SOURCE: Morris-Keitel, Helen G. “The Audience Should Be King: Bettina Brentano-von Arnim's ‘Tale of the Lucky Purse.’” Marvels and Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies 11, nos. 1-2 (1997): 48-60.

[In the following essay, Morris-Keitel considers “Tale of the Lucky Purse” as an example of a hybrid genre that combines a fairy-tale narrative and a dialogue with a royal audience.]

INTRODUCTION: SOCIAL PROSE OF THE VORMäRZ AND THE FAIRY TALE

The 1840s in the German states can perhaps best be characterized as a period of potential and real transition. Physicists describe such phases as unstable and full of activity as individual elements or groups reconfigure themselves into an altered, more stable state. To many inhabitants of the German states in this period, major changes in the political and economic spheres and, thus, in the social structure appeared to be on the horizon. Indications of this imminent change appeared most visibly among the peasants. Among this large constituency there began noticeable changes in demographics (with a country to city shift), in sources of income (with more families and individuals resorting to illegal means such as begging, prostitution, or theft in order to survive), and in the work force (with the employment of women and children in factories). In short, the German states were experiencing the effects of industrialization coupled with the, albeit slow, transition from a feudal to a capital-based society.

Literary responses to real and anticipated changes took many forms, including essays, poems, songs, manifestos, and satire. While the affinity between many of these forms is to be found only in their subject matter and their desired receptions, two fictional prose forms—the literary fairy tale and novellas and novels subsumed under the heading of Vormärz social prose—share a broad range of structural similarities, which at first glance may be masked by their obvious differences.

To date, few literary scholars have focused on the social prose of the Vormärz period (1840-48) in any systematic way; and only one scholar, Hans Adler, has attempted to delineate the aesthetic and ideological precepts behind this form:

Without recourse to a common conception of that which makes a human being human and of human rights, this literature would have neither a social nor a critical dimension. The critical dimension consists of the discrepancy between the concept of humanity as an absolute and the societal condition as an unacceptable reality, whether it be due to bad upbringing, terrible legislation or the unscrupulous abuse of privileges. The social dimension of this literature can be attributed to the fact that the hindrances standing in the way of realizing this concept of humanity are the subject of the narrative.

(“Literatur und Sozialkritik” 286)

Adler goes on to say that because authors of this prose are concerned with improving society, they not only expose the “evils” that prevail, they also propose concrete steps in their narratives that could be taken in order to avoid the seemingly inevitable “fall from society”—the fate of most of the lower-class protagonists (“Literatur und Sozialkritik” 286). A similar sociopolitical dimension has been attributed to the literary fairy tale in Germany by Jack Zipes, who asserts that it “records the breakdown of an old world structure, chaos, confusion, and the striving to attain a new world order which might allow for more humane conduct” (Breaking the Magic Spell 35). Zipes argues further that the literary fairy tale “express[es] the need for greater justice and more rational alternatives in opposition to arbitrary socio-political repression” (39). This similarity in the desired social function of the two literary forms implies a surprising affinity between fairy tales and more realistically-based social prose.

Indeed, a closer look reveals that these parallels between the two literary forms are reinforced on a structural level. Both social prose and literary fairy tales tend to have protagonists who through no fault of their own have “fallen” outside the bounds of civilized society (Adler, “Literatur und Sozialkritik” 286; Zipes, Breaking the Magic Spell 65). The stories of individual protagonists are meant to be understood as paradigmatic with broad representational significance in the extant society. Both often use clearly delineated dualistic paradigms—good/bad, rich/poor, beautiful/ugly—to reinforce the desired conception and critique of society. Both contain utopian revolutionary potential in that alternatives are implied or explicitly depicted that are to be concretized in the sociopolitical reality of the reader. Both generally make use of prevalent gender norms in their delineation of male and female characters.¹ And finally, both were written for an audience whom the authors deemed to be in a position “to question and problematize the state of the reader” and then ideally to effect change (Zipes, Breaking the Magic Spell 64; see also Adler, “Literatur und Sozialkritik”).

