Study Guide for Final (Spring 2008) -- part 5 (folktales)

As much as I love this picture, I need to put up some text. 

We began this unit with the French writer Charles Perrault's "Donkey Skin," an eighteenth-century adaptation of a folktale about a beautiful princess who has to flee her incestuous father and win the heart of a young prince...despite her necessary disguise.  Her fairy godmother, however, helps her do both.  Perrault was a "Modern."  In other words, he believed that people could improve on what the  Greeks and Romans had done.  "Ancients," on the other hand, believed that we could not.  Perrault, by the way, wrote the original Mother Goose tales.  This story is an interesting blend of magic and the mundane, clothing the heroine in radiant dresses and ending with the "moral" that "clear water and brown bread are sufficient nourishment for all young woman provided that they have beautiful clothes" and the "observation"  that "there is not a damsel under the skies who does not imagine herself beautiful and somehow carrying off the honors in the famous beauty contest between Hera, Aphrodite, and Athena" (37). 

The Brothers Grimm, folklorists from 19th century Germany,  collected and edited another version of this story.  It was called "All Kinds of Fur."  It does not have the classical references or the "moral" that Perrault added to his story.  Indeed, the Brothers Grimm's version (that again they collected and edited) spends less time at the father's fabulous palace and at the mother's deathbed and more time on the princess' escape and her efforts to attract the young prince's attention.  (However, as our anthology's editors noted, most of the people whom the brothers interviewed were NOT peasants, and the brothers later edited the stories so that they would be more appropriate for children.  Ah, the 19th century...the age of Bowdler who censored Shakespeare so that his plays could be read aloud in Victorian homes...the age of nationalism.)

I want to give you a link to the Brothers Grimm's "Godfather Death":

http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm044.html

Would you read this story about the poor man who chooses Death (rather than God or the Devil) to be his thirteenth child's godfather and about the young doctor, Death's godchild, who tries to trick his godfather, to your neice or nephew?  What do you find interesting about this story?  What do you think that the German peasants who originally listened to this story found interesting about it?