[In the following excerpt, Bottigheimer probes gender distinctions related to transgression and punishment in Grimms' Tales.]

A general pattern of exculpating men and incriminating women permeates Grimms' Tales. This pattern is clearly evident in the post-1819 versions of "Hansel and Gretel" (no. 15), "Snow-White" (no. 53) and "Cinderella" (no. 21), each of which provides a stepmother who assumes the burden of blame while the father, virtually absent, shoulders no share of the responsibility for his children's fates.¹ The theme of prohibition, transgression, and punishment offers an incisive example of this more generalized pattern. "Our Lady's Child" (no. 3) and "Brother Lustig" (no. 81) are two of several tales that embody and exemplify the gender-specific consequences of transgressing prohibitions.² "Our Lady's Child" and "Brother Lustig" alone contain a specific prohibition, clearly presented to a character, that functions solely to determine his or her obedience. Both the heroine and the hero knowingly violate this prohibition, but only the heroine is punished; the hero is rewarded.³

A comparison of the consequences of transgressing prohibitions in Grimms' Tales with those in other popular children's books of the nineteenth century—Max und Moritz or Struwwelpeter, for example—indicates that only the Grimms' are gender-specific. In other German children's literature of the nineteenth century, bad boys and bad girls alike suffer the grisly consequences of their disobedience: Paulinchen plays with matches and burns to a crisp, Kaspar refuses his soup and promptly dies of starvation, while Max and Moritz end their Spitzbuben careers ground up as feed for their neighbors' geese.

Male transgressors who go scot-free recall the trickster figure, whose real ability is "the power of avoiding consequences."⁴ On the surface, the literary history of the traditional male trickster figure would appear to account for the gender specificity of punishment in Grimms' Tales, but in the following discussion I conclude that all male figures in Grimms' Tales, whether tricksters or not, enjoy the boon of exoneration as well as the trickster's capacity to escape.

The two tales, "Our Lady's Child" and "Brother Lustig," differ in form: the first is a spare sequence of events that precipitates its female protagonist into mortal danger; while the second, a humorous tale, recounts the outrageously artful stratagems of a vagabond soldier who tricks his way into heaven. "Our Lady's Child" appeared both in the Large Edition intended for a scholarly audience and in the Small Edition, fifty tales selected by Wilhelm Grimm for a young readership, but "Brother Lustig" appeared only in the Large Edition, which suggests that Wilhelm Grimm had reservations about the morality expressed by the latter and chose to keep it from young children's eyes.

In 1807, twenty-one-year-old Wilhelm Grimm sat with Gretchen Wild, then twenty, transcribing the simple tale she told about a poor woodcutter's child whom the Virgin Mary saves from starvation and carries off to heaven. Until her fourteenth year the child plays with angels and wears golden clothes, but one day she opens a forbidden door behind which the Trinity sits in indescribable glory. For denying her deed, the girl is banished from heaven, and cast—mute—into a great forest, where she remains for years until a king hunting in the forest discovers her, takes her to his castle, and marries her. At the end of her first year of marriage, the mute queen bears a son, but in the following night the Virgin Mary appears, warning her that unless she acknowledges her former transgression, her son will disappear. The queen refuses, the Virgin Mary takes her son away, and on the following day the king's ministers advise burning her at the stake for having—they are convinced—devoured the missing child.

In the following two years the same sequence of events is repeated, and the king can protect her no longer. She is condemned to be burned at the stake. As she stands on the faggots, the desire to confess overcomes her. At that moment the Virgin Mary appears with her children, asking once again if she will confess. "Yes," answers the queen. Mary returns her children, the queen regains her speech and lives happily ever after.

Eight years later, one of Jacob Grimm's Viennese Wollzeilergesellschaft friends, Georg Passy, a bookseller, brought in a humorous narrative he had heard from an aged Viennese woman. Called "Brother Lustig," it tells of an old soldier discharged from the army with a paltry severance pay of one loaf of bread and four kreuzers. Nonetheless, he generously shares money and bread with a beggar, who is actually St. Peter in disguise. Rewarding him for his generosity, St. Peter offers to share his earnings from the practice of medicine with the soldier, though he stipulates that they limit their earnings to what they need for their subsistence. Their first case is paid for with a lamb, which St. Peter gives to Brother Lustig to cook; St. Peter enjoins him not to eat any of it, then leaves him in charge of the pot while he steps out for a walk. Thinking that St. Peter will never miss the heart, Brother Lustig sneaks it from the pot, but on his return St. Peter asks for the lamb's heart. Brother Lustig not only denies that he has eaten it, but he also lies, asserting that lambs have no hearts! No amount of pressure can make Brother Lustig confess. Next St. Peter restores a princess to life. He refuses a reward, but the soldier cunningly gets the king to fill his own pack with gold. St. Peter takes the gold and cleverly divides it into three piles, one for himself, one for the soldier, and one for the person who has eaten the lamb's heart. "Oh, that was me," replies the soldier coolly, scopping up the gold and revealing, but not confessing, his guilt.

