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Clever Maids: The Secret History of the Grimm Fairy Tales. By Valerie Paradiz. New York: Basic Books, 2005. 222 pp., bibliography, and index.
This book "is about the forgotten and unknown women of the Grimms' fairy tales, the social climate in which they collected their stories, and the extraordinary collaboration that bridged the gender divisions inherent in romantic culture to bring the stories into print" (xii). The author uses published correspondence of girls and women in the Grimms' circle to confirm their role in initially supplying tales for the Grimm collection. English-speaking devotees of the Grimm tales who have not read the work of Heinz Rölleke may not be aware of this material.
Paradiz discusses marriage as women's only realistic economic option, portraying the "powerlessness as a woman" (14) of Jacob and Wilhelm's mother, Dorothea, and vividly describing Dortchen Wild (who "complained about how boring their religion lessons were") and sister Lotte (who, "on the other hand, enjoyed learning all the prayers and songs in church" [47]). These statements, neither documented nor footnoted, point toward a fatal flaw: the book's repeated slippage between authorial claim and documentable fact, culminating in Paradiz's assertion that the young ladies of the Wild family "used the tales ultimately as an expression of their own sufferings, as 'a place from which to speak about their own speechlessness'" (200n6). This claim originates, however, not in the women's own words but in Marina Warner's assessment of the fairy-tale-telling situation in From the Beast to the Blond.
At the moment there are, in effect, two histories of fairy tales...