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Author
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Comment
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Don
Registered User
(8/23/05 6:05 am)
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Re: mistakes
I regret I don't have the time to summarize the Fabula article in any detail here. In short, the authors compare versions of the "Allerleirauh" tale from the Grimms' 1810 manuscript and their published editions of 1812 and 1857. The comparison shows how the Grimms modified the social and moral elements of their source tale for middle-class, juvenile readers, adjusting in particular the incest motif. If you can't locate the article for more details of the argument, then you might look at the discussion of "Allerleirauh" and incest in Maria Tatar's Off with Their Heads, where she sheds further light on the father/groom question and briefly summarizes some relevant German scholarship about the inconsistencies in the story and how confusion about the tale derives from the way the Grimms used their source. Beyond the specific question of Grimms' story, Tatar's discussion of incest in a wider range of tales is illuminating and worth reading.
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DividedSelf
Registered User
(8/23/05 7:20 am)
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Re: mistakes
That's great, thanks!
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JennySchillig
Registered User
(8/23/05 10:20 am)
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"D'oh!"
Why do I have this image of Jakob and Wilhelm reading the first edition, smacking their foreheads in unison, and going "D'oh!"?
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deathcookie
Registered User
(8/23/05 10:52 am)
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versions
I'm echoing Rosemary Lake's thought from earlier, but I do think the context of the story should also have a bearing on it.
Does the story even make sense if we go with the explanation that the two kings are the same king? I realize things do get lost in translation, but it's difficult for me to see why the princess would go to all the trouble of running away disguised in skins, only to purposefully allow her father to discover who she is and marry her. I realize the original tales were dark, but even a dark tale has to make some sort of sense, and follow the basic rules of story. Why would the Princess inexplicably change her mind about marrying her father after she was already "out of the woods?" Pun intended.
It seems far more logical that the discrepencies in the translations are due to mistakes, rather than assuming that the Grimms were watering down this story. Yes, I know the Grimms did water down the tales, but this tale seems incredibly awkward if we go with the idea that the king in the latter half of the story is her father.
Does anyone else agree?
-Callie
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catja1
Registered User
(8/23/05 2:34 pm)
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Re: mistakes
Yes; I've read that incest haunted the Gothic/Romantic period much as homosexuality haunted the late Victorians. James Twitchell's Forbidden Partners is an excellent literary-historical survey of the incest theme. What's interesting is that parent/child incest is almost universally reviled (in Western Europe/America in the 18th-20th centuries) -- Shelley's Cenci, and so forth -- but brother/sister incest was much more ambiguous. Incestuous siblings-- knowing or unknowing -- during this period were often presented sympathetically, and the mood is tragic rather than condemnatory. Byron's Manfred, Shelley's Laon and Cythna, Polidori's Ernestus Berchtold, and a host of Gothic novels all treat the incestuous siblings as tragic victims, and sometimes heroically rebellious. These treatments directly influenced V.C. Andrews, too. And then there's the folk ballad tradition; there's a whole host of incest ballads, almost all brother/sister, and almost all tragic.
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deathcookie
Registered User
(8/23/05 3:08 pm)
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Re: mistakes
But that still doesn't explain the awkwardness of the story, if in fact the king of the forest is her father. I'm not denying the prevalence of incest in grimm stories, I'm just saying that in this particular story I don't understand what the Princess's motive for "wooing" the king would be if he is supposed to be her father. I mean that's what she was running away from in the first place! So why would she now, whilst incognito, and safe from his advances, decide to reveal her identity to him through clues, ultimately ending in their marriage?
One of the first rules in creating a story is keep your characters consistent. If the heroine hates chocolate in chapter one, she doesn't suddenly love hershey bars in chapter 5. That doesn't mean characters don't experience growth and change over the course of a story, but the changes can't be inexplicable. A princess isn't disgusted by her father's attempts to marry her, and then suddenly she's ok with it.
If the original talespinner of "all-kinds-of fur" was relating this story to a group, can you imagine the questions from the audience? She'd never be able to get through the story without being pelted with a whole bunch of "but WHY!?"
I don't know, I'm just sayin'......
-Callie
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Veronica Schanoes
Registered User
(8/23/05 4:44 pm)
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Re: mistakes
Actually, in telling this tale out loud, the blurring between restrictive/unrestrictive clauses that Don mentioned as the cause of the confusion would be pretty well settled by tone of voice.
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Rosemary Lake
Registered User
(8/23/05 11:59 pm)
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comparing
I'm no scholar, but what interests me in such questions is comparing different versions of similar stories. These motifs all mixed and matched, but some elements remained stuck together. :-) Playing disguise/token games is something that occurs away from home, in the castle of an outside prince, not with a father; occasionally at the end of a 'salt' story I think the father does not recognize his victorious daughter. Before meeting that prince, girls leave home for various reasons: banished by a quarrel about salt etc; fleeing a cruel stepmother; fleeing a forced marriage (not _all_ forced marriages were euphemised incest).
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Lamplighter
Registered User
(9/2/05 3:11 am)
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Re: comparing
This is a really interesting thread.
I try not to follow lines of thought that I find unpleasant; not in a non-confrontational way, just don't like dwelling on the negative unecessarily. I usually run away from stories such as the one we are discussing as a result.