Some time later Brother Lustig, having run out of money, hopes to obtain a substantial reward by restoring a princess to life on his own; however, he fails. Suddenly, St. Peter appears, resurrects the princess himself, and saves the soldier from ignominy, but forbids him to solicit or to accept the smallest reward from the king. "By hints and cunning" (durch Anspielung und Listigkeit), however, Brother Lustig gets his pack filled with gold. Thereafter, to protect the soldier from treading "in forbidden paths" (auf unerlaubten Wegen), St. Peter gives him the power to fill his pack with whatever he wants simply by wishing for it. Years later, the soldier begins thinking about his impending death, tries to get into hell but is rejected, and as his final trick, gets past St. Peter by tossing his pack into heaven and wishing himself into it.

One might question whether a socially sanctioned moral has been expressed in "Brother Lustig." The tale might be thought to detail the idea that grace, once bestowed, cannot be rescinded. Yet this Calvinist thought would ill accord with the tale's provenance in Catholic Vienna. Reasoning that the nature of the German humorous genre (Schwank) carries within itself the requirements for caricaturing society's norms, one is led to question why two homologous tales dealing with the themes of prohibition, transgression, and punishment divide neatly along gender lines with the Schwank populated by men and the polished morality tale acted out by women. This formal genre distinction corroborates structurally the gender-related differentiation between "Our Lady's Child" and "Brother Lustig": the Schwank, an infinitely extensible catalog of picaresque encounters, is made to parallel male experience, whereas the morality tale, with its tightly constructed closed form, expresses female experience. Although the genres differ sharply, the two tales' plots were homologous at their first appearance and remained so from edition to edition, as table 8.1 indicates.

Lexical similarities underscore plot similarities. Gold itself signals each character's transgression: in "Our Lady's Child" Marienkind's finger is gilded by the Trinity's fire and splendor and in "Brother Lustig" the soldier's pack is filled with gold. The Trinity accelerates the plot in both tales. It reveals the girl's transgression in "Our Lady's Child" and brings about the princess' resurrection when St. Peter invokes it in "Brother Lustig." In addition, keys, a castle, and apostle(s) appear in each tale, though in dissimilar functions. In both tales, a triple denial occurs twice. Both tales contain allegorical elements in conjunction with a symbolic prohibition (the thirteenth door and the heart of the lamb) as well as familiar images from seventeenth-century European religious literature, such as the binary opposition of the divinely appointed castle versus the worldly inn and the broad way versus the narrow way.

The elemental images of fire and water, sometimes implied, sometimes explicit, course through both tales. The girl's father, a woodcutter, provides fuel for burning; the Trinity appears in fire and splendor (Feuer und Glanz); the girl's sin involves touching heavenly fire (Berührung des himmlischen Feuers); and at the conclusion, Marienkind, now a queen, stands bound to the stake surrounded by flames. In "Brother Lustig" fire appears realistically as well as symbolically. He lights a fire (machte Feuer) to cook the lamb. Fire and water are likewise united in scenes that depict boiling the princesses' flesh from their bones to restore them to life, which like the fire and water of the rain extinguishing the flames in "Our Lady's Child" can be understood to mediate a rebirth, a return to life. . . .

And finally, the word "heart" (Herz) permeates both tales. In "Our Lady's Child" the girl/queen's heart is filled with longing; her heart beats hard and the Virgin lays her hand on it; the girl abandoned in the forest wins the king's heart; and in the final scene a heart is moved to repentance. Repeated reference to the heart of the lamb in "Brother Lustig" conjures up images of the heart of the symbolic lamb, Jesus. In this sense, it appears twenty times, while the soldier addresses Peter three times as "heart's brother" (Bruderherz).

