Grimm's Fairy Tales (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

In the preface to the first edition, the Grimms celebrate the purely German and authentically oral and peasant origins of the tales. They had the good luck, they say, to find a village storyteller, Frau Viehmann, whose tales were “genuinely Hessian,” thus from a “rough-hewn” and relatively unchanged and isolated region.^a The folktales, they write, “have kept intact German myths that were thought to be lost”; further search “in all the hallowed regions of our fatherland” would reveal other treasures. The German and oral roots are emphasized again and again: “Everything that has been collected here from oral traditions is (with the exception of ‘Puss in Boots’ perhaps) purely German in its origin as well as in its development and has not been borrowed from any sources.”

Actually, the character and provenance of the tales are much more complicated than this. As Jack Zipes explains in The Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forests to the Modern World (see “For Further Reading”), the Grimms did in fact get tales from peasants and lower-class people, but they also acquired them from other kinds of informants, including educated young women among their friends from upper-middle-class and aristocratic families. These women had heard some of their stories from peasant nannies or servants, but they had also read them in books and magazines. The Grimms themselves took “Jorinde and Joringel” and other tales from books; “The Juniper Tree,” written by the artist Philipp Otto Runge (1777-1810), first appeared in a magazine. The use of something other than oral materials is hinted at in the rather confusing sentence above referring to “Puss in Boots.” At least one of the Grimms’ young women informants came from a French-speaking Huguenot family and would have known the celebrated fairy tales of Charles Perrault, published in 1697, including “Le Maôître Chat, ou le Chat botteé,” the Puss in Boots story. According to the German philologist and Grimm scholar Heinz Roölleke, even Frau Viehmann, the Hessian storyteller, was actually the daughter of an innkeeper, of partly French Huguenot ancestry, and thus not quite the echt German peasant portrayed by the Grimms (McGlathery, ed., The Brothers Grimm and Folktale).

Apparently troubled by these issues, the brothers return to them in the preface to the second edition, where they write, “We have reviewed everything that seemed suspicious, namely what might have been of foreign origin. . . . ” They threw out “Puss in Boots,” but retained other tales almost identical to those of Perrault—among them “Cinderella,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” and “Allerleirauh” (“Many Furs”), which is essentially Perrault’s “Peau d’aône” (“Donkey Skin”). The Grimms knew the earlier collections well and even allude explicitly in the preface to the tales of Perrault, Giambattista Basile (1575-1632), Giovan Francesco Straparola (c. 1480-1557), and the collection of medieval Welsh tales known as The Mabinogion.

Although all of these works long antedated their own, indicating that some of the tales they were collecting must have derived from these earlier “foreign” sources, the brothers seem to have convinced themselves that their versions were separate German tales that somehow resembled the “foreign” ones or were even their true originals. Trying to account for the “widespread diffusion of the German tales,” they write, “we find . . . precisely these tales, throughout Europe, thus revealing a kinship among the noblest peoples.” Here, in their eagerness to praise the superiority of northern Europeans, they appear to be ignoring some obvious non-European sources, such as The Thousand and One Nights, the famous collection from Arab, Persian, and Indian sources, in which, to cite just one example, “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” contains elements that will later appear in the Grimms’ “Simeli Mountain.”

In the preface to the second edition, the Grimms emphasize the “accuracy and truth” of their methods and condemn others who embellish folk materials. Yet they acknowledge their own editorial efforts: “Fragments have been completed, many stories have been told more directly and simply, and there are very few tales that do not appear in improved form.” Moreover, stories that “complemented each other” have been combined—sometimes producing, it must be said, awkward results. The Grimms also put into the stories rhymes and proverbs to give the sense of real peasant storytelling. Yet they write, “We did not add anything from our own resources,” but only sorted out “what is pure, simple, and yet intact from what is inauthentic.” “Authenticity,” then, was not a quality intrinsic to the tales as recorded, but rather an ideal to be striven for, something to be created in order to give the tales their true character.

