Reviews of Recent Productions of Hedda Gabler

Tonight I'd like to start posting links to reviews of recent productions.  I'll begin with Ibsen's Hedda Gabler.  The 2009 production starring Mary Louise Parker has produced a number of striking images.  Let's see what the critics thought of the performance itself.

The New Yorker's John Lahr weighs in here:

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/theatre/2009/02/09/090209crth_theatre_lahr

The New York Times' Ben Brantley criticizes this production severely:

http://theater.nytimes.com/2009/01/26/theater/reviews/26bran.html

On the other hand, Brantley praises the touring production that starred Cate Blanchett:

http://theater.nytimes.com/2006/03/03/theater/reviews/03hedd.html

Here she is with Hugo Weaving (Judge Brack).


Hilton Als, however, is more skeptical, claiming that Blanchett is really playing 20th century actress Katherine Hepburn rather than Hedda.

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/03/20/060320crth_theatre

Als preferred Glenda Jackson's Hedda.


For more about this film version, see this link:
http://lecinemadreams.blogspot.com/2011/01/hedda-1975.html

Surprise!  Surprise!  The film was released in theaters.  Patrick Stewart played Hedda's former lover, Lovborg.

Let's look at some other recent productions.



In 2009, Chicago's Raven Theater's production received much praise:

http://chicagotheaterblog.com/2009/05/08/review_raven-theatre_hedda-gabler/

Adrian Noble directed this British production just last year:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/theatre-reviews/7397799/Hedda-Gabler-at-the-Theatre-Royal-Bath-review.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2010/mar/08/hedda-gabler-theatre-royal-review



German director Thomas Ostermeier tries to answer the question of why a contemporary Hedda doesn't just leave Tesman and start over:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2008/feb/29/theatre1

More locally, the always-intriguing Washington Shakespeare Theater Company has staged this play:

http://dctheatrescene.com/2008/02/16/hedda-gabler/

The Philadelphia-area Mauckingbird Theater Company has imagined Hedda as a lesbian:

http://www.broadstreetreview.com/index.php/main/article/mauckingbirds_lesbian_hedda_gabler




I'll finish with a link to a review of an interesting 2007 production from Pittsburgh:

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/07170/795181-325.stm


See the link below for the entry with the plethora of video clips, including the one pictured below!

Link

Hedda Gabler

Several different versions of Hedda Gabler are available at YouTube.

The first is a recent version by the Actors Ensemble of Berkeley:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjqHQJe6Go8

Janet Suzman played Hedda in this 1972 BBC version:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mp3R2gtNjo&playnext=1&list=PLE72E862928DB334E

Ingrid Bergman's 1963 performance is also from the BBC:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKgcjssJgvY

Diana Rigg's Hedda dates from 1981:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABXsAXyuZ7U

Below are parts of various theatrical versions.  If you speak Spanish, you may be interested in this version from Uruguay:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQCmgpRJYv0

Or this version from Spain:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlQPu8XUWQY&feature=related

Britain's Broken Biscuit Theater has staged this version.  Its director is Marysia Kay.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RC9kVqTYByc

Mary Louise Parker has recently appeared as Hedda:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsyD7sOzels&feature=fvwrel

This last "avant-garde" version is from the University of Central Florida:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfXosl5lojE&feature=fvsr

Enjoy, and let me know what you think!

Dr. Szlyk

Michelle Found an Article about Emily Dickinson's "Loaded Gun" poem

Link

Susan Howe provides another viewpoint on Emily Dickinson's poetry, especially on her Civil War work.

Thank you, Michelle!

Summary of "The White Man's Burden"

Link

Above is Shefali's summary of "The White Man's Burden," the poem by Rudyard Kipling.  This poem was published about the same time that Heart of Darkness appeared in Blackwood's Magazine.

The picture above is of Theodore Roosevelt and his Rough Riders, the calvary unit that he commanded in Cuba.  About three years after this picture was taken, Roosevelt became President of the U.S..  He succeeded William McKinley who had been assassinated. 

