Clever Maids

by Julie Della Torre

I came across a pile of books I have always meant to read and have moved from one spot to another for years. This summer I decided to start at the top and work my way down. The first book I picked up was Clever Maids: The Secret History of the Grimm’s Fairy Tales by Valerie Pradiz, 2004. 

Reading the title closely, I should have known what the book was a bout, but, I opened the book expecting an analysis of Grimm’s stories featuring clever maids. Not this book! This was more of a biography of the Grimm’s brothers and their world of collecting. The clever maids referred to in the title are the clever young women from whom they collected their stories. The book also paints a historical and social picture of the Germanic world at this time.

AUTHOR

Valerie Paradiz is a German feminist, activist and author. Her scholarly research of the historical and social culture of the time and her analysis of the tales allows for some interesting connections between the life lived by the Grimm brothers and the tales they collected.

FAMILY

The Grimm’s family (5 boys and one girl) lived a good, middle-class life until the father died, the children still quite young. The mother suffered from what was called melancholia, became dependent on her father and then on offerings from her own siblings. Paradiz portrays the dire straits for women of the time, both monetarily and socially.  She sites tales that feature such women setting the collecting into the social climate and women’s place in it.

HISTORY

The Grimm brothers lived a significant part of their lives during the Napoleonic Wars. Germany had never known a nationalistic unity like France and England due to the many nation states that made up Germany.  The brothers chaffed under the rule of the French in their city and never lost their zeal for furthering the German language, literature, cultural identity and national pride.

COLLECTING

It was the beginning of the Romantic period.  In philosophy and literature there was longing for simplicity, of nature and natural feelings. The brothers yearned for a simpler time, a time of their young childhood in the German countryside. They built the romantic illusion that they collected these old fairy tales from peasant women throughout the German countryside. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The brothers fondly remembered their aunt telling them stories when they were young, but they began their collecting by compiling and cataloguing folk songs for their benefactor/mentor, Brentano.  This collecting grew dissatisfying, for it entailed gathering from written sources. It wasn’t long before the brothers began collecting stories in a new and different way. Their sister, Lotte befriended a family in the neighborhood, a family of six sisters. The Wild family was a middle class family and the girls well educated.  The girls knew many stories and delighted each other in the telling of them. Soon weekly gatherings occurred in which stories were told round; the brothers jotting down the stories as they were told. Soon they began soliciting these stories. The girls would write them down and send them to Jacob and Wilhelm. Some of the stories the girls had heard, some they made up and some were a combination of the two. 

The brothers collected from these girls for many years. When the girls married and moved off Wilhelm discovered a new source of stories, the girls in the Hassenphlug family. Like the first, this family consisted of well educated, middle class girls who delighted in stories, were well-read and had leisure time.  The Brothers Grimm found a number of such families, gathering and soliciting from these young women. Many of these women went on to become the first well-known German female authors. Later the two brothers happened on their ‘ideal’ source. Dorothy Viehamann, an older, illiterate German woman 

The Grimm brothers offered only one story from their childhood for their collected edition Children’s and Household Fairy Tales. All of the other stories came from these ‘clever maids’. The brothers collected the stories, selected the ones they liked, chose and consolidated the most salient parts of similar stories and edited them all.  The Brothers Grimm were surrounded by and influenced by women all their lives. The women who lived their stories and the clever maids who told them were never given any credit by the two brothers. This book strives to right that wrong.