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Spare the Rod and Spoil the Child? Bettine's . Das Leben der Hochgräfin Gritta von Rattenzuhausbeiuns Shawn C. Jarvis Bettine and Gisela von Arnim's fairy tale novel Das Leben der Hochgräfin Gritta von Rattenzuhausbeiuns has gone almost completely unnoticed in the reception of their works and in discussions of the Märchen genre. This is perhaps not surprising, given that Kunstmärchen by women have generally been ignored and that this particular work has led a somewhat dubious existence for the past 140 years. Gritta was not published during Bettine's or Gisela's lifetime [mysteriously, Bettine never included it in her own collected works), nor was its authorship and date of inception certain until recent archival work uncovered manuscripts in Gisela's hand, her drawings of pivotal scenes from the Märchen and the typeset title page dated 1845. Thus the questions that preoccupied literary historians like Mallon and Konrad could be laid to rest. A far more fundamental question, however, which impinges on our understanding of the piece itself, has either been brushed aside or never raised by literary critics: why did the work remain incomplete? Mallon, who originally discovered the manuscripts and typeset pages in the Grimms' literary estate, argued that the gap between page 208 of the original and the concluding paragraph can be explained by the misplacement of the pages or their disappearance among other files in the estate. But, he assured: "Der Verlust kann . . . nur geringen Umfang haben und auf zufälligem Anlaß beruhen: die auf Seite 229 erzählten Begebenheiten bei Grittas Brautzuge drängen erkennbar zum Ende der ganzen Handlung" (Mallon 249). Although it hardly seems likely that the last pages, except the very last, should be misplaced and as yet undiscovered in a mass of material exhaustively studied by numerous researchers, Mallon's misconceptions are explicable: he was writing in 1925 and based his assumptions on the understanding of the traditional bourgeois Märchen. We, like Mallon, all intuitively know that the fairy tale concludes with a marriage. What Mallon's analysis failed to take into account was that this work might only superficially be a Märchen, at least in terms of the bourgeois model evinced by Perrault and the Grimms, and that Bettine and Gisela may have been unable or unwilling to resolve the conflict between the personal narrative they wanted to project for themselves and the social narrative implied by the form they implicitly rejected: a case of irreconcilable differences which forced them ultimately to divorce themselves from this mésal77 liance. With Gritta they suggested an alternative which broke with the bourgeois tradition and which necessarily remained incomplete. In contrast to the assertions of critics like Konrad who insist: "In der Gritta hat Bettine ganz absichtsfrei gestaltet, unproblematisch und heiter" (Anmerkungen 160), it is my contention that this piece and Bettine's choice of the Märchen genre were anything but unintentional and unproblematicäT! Γη many ways, Bettine and Gisela remained true to the generic form and content. Within a framework of traditional fairy tale plot (the daughter's banishment by the stepmother, her happy reunion with the family and the inexorable move toward the correct bourgeois conclusion, Gritta's eventual presumed marriage to the Prince) are embedded a number of other Binnenmärchen and fairy tale motifs. The constellation of characters are also structurally correct: there is a cruel stepmother, a wicked witch (here represented by the nun Sequestra), a king, a prince (Bonus von Sumbona), a surrogate princess (Gritta), a fairy queen (the Elfenfürstin), faithful servants, as well as magical and animal helpers. But within this framework, a number of inconsistencies come to light. The understanding of these inconsistencies is the most difficult task in interpreting this work. It could, of course, be that Bettine and Gisela were using the genre as Goethe did : as a form "zugleich bedeutend und deutungslos," intent only upon the "context-free" literary experiment --this might explain their introduction of several motifs which never find their resolution within the piece (e.g., the implicit intention of the Ahnfrau to help Tetel recover his eyesight or the interdiction about the evil privy councilor by the Elfenfürstin...

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