What then differentiates the two forms? Simply put, it is the agency attributed to the protagonist. In fairy tales of the Grimmian type, the primary concern is “socializing the individual to accept his or her prescribed role in society” (Jarvis, “Literary Legerdemain” 16). And in Romantic fairy tales, the protagonist “represent[s] the ultimate human refusal to become a cog in the wheel of growing state regulation, industrialization and bureaucratization” (Zipes, Breaking the Magic Spell 65-6). In either case, as well as in female-penned tales that invert the Grimmian paradigm, the focus is on the ability of the single individual (with occasional help from magical objects, creatures, or beings) to realize him- or herself. Self-realization, if one can even call it that, is reduced to the lowest common denominator in social prose; human or “sub-human” existence is linked directly to bare survival, that is, the ability to provide for the material needs of an individual or a family.² Indeed, many works of social prose imply that the protagonists would feel fulfilled and be content with living at or slightly above the subsistence level. Materialism, not individual traits such as vanity, jealousy, creativity, imagination, or intelligence (Zipes, The Brothers Grimm 81; Jarvis, “Literary Legerdemain” 112), determines individual behavior (good or bad), individual success, the relationships between individual or groups of individuals, and the relationship between these groups and the State.

Such an emphasis on the material world precludes the use in social prose of another element dominant in literary fairy tales, namely the use of magic or fantasy “to announce the emancipation of the self” (Zipes, Breaking the Magic Spell 65) or “as a way to create a different consciousness” (Jarvis, “Literary Legerdemain” 67). The writers of Vormärz social prose want to emphasize that neither the suffering they depict nor the solutions they propose are products of magic potions, spells, or witches; rather, both are under the control of “normal” human beings. As Adler states, authors of social prose “dispel the illusion inherent in fairy tales” that the suffering individual, alone, (with a little help from talking animals, wisewomen, etc.) can turn her or his fate around (“Literatur und Sozialkritik” 299). Thus, the common pleas for the humane factory owner in many works of social prose which in essence is a call for the entire bourgeoisie to accept their responsibilities as Christians and/or Humanists to ensure the preeminence of morals in a world the authors depict as being increasingly corrupted by mammon (Adler, “Literatur und Sozialkritik” 294; Soziale Romane 182).³ In a sense, the individual identities of fairy tales are replaced with social group identities, and whole groups are called upon to act uniformly, particularly in their interactions with other social groups.

While it is clear that both fairy tales and social prose have a didactic purpose, the emphasis placed on the individual very differently positions the reader of the two forms. In the case of fairy tales, the reader is expected to identify with and learn the same lessons as the protagonist. In male-penned tales, this translates into accepting the social roles society has defined, whereas in female-penned tales, this often means the establishment of an all-female society outside of established society (Jarvis, “Literary Legerdemain” 112). In first case, the “real world” is accepted as it is, and in the second the “real world” must be escaped from in order for the protagonist to realize her potential (168). Although the second implies a critique of existing social norms, it does not emphatically call on the reader to change existing society. In social prose, on the other hand, the readers are to empathize with the protagonist, realize and correct any misperceptions they might have regarding the actual causes of poverty and its associated (undesirable) effects, and then modify their own behavior in the real world accordingly. Social prose's intended audience was not the suffering lower classes, but rather those in positions of power, primarily economic, but in some cases also political, who have been exposed in the narrative as the cause of the protagonist's inhuman existence.

What happens, then, when an author wants to retain the hope attached to the individual's creative capacity while at the same time exposing more concretely the systemic causes of social injustice, and to whom should such a tale be addressed? These are the conceptual and formal dilemmas faced by one acknowledged master of hybrid genres, Bettina Brentano-von Arnim (1789-1859). It is her attempt to unite the two previously discussed genres into a coherent whole to which I will now turn. The result—“Der Heckebeutel,” or “Tale of the Lucky Purse”—is an eloquent testimony to the proximity between social prose and literary fairy tales in the Vormärz period.