Lives Like Loaded Guns

In this gripping book, British author Lyndall Gordon explores the family constellations surrounding Emily Dickinson and the publication of her work.  These constellations include the family that ED knew during her lifetime as well as the family of Mabel Loomis Todd, the woman who edited and regularized ED's poetry after her death.  (She called it preparing the poems for publication, and she did do much to promote them.)  After ED's death in 1886, her remaining family came into a long, sustained conflict with the Todds.  This conflict continued throughout the lives of the last remaining Dickinson and the last remaining Todd, and the echoes of this conflict continue even today in the way that scholars and students read ED's poems and the people who inspired her.

Let's begin with a pictorial family tree of the Dickinsons!


Apologies for the size of the picture, but it shows the details much more clearly.  Gordon looks at more of ED's extended family: a grandmother Gunn with a fierce temper, an invalid male cousin who probably suffered from epilepsy, a maternal aunt who mothered ED, and cousins who were ED's lifelong friends and withheld her letters from the Todds.  Of course, Gordon gives us a stronger sense of what ED's mother was like and how her marriage constrained her.   These constraints were a social phenomenon.  As Gordon points out, poet Julia Ward Howe's husband forced her to abandon her introspective, critical style of poetry.  He threatened to divorce her (which meant that he would have custody of their children) unless she stopped writing poetry--or started writing less controversial poetry.  We know this less controversial poetry as "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."  Closer to home, ED's sister-in-law Sue was bullied and cajoled into marriage to a man whom she did not love.  She was not able to pursue the teaching career that she loved.  ED's sister Lavinia could not marry the man she loved.  On the other hand, ED chose not to marry, a choice that enabled her to write.

Or...as Gordon speculates...did ED's epilepsy free her to write?  Here are links to poems that may indicate her epilepsy.

http://www.sanjeev.net/poetry/dickinson-emily/my-first-well-day-since-many-ill-163327.html

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/I_like_a_look_of_Agony,

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/I_felt_a_Funeral,_in_my_Brain,

Keep in mind that, in the 1800s, epileptics were not allowed to marry and that they at best lived in seclusion.  At worst, they were sent to psychiatric hospitals, and women were more likely be admitted to these institutions.  Medical treatment was very primitive, and the most insightful doctor whom ED consulted advised her to stay away from experimental cures and pursue a calm, home bound life.

Below is a picture of a psychiatric hospital on NYC's Blackwell's Island.  If you've taken EN 211, you may recognize this place from Margaret Fuller and Fanny Fern's non-fiction.


Below is a picture of ED's home in Amherst, MA. 


Although ED did not marry, perhaps because she did not marry, she experienced several intense relationships.  In my previous entry, I mentioned her intimacy with her sister-in-law, Sue, and then with editor, writer, and abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson.  ED's relationship with married newspaper editor Samuel Bowles could be described as an entanglement.  She sent this poem to him.  Could it be about their relationship?  Or, as Gordon suggests, could it be a persona poem?

http://www.kalliope.org/digt.pl?longdid=dickinson200108301072

Her correspondence with classmates is both compelling and awkward.  Frequently, her classmates chose not to respond to her.  Later in life, after her father's death, she became involved with his friend and colleague, Judge Otis Lord, a widower.  Her letters to him are lively, charming, and more down-to-earth.  The couple even discussed marriage, but it was not to be.  Below is a picture of Judge Lord.




I also like how Gordon discusses ED's year at Mount Holyoke Seminary, the first American college for women (pictured above).  Academically, her year was successful as the future poet thrived on the college's challenging curriculum.  (She studied geology, chemistry, and astronomy among other courses.)  However, the college's emphasis on evangelical Christianity isolated ED, for she was very much a skeptic and resisted the college president's attempt to convert the student body en masse.  Worse, the college president encouraged students to spy on each other and discouraged them from forming close friendships.  ED's roommate and cousin, Emily Norcross, spied on her.  Eventually, ED left the college due to "ill health."  Does stress bring on seizures?


