Customer Reviews

Clever Maids: The Secret History Of The Grimm Fairy Tales

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Scholars have long known the backstory to Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm's famous collection of fairy tales. Despite the legends, the brothers were not itinerant travelers collecting the tales from the German peasantry. (Unfortunately, this legend is soon to be perpetuated to a larger audience by Terry Gilliam's entirely fictional film, The Brothers Grimm.) In reality, the brothers mostly collected the tales from their sister, Lotte, and through her circle of friends and associates. The brothers then continously edited the tales for several years until we have the versions of Hansel and Gretel, Rumpelstiltskin, Puss in Boots, and many other tales that we know today.

Most of this backstory, especially that of the women tellers, has been scattered about in strictly academic works in English and mostly German. Valerie Paradiz has synthesized this material into one cohesive and highly readable book. While we have the stories of the women and the changes made to their tales, we also receive a sympathetic view of the two brothers, struggling to support a family hit by several tragedies by doing work they loved and valued. Neither the brothers' contributions nor those of the women collaborators are diminished.

While the book has an academic bent, it works best as general nonfiction and is highly recommended for a much larger audience. Paradiz's writing style is warm and approachable, making details interesting instead of trivial. A familiarity with the Grimms' tales is helpful, but not necessary, since she provides enough information about each to support her prose. Consequently, an interesting slice of German and folklore history is made accessible in a deceptively short book. Footnotes and a biliography are offered in the back of the book for further reading and research.

Clever Maids by Valerie Paradiz is an important contribution to Grimm scholarship, and while Ms Paradiz certainly has credentials as a Germanist, she seems more interested in advancing a feminist point of view than truly following the material where it leads her. She deserves credit for using the Grimm correspondance to correctly attribute the female friends of the Grimms as the immediate sources of many of the famous Kinder und Hausmärchen, but this, as she notes in the prologue (p. xv) was already known to German researchers. What she seems to want to imply, but never outright states, is that the women the Grimms collected from may actually have composed some of the stories when prompted by Jacob and Wilhelm to tell stories from their childhood. Instead she gives lip service to the "oral tradition," while seeming to undermine it at every turn. Again and again she draws comparisons with the lives of the Grimms and their female contributors, always with an observation on the oppressed status of women in 19th Century Germany.

Consequently, I find her devotion to German literary scholarship just a little questionable. I recall hearing a radio interview with her on the local NPR affiliate, and she consistantly "americanized" the German names of the figures in her book, as if she was afraid she would lose potential readers by appearing too arcane.

Another (small) disappointing point of her research is her apparent unfamiliarity with scripture and the influence of scripture on the stories. On page 135, she states, "In the gospels, (St. Anne) is the mother of the Virgin Mary." In fact, the mother of Mary is neither named nor even mentiioned in either Matthew or Luke; the name "Anna" comes from non-canonical sources, and is most likely an imitation of Hannah, the mother of the Old Testament prophet Samuel, whose infancy narrative closely parralels that of Christ and John the Baptist. Furthermore, when discussing the typical Grimm plotline "of older brother(s) versus younger," (p. 107) she strains to make a biographical comparison to Jacob and Wilhelm's younger brother Ferdinand, while totally ignoring the more obvious parallel to Joseph and Jacob in the book of Genesis.

Nonetheless, Ms. Paradiz makes many valid points and certainly has performed a valuable service in bringing the real Grimms' lives into popular readership just when an excrable Hollywood movie has appropriated their names for the sake of brainless entertainment.

Clever Maids is a decent read, about the female sources of the fairy tales we're accustomed to attributing to the Brothers Grimm, and has some biographical interest. But the author seems to have an axe to grind, which can get annoying. She keeps noting that the Grimms never thanked their female sources by name in their publications. Surely it would've been nice if they had, but I wonder if such public acknowledgment was really the custom in the early 1800s. The Grimms were folklorists--they never claimed to be the tales' original authors.

Still, nice to know a bit more about the Grimms and their process for collecting and setting down stories. The book is less interesting for its analysis of the tales, which is (to say say the least) not subtle. For fairy tale analysis, I prefer Maria Tatar's Off With Their Heads.

This book is a great read for adults but some editing is needed when telling the tales to kids.

Valerie Paradiz's book, "Clever Maids," is an excellent history of the Grimm Brothers and their lifelong work cultivating folk tales. I wish I had this book in college, because I think it is a first-rate story that deserves to be shared with the masses.

Over the years, the Brothers Grimm have had their singular lives wrapped up in fictional renditions that border on fairy tales themselves. In Drew Barrymore's 1998 movie, Ever After, it is the Grimms who visit an aging dowager queen in France, so she can tell them about her grandmother, the original "Cinderella." Then there is the wildly fictional movie of the same name about The Brothers Grimm that creates them into gallant, manly adventurers who stumble upon fairy tales come to life and have to defeat them, etc. With all of the myth surrounding the men, it is pleasant to see a compact, historical accurate biography of the Grimm Brothers and their fairy tale compilations.

The author not only unearthed many interesting facts about where the fairy tales the Grimms took down came from, but her smooth writing talents combined with an academic eye allowed us distinctive, unique insights into their lives and their feelings in relation to the world around them. Though the title is slightly misleading - we don't learn about the way these women might have thought and felt like we do the Grimms - the story itself, and the people involved, are riveting.

Historians might have known and written the full story about the creation of the Grimms' Fairytales before, but this is the first work that has made that information accessible, readable, and, quite frankly, thrilling to read.

Valerie Paradiz is a feminist of the 'women can do no wrong, men can do no right' school of thought, and this attitude pervades her story of the brothers Grimm and the women who supplied some of their stories.

She critcises the Grimm brothers for not giving enough credit to the women who supplied many of the stories in the first volume of their famous tales, but then she grumbles about them giving too much credit to one particular woman in the second volume of the tales.

She criticies the princess's father in one tale for making his daughter keep a promise she has made, and she disapproves of the father of one of the Grimms' friends for punishing his daughter for stealing from her sister and then lying about it. Aren't men brutes? Why should girls not be allowed to steal, lie and break promises with impunity?

The book is entertaining enough as a factual account of the lives of the Grimm brothers, how they compiled their stories, and some of the women who supplied a lot of the stories, but the constant feminist carping makes it somewhat trying to read.

The Brothers Grimm were not nice little tales of sweetness and light like Hans Christian Andersen. They used raunchy humor, sexual and physical violence, and gender inequity as a standard--far above the heads of most childrne. As were the sex scenes in the movie, 'The Parade of the Penguins.' Thank God.

Fairy tales have always been transmitted orally from the Middle Ages through antiquity. That is the way our Appalachian ballads and tales ae being done today, and much is lost by not being written down. They've consisently been about good and evil, rich and poor, heroic and helpless, and humanity and inhumanity.

Their first published fairy tale was THE FROG PRINCE. One we will always remember. From the beginning the tales were too vulgar and violent for young minds. They used their first published book CHILDREN'S AND HOUSEHOLD FAIRY TALES in 1812 as a literary privilege, to see what they could get away with, and do so with much aplomb. This was the age of German Romanticism and the Napoleonic Wars. Goethe was at his peak and 'men of letters' were interested in reviving old sagas from earlier times. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were intent on preserving the German past. They set out to unearth every folk story ever told in the German tongue, and their first book became a modern classic, coming in second only to the Bible in those days.

A history of their heritage and lives is presented here as proof positive that they did indeed change the literary world. Interspersed with some of their tales is the story behind them and why the brothers felt as they did. That makes this a 'classic' of a classic.