BETTINA BRENTANO-VON ARNIM'S HYBRID NARRATIVE

In 1842 the Prussian government announced a public essay contest, the purpose of which was to establish “whether the complaint about growing poverty was justified, what the causes and the signs of this impoverishment were, and what means could be used to control said poverty” (Vordtriede 450). Brentano-von Arnim, who had addressed similar issues in her conversational novel Dies Buch gehört dem König (The King's Book, 1843), decided to collect information that would help her answer these questions. The material gathered was to be compiled and commented on in a volume entitled Das Armenbuch (The Poor Book), which was never completed and only published as a fragment by Werner Vordtriede in 1962. Paradoxically, the event that commanded the attention of numerous other Vormärz authors, who then wrote works subsumed under the general heading of social prose, namely, the Silesian Weaver Uprising of 1844, is what kept Brentano-von Arnim from finishing her Poor Book project.

It was common knowledge among the educated bourgeoisie and the nobility in Berlin that Brentano-von Arnim was collecting materials for her Poor Book, and it was assumed that the critique begun in The King's Book would be continued and possibly strengthened in this new work. Thus, Alexander von Humboldt, representing the court, warned her against publishing the work and intimated that there were already those in Berlin who saw Brentano-von Arnim as one of the instigators of the uprising. As she wrote to Adolf Stahr, a renowned publisher of the period, in a letter of 27 June 1844: “Just wanting to help the hungry is equated with preaching revolt” (qtd. in Meier 227). Wolfgang Frühwald may be correct in his assertion that it was not threats alone that kept Brentano-von Arnim from completing this project (275). However, his argument that she gave up trying to publish the book because it had been made essentially superfluous does not adequately explain her decision, especially since the “Tale of the Lucky Purse” is dated 1845—clearly after the decision was made to abandon the larger project.

The fictional form of “Tale of the Lucky Purse” distinguishes it from the other materials related to the Poor Book project, which are reports and/or sociopolitical analysis. Concretely, the impetus to write the tale came from a request made by Prince Waldemar of Prussia for a report regarding the utilization of a sum of money he had given her (Vordtriede 497). Instead of providing a balance sheet documenting the expenditures, Brentano-von Arnim chose to transform an old woman's life history into a didactic tale demonstrating the author's familiarity with the broad range of fairy-tale traditions. Brentano-von Arnim, in the tradition of women's fairy tales, provides the reader access to the life history of a woman from which the presence of men is noticeably absent (Jarvis, “Literary Legerdemain” 70). Drawing from the Romantic tradition, she celebrates the creativity of this individual. And finally, in a Grimmian sense, Brentano-von Arnim reinforces the necessity of a patriarchal social structure. In order to combine all these traditions with her attempt to answer the question about the cause(s) of pauperism (the raison d'être of social prose), Brentano-von Arnim must shift positions within the narrative between that of the listener to and that of the teller of the tale, a feat accomplished stylistically by inserting the old woman's story into a “dialogue” with her royal audience.

This inner narrative is the life history of an eighty-nine-year-old woman who has appealed to Brentano-von Arnim for financial support. For the most part, Brentano-von Arnim allows the old woman to tell her own tale before she resummarizes at the end of the existing text. Although the old woman's economic situation provides the motivation for her exchanges with Brentano-von Arnim, truer to the Romantic and female fairy-tale traditions, it is the persona of this old woman that Brentano-von Arnim highlights in an attempt to reform her “listener(s).⁴

The old woman, as the focal point and primary narrator of the inner narrative, is typical of the protagonists in many fairy tales in two respects. First of all, her story is set in motion by a task she must fulfill. Her dying daughter's last words to her are: “Mother, do not desert my children” (“Heckebeutel” 499). Her attempts to keep her promise are characterized by resourcefulness and creativity, even if they are ultimately thwarted (Zipes, The Brothers Grimm 26). On the other hand, in contrast to most fairy tales, the tasks the old woman undertakes in order to fulfill this promise are all self-defined. In other words, there is no character in the tale who stipulates what she must do in order to achieve her goal.

Various other structural elements, at least from the point of view of the intended royal male audience, mask the fairy-tale elements. The historical and place specificity of the old woman's narrative, although not uncommon in women's fairy tales,⁵ definitely counter the seemingly ahistoricity and universality of the “once upon a time” and imprecise settings most commonly associated with fairy tales. The specific dates cited, 1793 and 1806, as well as the obvious setting of the exchange at Brentano-von Arnim's house in Berlin, are particularly important in establishing the long relationship between this peasant woman and the tale's intended royal readership.