I did not forget the Todds!  It was very hard for me to find a picture of this family: the bewitching Mabel Loomis Todd; her husband, David, a professor of astronomy at Amherst College; and their daughter, Millicent Todd (later Bingham), who continued her mother's work on a more scholarly note.  Instead, I found the cover of a collection of Mabel's correspondence with her lover and ED's brother, Austin Dickinson.


Married to a very junior professor at Amherst who was also unfaithful to her, Mabel Loomis Todd was a bright, beautiful young woman in search of...something!  Initially, she was Sue Dickinson's protege, but then her flirtatious ways attracted first Sue's son--and then Sue's husband.  (Where is Carolyn Hax when you need her?)  Mabel also wanted to become friends with ED herself but was unable to.  However, after the poet's death, she helped ED's sister Lavinia transcribe the poems for a collection.  Mabel's role in the collection became greater and greater even as she strove to alienate her lover from his wife and children and to "feather" her family's nest.  (Austin Dickinson was a wealthy, powerful lawyer in Amherst and the college's treasurer.  Ironically, he didn't recognize his sister's greatness, but he did help his lover's husband.)  I must add, though, that Lavinia didn't pay Mabel and that she didn't recognize how much the younger woman did.


Ultimately, after her lover's death and the publication of two volumes of poetry, Mabel attempted to wrest a parcel of land away from his family.  Below is a picture of the Todds' house.  It is now a bed and breakfast.



Back to my story...In order to get the land she wanted, Mabel had to first get Lavinia's signature on a deed...as it turned out...under questionable circumstances.  It goes without saying Lavinia and Mabel could no longer work together.  They went to court over the signature.  Lavinia won the suit and its appeal; Mabel locked away the poems and letters that she had been working on.  This was in 1898.

By the way, here is a picture from a 2000 recreation of Mabel and her husband's presentations on their expeditions together.  One was to Japan where she climbed up to the sixth stage of Mt. Fuji, a remarkable feat for a woman of those days.


The picture below is of a 1906 *summer* climb of Mt. Fuji.



For many years, in fact, over the course of much of the 1900s, the Todds and the Dickinsons fought over ED's work and her public image.  Mabel Loomis Todd's editing was heavy handed by our standards, and she fought to slander Sue Dickinson's character and diminish her role in ED's life, but she did much to promote the poet's work, including lecturing on it.  Her daughter, Millicent Todd Bingham, a professor of geography, continued the task of promoting ED's work--and her mother's work after MLT died in 1932.  She also argued against Martha Dickinson Bianchi's attempts to romanticize her aunt's life.  However, MDB's 1914 edition of her aunt's poetry and her subsequent biography drew readers' attention to ED's poetry.  Moreover, the critical climate in the early 1900s was more receptive than it had been in the 1890s.  A romance novelist, MDB provided her aunt's story with a master narrative: one unhappy love affair had caused her to retreat from society and write poetry.  MTB, on the other hand, specifically argued against this master narrative.  She published ED's letters to Judge Lord as part of her argument, and she encouraged Yale professor Richard Sewell to write a scholarly biography of ED.  This two-volume biography would appear in 1974.  Then readers and scholars would be even more receptive to ED and her work.

I'll close with a picture of Sewell's book


and of some pictures from the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, MA.

This picture shows more of the museum's gardens.

Below is a picture of Emily Dickinson's bedroom.



Finally, below is the cover of the first edition of ED's poems.  The painting on the cover is by Mabel Todd Loomis.

White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson & Thomas Wentworth Higginson

Emily Dickinson's life has intrigued many people over the years.  Why did she withdraw from society, refusing to "cross [her] Father's ground to any House or town"?  Why did she write such strangely compelling poetry?  Who inspired her?

