The Political Economy of Fairy Tales

In a TLS review of several recent books on fairy tales, Fracesca Wade points to the political context and economic setting of early folk and fairy tale collections.

Inspired by Herder, the Grimms, she observes, intended to recover Germanitas by study of natural German poetry: “Although the brothers drew widely on international literary sources – Perrault, Gianfrancesco Straparola, Madame d’Aulnoy – the bulk of the book was composed of oral tales collected from contributors in and around Kassel. Dorothea Viehmann, who sold vegetables at a market stall, shared around forty stories; the Grimms enlisted her picture for their frontispiece to showcase the authentic origins of their collection. . . . While the brothers were researching in the Kassel Library, Napoleon’s forces occupied the city; immediately the project achieved new political resonance, looking towards the possibility of a unified nation by laying claim to a common German literary heritage. Later, this vision would be reappropriated: under the Third Reich, Grimm tales were enshrined in the school curriculum, and one film adaptation told the tale of Red Riding Hood’s rescue by an SS officer. After the war, the Allies even proscribed the Grimms from schools and libraries as former fascist propaganda.”

The grim realities of nineteenth-century economics also shadow the tales: “Think of Hansel and Gretel, abandoned in the forest by their stepmother. In the first edition, even more horrific, it is their mother, and they are sent away not out of cruelty, but desperation. The siblings are lucky in comparison with the characters of “The Children of Famine”, which also takes as its premiss a poverty-stricken family that cannot feed its children. We never discover if the mother in this story would have abandoned her children to the mercy of a witch; by morning they have starved to death. For hungry families, Warner [Once Upon A Time] tells us, infanticide was an unfortunate option; stepmothers and orphans are the vestiges of a society where death in childbirth was common, while tales of adventurous youngest sons may reflect laws of primogeniture: all this is ‘stirred into the pot of story.’ A tale where a retired soldier with nothing left to live for sells his soul to the Devil is a witty variation on the quest tale, and betrays the difficulties of reassimilation after war; one of the Grimms’ contributors was a poor veteran who told them seven tales in exchange for some leggings. But Warner argues convincingly that fairy tales – also known as Wundermärchen, ‘wonder tales’ – were told to offer hope and escapism to those in dire straits, and endings are usually happy.”