Lexical similarities buttress the hypothesis that up to a point the two tales tell the same story. They differ in only a few essential respects, namely, in different gender-specific patterns of behavior as well as in the equally different and gender-specific consequences of transgressing prohibitions. For a single transgression Marienkind is repeatedly punished over many years, from her expulsion from heaven until the moment when the faggots are ignited; but for first contravening St. Peter's wishes and then transgressing his express prohibition, Brother Lustig is not punished but is rewarded in ways that lead to his eventual salvation.

A vocabulary laden with ethical and religious values, ecclesiastical imagery, and a divine cast of characters—the Virgin Mary, angels, all twelve apostles, and the Trinity—reinforce Mary's pious judgment on the offending Marienkind: "You have not obeyed me, and besides that you have lied; you are no longer worthy to be in heaven" (Du hast mir nicht gehorcht und hast noch dazu gelogen; du bist nicht mehr würdig, im Himmel zu sein). The child has previously promised to be obedient (gehorsam zu sein), which within the context of the tale justifies Mary's subsequent actions when she thrice appears, saying:

If you will tell the truth and confess that you did unlock the forbidden door, I will open your mouth and give you back your speech, but if you persevere in your sin, and deny it obstinately, I will take your newborn child away with me.

Willst du die Wahrheit sagen und gestehen, daß du die verbotene Tür aufgeschlossen hast, so will ich deinen Mund öffnen und dir die Sprache wiedergeben; verharrst du aber in der Sünde und leugnest hartnäckig, so nehme ich dein neugeborenes Kind mit mir.

When faced with imminent death, the queen wants to repent, Mary responds, "He who repents his sin and acknowledges it, is forgiven" (Wer seine Sünde bereut und eingesteht, dem ist sie vergeben). The Biblical ring of this statement is prefigured by several Gospel-invoking lines. The poor woodcutter and his wife no longer have "their daily bread" (das tägliche Brot, see Matt. 6:11), and Marienkind, in heaven, "examined the dwellings of the kingdom of heaven" (besah die Wohnungen des Himmelreiches): directly borrowed from John 14:2. In stark contrast to this highly elaborated ethical and religious framework, Brother Lustig operates beyond ethics and on the fringes of morality, despite allegorical allusions both to Jesus and the path to heaven as well as the presence of St. Peter. Other differences in the two tales also support gender distinctions. From the beginning the girl/queen recognizes that her patroness, the Virgin Mary, is clothed in the glory of heaven and wields formidable power, whereas Brother Lustig either doesn't know or doesn't wish to acknowledge the identity of the comrade who can see into his heart, raise the dead, and grant wishes.

The depiction of food in the two tales likewise differs, for in "Our Lady's Child" it remains delightfully but unnutritiously symbolic—sugar cakes and sweet milk (Zuckerbrot und süße Milch)—whereas Brother Lustig's bread, beer, lamb, and goose nourish a great appetite. Prominent in "Our Lady's Child" but absent in "Brother Lustig" is the desirability of calm, repose, punishment, and muteness. This narrative contrast clearly delineates both the girl/queen's passivity and the abject suffering necessary for her to regain life, whereas Brother Lustig always appears as an active protagonist flouting authority and disregarding prohibitions.

The foregoing narrative and lexical analyses also indicate the gender-differentiated consequences of transgression. The message is clear and unambiguous. Norms buttressed by society and religion bind women of all degrees from poverty to majesty, and a woman's transgression of these norms results in profound deprivation of selfhood, that is, muteness or the possibility of death itself.⁵ A man, however, may ignore prohibitions without consequence. Editorial alterations in edition after edition loaded the text of "Our Lady's Child" with an ethicoreligious vocabulary. Between 1807 and 1812, the tale underwent considerable change. The plot remained constant, but shifts in vocabulary and motivation depersonalized the heroine and intensified her suffering and isolation. The consistent direction of editorial change, the decision to include it, but not "Brother Lustig," in the Small Edition, as well as Wilhelm Grimm's characterization of the collection as a childrearing manual (Foreword to the 1819 edition) all indicate a well-honed gender-differentiated design for substituting compliant for obstinate behavior in his young female readership.