One popular reimagining of ED is William Luce's 1976 play The Belle of Amherst.  (The picture below is from Redmond, Washington's Sound Theater Company's recent production.)


You may also see part of Jennifer Levinson's performance at this video linked below:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fz8girAKwJM

Others are intrigued by ED's relationship to her sister-in-law, Sue.



http://santitafarella.wordpress.com/2008/07/15/emily-dickinson-lesbian-her-letter-to-susan-gilbert-in-june-of-1852-might-tell-us-less-than-you-think/

http://www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org/ed/node/78

Brenda Wineapple has decided to examine ED's friendship with poet, editor, and abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson.  As she points out, often people have wondered just what ED saw in Higginson.  He has been caricatured as the man who tried to regularize ED's poetry.  After all, his poetry tended to be carefully crafted sonnets, and his most well-known poems today are translations of Petrarch, the 14th century Italian poet known for his love poems to Laura, a woman he never actually met.

http://www.sonnets.org/petrarch.htm#010

http://www.sonnets.org/petrarch.htm#020

Also, take a look at the cover of White Heat above.  How old does she look?  What comes to mind when you look at her?  when you look at her next to the middle-aged man with facial hair and a military uniform?

 
It is one of the few photographs of ED.  True.  It was taken when she was a teenager.  She began to write to TWH when she was thirty.  Without fooling around with her existing photographs (which in itself is trouble and which ED's family did do), we will always have a distorted view of ED (and therefore of her relationship to TWH) if we focus on the photographs.  I don't know what I would have placed on the cover of White Heat, but something less direct and more evocative might have been better.

However, Higginson was more than "just" a translator and magazine editor, and his relationship with ED was fairly complex.  Wineapple notes its sexual tension.  Today we might consider their relationship to be an emotional affair and even emotional infidelity as TWH was married to a chronically-ill woman at the time.  Wineapple also speculates about what he gained from ED as well as about what she gained from him.  Moreover, as Wineapple points out, ED consciously chose Higginson as her mentor, for she would have been familiar with his work for the Atlantic Monthly as well as his political activism.  This is not to say that ED was politically radical or even engaged with politics.  Some of the tension in her relationship with TWH occurs when she downplays his desire to fight in the Civil War.  (He ultimately trained African-American soldiers in South Carolina.)  She was much more interested in TWH's nature writing, and her family was relatively conservative.


Below is Frederic Edwin Church's painting of Mount Katahdin in Maine, one of the many subjects of TWH's nature writing.

However, TWH tended to examine nature closely.  A more typical topic for him would be the water lily (shown below):


As you'll note from these poems, ED also likes to examine nature closely.

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20949

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=180204

http://www.tcnj.edu/~carney/dickinson/poems.html#did_the_harebell



Yet Wineapple is persuasive in her readings of ED's poems with imagery relevant to the Civil War.  See these links for a few of these poems: 

Apologies for any pop-ups!

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/emilydickinson/10548

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/My_Portion_is_Defeat_%E2%80%94_today_%E2%80%94

Below is a picture of Glory, a 1989 film about the company that Higginson had wanted to command.




ED and TWH's friendship began in 1862 and continued through the rest of her life despite his remarriage to a much younger woman and her intriguing relationship with Judge Otis Lord.  ED & TWH's correspondence periodically slowed, but she would send him her poems, referring to herself as his "Pupil" as late as 1884, the year before her death.  Interestingly, even then, she also toyed with submitting her poems for publication when another of TWH's proteges, Helen Hunt Jackson, contacted her about submitting them to The No Name Series.  ED sent Jackson one poem, "Success is counted sweetest":
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=174990

This poem would be published...anonymously.

After her death, TWH co-edited her poems with Mabel Loomis Todd, the mistress of ED's brother.  Todd, as it turns out, was responsible for the "regularization" of ED's poems.  TWH was more of an advocate, convincing Todd to include particular poems and writing the preface to the collected poems.  Initially, this project was successful, but 19th century readers were not quite ready for Dickinson, and Lavinia Dickinson, ED's sister and heir, soon quarreled with both Todd and TWH. 