The same kind of self-contradiction characterizes the Grimms’ attitude toward “certain matters.” As the tales became popular with children, parents complained about references to sex and other bodily functions. In the first edition, the brothers dismiss such criticism on the grounds that everything in the tales is natural: “Nature itself . . . has let these flowers and leaves grow in these colors and shapes.” In the second edition, however, after positing “the innocence . . . of a straightforward narrative that does not conceal anything wrong by holding back on it,” they go on to say, “nonetheless, in this new edition, we have carefully eliminated every phrase not appropriate for children.” Over the course of successive editions, many erotic and excremental references were cut out or toned down. In the first edition, for example, the donkey in “The Table, the Ass, and the Stick” emits gold from both ends, but later the gold comes only out of its mouth. In the first edition, after her nightly frolics with the prince, Rapunzel notices that her clothes are getting tighter; later editions delete any reference to this suspicious weight gain. The process of revision and editing to make the stories less offensive, more coherent, more “authentic,” and so on, went on continuously, beginning with the first handwritten transcriptions from oral sources until the final edition of 1857. In their attempt to find and record the authentic voice of the German folk—“the value of a voice speaking directly to the heart”—the Grimms seem to have ended up with all the ambiguities of writing.

The whole idea of a purely oral tradition of the tale has in fact been questioned. The French stories that made their way into the Grimms’ volumes were certainly written. They came, via Perrault and others, out of the French conte, a sophisticated mode of storytelling that had been a pastime and jeu d’esprit in aristocratic salons in France since the late seventeenth century. Some of these stories were invented by their upper-class authors, but others were acquired from peasant nurses and servants. It seems that tales passed in and out of print in France, as in the German lands and elsewhere. Just as upper-class writers heard tales from illiterate tellers and embellished and published them, so lower-class people heard stories from books, modified them, and passed them on, until eventually they made their way once again into print.

The distinction between oral and “literary” material is thus not clear. Nor is there a clear distinction between the conte de feées, the fairy tale that dealt mostly with aristocratic characters and marvelous events, and the folktale, with its real-life setting of farm and village. The Grimms’ collection contains tales of both kinds and many that are mixed, with the forest, which is both natural and full of mystery, functioning as a kind of intermediate space between the real world of peasants and farm animals and the fantastic realm of talking beasts and enchanted castles.

Whether oral or written, the modes of transmission and dispersal of the tales remain somewhat obscure. How do the same tales or motifs turn up in widely separated cultures? The farther these motifs are pursued through time and space, the more tangled the lines of possible influence and transmission. The German Sanskrit scholar Theodor Benfey proposed in 1859 in his preface to the Panchatantra, a collection of Indian tales, that the European tales had originated in India and spread from there. This theory of “monogenesis” was challenged in 1893 by French philologist and medievalist Joseph Beédier, who argued for “polygenesis,” the independent origins of tales found in different parts of the world. In the latter case the remarkable re semblances among tales from different times and places would have to be accounted for by fundamental similarities in the physical and psychological patterns of human life across cultures.

In the blurred logic of their prefaces, the Grimms seem to be struggling with all of these problems, and with the ambiguous and heterogeneous nature of their material. In their search for the purity and simplicity of the German oral tradition, they found both less and more than they sought. The tales—natural “flowers and leaves” supposedly plucked from pristine country lanes—turn out in many cases to be complex hybrid blooms whose genetic structure and inheritance are still not fully understood.

The study of folk and fairy tales has given rise to many theories and schools of interpretation. Anthropological and mythical interpreters find in the tales allusions to primitive rituals, especially initiation rites, as well as prescientific and mythic representations of natural phenomena, such as the change of the seasons. For Freud, fairy tales reveal unconscious fantasies like those in dreams. The psychoanalytic approach is most fully developed in a study by Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, which contains interpretations of many of the Grimms’ tales. Under the influence of the theories of Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, sees in the hero of the tale and his trials archetypes of the collective unconscious, the timeless reservoir of universal human experience. In Morphology of the Folktale, the Russian formalist critic Vladimir Propp classifies tales according to a limited number of functions performed by the characters, always in a fixed sequence. The historical-geographic method of the Finnish folk lorist Antti Aarne and the American Stith Thompson traces tales back through variants to their presumed places of origin. Feminist critics try to show how fairy tales reflect and perpetuate patterns of male domination and female subjection and passivity, an argument incorporated into a broader Marxist critique focused on the political and social dimension of the tales by Jack Zipes, a scholar and translator of the tales.