There is one aspect about this female protagonist that distinguishes her from her counterparts in both fairy tales and social prose: her age. As Shawn Jarvis has noted, “canonical fairy tales (at least Grimm types) tend to present models for the socialization of individuals at the gateway to adulthood” (Jarvis, “Trivial Pursuit?” 108). This is also the case for noncanonical works by women. In the first type, older women are generally evil stepmothers or wicked witches, in the second, they are wisewomen who help the protagonist on her path to self-realization (Jarvis, “Literary Legerdemain” 157). Social prose, too, tends to focus on the tragic demise of young women. Either their “innocent” beauty leads to sexual exploitation by wealthier males (Dronke; Willkomm), or young mothers, powerless to improve their situation, must watch their children starve or die in the “jaws” of the machines (Dronke; Willkomm; Otto).

Brentano-von Arnim's choice of heroine should not surprise those familiar with The King's Book. It is older women, represented most convincingly by the main protagonist of this work, Frau Rat Goethe, who still “love honesty, have a sense of honor, spirit, and heroism” (Brentano-von Arnim, Dies Buch gehört dem König 273). In other words, it is these older women who still possess those virtues that Brentano-von Arnim argues the State has lost and that must be regained if the “unhealthy ferment” among the common people is to be combated successfully (271; Hoock-Demarle 56).

Brentano-von Arnim collapses the typical young female heroine of a woman's tale and her helper, whom Karen Rowe has defined as fitting into the category of “les sages femmes,” “wise women who transmit culture,” into one figure (64). Despite the wisewoman qualities—her knowledge and her rhetorical skills—the (“young”) protagonist cannot accomplish the task assigned her. This coalescence of young and old allows Brentano-von Arnim to realize her ultimate goal, which was to criticize sociopolitical conditions that “led to the reification of the individual, i.e., the production and use of human beings as (though they were) tools and commodities” (Zipes, Breaking the Magic Spell 57), thereby locating the source of the (old) woman's suffering outside the individual.

Brentano-von Arnim's resistance to the reification of the old woman proves to be simultaneously the strength and weakness of the tale. Since the old woman speaks in the first person, there is no indication of alienation from the self.⁶ Her humanness is still intact; at no point does she approach the “animal-like” state of similar protagonists encountered in works of social prose (Otto; Dronke). Indeed, Brentano-von Arnim praises her “neat, beautiful appearance” during their first encounter (“Heckebeutel” 498).

Brentano-von Arnim's acceptance of the old woman obstructs her from analyzing the situation from any other perspective than that of the old woman—the old woman's explanation suffices to explain her destitution. Brentano-von Arnim is satisfied with this rather naive assessment because it coincides with her own analysis of the social malaise. Even though the old woman seemingly points to some concrete causes, such as the loss of almost all the male members of her family in military service to the King or the government's decision only to sell merchants licenses for the period of one year at the considerable cost of twelve thalers, it is implied that if the King only knew of these sacrifices and injustices, then he would, out of fatherly love for his subjects, save and protect them. Both women believe in love as a revolutionary force (Böttger 256), as the moral lesson of the tale underscores: “If only the rich could read God's law—Do unto others as thou shalt have done unto you—in their own hearts, then more merchants licenses would be bought than the poor need for their trade” (“Heckebeutel” 514).

It is the unison of both women's voices that has led Birgit Ebert, in one of the few analyses dealing specifically with “Tale of the Lucky Purse,” to emphasize the rhetorical skill of the old woman in Brentano-von Arnim's tale. Ebert argues that Brentano-von Arnim transforms “begging into the art of persuasion” (190). In fact, as Ebert observes, the best thing about her is “the courage of the poor woman to articulate; to use one's own voice means to step into public life” (191). While it is true that the old woman tells her tragic story in order to receive alms (or, as she claims, “loans”) from the narrator, I think one has to be careful not to confuse the original private acts in the Brentano-von Arnim home with Brentano-von Arnim's desire to project and amplify this woman's voice for a public audience because she represents views congruent with those of Brentano-von Arnim.

