'Murderer's House' - University of Victoria

a series of forty-one volumes published in 1785 by Charles-Joseph de Mayer, contains
hundreds of fairy tales of the seventeenth and eighteen centuries, the high point of the
literary genre. The Cabinet includes more than twenty authors and over half of these are
women (Warner xii). Further, according to Jarvis, German women also wrote
Volksmärchen and Kunstmärchen long before the Grimm Brothers (“Trivial” 119). For
example, writer Benedikte Christiane Naubert, who is often forgotten in modern
canonical histories of the genre, published her Neue Volksmährchen der Deutschen from
1789-92, predating the Grimms‟ collections by more than two decades. 53 Moreover,
investigations about the sources and methods used by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm have
shown that more than fifty women and girls contributed tales and tale variants to the
Grimms‟ collections of stories from 1808 to 1830 (Blackwell 1).
Feminist readings of fairy tales have relied on the argument that storytelling is
“semiotically, a female art” (Rowe 71). Rowe shows that through their association with
fates, fairies, and spinning in European culture, women are identified with the art and
power of spinning tales (54-71). She suggests that the history of male appropriation of
folk and fairy tales is the history of men‟s attempt to gain control of this female voice, to
take possession of the female art of storytelling. Rowe writes:
To have the antiquarian Grimm Brothers regarded as the fathers of modern
folklore is perhaps to forget the maternal lineage, the “mothers” who in the
French veillées [social gatherings] and English nurseries, in courts and the
German Spinnstube, in Paris and on the Yorkshire moors, passed on their wisdom.
The Grimm brothers, like Tereus, Ovid, King Shahryar, Basile, Perrault, and
others reshaped what they could not precisely comprehend, because only for
women does the thread, which spins out the lore of life itself, create a tapestry
53 Other fairy tale collections published by female writers which predate the Grimms‟ Kinder und
Hausmärchen include Agnes Franz‟s 1804 Kinderlust, Caroline Stahl‟s 1818 edition of Fabeln, Mährchen
und Erzählungen für Kinder, and Amalie Schoppe‟s voluminous fairy-oeuvre composed of works like
Kleine Mährchen-Bibliothek, oder gesammelte Mährchen für die liebe Jugend (1828) and Volkssagen,
Mährchen und Legenden aus Nord-Deutschland (1833) (Jarvis, “Trivial” 119-20).
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