Has anyone not heard of stories such as Hansel and Gretel or Cinderella? What about characters like Rapunzel letting down her hair, or cheeky imps like Rumpelstiltskin? As well as Disney giving us a version of Cinderella, perhaps even more famously, the cartoon of Snow White has created an inevitable connection between the character and seven white-bearded, apple-cheeked dwarves.
Grim Tales
All these stories come to us largely through the work of the Brothers Grimm, as they are generally known. Their fairy tales, published in Germany in the 19th century, have a very different understanding of ‘fairy’ from Walt Disney. The first collection published by the brothers was called Children’s and Household Tales and some may wonder at the appropriateness of Children’s.
These stories were not sanitised fare. For example:
In ‘The Juniper Tree’, a couple pray to God to give them a child. The woman gives birth to a baby boy and dies of happiness. The widower remarries, and his new wife has a daughter to whom she is devoted, but she loathes her stepson, decapitating, dismembering and cooking him into a stew for dinner. A magical bird alights on a juniper tree, singing of the woman’s crime, and drops a millstone on her, killing her. The bird is transmuted into the son who joins his joyful father and stepsister, they eat together and live happily ever after.
That example comes from a review of Ann Schmiesing’s The Brothers Grimm: A Biography by John Gray in The New Statesman. It’s a thoughtful review of a fascinating book. Among other things, it points out that although the Grimms’ folk (or Volk) tales were used by nationalists to help determine an authentic German sensibility, rooted in the German people and the landscape, the stories actually came from a much wider range. Some have their sources in 17th century French texts, for example, and the tales in what is now known as The Arabian Nights, were drawn together over centuries in the Middle East, with rots in Arabic, Persian and Mesopotamian literature.
While certain cultures do sometimes try to define what is nationalistically or ethnically distinctive, we find again and again that the richest cultures are made up of shared influences from many sources, arising form the migration of peoples and ideas.
Adichie Returns
An example of that kind of migration and hybridity is Chimananda Ngozi Adichie, whose novel Dream Count will be published at the beginning of next month. It is her first novel since Americanah, which was published in 2013 and like that novel and Adichie herself, it shuttles between the USA and Nigeria.
The novel weaves together the stories of four different women and considers territory which will be familiar to Adichie’s readers, such as immigration, female relationships and women’s roles. Add into that motherhood and the pressure to be a mother, relations between Africans and African Americans and ‘the Americanisation of language and thought’. There is a new frankness to her narrative, as she reveals in this fascinating interview:
Incubating for some time at the back of her mind was the idea that she should write more about the ‘gritty reality’ of women’s bodies and the obstacles to women’s lives caused by gynaecology. She saw it as demystifying the experience of, say, premenstrual dysphoric disorder. Or fibroids. Or the violence of the birthing experience. ‘There’s a lot that has to do with having a female body that isn’t much talked about,’ she says, ‘and it’s consequential for women’s lives.’
It’s great to see Adichie back. And she reveals in the interview that Zadie Smith rates the new novel, s that’s already a good sign.