The voice of this old woman is only heard because Brentano-von Arnim chooses to enter into dialogue with her. Furthermore, this voice only has the potential for being heard outside the privacy of the narrator's home due to Brentano-von Arnim's decision to raise the old woman to exemplary status. After all, this inner narrative is prefaced by the words, “for example” (“Heckebeutel” 498). In recording the story as she does, first letting the old woman speak and then echoing her at the end of the tale, the old woman seems very powerful. This power is derived, however, from the empathy Brentano-von Arnim obviously felt and displayed as the listener in the actual encounters with this woman.

This capacity on the part of the “rich” listener to be able to empathize with the “poor” narrator is the linchpin upon which both the inner (the old woman and Brentano-von Arnim) and the outer (Brentano-von Arnim and the royal audience) narratives of the “Tale of the Lucky Purse” hinge and is also the aspect of this tale that most closely allies the narrative with other Vormärz social prose. Its significance becomes apparent if one compares Brentano-von Arnim's narrative to a similar scene in Ernst Dronke's novella, Reich und Arm (Rich and Poor, 1846). In this scene, a poor textile worker, Paul Hofacker, goes to Baron von Bernheim, the factory owner, to request a week's leave with pay in order to take care of his two-year-old daughter, who is dying of severe burns suffered while both parents were away at work, and his eight-months pregnant wife, who is bedridden due to shock and guilt. The Baron's response ranges from reproaches (“Why did they leave the children alone? How can they trust in God to provide for them?”) to economic/business rationales that forbid him from granting the request (Dronke 59-61).

The parallels between the old woman and Paul Hofacker are numerous. Both are depicted as honest, hardworking individuals whose efforts to eke out a living are thwarted continuously by factors beyond their control. Strong maternal or paternal feelings (obviously positively valued by both Brentano-von Arnim and Dronke) outweigh individual pride and motivate the two to ask for financial assistance. Both promise to remunerate their lenders. These pleading voices—as articulate as they may be—attest to the powerlessness of the individual speaker in a society as a whole, thereby underscoring the importance and power attached to the listener.

The dispositions of the listeners, Brentano-von Arnim and the Baron, motivate disparate responses on the part of the storytellers. On the one hand, the listener motivates the speaker, the old woman, to return to her again and again, and to endow Brentano-von Arnim with the descriptors “guardian angel” and “refuge” (“Heckebeutel” 506-07). On the other hand, the charity of the listener—the Baron ends the conversation with his worker by throwing the distressed father a thaler—“takes away his [the worker's] right to speak” (Dronke 61). What is it that distinguishes these two listeners? It is, I would argue, the role the listener has defined for her- or himself in society.

The Baron makes a conscious distinction between Baron von Bernheim the businessman, who must be deaf to such appeals for help and Baron von Bernheim the “human being,” who takes pity on the worker—hence the thaler (Dronke 61). Significantly, this thaler comes from a “stack of paper money” the Baron pulls out of a desk drawer (Dronke 60). The businessman is highly cognizant of how this money has been amassed, and this knowledge dominates and has control over his “humanist” alter ego. Brentano-von Arnim's “lucky purse,” until the very end of the tale, is a purse “in which money, like the famous hedge-penny, constantly renews itself, as long as it is spent on germane occasions,” effectively eliminating any connection between the money it dispenses and a tangible source (“Heckebeutel” 498).

Notably, however, the “lucky purse” does remain in Brentano-von Arnim's possession; it is not given to the protagonist, the old woman, in contrast to the purse in Chamisso's Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte (Peter Schlemihl's Marvelous Tale, 1814). Thus, Brentano-von Arnim, as the keeper of the “lucky purse,” sets herself up as the important and necessary assistant to the old woman. As Zipes has pointed out in regard to fairy tales, “the … protagonist [the old woman] is nothing alone, by him or herself, but becomes omnipotent when assisted by small creatures or outsiders, those figures who are marginal and live on the border between wilderness and civilization, between village and woods, between the earthly world and the other sacred world” (The Brothers Grimm 81). This role is closely intertwined with Brentano-von Arnim's role as the “rich listener,” and in neither role does she ultimately have the power to enable this one woman's desire to become self-sufficient (that is, “omnipotent”). Furthermore, Brentano-von Arnim does not assign herself the role of the wisewoman vis-à-vis the old woman. She offers her no advice; she provides only a sympathetic ear and some money.

