Fite had openly attacked the highly moralised fairy tales of Mme Leprince de Beaumont’
(Davis 1987:113).
In nineteenth-century France the market for fairy tales for children was limited to
Perrault (Caradec 1977:53 ff.) and a few translations of Grimms’ Tales. In general,
France’s educational system, and hence its book market, was firmly closed against
fantasy.
GermanyThe fairy tale in Germany derived almost completely from the French tradition. For a
century, translations and borrowings had enabled German booksellers to repeat the
French model: the writings of Charles Perrault, Charlotte de la Force, Suzanne de
Villeneuve, Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy and the Cabinet des Fées supplied middle- and
upper-class German adults and children with tales about fairies and fairy tales, and the
bibliothèque bleue had delivered chapbook versions of the same material (Grätz 1988:83
ff.) to the lower orders.
The French had ascribed fairy tales to women’s authorship, despite the manifest
participation by many men such as Perrault. German intellectuals took a circuitous
route to arrive at the same conclusion. First, they developed a theory of the fairy tale
(Märchen) that linked it with ancient history, which they defined as the childhood of the
human race. Then the childhood of the human race was equated with childhood per se.
Because of fairy tales’ simple structure and plot lines (so different from the tales about
fairies of the précieuses) J.G.Herder further equated fairy tales with nature. And finally,
because a body of gender theory had developed in eighteenth-century Germany that
defined women as the incarnation of nature, fantasy and non-rational cerebration, and
because—in the same theory—women’s natural state was motherhood, the
establishment of the two fairy tale correlates, childhood and nature, forged a theoretical
linkage between fairy tales and women. (A belief in that conclusion endures in many
quarters to the present day.) Enlightenment pedagogues thus denigrated fairy tales as
stories told by ignorant nursemaids, or by women, who were understood to be incapable
of intellection, and sought, unsuccessfully, to eradicate fairy tales from the nursery and
classroom. None the less, fairy tales entered the precincts of some privileged German
homes just as they had in England: Mme de Beaumont’s Magasin des Enfans was
translated into German as Lehrreiches Magazin für Kinder and published for girls’
reading in 1760, and Sarah Fielding’s Governess, with its fairy tale inclusions, was
translated into German and published in the following year.
With the rise of German Romanticism, fairy tales were proposed as a paradigm for
educating the imagination (Steinlein 1987:115 ff.), and when Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm
published their Kinder-und Hausmärchen (1812 et seq.), they labelled it a child-rearing
manual (Grimm 1812: preface). The collection eventually contained over two hundred
tales, culled from friends, acquaintances, country informants, children’s almanacs and
old books. The ‘Twelve Brothers’ (no. 9) may be taken as typical. Twelve brothers face
relinquishing their patrimony and losing their lives should their mother bear them a
sister. When that happens, they flee to the forest and vow blood vengeance on every girl
they might encounter in the future. A full complement of fairy tale situations ensues,
150 FAIRY TALES AND FOLK-TALES