No single theory can account for the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, a complex, multidimensional work made up of more than 200 smaller works of varying type and quality, with many layers of intention and meaning. Although the Grimms selected, edited, expanded, revised, and generally imposed their own sensibility on the tales, giving them a certain unity of tone, they did not invent them. The tales come from different times and places and retain the traces of their origins—oral and written, primitive and sophisticated, peasant, middle class, and aristocratic—all filtered through the particular historical and class consciousness, the moral ideals, and the unconscious wishes and fantasies of the brothers themselves. Thus they present difficult problems for criticism. A comparison of two of the most interesting approaches—the Marxist analysis of Jack Zipes and the psychoanalytic explication of Bruno Bettelheim—may cast some light on these problems and on the tales themselves.

Jack Zipes focuses on the social and historical context and consciousness of the Grimms and their work. In Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion, he asserts that in the early folktales “the main characters and concerns of a monarchistic, patriarchal, and feudal society are presented, and the focus is on class struggle and competition for power” (p. 8). Although injustice and oppression are temporarily overcome to produce the usual happy ending, this happens through magical means, leaving relationships of power fundamentally unchanged. Zipes argues that the Grimms adapted the old tales to the ideals of nineteenth-century capitalism, with the goal of socializing children to bourgeois society:

The male hero learns to be active, competitive, handsome, industrious, cunning, acquisitive. His goal is money, power, and a woman (also associated with chattel). His jurisdiction is the open world. His happiness depends on the just use of power. The female hero learns to be passive, obedient, self-sacrificing, hard-working, patient, and straight-laced. Her goal is wealth, jewels, and a man to protect her property rights. Her jurisdiction is the home or castle. Her happiness depends on conformity to patriarchal rule (p. 57).

In Fairy Tale as Myth, Myth as Fairy Tale, Zipes says that the best-known tales have become myths, thereby taking on a quasi-religious authority that disguises their roots in a particular historical and political context. Following the ideas of the French literary critic and theorist Roland Barthes (1915-1980), Zipes claims that this mythification of the tale makes what is contingent, political, and ideological appear natural, true, and universal. In this way, the classic tale has become “dehistoricized, depoliticized to represent and maintain the hegemonic interests of the bourgeoisie” (p. 6). In a chapter entitled “Rumpelstiltskin and the Decline of Female Productivity,” Zipes analyzes the tale of the miller’s daughter who spins straw into gold with the aid of a tyrannical gnome in the context of changes in the manufacture of linen after the invention of the spinning machine in 1764: “The Grimms were making a social-historical statement about the exploitation of women as spinners and the appropriation of the art/craft of spinning by men” (p. 55).

Like Jack Zipes, Bruno Bettelheim also sees folk and fairy tales as influencing the child’s development and relationship to society, but in quite a different way. In The Uses of Enchantment, Bettelheim is concerned not with the historical and political dimensions of the tales, but rather with their representation in symbolic form of the child’s inner life, which he sees as essentially timeless rather than rooted in a particular historical context. “By dealing with universal human problems, particularly those which occupy a child’s mind, these stories speak to his budding ego and encourage its development, while at the same time relieving preconscious and unconscious pressures” (p. 6). The reality of the fairy tale is not that of the external world, says Bettelheim: “No sane child ever believes that these tales describe the world realistically” (p. 117). The fairy-tale kings and queens, with their arbitrary power, are not the unjust authorities of the world of history and politics, but rather the monarchs of the child’s daily life, the father and mother. The prevalence of evil stepmothers in fairy tales is attributed by Zipes and other critics to the frequency in earlier centuries of death in childbirth, which left widowers to take new wives hostile to the first wife’s children. Bettelheim, however, sees the evil stepmother character not as a product of actual historical conditions, but as a psychological stand-in for the cruel, angry, or rejecting side of the real mother, who can then be idealized, in the person of the dead biological mother, as all good and loving. This interpretation is substantiated by the fact that after the first edition, Wilhelm changed mothers to stepmothers in “Snow-White and the Seven Dwarfs” and “Hansel and Grethel.”