Prohibitions of three kinds occur in Grimm's Tales. The first is an explicit prohibition set by a figure generally acknowledged to be morally and/or religiously good or naturally inclined to benevolence, such as the Virgin Mary, St. Peter, God, natural mothers, or supernatural helpers. The second is an explicit prohibition set by a sinful malevolent character, such as the murderous bridegroom in "Fitcher's Bird" (no. 46) or the devil. The third type of prohibition is implicit, inhering in broadly recognized rules of conduct, for example, the Ten Commandments' prohibitions against theft.

Each of the three types of prohibition is accompanied by regular patterns of gender-specific behavior. In Grimms' Tales girls and women are always supposed to obey prohibitions set by good figures, but male characters move with considerably more freedom among these prohibitors. Prohibitions set by a malevolent figure may be ignored by girls and boys, women and men alike. Implicit prohibitions, on the other hand, are regularly honored by women and contravened with impunity by men. For example, in "The Thief and His Master" (no. 68), the son sets about learning "witchcraft and thieving thoroughly" (hexen und gaudeifen gut), to which he adds murder when necessary. Like "Brother Lustig" this is clearly a Schwank, and it has a male cast of characters. In a second tale, "Thumbling's Travels" (no. 45), from the first edition onward Thumbling steals without conscience, compunction, or consequence. He limits himself to stealing one kreuzer from the king's treasury, only "because he could not carry more" (weil es nicht mehr tragen konnte). And in "The Master-Thief" (no. 192) the trickster proves his skill in three imaginatively intricate thefts and gains a reward for outwitting the count and his entire retinue.

Transgressions can be carried out knowingly or unwittingly. Conscious transgressions by girls occur in at least four tales; in two the girls are punished and in two they escape. These two possible outcomes correspond with the good or evil nature of the prohibitor. In "Frau Trude" (no. 43), the bad end of a girl who knowingly disobeys her parents is foretold in the first sentence:

There was once a little girl who was obstinate and inquisitive, and when her parents told her to do anything, she did not obey them; so how could she fare well?

Es war einmal ein kleines Mädchen, das war eigensinnig und vorwitzig, und wenn ihm seine Eltern etwas sagten, so gehorchte es nicht; wie konnte es dem gut gehen?

She ends up as a block of wood thrown onto Frau Trude's fire.

In "The Willful Child" (no. 117) a child willfully disobeys the dictates of death itself, and its parents must beat it back into the grave with a rod.⁶ On the other hand, conscious disobedience of a malevolent captor in "Fitcher's Bird" (no. 46) and in "The Robber-Bridegroom" (no. 40), although it produces grave interim consequences for the protagonist's older sisters, ultimately leads to a successful escape for all three sisters in both tales.

Boys get off much more lightly. Their conscious violations of prohibitions set either by good supernatural helpers or by evil figures bring no punishment in their train. In "The Golden Bird" (no. 57) the youngest prince repeatedly disregards a fox's prohibitions and injunctions yet each time is given another chance. In "The Gold-Children" (no. 85) a fish enjoins a man to strict secrecy about the source of his sudden good fortune, warning, "if you speak but a single word, all [good luck] will be over" (sprichst du ein einziges Wort, so ist alles vorbei). Twice the man blurts out the secret of his newfound wealth, because his wife goads him to uncontrollable anger (itself an implicit exculpation of his failure to meet the conditions), and twice the fish grants a reprieve. On their third encounter, the fish ensures that the man will not subvert his own good fortune. He literally incorporates his golden wealth into their family by causing the birth of two golden children, two golden foals, and the growth of two golden lilies in the dooryard, at which point the tale begins an entirely new narrative cycle.

Like girls and women, boys and men do not suffer from disobeying the prohibitions of evil characters. But while girls and women merely escape, boys and men gain rich rewards. A good example of this pattern emerges from "The Devil's Sooty Brother" (no. 100). Here the devil forbids a discharged soldier to look into some kettles and then departs.

The soldier now took a good look on every side. . . . He would have given anything to look inside [the kettles], if the Devil had not so particularly forbidden him: at last he could no longer restrain himself, slightly raised the lid of the first kettle, and peeped in, and there he saw his former corporal sitting.

Der Soldat schaute sich nun einmal recht um. . . . Er hätte für sein Leben gerne hineingeschaut, wenn es ihm der Teufel nicht so streng verboten hätte; endlich konnte er sich nicht mehr anhalten, hob vom ersten Kessel ein klein bißchen den Deckel auf und guckte hinein. Da sah er seinen ehemaligen Unteroffizier darinsitzen.