Below is a link to a version of TWH's preface that appeared in the October 1891 issue of The Atlantic Monthly.  Beneath the Victorian verbiage, he quotes freely from ED's poems and letters:

http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/poetry/emilyd/edletter.htm

I'll close with a picture from the garden at the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, MA.  During her lifetime, ED was also known as a gardener.

Clever Maids: The Secret History of the Grimm Fairy Tales

Americans have...or used to have...a saying that behind every successful man was a strong woman.  Valerie Paradiz' study is about the women who provided the Brothers Grimm with their stories and who, for the most part, did not receive any credit for it.  Ms. Paradiz argues that this occurred because of eighteenth and nineteenth century attitudes towards women.  Women were to be silent and submissive.  It goes without saying that they received limited educations. Indeed, the Brothers Grimm severely criticize their fifteen year old sister Lotte for mourning their mother's death and being unable to devote herself to domesticity the way that their mother had.  Wilhelm Grimm had a very problematic relationship with Annette von Droste-Hulshoff, a bright, feisty young woman who would later become a noted writer.  In fact,  von Droste-Hulshoff's picture appeared on a West German stamp in 1961.




However, the Brothers Grimm experienced other more supportive relationships with women.  I have mentioned their neighbor Dorothea Wild, who later married Wilhelm.  She was also Lotte's close friend and tried to mediate between her and her older brothers.  Here are links to two of the stories that Dorothea or Dortchen passed on to Wilhelm and Jacob.  The first is "The Six Swans," a story that Ms. Paradiz believes reflects Lotte's predicament:

http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm049.html

Another was "The Singing Bone," a story that may have reflected Dortchen's own dilemma as the beloved of three of the Grimms: Wilhelm, Jacob, and Ferdinand, their ne'er do well sibling.

http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/type0780.html#grimm

Henry Justice Ford's 1894 illustration of "The Six Swans" is below:



Dortchen's sisters also contributed to the Grimms' project.  One of the first stories that they gave was "Child of Mary":
http://www.fairytalechannel.org/search/label/Child%20of%20Mary .  Dortchen's older sister Gretchen was the storyteller this time.  Another of Gretchen's contributions was "The Companionship of Cat and Mouse": 
http://www.cgjungpage.org/index2.php?option=com_content&do_pdf=1&id=156
Another sister, Mie, told the tale of "Godfather Death":
http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm044.html .  However, I want to close with a link to another of Dortchen's stories, "All Fur":  http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm065.html.  "Frau Holle" (pictured below) is another of her stories, too.

http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm024.html

Another storyteller was Friederike Mannel, a pastor's daughter who ran a guest house in Allendorf.  She also contributed folk songs to a collection by Clemens Brentano, one of the Grimms' mentors.  One of her stories that she gave to the Grimms was "Fitcher's Bird."  The version printed here draws on her telling as well as on Dortchen's:

http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm046.html

Allendorf is a common name for a German town or city, but I think that this may be Friederike Mannel's city:

Interestingly, as Ms. Paradiz relates, while Wilhelm enjoyed Friederike's company and respected her knowledge of folklore, he was highly annoyed by his mentor Brentano's young wife, Auguste, who had the temerity to discuss Shakespeare and Goethe.  Auguste was a fellow guest at Friederike's establishment.  Friederike was friendly to Auguste but also shared Wilhelm's annoyance with her.