The extremes of absolute good and evil in the tales, according to Bettelheim, appeal to the tendency to polarization on the part of the immature ego, which cannot yet tolerate the mixed and ambiguous nature of real mothers and of reality generally. Dragons, giants, and demons also correspond to aspects of the child’s inner life—anxieties, hatreds, sadistic fantasies. In these frightening creatures, the child meets and conquers “the monster he feels or fears himself to be, and which also sometimes persecutes him” (p. 120).

One of Bettelheim’s most sustained analyses is of “Briar Rose,” the Sleeping Beauty story; which he reads as an account of adolescence and sexual maturation. In this story a king, having been told by an evil fairy that his daughter will prick her finger on a spindle and die, tries to avert the curse by banishing all spinning from the castle. Yet inevitably, at the age of fifteen, the princess manages to find a spindle, pricks her finger, and begins to bleed, inheriting the prophesied “curse” of menstruation. She falls into an enchanted sleep—the narcissistic trance of adolescence—protected against premature sexual encounters by a thorny hedge, until wakened to mature sexual love by the prince’s kiss.

Zipes, who attacks Bettelheim’s interpretations on the grounds that they ignore historical and social contexts, reads the Sleeping Beauty story very differently, as “a bourgeois myth about the proper way males save . . . comatose women” (The Brothers Grimm, p. 152). The charge of sexual stereotyping in the tales, however, does not concern Bettelheim: “Even when a girl is depicted as turning inward . . . and a boy aggressively dealing with the external world, these two together symbolize the two ways in which one has to gain selfhood: through learning to understand and master the inner as well as the outer world” (p. 226). Bettelheim believes that children are able to relate a story to their own experience regardless of the main character’s sex.

Bettelheim explores the psychological richness of the tales in fascinating detail, opening up endless possibilities of understanding and interpretation. But he does tend to idealize them, emphasizing their beauty and their healing properties. In a detailed analysis of “Cinderella,” for example, he argues that the tale deals with the hidden sexual and aggressive tensions within the family and finally resolves them in a positive way: “ ‘Cinderella’ sets forth the steps in personality development required to reach self-fulfillment, and presents them in fairy-tale fashion so that every person can understand what is required of him to become a full human being” (p. 275).

There are, however, other related but less beautiful tales dealing with the relationship between a widowed father and his daughter, such as “The Handless Maiden” and “Allerleirauh” (“Many Furs”), which Bettelheim does not analyze, perhaps because they do not present such positive developments, at least not very convincingly. These stories are less famous than “Cinderella,” and for good reason. In “Allerleirauh” the widowed king wants to marry his daughter, who runs away, disguising herself as a kitchen maid. In “The Handless Maiden,” the king asks his daughter to let him chop off her hands in order to save himself from the Evil One, suggesting powerful evil desires that can be thwarted only by mutilation; the daughter submits and then flees her father.

In both of these fascinating stories, the father—like King Lear, whose story originates in a related legend—demands an excessive and unnatural love from his daughter. The Oedipal horrors—incestuous desire, abuse, and mutilation—are too obvious and frightening to make for entirely agreeable reading. Both stories end well: The Handless Maiden gets silver hands and then grows new ones, and both heroines marry kings—perhaps new father figures. But the happy endings seem unconvincing—especially the new hands!—and not fully adequate to the anxieties aroused by the original situations.