The limitations to Brentano-von Arnim's ability to respond to the woman's needs as keeper of the purse is demonstrated in a scene in the inner narrative where the magic of the purse seems to wane. During the sixth encounter with the old woman, instead of the requested five thalers, the purse only contains four (“Heckebeutel” 507). Even her power as a listener is restricted when, during the seventh and final visit, the old woman says: “Dear little lady, I can demand nothing of you. You have done your duty by me …” (“Heckebeutel” 512 and 514). In agreement with the old woman, Brentano-von Arnim acknowledges the futility of her isolated acts of charity, breaks off the inner narrative, and exchanges her previous role as listener for that of the “poor,” yet eloquent story teller.⁷

THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE (LUCKY) PURSE

Brentano-von Arnim's role as “keeper of the (lucky) purse” remains unchanged throughout the entire text because this is what allows her to be both the listener to and the teller of tales. This flexibility is also undeniably linked to her position in society as an educated (noble)woman influenced both by Enlightenment and Romantic traditions. She could, for the most part, remain outside or on the periphery of the economic changes occurring around her in the 1840s in Prussia. As an interested observer, Brentano-von Arnim responded to the effects on individuals accompanying social change and took it upon herself to act as their intercessor vis-à-vis the King. It was her hope to serve in these roles as a catalyst for a more stable and equitable state in both political and social terms.

The “lucky purse” is the signifier in the text that holds the key to Brentano-von Arnim's synthesis of fairy tale and social prose. In this object the boundaries between magic and reality are erased. Until the final visit, the source of the “lucky purse's” funds remains mysterious, magical. However, during the last visit, Brentano-von Arnim reveals the source of the two gold pieces currently contained in the “lucky purse.” What had appeared as mysterious is now tangible, what was innocently charming is now dangerously concrete. This transformation from a magical world to the real world and Brentano's accompanying words leave no doubt about who must alter his behavior if the threats to society posed by the “social question” are to be countered: “It would seem most probable that the second gold piece will also go up in this old Sybille's smoke of hopes, if his royal highness does not decree otherwise” (“Heckebeutel” 515). However, in order to do this the King must recognize the suffering of “his people” and (re)assert himself as a truly “royal patriarch” who would “tear down all the hindrances that the high-ranking phantoms, the fawning courtiers and bureaucrats who are the enemies of the people have erected” (Böttger 255; 254). He must be willing to assume the role of listener and to act upon what he has heard, thereby creating a “union between monarchy and democracy” (Böttger 311).

The radical conservative position Brentano-von Arnim assumes in her hybrid form only becomes apparent when contrasted to the positions of her contemporaries. The majority, if not all authors who supported retaining the monarchy refused to seek systemic causes for the growing impoverishment of the lower classes. They preferred to see poverty as inherent to society (that is, determined by God) or as result of the individual's failure to be a productive member of society. Most liberal bourgeois writers, aware of the growing economic power of their peers and in hopes of attaining political power in the near future, sought to reform (bourgeois) industrialists. In contrast to either the conservatives or the liberals, Brentano-von Arnim wanted to “save the King”—to advise, inspire, and warn him (Böttger 244) and thereby socialize him according to her own paradigm of the Volkskönig (King of the people). This is the most threatening aspect of Brentano-von Arnim's hybrid form and that which limits the scope of her potential audience. Her solution to the “social question” and thus her message in “Tale of the Lucky Purse” are suited for only one audience, the King (and his heirs).

