Dysfunctional Families (and Scholars) of the Past

Great history research will make you regret your teaching: revising the historical and cultural record effectively renders our past teaching false. This is why we must maintain some uncertainty in our presentations, some transparency about the historiographical process.

For example, I have for years used the Grimm fairy tales as sociological evidence of the frequency of remarriage and blended families in pre-modern Europe. I don't need to: there's plenty of research on real families out there. But as an example in class, everyone has heard of the evil stepmother, the nasty stepsister, the orphan child adopted into an unpleasant situation, etc. It's very effective as an illustration of the continuity between our multiplicity of family situations and the tensions they engender with the families of the past which are so often misportrayed in very simplistic terms.

Unfortunately, the Grimm brothers falsified and distorted their data when they published their research, to fit their political and social preconceptions and to make it more marketable. How modern of them! Maria Tatar has published a new book on the Grimm tales which adds a great deal of complexity to the neat and pretty stories with which we are so familiar.

In an interview [PDF] Harvard's Tatar reveals some of the less well known variants on the stories (Red Riding Hood, for example, outwits the wolf herself in some versions; there are hundreds of variants of Snow White, some of which are just little differences in detail, but some of which are really thematically important) as well as explaining some of the process of production, reproduction and collection. It's that last that bothers me most:

Q: Why are stepmothers in these tales always evil?
Tatar: In many of the original tales there were no stepmothers at all, only biological mothers. By replacing mothers with stepmothers, the Grimms could assign evil intentions to women and still preserve the sanctity of motherhood.
Q: Who were the Brothers Grimm and why did they make such an effort to collect and disseminate these tales?
Tatar: The Grimms—and they were two brothers, Jacob and Wilhelm—wanted to consolidate national identity by creating a body of German folklore. And they felt a powerful need to collect what they called the “poetry of the people” before it disappeared from hearths and workrooms. They also wanted to sell books, which they did by turning their collection into a"manual of manners." But they were also scholars—they launched the first dictionary of the German language and were involved in politically progressive movements. They were also cosmopolitan thinkers who acknowledged the international sources for their collection, and they worked hard to record cultural variants of folktales.

So, the Brothers Grimm were popularizers, distorters, and I'm going to have to come up with other illustrations of family structure diversity. But they did do some fantastic folkloric work, even if we have to revise and reconstruct some of it. [sigh] [Somehow, the"History and Politics of Nostalgia" paragraphs at wood s lot seem relevant, but I haven't figured out how, yet]