Moreover, the devil well knows the soldier has violated the prohibition, for he says on his return, "But you have peeped into the kettles as well" (Aber du hast auch in die Kessel geguckt). But he exculpates the soldier, since he has shown no mercy to his former officers:

it is lucky for you that you added fresh logs to them, or else your life would have been forfeited.

dein Glück ist, daß du noch Holz zugelegt hast, sonst war dein Leben verloren.

The sweepings with which the soldier fills his knapsack turn to gold, and by singing the sweet song he learned in hell, he wins the king's heart, marries his youngest daughter, and inherits the realm.

Unwitting or involuntary transgressions also produce differential results dependent on gender. The pathetic little tale "The Ear of Grain" [RBB] (no. 194) details how a little girl fell into a puddle one day as she and her mother were passing a grain field:

the mother tore up a handful of the beautiful ears of grain [RBB], and cleaned the frock with them. When the Lord, who just then came by, saw that, he was angry and said: "Henceforth shall the stalks of grain [RBB] bear no more ears; people [RBB] are no longer worthy of heavenly gifts." The by-standers who heard this were terrified, and fell on their knees and prayed that he would still leave something on the stalks, even if the people were undeserving of it, for the sake of the innocent chickens which would otherwise have to starve.

Da riß die Mutter eine Handvoll der schönen Ähren ab und reinigte ihm damit das Kleid. Als der Herr, der eben vorbeikam, das sah, zürnte er und sprach: "Fortan soll der Kornhalm keine Ähre mehr tragen: die Menschen sind der himmlischen Gabe nicht länger wert." Die Umstehenden, die has hörten, erschraken, fielen auf die Knie und flehten, daß er noch etwas möchte an dem Halm stehen lassen: wenn sie selbst es auch nicht verdienten, doch der unschuldigen Hühner wegen, die sonst verhungern müßten.

The mother's imputed guilt and implicitly conveyed responsibility for reducing earthly grain yields from four- or five-hundred-fold to fifty or sixty (vierbis fünfhundertfältig [auf] fünfzig-oder sechzigfältig) shows how far the limits of credibility could be strained in the effort to incriminate women. No prohibition had been set in this tale; the woman's deed welled out of maternal care; and God's response is at best capricious and at worst irascible.

An equally unintentional transgression by a boy in a different narrative framework appears in "Iron Hans" (no. 136) but with diametrically opposed results. What happens to him offers an instructive and revealing contrast to Marienkind's fate in "Our Lady's Child." Iron Hans clearly specifies the prohibition:

"Behold, the gold well is as bright and clear as crystal, you shall sit beside it, and take care that nothing falls into it, or it will be polluted. I will come every evening to see if you have obeyed my order." The boy placed himself by the brink of the well . . . and took care that nothing fell in. As he was thus sitting, his finger hurt him so violently that he involuntarily put it in the water. He drew it quickly out again, but saw that it was quite gilded, and whatsoever pains he took to wash the gold off again, all was to no purpose. In the evening Iron Hans came back, looked at the boy, and said: "What has happened to the well?" "Nothing, nothing," he answered, and held his finger behind his back, that the man might not see it. But he said: "You have dipped your finger into the water, this time it may pass, but take care you do not again let anything go in."

"Siehst du, der Goldbrunnen ist hell und klar wie Kristall: du sollst dabeisitzen und achthaben, daß nichts hineinfällt, sonst ist er verunehrt. Jeden Abend komme ich und sehe, ob du mein Gebot befolgt hast." Der Knabe setzte sich an den Rand des Brunnens . . . und hatte acht, daß nichts hineinfiel. Als er so saß, schmerzte ihn einmal der Finger so heftig, daß er ihn unwillkürlich in das Wasser steckte. Er zog ihn schnell wieder heraus, sah aber, daß er ganz vergoldet war, und wie große Mühe er sich gab, das Gold wieder abzuwischen, es war alles vergeblich. Abends kam der Eisenhans zurück, sah den Knaben an und sprach: "Was ist mit dem Brunnen geschehen?" "Nichts, nichts," antwortete er und hielt den Finger auf den Rücken, daß er ihn nicht sehen sollte. Aber der Mann sagte: "Du hast den Finger in das Wasser getaucht: diesmal mag's hingehen, aber hüte dich, daß du dich nicht wieder etwas hineinfallen läßt."