The Grimms relied on other groups of sisters.  The first were the Hassenpflugs, a family who had emigrated from France because of religious persecution.  Ironically, the Hassenpflugs' stories brought French influences into the Grimms' collection of ostensibly German stories. Over the years, several of their stories were incorrectly attributed to "Old Marie," a fictional servant of the family.  This particularly strikes Ms. Paradiz as Marie Hassenpflug, one of the more prolific storytellers, was a beautiful young lady.  Marie's picture is below:


Among the sisters' contributions was "Little Red Cap":
http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm026.html

Charles Perrault's "Little Red Riding Hood" may be found here: 
http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/type0333.html#perrault

Another contribution was "The Maiden with No Hands": 
http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/armlessmaiden/index.html

The second group of sisters were the von Hauxthausens, members of the German nobility and themselves collectors of German folklore.  Some of the stories that these women gave were written in dialect.  This particularly pleased the Grimms who were linguists as well as collectors of stories.  One story was "The Maid of Brakel" : 
http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/4459/
Another, more famous, is "The Bremen Town Musicians" although the version given here is attributed to Dorothea Viehmann, another important storyteller and the only one who was given credit during the Grimms' lifetime.

http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm027.html

"Devil Greencoat" was another story that the von Hauxthausens gave the Grimms.  Unfortunately, it is not available online, but you may reconstruct it from Surlalune's annotations:
http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/bearskin/notes.html

"Bearskin," a heavily revised version is available here: 
http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/bearskin/index.html

The youngest von Hauxthausen sister, ten year-old Anna, was particularly helpful to the Grimms.

Annette von Droste Hulshoff's sister Jenny was the source for "The Worn-out Dancing Shoes":
http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/twelvedancing/index.html
In 1874, Charles Deulin, a French author, reworked this story:
http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/twelvedancing/stories/lang.html
By the way, even though Annette terrified Wilhelm, he was very much attracted to Jenny, a sweeter and less opinionated young woman.  He may even have wished to marry her.


Finally, I'd like to mention Dorothea Viehmann, an older woman who more closely fit our preconceptions of the Grimms' sources.  Once middle class, she had married a tailor (an occupation that appears frequently in the Grimms' stories), and by the time she met Jacob and Wilhelm, she was quite poor, living a hand to mouth existence.  The stories that she provided included "The Goose Girl":
http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/goosegirl/index.html

"Doctor Know It All" :
http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm098.html

and "The Three Army Surgeons":
http://www.pinkmonkey.com/dl/library1/story171.pdf

Unsurprisingly, not only did Dorothea Viehmann receive credit for telling the brothers her stories but her picture appeared in their collection.


Jack Zipes discusses the impact that historical and cultural context had on the Grimms' stories.  One wonders how much impact the storytellers' own lives had on the stories that they chose to give the brothers.

After Dorothea Viehmann's death in 1815, the Brothers Grimm moved on to a new stage of their careers.  Of course, many of their younger storytellers and collectors had also married and become mothers, so they no longer had time to provide the brothers with stories.  As Ms. Paradiz observes, from this point on, the stories that the brothers collected would be print versions from old libraries.  Wilhelm also spent much time adapting stories for young readers.  Even then, Ms. Paradiz notes, parents considered the Grimms' stories to be too harsh for their children.

I'll close with some images from the Grimms' stories.

This is actually an illustration of Hans Christian Andersen's retelling of "The Worn-Out Dancing Shoes":


Ah, this is a good place for a picture of a cat and a mouse!!

Here is a modern illustration of "Little Red Cap":

Once again here are the town musicians of Bremen .... in Bremen!

The Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forests to the Modern World

This summer I resolved to learn a little more about fairy tales, specifically about the people who have written or transcribed them.  Probably the most famous of these people are the Brothers Grimm (Wilhelm and Jacob), so I've begun my reading with Prof. Jack Zipes' study (pictured above).  This book is more than a biography as it covers not only the brothers' life stories but also the impact that their tales have had on German readers (scholars & common readers)--and the reasons that they have had such an impact.

Do you know about the 2005 movie, The Brothers Grimm, that starred Heath Ledger?  (See the link below for the trailer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3QkwDld1d4


    That is not the real story.