In another version of the Handless Maiden story, considered more authentic by the Grimms themselves, the girl’s father asks for his daughter’s hand in marriage and, when she refuses, has her hands and breasts chopped off. As usual, the most shocking details were deleted from the published version by the Grimms. In the words of the critic Peter Dettmering, “Faced with monstrously cruel mothers and with fathers driven by incestuous desires, they sought their salvation in the editing of texts” (quoted in Tatar, The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales, p. 37). Going back to the earlier versions of one of their tales is rather like the process Freud describes in interpreting a dream: The edited text, like the manifest dream remembered in consciousness, conceals a repressed forbidden content, often an unedited account of cruelty and incest.

Abuse of children is presented more openly where there is no explicitly sexual element. In dozens of tales children are starved, beaten, persecuted, or abandoned, mostly by their own fathers or (step)mothers. These tales do not always reach a hopeful resolution like that of “Hansel and Grethel,” which Bettelheim reads as an account of the “difficulties and anxieties of the child who is forced to give up his dependent attachment to the mother and free himself of his oral fixation” (p. 170). Oral needs could also be said to figure in “The Poor Boy in the Grave,” where a starving orphan boy, beaten and abused by his master, betrayed by the judge who might have protected him, gorges himself on stolen honey and wine in a last desperate effort to gratify his hunger before dying. The fire that destroys the home of the cruel master is no consolation to the reader of this bitter tale, which could have been taken from a real-life account in the newspaper, in the Grimms’ time or our own. Although a psychoanalytic interpretation in terms of children’s oral needs and fears could be worked out, it would serve only to minimize the real-life horror depicted here.

In “The Juniper Tree,” one of the most celebrated and moving tales, a little boy is killed by his stepmother, who tries to blame the crime on her daughter and then cooks the boy in a stew and feeds it to his father. The motif of the child fed to the father has a past in Greek mythology and could also be analyzed in psychoanalytic ways, like “Hansel and Grethel,” in terms of the child’s fears of its own unconscious cannibalistic impulses. But despite the fantastic ending, in which the mother is killed and the child resurrected, the acutely observed details of the mother’s behavior and feeling—her momentary remorse, her attempt to blame the daughter—give it a chilling realism and suggest the horror of adult malice rather than childish fantasy. Bettelheim does not comment on this story, perhaps because it fits less well his paradigm of the tales as representations of children’s unconscious conflicts and their resolution. His optimistic view works better with the more positive tales than with the darkest and most tragic ones, just as classical psychoanalytic theory works better with children’s typical sexual and aggressive fantasies than with instances of actual abuse. The tales, like all genuine works of art, are rooted in reality as well as in fantasy, and the reality of life among an impoverished peasantry meant that children were abandoned, abused, and murdered, even more frequently than in our own time and place.

Bettelheim scarcely mentions another disturbing aspect of the tales, evoked in the prefaces by the romantic idealization of the “pure” German folk and the concern with screening out “foreign” influences. This vocabulary suggests the racist strain in German nationalism, later to become murderous obsession. Of the three tales with Jewish characters in the Grimms’ collection, two—“The Jew Among Thorns” (included in this selection) and “The Good Bargain” (not included here)—are frankly anti-Semitic. In the third tale (also not included here), “The Bright Sun Brings It to Light,” a man who murders a Jew is actually brought to justice.

Sad to say, Nazi ideologues enshrined the Kinder- und Hausmärchen as virtually a sacred text, a special expression of the spirit of the Volk, as Maria Tatar points out, and even came up with a reading of “Little Red Riding Hood” as an allegory of the menace to the German people from the Jewish wolf (The Hard Facts, p. 41). The Grimms, long dead by then, were obviously not responsible for this interpretation, but they undoubtedly did real harm by including the two anti-Semitic stories in their collection and even, as Ruth Bottigheimer notes, in Grimms’ Bad Girls and Bold Boys (p. 140), reprinting them in a short edition for children. Thus the tales should not be idealized. They do enrich the mental lives of children, as Bettelheim shows, yet some of them evoke not universal psychological conflicts but dangerous prejudices in the culture from which they came.