If one disregards motivation (Marienkind's curiosity versus the prince's overpowering pain), as Wilhelm Grimm apparently did, then this tale seems similar indeed to "Our Lady's Child." The transgressor hides his/her gilded finger, but the inquisitor knows all. After two subsequent violations of the prohibition, treated as equally unavoidable (remember that Marienkind only violated the prohibition once), the boy is ejected from this protected realm, as Marienkind was ejected from Heaven:

let the boy excuse himself as he might, it was of no use. "You have not stood the trial, and can stay here no longer. Go forth into the world, there you will learn what poverty is. But as you have not a bad heart, and as I mean well by you, there is one thing I will grant you; if you fall into any difficulty, come to the forest and cry: 'Iron Hans,' and then I will come and help you."

"Du hast die Probe nicht bestanden und kannst nicht länger hierbleiben. Geh hinaus in die Welt, da wirst du erfahren, wie die Armut tut. Aber weil du kein böses Herz hast und ich's gut mit dir meine, so will ich dir eins erlauben: wenn du in Not gerätst, so geh zu dem Wald und rufe 'Eisenhans,' dann will ich kommen und dir helfen."

Both Marienkind and the prince must experience poverty, but whereas the isolated girl is walled in by a thorn hedge, the boy wanders the world. For her the forest is a prison, for him it offers release in time of danger. Expulsion clearly leads to different experiences for girls than it does for boys.

The degree and extent of punishment also shifts radically depending on the sex of the offender. Sitting forlorn, eating roots and berries, wearing clothes that rot and fall off, and being exposed to freezing rain, Marienkind's punishments contrast with those meted out to male offenders. When Gambling Hansel (no. 82) lies to the Lord and St. Peter, they grant him three favors! His gambling habits are so entrenched that he is eventually expelled from heaven, but he is nonetheless granted a form of immortality: "his soul broke into fragments, and went into the gambling vagabonds who are living this very day" (is in d'onnen Spiellumpen g'fohrn, döi non bis date lebend).

Punishment is so much a part of female experience that it can be meted out whimsically, for no transgression at all.⁷ "The Beam" (no. 149) recounts a tale of a sorcerer amazing a crowd of gaping onlookers by lifting a heavy beam and carrying it around as if it were only a feather.

But a girl was present who had just found a four-leaved clover, and had thus become so wise that no deception could stand out against her, and she saw that the beam was nothing but a straw.

Nun war aber ein Mädchen, das hatte eben ein vierblättriges Kleeblatt gefunden und war dadurch klug geworden, so daß kein Blendwerk vor ihm bestehen konnte, und sah, daß der Balken nichts war als ein Strohhalm.

Full of anger at being exposed, the sorcerer determines to revenge himself on the girl. On her marriage day, he causes her to see a mirage: she mistakes a field of blue flax flowers for a swollen stream, through which she "wades," hiking her wedding gown up high. Suddenly,

her eyes were opened, and she saw that she was standing with her clothes lifted up in the middle of a field. . . . Then all the people saw it likewise, and chased her away with ridicule and laughter.

gingen ihr die Augen auf, und sie sah, daß sie mit ihren aufgehobenen Kleidern mitten in einem . . . Feld stand. Da sahen es die Leute auch allesamt und jagten sie mit Schimpf und Gelächter fort.

There is not a single tale in the collection in which a boy suffers an equally unmerited fate under similarly humiliating circumstances.

The question of Wilhelm Grimm's goal in defining motivation and outcome naturally arises given the abundant evidence of gender differentiation involving prohibitions, transgressions, and punishments. The potential for reformulation always lies at hand for an editor, and there is some evidence in the vocabulary of the final versions of the texts that the process at work was systematic. For instance, prohibitions in tales about men tend to be morally or ethically diluted or altogether absent; when the Lord and St. Peter tell Gambling Hansel to go out and buy bread with three groschen that he instead loses at the gambling table, St. Peter turns to the Lord and says on three separate occasions, "Lord, this thing must not go on" (Herr, dos Ding tuet koan guet), but they avoid laying a prohibition directly on him. In "The Golden Bird," the fox refers to his clearly articulated prohibition as "advice" (Rat), while the fish in "The Gold-Children" calls his prohibition a "condition" (Bedingung).

