Marvels & Tales

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 in circulation. In the study of German fairy tales, one account acknowledges the role of print in the dissemination of fairy tales, is informed by the theoretical framework of Rudolf Schenda and the detailed documentation of Manfred Grätz, and is guided by the thorough explorations available in the Enzyklopädie des Märchens. Unfortunately, this history is almost entirely unknown and unused in English-reading scholarship and unaccountably not referenced by Paradiz. Instead, she positions her study within a second traditional history and thus remains a mere conduit for now-obsolete assertions. She perpetuates the erroneous notion of exclusively oral sources: "That's just what the [Grimms'] fairy [End Page 127] tales are: stories that have been transmitted orally, generation to generation, from as far back as antiquity and the Middle Ages" (x). Charles Perrault's "stories were not original creations, but collected oral material edited and fashioned by him into print" (96).

Paradiz says that she intended her book to bring scholarly perceptions of the last forty years to a broad lay audience. But from what scholar could she get the notion that "[t]he story of 'The Three Army Surgeons' strangely reflected the rising incidence of organ transplants that had begun to take place in experimental medicine in Europe" (176)? The latter embodies Paradiz's understanding of Jacob's concerns about his body's fate should he die in Paris without previously having made burial arrangements (206n13). Not pioneering surgeons but routine body snatchers providing medical schools with cadavers for anatomy lessons would have been the source of his concerns (a correction confirmed by an organ transplant surgeon).

An outlandish proposition like early-eighteenth-century experimental organ transplants undermines other doubtful statements. Hassenpflug ancestors expelled as Huguenots from France in 1685 or before could not have brought with them Perrault's French tales published in 1697 to Germany (96), nor is it biologically tenable that Marie Hassenpflug's grandfather left France as a adult pastor in the 1680s (95). If Paradiz's casual description of Napoleon's army moving from Germany "westward toward Poland" on their way to Moscow (57) were not embedded within so much other nonsense, it could be viewed as a minor lapse. Only colorful asides such as Ferdinand Grimm's pigeons refusing to eat in his absence are sure to derive from a contemporaneous source. An alert reader will also wonder why no copy editor caught the book's misused prepositions, repeated misspellings, and frequent...