Reading Fairy Tales as Cultural Histories

[Image at right: Little Red Riding Hood, illus. W. Momberger, Aunt Mary's series (New York: McLoughlin Bros., 1856), from The Little Red Riding Hood Project, University of Southern Mississippi]
Purpose: to examine fairy tales as expressions of peasant beliefs, concerns, and lifeways in the late middle ages and early modern period.

Source: Grimm's Fairy Tales (Hansel and Gretel, Rumpelstiltskin, and Sleeping Beauty) and Robert Darnton's "Peasants Tell Tales: The Meaning of Mother Goose," from Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre And Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Vintage Press, 1984).

Method: analyze oral tradition using the methodology of cultural history.

Fairy tales are a source for understanding the pre-scientific peasant view of the world. Folk stories like Hansel and Gretel, Rumpelstiltskin, or Sleeping Beauty tell us many things about folk concerns, hopes, and fears during the late middle ages and the early modern period. Because few peasants could leave written records of their hopes and concerns during this period, historians must learn to analyze the written versions of oral traditions to shed light on the mentalite of European peasants.
Robert Darnton, a cultural historian who teaches at Princeton University, is one of the leaders in the field of cultural history. His essay, "Peasants Tell Tales: The Meaning of Mother Goose," provides an example of how an historian can carefully read folk tales and thus reveal peasants' lives.
Read Darnton's essay, paying close attention to the way he uses Mother Goose stories to illustrate peasants' concerns. Then read the three Grimm's fairy tales. What can you derive from these stories? Do you find the same types of concerns in the Grimm tales that Darnton found in Mother Goose? What are these concerns?

Questions to Think About:

1) According to Darnton, what were peasants' lives like during the late middle ages and early modern period? What were peasants' chief concerns?

2) Do the Grimm fairy tales which you read reflect any differences in way of life or in peasants concerns? If they are different, why might they differ?

3) What are the main strengths of Darnton's approach? What are the main weaknesses of such an approach?

4) What other kinds of evidence could one find to explain peasants lives during this period? What would be the relative strengths and weaknesses of those kinds of evidence?

5) What is "cultural history"? What is "mentalite"?

Further resources and readings:

William S. Baring-Gould and Ceil Baring-Gould, The Annotated Mother Goose. New York: Meridian Books, 1962.

Robert Darnton, "Intellectual and Cultural History," in Michael Kammen, ed., The Past Before Us: Contemporary Historical Writing in the United States. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980.

John Ellis, One Fairy Story Too Many: The Brothers Grimm and Their Tales. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983.

Jack Zipes, The Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forests to the Modern World. New York: Routledge, 1988.

National Geographic’s Grimm’s Fairy Tales site: http://www.nationalgeographic.com/grimm/.

Prepared by Professor Catherine Lavender for Honors 506 (The Western Experience: Social Science), The Department of History, The College of Staten Island of The City University of New York, Spring Semester 2001. Send email to lavender@postbox.csi.cuny.edu
Last modified: Tuesday 30 January 2001.