Clever Maids: The Secret History of the Grimm Fairy Tales (review)

It is by now old news, at least to students of folklore and children's literature, that the Brothers Grimm did not gather their famous folktales from grandmotherly German peasant women. Over twenty years ago, John M. Ellis's exposé, One Fairy Story Too Many, among others, put that myth to rest. Even though Valerie Paradiž's Clever Maids brings little that is surprising to the study of the famed collectors and redactors, it is a book well worth reading for its intimate look into the lives of the Grimms' informants as well as for Paradiž's own storytelling style. Paradiž focuses on the first thirty years of the lives of the Grimm brothers, Jacob and Wilhelm, and more specifically on their collaborators—mostly women. In fact, announcements from the publisher recommend this book for women's studies programs, which suggests the direction of the argument.

Perhaps one appealing aspect of this book is that Paradiž does not have an axe to grind. She is not attempting to debunk anyone or to shock us with outrageous interpretations of the tales. Indeed, she simply tells us a story of two young men, both brilliant, raised in dire circumstances, who found their passion and had the good fortune to be surrounded by a great many willing helpers. In nearly all the chapters, Paradiž manages to work in the summary of one or more of the tales and shows us how the plot or the characters or the theme in some way parallels the experiences of the tellers or of the brothers themselves. This itself is a clever narrative device. And although she is at times a bit condescending in her summaries of the tales (editorializing with a sardonic "of course" or "miracle of miracles"), perhaps betraying that she herself is not a folklorist, she does convey effectively the power of these stories to speak to the deepest human emotions and needs.

This is a brief book with only twelve short chapters, so anyone interested in a thorough and scholarly look at the lives of the brothers will need to look elsewhere. However, in this little span, Paradiž is able to convey a fine sense of the time period, including the everyday lives of ordinary people. She stresses the influence of the Napoleonic Wars on the Grimms—Jacob, for instance, was the reluctant librarian to Napoleon's despised brother Jerome, King of Westphalia. It was during the upheaval caused by these wars that many Germans began to seek a cultural identity, and the Grimms saw the potential to express that identity through the spoken and written word. Paradiž points to parallels between some of the tales ("The Magic Table, the Golden Donkey, and the Club in the Sack," for instance) and the greed and abuse of power so rampant in the Napoleonic empire.

Her principal interest, however, is in the more personal aspects of their lives and work. Curiously, despite growing up in a family of five brothers and one sister, Jacob and Wilhelm found themselves surrounded by women. Their father died when they were young and they were raised by their widowed mother, with the assistance of two aunts, who were very dear to them. They lived next door to the Wild family with its six daughters (one of whom would be Wilhelm's future wife). They were acquainted with the four Hassenpflug sisters and with the aristocratic von Haxthausen family who had seven daughters. Many of these young women provided Jacob and Wilhelm with the core of their stories. It is interesting how many of the Grimms' informants were actually teenagers, which may explain the obsession in many of the tales with the heroines finding Prince Charming and getting well wed. Paradiž points out that for a woman in the early nineteenth century, a good marriage was the only hope for a comfortable and respectable life. She also points out that storytelling was the province of women because it was they who needed something to...