rose in the original work), Snow White (not to be confused with the Snow White in the "Snow White and Rose Red" story), and Cinderella.

This is not a book that I have read, but it was one of the "lit circle" options for my YA lit class. The group that read it, on the whole, did not seem enamored of it, to say the least. It seems to me to be a graphic retelling of "Snow White and Rose Red"...I don't remember anyone in their group bringing that up.