However, contrary to what we "know," neither did the Brothers Grimm go out to the farms and forests and collect stories from German peasants.  As Prof. Zipes points out, the brothers gathered their stories from literate, middle-class storytellers who came to their house.  (Wilhelm even married one of the storytellers, Dortchen Wild, a pharmacist's daughter.)  The brothers then collected different versions of these stories, revising and editing them for publication.  Wilhelm continued to rework these stories as the audience of the collections changed from adults to children.  Here is a link to a comparison of different versions of "Hansel and Gretel":
http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm015a.html

You may also read different versions of "Snow White" here:
http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm053.html
http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/type0709.html#snowwhite

Prof. Zipes therefore discusses the Grimms' tales as literary fairy tales, works that draw on both orality and print.  Although the Grimms' tales occupy a unique position in German and world culture, they are also very much a type of literature that was very popular in the 19th century.

Arthur Rackham's illustration below is from an English translation of "Snow White" (1909).  In this version, she is called Snowdrop.


Prof. Zipes also points out that the most well-known stories, the ones that we think of when we think about the Brothers Grimm's fairy tales, do not represent all of the stories that the brothers collected, revised, and edited.  Here are links to some other stories.  We may talk about "Godfather Death" in class: http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm044.html.  Prof. Zipes discusses "The Maiden Without Hands" at length:  http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm031.html  Another story that he alludes to is "Frau Trude" :  http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm043.html

To see Justin Chen's art inspired by "The Maiden Without Hands," go to this link:
http://jkhc.blogspot.com/2009/02/maiden-without-hands-click-image-for.html

In fact, when we think about the most well-known stories, we may really be thinking about versions by Walt Disney or one of the many 20th-century writers for children!  

Prof. Zipes seems to be most interested in the historical and cultural context of the Grimms' stories.  Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm lived from 1785 to 1863 and 1786 to 1859.  During their lifetime, Germany was not one country.  It was divided up into different, independent states such as Hanover and Prussia, and, during the early 1800s, these states became satellites of France.  In other words, they were ruled by members of Napoleon's family.  As a result, the Grimms sought to preserve German culture and were very much in favor of German unification.  Their family situation complicated their political and cultural activism.  Since their father had died when they were boys, Jacob and Wilhelm also had to struggle to survive in a world where money and social standing were essential.  Both men trained as lawyers and worked in a variety of professions.  Yet ultimately they were successful.  They were able to pursue their cultural activism and publish a number of works, including the beginnings of a German dictionary as well as their anthologies of fairy tales.  The brothers were proud of their success and attributed it to their values (hard work, love of family, Protestant piety).  Prof. Zipes suggests that their stories reflected both the larger political and cultural context and the brothers' personal situation. 

Below is a map of Europe so that you may see where Germany is:


  Also, below is a picture of Kassel, the city that the Grimms called home.  It is now described as "the capital of the German fairy tale route":


Prof. Zipes concludes by showing how central the Grimms' tales are to Germans.  The stories are truly a common cultural currency and represent a different kind of popular culture, that is, folk culture.  As examples of folk culture, they played a key role in Germans' efforts to rehabilitate themselves after WWII and, in East Germany, to establish and support Communism. Late twentieth century authors in West Germany reworked these stories for adults and children both as satire and as stories that continued the Grimms' tradition of political and cultural activism.  Some of these reworkings are poems!  German pop psychology draws on the Grimms' tales in ways that intrigue yet infuriate Prof. Zipes.   He considers these pop psychologists' readings to be very limited and limiting.

It is always interesting to see how people from other cultures look at our readings...and at literature in general. 

Below is a picture of a sculpture of the Frog Prince.

And here is an image from a German comic "Frau mit Frosch" (Woman with Frog) about a businesswoman and her modern-day frog prince:

I tried to look for illustrations of some of the more outrageous modern-day adaptations, but they aren't online yet.  In more than one story, the fairy tale heroine starts a union for workers, and one even emigrates to America because our country has no kings or princes.  One hero is helped by an elf named Xram...Marx backwards.  And these were the adaptations from capitalistic West Germany!  The communist East Germans' adaptations were more traditional.