There is a whiff of perverse cruelty in many tales, not only in the frightening ordeals undergone by heroes and heroines, but also in the inventively sadistic punishments meted out to villains, who have to dance in red-hot shoes, get their eyes pecked out by birds, are rolled down hills in barrels studded inside with nails, or are thrown into vats containing boiling oil, poisonous snakes, or both. Adults tend to be more unnerved than children by these elements of the German Gothic imagination; at one public reading an audience of children found “The Juniper Tree” not horrifying but “hilarious” (Tatar, p. 21). In any case the grisly cruelty in the tales comes out of the same amoral source that generates their vital narrative energy and imaginative richness, and the pleasure they afford is not entirely innocent. The sense of an unacknowledged darkness beneath the surface is part of what makes them both disturbing and compelling.

This mysterious and somewhat perverse vitality may also prevent the tales from truly fulfilling the function of moral instruction, for either good or ill. They have been used for that purpose in the German school curriculum, and William Bennett, the conservative moralist, has included several of them in his Book of Virtues: A Treasury of Great Moral Stories (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), a volume of improving literature for children. There is, of course, absolutely nothing wrong with this, but it probably doesn’t work. To be sure, virtue is presented movingly in the tales, as in “Star Dollars,” where in an act of radical Christian charity a little girl gives her last rag of clothing to another child in the snowy forest, or in the self-sacrificing love of the many siblings who try to rescue each other from harm. In more typical examples, virtue is rewarded with wealth and position, as in the best middle-class Protestant morality. Kindness to beggars, for example, pays off, these unattractive characters usually turning out to be wealthy and powerful beings under enchantment who reward good behavior handsomely.

But it is not clear that children actually respond to this pattern as the moralist might hope, as suggested by the unpredictable laughter at “The Juniper Tree.” By the same token, the tales may not really function, as Jack Zipes fears, to perpetuate an unjust social order by instilling bourgeois virtues of industry, obedience, and submission to patriarchal authority. There is great variety among the tales and a great range of meanings and morals; some apparently have no moral at all beyond a good laugh. Among the 200 in the Grimms’ final edition, there are romantic stories of love, enchantment, and rescue, but also tall tales, animal fables, crime stories, funny stories about spectacularly stupid people, and bawdy fabliaux like “The Wedding of Mrs. Fox,” in which all but the youngest child will sense a dirty joke. In many cases the hero wins out through the virtues of courage and perseverance, but in others cunning and deceit carry the day.

The tales embody and gratify many desires, some of them contradictory: desires to have terrifying adventures, to know the cruelty of the world, to survive danger through one’s own cleverness and beauty, to see one’s enemies harshly punished, and finally to be recognized as king or queen and paired forever with a royal mate. Yet human beings also desire suffering, as history demonstrates all too well, if only to feel more intensely. Indeed, we want experience, although some varieties—such as the horrors of war, torture, and rape, the grisly murders and mutilations that both terrify and fascinate—are best had vicariously, as in reading “The Feather Bird” and “The Robber Bridegroom.” Here the moral lessons, if there are any, tend to be overshadowed for the reader by the sensational violence of the content. Taken together, the tales seem animated by a kind of anarchic energy that finally overwhelms moral and social lessons.

The patriarchal pattern is often undercut in the same way. In “The Shoes Which Were Danced to Pieces,” for example, the twelve princesses who defy their father by slipping out of their locked bedroom every night are finally reined in by an old soldier, who follows them to their underground dance hall and is rewarded by the king with the hand of the eldest princess; thus the authority of the father-king is reestablished. But the most memorable elements of the story are the thrilling secret staircase under the bed, the underground lake and castle, and the trees with leaves of silver, gold, and diamond. The brilliant fantasy world of the rebellious girls is far more important to the reader than the actions of the king or the old soldier.

Another rebellious princess, in “King Thrush-Beard,” mocks all her suitors until her father forces her to marry a beggar and work as a serving maid. But in the end things turn out well for the choosy girl, who discovers that her beggar husband is actually a king. The Jungfrau Maleen, in the tale of that name, refuses the marriage arranged by her father, who walls her up in a tower. After digging her way out with a bread knife, the determined Maleen tracks down her true love and wins him back from a counterfeit bride, who loses her head for her evil deeds. Even Rapunzel, the quintessential imprisoned maiden, manages to find a lover and get him into her tower at night by using her hair as a ladder, then survives for years in a desert as the single mother of twins. It is not the prince who rescues her, but she who saves him, by curing his blindness with her tears.