Transgressions appear to be similarly shaped according to gender. Beyond the fact that a girl is always punished after only one misdeed while a boy often bears off a reward after three to five offenses, Grimm colors the misdeeds darkly or lightly according to gender. Marienkind's curiosity "gnawed [at her heart] and tormented her, and let her have no rest" (nagte [in seinem Herzen] und pickte ordentlich daran und ließ ihm keine Ruhe), while the young prince in "Iron Hans" transgresses "involuntarily" or "unhappily" and "was terrified" (unwillkürlich, unglücklicherweise, erschrak). Within Grimm's comprehension of tales as sets of motifs, such adverbial alteration probably did not represent tampering. Such changes and exculpating devices would have seemed entirely licit to him, the assembler of authentic expressions of the people's voice. Since Wilhelm cleared his desk and disposed of notes and notations after each edition had appeared, subsequent readers of his published tales can only infer the precise form of the material he had at his disposal in preparing each new edition. His own notes (1812, 1815, 1822, and 1856) generally offer the plot in outline, with special attention paid to variations in motifs in conjunction with their geographical distribution. For example, his notes to "Iron Hans" mention variants of this tale all over Central Europe, but we no longer have access to the precise wording of the variants he used to add to the original brief dialect version appearing in volume 2 of the First Edition in 1815. Nor would versions of the tale published after Grimms' Tales made their appearance necessarily reveal this to us, for once his collections were published, they themselves sometimes reshaped folk narratives in other countries. However, one published form that preceded his own offers us a glimpse of "The Iron-Man" in a pre-Grimm form, which he knew.⁸ In a line reminiscent of the spirit of The Magic Flute, the iron man reminds Salkar, the prince, "Only blind obedience in everything that I will order you to do will bring this about." Thus the theme of obedience remains, though Vulpius treats it in 1791 in a manner markedly different from Wilhelm Grimm's in 1815 and after. In one other instance, however, archival evidence remains to highlight Grimm's own shifts away from his sources. A North German version of "Gambling Hansel" records an actual prohibition directed at Hans by God and St. Peter, which has been deleted in Grimm's own final version.⁹ Thus, Grimm regularly makes male transgression into an unwitting act which is rewarded.

Subsequent generations and later analysts have understood the Grimms' individual tales as revelations of inherent and transcendent truth. This mindset emerges clearly from the title of Pierre Bange's article, "Comment on devient homme: Analyse semiotique d'un conte de Grimm: 'Les Douze Frères,'" in which he argues that the changes introduced by Grimm into the 1819 and subsequent texts formulate a moral code as opposed to the immoral code that preceded it, and that furthermore it appears to be necessary for boys to break interdictions in order to mature.¹⁰ Bange's argument founders on the existence of numerous amoral tales within the canon of Grimms' Tales. Reclassifying all amoral or immoral tales in which the protagonist escapes punishment as humorous tales (Schwänke) allows one to establish a "code moral"¹¹ but ignores the unavoidable question about gender distinctions that characterize the two groups.

If there is a moral code in these tales, how can it be understood?¹² Within the 210 tales of the Grimms' collection, a witch-burning notion of eradicating (generally female) evil coexists with an indulgent tolerance of (generally male) malefaction. Plots routinely circumscribe girls' and women's sphere of activity by laying prohibitions on them, and the language of the text exhibits an effort to avoid laying prohibitions on boys and men. Obedience is necessary for females but not for males. Girls and women are regularly punished in Grimms' Tales, and the punishment itself often seems to take precedence over the transgression that is supposed to have occasioned it, as does an apparent inner drive to incriminate females. At the same time, the text systematically exonerates males from guilt and repeatedly returns them to customary and acceptable paths.

One essential image might account for the skewed values which inhere in the gender-specific consequences of the prohibition/transgression/punishment paradigm: Eve herself. An interpretation of the original woman as the introducer of sin to the world and as the instrument of Adam's fall from grace would account for many of the peculiar characteristics of the gender-specific aspects of the paradigm, particularly if all women were identified with Eve's wrongdoing and all men with Adam's essential and inborn innocence. From this pivotal moment, girls and women in Grimms' Tales seem to derive their identity as delinquent and their destiny as punishable, while boys and men seem to acquire a blanket excuse together with forgiveness for their transgressions. This premise is nowhere stated in Grimms' Tales, but it is consistent with the patterns that emerge from the collection and also with exegetic material in many children's Bibles, catechisms, and chapbooks in Germany. Thus Grimms' Tales, which incorporates so many of the values of its contemporary society, would appear to be a volume well suited to understanding implicit nineteenth-century German social and moral values.¹³ Its use as a sourcebook for the psychology of children and adults beyond those borders, however, is at best open to question and at worst fundamentally misleading.