From the structure of the tale it would seem that Brentano-von Arnim believed in the ability of such a tale to serve “as a record and reflection of society” and “as a normative influence on its reader or listener” (Bottigheimer, Grimms' Bad Girls and Bold Boys 12). The royal audience, following her example, would listen and act. However, we must not forget that this tale never reached royal ears (nor eyes). Numerous events—including her failure to change the King's opinion in the cases of Heinrich Ludwig Tschech in 1844, who had attempted to assassinate the King, Friedrich Wilhelm Schloeffel in 1845, a Silesian factory owner who had assisted Brentano-von Arnim in collecting data for the Poor Book project, and Edgar Bauer in 1845, who was arrested due to his political views (Bäumer and Schultz 105-11); the court's intervention into her Poor Book project; and the use of government troops to quell the Silesian Weaver Uprising—led Brentano-von Arnim to doubt the King's willingness to listen, especially to the “wisewomen” of his kingdom. For if one hypothesizes the King as the implied protagonist of this tale, as I believe Brentano-von Arnim did, the role of the wisewoman is the role the old woman and Brentano-von Arnim ideally play. “Wisewomen,” however, were asynchronous with the accepted gender roles of the day and, in the aftermath of Brentano-von Arnim's King's Book, were seen as threatening, particularly by the State apparatus surrounding the King.⁸ Censorship—official, unofficial, and self-imposed—was the only means of protecting royalty from the dangers of listening to the teller(s) of such tales.

Notes

1. See Zipes, The Brothers Grimm 14; and Morris-Keitel. As Shawn Jarvis has convincingly argued, female-penned tales in the nineteenth century often subvert prevalent gender norms and their authors “re-wrote the image of women in literature in order to re-define the real women they envisioned or hoped to become: independent, autonomous, educated, even magical” (“Literary Legerdemain” 172).

2. The lower classes in social prose are often depicted as animal-like or ghoulish, that is, nonhuman. See, for example, descriptions of “die alte Lise” in Otto's Schloß und Fabrik (1: 210-11) or of Susanne and Betty in Dronke's Maikönigin. See also Morris-Keitel.

3. See Ernst Dronke, Aus dem Volk & Polizei-Geschichten (1846); Louise Otto, Schloß und Fabrik (1846); Robert Prutz, Das Engelchen (1851); Georg Weerth, Romanfragment (1843-47); and Ernst Willkomm, Weisse Sclaven oder die Leiden des Volkes (1845).

4. For a detailed analysis of this figure, see Ebert.

5. See Jarvis, “Literary Legerdemain,” in particular Chapter III, “Using History to Explain Her-Story: Amalie von Helwig's Die Sage vom Wolfsbrunnen” (73-104).

6. Jarvis, “Literary Legerdemain” 116. See also Bottigheimer, Grimms' Bad Girls and Bold Boys and Fairy Tales and Society.

7. This was not a new role for Brentano-von Arnim. She had, for example, successfully mediated a reinstatement of Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm in 1840. This role also closely parallels that of Frau Rat Goethe in The King's Book.

8. As Jarvis has surmised: “German women's Märchen may have presented paradigms that were unintelligible to readers schooled in the tradition of male fantasies and male solutions to political dilemmas in canonical fairy tales, or they may have presented solutions which were unacceptable because they were understood all too well” (“Literary Legerdemain” 4; emphasis added).

[Editor's note: Scholars refer to and spell the name of Bettina Brentano-von Arnim in various ways—including Bettine von Arnim and, as in the preceding essay by Jeannine Blackwell, Bettina von Arnim. In this issue there has been no attempt to impose a consistent form or spelling. This accounts for the variations in the works cited and the different surnames used by Blackwell and Morris-Keitel in their essays.]

An earlier version of this essay was presented at the 49^th Annual Kentucky Foreign Language Conference in Lexington, Kentucky, in April 1996. All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated.

Works Cited

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Bäumer, Konstanze und Hartwig Schultz. Bettina von Arnim. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1995.

Böttger, Fritz. Bettina von Arnim, ihr Leben, ihre Begegnungen, ihre Zeit. Berlin: Verlag der Nation, 1986.

Bottigheimer, Ruth B. Grimms' Bad Girls and Bold Boys: The Moral and Social Vision of the Tales. New Haven: Yale UP, 1987.

———, ed. Fairy Tales and Society: Illusion, Allusion, and Paradigm. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1986.

Brentano-von Arnim, Bettina. Dies Buch gehört dem König. 1843. Ed. Ilse Staff. Frankfurt a.M.: Insel, 1982.

———. [“Erzählung vom Heckebeutel”]. Vordtriede 497-517.

Dronke, Ernst. Reich und Arm. In Aus dem Volk & Polizei-Geschichten. 1846. Ed. Bodo Rollka. Cologne: Leske, 1981. 11-90.

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