There are many examples of clever, active, and even heroic young women. In “The Robber Bridegroom,” the heroine tricks a cannibalistic murderer and brings him to justice, and in “The Feather Bird” another heroine rescues herself and her two sisters from a wizard who is really a serial sex killer. In a number of moving tales, a sister protects or rescues her brothers, as in “The Six Swans,” “The Seven Crows,” and “The Twelve Brothers,” where the sister offers her life for those of her brothers.

Peasant women are often presented as bold and cunning. In “The Peasant’s Wise Daughter,” the girl gives her father practical advice, rescues him from prison, figures out a riddle, marries the king, saves a poor man from the king’s cruelty, escapes a death sentence, and finally brings her difficult husband to heel. Clever Grethel, in the story of that name, eats and drinks the food and wine she had prepared for her master’s dinner party, then covers up her misdeed by sending him off in pursuit of his guests armed with a carving knife. In “Old Hildebrand,” a wife conspires with her lover, the village parson, to get rid of her gullible husband by sending him on a pilgrimage.

Even though there are not really enough adventurous heroines to go around, the female reader can easily identify across the barrier of gender with the male hero, as in reading a novel. If this were not possible, women would be barred from access to more than half the world’s great literature. In reading stories such as “The Golden Bird,” the girl imagines herself into the skin of the adventurous male protagonist rather than withholding her interest until a princess with whom to identify appears on the scene.

There are numerous contemporary attempts to write fairy tales with correct messages, some of them charming and successful. But many suffer from the imaginative flatness produced by good intentions; they have no subtext, only a text, and the provocative richness and ambiguity of the Grimm stories is lost. Those who want to subvert the originals often fail to notice the extent to which they subvert themselves. “Little Red Riding Hood,” for instance, contains an explicit moral—don’t stray from the straight path, don’t talk to strange wolves—that has been applied in a variety of contexts by parents, teachers, mythologists, feminists, even Nazis. In all cases it is clearly a parable about how to avoid danger by following the instructions of those in authority. Yet does it really work that way? The most exciting part of the story, the bit children like to hear over and over, is the sly dialogue between wolf and girl, culminating in the terrifying moment when the hairy beast leaps out of bed and grabs her. Referring to the Perrault version, in which Petit Chaperon Rouge actually undresses and gets into bed with the wolf, the American writer Djuna Barnes (1892-1982) commented, “Children know something they can’t tell; they like Red Riding Hood and the wolf in bed!” (quoted in Bettelheim, p. 176).

In such richly symbolic material, imagination and desire seize what they will, in spite of social and moral lessons. Above all, the imagination responds to the sense of another dimension of experience. Most of the tales, even those set in the real world of farm or village, open up suddenly into a magical space of adventure. This may happen through the encounter with a powerful being (a witch, a giant, a talking animal) or through some apparently ordinary object (a comb, a mirror, a hat) that is suddenly revealed to have unexpected powers. Through such beings or objects the hero or heroine gains entrance to another world existing within that of ordinary reality, a magical space like the lake and castle under the bed in “The Shoes Which Were Danced to Pieces” or the cavern inside the mountain in “Old Rinkrank.”

These enchanted places suggest the freedom of the imagination itself, existing within the real world of history, class conflict, and politics and yet always escaping it, claiming some degree of autonomy. The reader of the tales, child or adult, gains access to this other dimension, the realm of structured fantasy that is the source of literature and art, where the creative power of the mind itself offers at least partial freedom from the real world of conflict and oppression, and even the hope of one day transforming it.

Elizabeth Dalton is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Barnard College. She is the author of Unconscious Structure in “The Idiot” (Princeton University Press, 1979), a psychoanalytic study of Dostoevsky’s novel, and has published fiction and criticism in The New Yorker, Partisan Review, Commentary, and The New York Times Book Review.