Notes

¹ "Snow-White" and "Hansel and Gretel" both add a stepmother figure to exculpate the natural mother. The good biological mothers' early deaths do not alter the fact that succeeding versions of these two tales exculpate the father-figures who remain alive but do nothing to protect their children against the evil machinations of their second wives. This contrasts sharply with Ludwig Bechstein's contemporary and very popular collection, Deutsches Märchenbuch, in which mothers and fathers routinely share both guilt and responsibility. See for example a "Hansel and Gretel" analogue, "Der kleine Däumling": "Da beratschlagten eines Abends, als die Kinder zu Bette waren, die beiden Eltern miteinander was sie anfangen wollten, und wurden Rates, die Kinder mit in den Wald zu nehmen wo die Weiden wachsen, aus denen man Körbe flicht, und sie heimlich zu verlassen" (1857: "When the children were in bed one evening, both parents discussed what they should do, and they decided to take the children along into the wood where the willows grow from which one weaves baskets and to leave them there on the sly").

For a further contrast, see Perrault's "Hansel and Gretel" analogue, "Little Tom Thumb" (Le Petit Poucet), where the mother openly accuses the father of being a monster for suggesting—even if sorrowfully—that they abandon their children in the woods.

² These gender distinctions echo those in tales where the wicked mother-in-law is discovered to be a witch/cannibal. She is generally executed summarily amid astonishingly gory detail—a pit of vipers, boiling oil, a nail-studded barrel in which she is rolled downhill, a blazing pyre—whereas in the one tale in which a male cannibal is caught, he is turned over to the authorities and executed, but no details are given. Even the detested Jew in "The Jew Among Thorns" (no. 110) is spared the indignity of summary execution; a judge must first pronounce the sentence and justify it, even if he does so in violently anti-Semitic terms. Gender prevails over justice. Males inhabit the public sphere and women are subject to private justice. See chaps. 9 and 12 for a detailed discussion.

³ Walter Scherf points out that "eine gründliche Untersuchung des Märchentyps vom Marienkind steht noch aus" (275). See "Marienkind" in Lexikon der Zaubermärchen, 273-76.

⁴ Welsford, The Fool, 50-51.

⁵ See chap. 9.

⁶ "The Willful Child" is a problematic example because gender is not specified in the German tale. No pronoun identifies the child as a boy or as a girl, but the Hunt/Stern translation unwittingly absorbs the generally expressed gender bias in Grimms' Tales and translates es as "she."

⁷ The special need for chastising females may, in part, be related to the absolute need for female chastity, because of the risk pregnancy posed as publicly perceivable sin. The sixteenth-century text, Der bösen weiber / Zuchtschul . . . specifically addresses the need to chastise children, "und sonderlich dein mägdlein dz sie nit etwan in ein bühlerey geraten und zu schentlichem fal kommen" ("and especially your girls [includes both daughters and maids] that they don't get into [sexual] mischief and come to a shameful pass").

⁸ See his notes to the tale. It was Christian August Vulpius' volume of Ammenmärchen (1791), which includes "Der eiserne Mann, oder:—der Lohn des Gehorsams" (The Iron Man, or the Reward of Obedience).

⁹ Nachlaß Grimm, 1757.

¹⁰ In G. Brunet, ed., Etudes allemandes, 93-138.

¹¹ Bange, 118.

¹² Walter Scherf poses a similar question in the Lexikon der Zaubermärchen: "Warum wird das stumm gewordene Mädchen so grausam von der Gottesmutter bestraft?" (274), calling it a "moralisch-unmoralisches Beispiel" (275), i.e., finding no underlying explanation.

¹³ A fundamental problem in Bruno Bettelheim's reasoning in The Uses of Enchantment is his assumption that the values expressed in fairy tales, in particular in those of Grimms' Tales that he cites, represent transcendent developmental paradigms and norms. Children reared in a society that expresses the values outlined in this and other chapters of this study will undoubtedly incorporate them into their developing sense of themselves as individuals. Grimms' Tales may indeed offer insights into the psyches of children reared unquestioningly along the gender-specific lines that the volume formulates, but certainly not into the psyches of children in cultures with differing views of what characterizes appropriate male and female behavior.