Clever Maids: The Secret History of the Grimm Fairy Tales

Abstract

Clever Maids: The Secret History of the Grimm Fairy Tales Paradiz V. (2005). Clever Maids: The Secret of the Grimm Fairy Tales. New York: Basic Books. The Grimm brothers, Jacob and Wilhelm, are best known for their volumes of fairy tales such as Snow White, Sleeping Beauty and Rumpelstiltskin. To a smaller group of scholars, they are also known as early linguists, and memorialized in Grimm's Law, a description of predictable consonant shifts in human language over time. In her new book, Clever Maids, Valerie Paradiz (VP) combines these two facets of the Grimm brothers and adds a third: the true source of their tales and goal in collecting oral folk tradition for publication. The brothers seemed to always love both language and their German heritage. In addition, they were sent to Marburg to attend university, where they could formalize their interests into acceptable scholarly projects. They studied German literature and history, searching for what VP terms the Volk Spirit. Their first project was an attempt to document all the stories ever told in German. To do so required fieldwork; fieldwork required research assistants, and this is where the clever maids make their appearance. VP likens the suppliers of the brothers' stories to "fairy tale think tanks" (xii), usually daughters of neighboring families who were familiar with the stories passed along from generation to generation. While the type of scholarship afforded men through university training and publication was not accessible to women, women nonetheless passed along in their hours of work and leisure stories of the VoIk, that is, fairy tales. Many of these stories, retold by VP in her book, focus on common life and often give morality tales on the correct behavior enforced on women, such as obedience, chastity, and diligence. Still, while the stories reflected those sad realities, they left room for a more constructive mission of airing the female plight and sometimes even altering plot lines to offer hope and subversion to the status quo. In simply telling their stories to Jacob and Wilhelm, women were contributing to the preservation of the Volk Spirit. As you can guess, however, they were never directly given written credit for their work. Just as the brothers hoped to preserve the German soul through documenting oral tradition, they credited their sources as such entities as the folk spirits of the country, past and present. The brothers converted an oral tradition into a written one, a medium given less academic validation into one of scholarship. Ironically, they favored story tellers who could accurately recount tales verbatim for the brothers to transcribe. Here, says VP, the brothers perpetuated the myth that the German soul and its past are best preserved if the written form captures the rhythms and phrasing of oral tales. …