Whilst the translation/interpretation mistake theories often stand examination ("Turn the other cheek" not being an act of submission, but defiance against Roman legally slapping Jews, for example), perhaps in this case there is an invitation to think the unthinkable in the actions of our heroine? Her very peculiar behaviour perhaps emphasises the very peculiar behaviour of consentual non-sibling incest relationships?
Or is this reading way to much into the intentions of the authors? I guess there would be other examples of such intent if it were present. For this to really work, we would have to consider the other stories collected at the same time in a similar, message-heavy light?
Probably just a mistake then?
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flyingwoman
Registered User
(9/5/05 11:15 pm)
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red shoes
What is the "bloody shoes and all" refering to?
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Veronica Schanoes
Registered User
(9/6/05 1:39 pm)
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bloody shoes
It's referring to the earlier versions of Cinderella in which her sisters cut off various parts of their feet in order to fit into the glass slipper, and are only found out when some birds tell the prince about the blood in the shoe. The poster is referring to the gory aspects of tales.
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elfinkt
Unregistered User
(9/18/05 3:48 pm)
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Origins of donkeyskin..ect
Actually,
I don't think that Grimm's first version of the story is necessarily
a mistake....The first recorded versions of any kind of fairy tales
is those written by straparola's book. In there the version of the
story (all-kinds-of-fur)is not only about incest but also about
some form of abuse. See www.pitt.edu/~dash/incest...straparola
for further details. Literally the German word translation is closer
to all-kinds-of-fur rather than Donkeyskin.
The suggestion is that fairy tales used to be more closely tied to their forerunners...courtly romances and obviously that they were presented to a more adult audience.
When one looks at Grimm's books the trend is to clean up the sex and language (although not the violence) the later the edition. Scholars often comment that the reason for this is because it was not until later that the Grimm's decided that fairy tales might be a good form of entertainment for "children," for this was a new concept. Thus the "cleaning up" of Cinderella to having no bloody shoes or pecked out eyes.
:)
Katy,
P.S. For more information about the Grimm brothers I suggest picking up a biography, which will dispel many myths including that of the Grimm's traveling the countryside to record tales...Scholars today think that the Grimm brothers played the fairy storytelling game in their parlor, and recieved a lot of information from their middle class sisters rather than the countryside!
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Rosemary Lake
Registered User
(9/18/05 7:32 pm)
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Ashliman
[[ straparola's book. In there the version of the story (all-kinds-of-fur)is not only about incest but also about some form of abuse. See www.pitt.edu/~dash/incest...straparola ]]
An interesting essay by Ashliman. Here is an excerpt:
"Not only do the young women's future spouses resemble their fathers in rank and disposition, in addition the tales are often told in such a way as to make it easy to confuse the identities of the first master and the second master (if indeed the two are different).
"I often encounter students who read "All-Kinds-of-Fur" with the understanding that the king who found the heroine hiding in the hollow tree and who ultimately married her, was none other than her own father. Countless listeners from the past must have understood the story in this same way, thus turning it into an account of consummated sexual attraction between father and daughter."
A point on the other side, might be that at the second castle there is a ball and the heroine appears in the gift dresses, looking beautiful, and is admired by all. If this were at the same castle she had run away from, it seems someone would have recognized her.
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JennySchillig
Registered User
(9/27/05 1:47 pm)
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Re: Ashliman
Actually, didn't the Grimm's version of Cinderella (with the bloody shoes and pecked-out eyes) come later than the Charles Perrault, which is the version we all know (fairy godmother, pumpkin, mice-into-horses)?
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Veronica Schanoes
Registered User
(9/27/05 2:04 pm)
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Re: Ashliman
Grimm came after Perrault, but Perrault was kind of a big softie, as brutal punishments are pretty common in this tale.
Quoting Maria Tatar in The Classic Fairy Tales: "This ending,
along with the details of the mutilation of their feet, is often
cited as evidence of the brutal, violent turn taken by German fairy
tales. Yet the Grimms' punishment for the sisters is relatively
mild when compared to what befalls their counterparts in other cultures.
An Indonesian Cinderella forces her stepsister into a cauldron of
boiling water, then has the body cut up, pickled, and sent to the
girl's mother as 'salt meat' for her next meal. A Filipino variant
shows the stepmother and her daughter 'pulled to pieces by wild
horses.' And a Japanese stepsister is dragged around in a basket,
tumbles over the edge of a deep ditch, and falls to her death."
The Chinese version has the stepmother and her daughter struck by
falling stones and dying that way. In a pre-Perrault French version,
Cat Cinderella, Cinderella murders her first wicked stepmother only
to find that the next one is worse.
More conciliatory Cinderellas are to be found in Perrault, an Armenian version, and some American versions.
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Rosemary Lake
Registered User
(9/27/05 7:12 pm)
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punishment
Does the incestuous father often get punished? Iirc Ashliman may have mentioned only one version where he did. King Lear got punished, in effect, but that was a Salt story instead of an Incest story.
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Rosemary Lake
Registered User
(9/30/05 2:19 pm)
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Iron Hans
I just noticed the same sort of confusion in reading "Iron Hans" at www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm136.html
When the prince, considering himself exiled, goes to seek a gardener's job, it wasn't clear whether he went back to his father's castle or to a different castle. Because there was nothing to distinguish the castles and he was taking so much trouble to stay disguised, I read it part way through thinking it must be the same castle.
Of course it's a different tale type, but as in 'love like salt', the royal protagonist leaves home as result of a silly conflict, lives in lowly disguise at another castle, and wins a royal mate there after playing disguise/token games.
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