The cultural legacy of the Brothers Grimm is fraught with incongruities, which complicate contemporary relationships to their collected folk tales. Folklorist, Simon Bronner, highlights several antagonistic dichotomies credited to the brothers, including “international diffusion and romantic nationalism…[and]…blatant literary license and fidelity to tradition.”[1] Though the brothers had sociopolitical justifications for revising folk tales, it is important to recognize the dynamic nature of oral narrative (even when recorded) as it interacts with various tellers and listeners, reflecting both societal values and contemporaneous literary texts. This active relationship continues as modern readers examine and cocreate meaning with existing tales. German Studies Professor, Dr Meyertholen observes that the Grimm brothers “wrote in drag” as they appropriated the voices of female storytellers and “the female stock character of the…fairy-tale grandma.”[2] They were able to maintain male power dynamics as they infused folk tales with patriarchal concepts, but the resulting narratives contain fragments of nonnormative symbolism and messages of femme resistance, which are reinterpreted by diverse readers.[3] Analyses of motifs and themes present in Grimm tales invite a deeper look into nontraditional understandings of the texts. This paper will reflect on three Grimm tales with overlapping motifs and themes, which can be interrogated via a queer lens— “The Goose Girl at the Spring,” “Princess Mouseskin” and “Bearskin.”
A purposely undefinable term, “queer involves questioning of dominant forms of social and political relationships while deliberately resisting any prescription of what those relationships should look like.”[4] It generally relates to nonnormative concepts surrounding gender, sexuality and desire, but can be expanded to explore any resistance to mainstream constrictions.[5] Queer theory finds its ancestry in feminist and intersectional scholarship, which emphasises “situated knowledges” brought to a text through lived experience.[6] Queer reading involves scanning between the lines of existing work to not only find surviving threads of queer motifs and themes, but to bring one’s own embodied participation to the text in a dynamic and reciprocal process. Folklorist, Dr Cristina Bacchilega, recognises folk tales as exhibitions of opposing desires within particular socio-historical frameworks.[7] As oppressed workers with rigidly defined gender roles, German women, particularly spinners, were able to weave their longings for better standing into entertaining tales as small acts of resistance.[8] Drs Jarvis and Blackwell see these “tensions…[as] useful for investigating the very shifts in behaviour and sentiment necessary for faint threads of queerness to become visible in the social fabric.”[9] Folk tales provide space for the exploration of taboo subjects via their existence outside of recognisable time and space.
“The Goose Girl at the Spring” and “Princess Mouseskin” are ATU 923, “Love Like Salt” variants, which centre around the fatherly rejection of a king’s third and youngest daughter when she equates her love for him to the preciousness of salt. They also contain several motifs in common with ATU 510B, “Peau d’Asne.”[10] The goose girl finds herself, literally and figuratively, in a realm of enchantment, wrapped in a concealing skin and in an ambiguous relationship with a wise woman. Mouseskin goes through several transfigurations – from princess to mouse to man to king – in pursuit of her true self. Bearskin involves a disregarded soldier, who must go unwashed and wrapped in the skin of a bear for seven years at the behest of the devil and in order to achieve accepted status. The three tales share similar motifs and themes, which lend themselves to a queer reading of the texts.
Motifs that recur in two or more of the tales are animal skin disguises, threes, greens, witch/devil archetypes, rings and lack of recognition. The goose girl disguises herself in some undisclosed animal skin, Mouseskin conceals both her gender and her species with the skin of a mouse and Bearskin grudgingly hides behind a combination of bear hide and filth. Each of the protagonists is experimenting with layered identities while obscuring their forbidden selves. The number three comes up repeatedly in the two “Love Like Salt” narratives. There are three daughters, three oak trees at the entrance of the goose girl’s space of transformation, three calls of the nightowl to mark the beginning of her ritual and three years passed in the realm of enchantment before she is accepted as her authentic self. A near reflection of the salt tales, Bearskin contains three daughters, the youngest of whom recognizes his kindness and accepts his betrothal, while the two older daughters reject rather than fawn over him. The number three also echoes femme identities of mother, maiden and crone, which can be experienced nonlinearly within realms of enchantment. The colour green is present in all three tales through the forests of exile, the carved emerald box carrying a pearl tear from the goose girl’s eye and the green jacket of the devil, which provides unending financial support for Bearskin and indicates “a hunter dressed in green seeking his prey” and associations with nature.[11] The witch/devil archetype represents a different way of life, outside of linear time/space and heteronormative constructions. Upon encountering the witch, most people, “when they had a choice…took a different path.”[12] The central characters, however, embraced alternative ways of being. The rings belonging to Mouseskin and Bearskin seem to have sexual and even genital associations. When Mouseskin’s ring – “so precious that they thought that she had stolen it” – is discovered she is forced to reveal her assigned gender.[13] Bearskin splits his ring with his betrothed, who accepts him without judgement and must wait for his imposed transformation to end before they can marry. Upon their reunion “it was clear that both parts fit perfectly together.”[14] A perverse reading indicates both a sexual act and compatibility between two people who are not conforming to societal norms. Lastly, once they have reached their becoming, all three protagonists, who have been scorned for their otherness, are not recognized by those who chose to ostracise them.
Queer themes of nonnormative temporality, marginalised characters, queer kinships and transformation permeate these tales and challenge heteronormative, patriarchal perceptions. The realm of enchantment or liminal space embodied by the three protagonists as they explore their queerness is nonlinear, asynchronous and essentially out of time. As described by queer studies professor, Dr Elizabeth Freeman, “[i]f normative temporality scores an “implantation through which institutional forces come to seem like somatic facts,” then enchantment desynchronizes the regimes of marked institutional time.”[15] It is a place where seemingly one-dimensional characters, who resist normative identity have room for sideways growth, which “challenges linear, hierarchical and filiational models of human development and proposes modes of personal change that are additive rather than serial.”[16] The goose girl’s realm is the most obvious. Created and/or maintained by the witch, who has adopted her, the fecund realm is imbued with cyclical processes and gendered knowledge, which cannot be attained in the oppressive world of the goose girl’s youth.[17] The wise woman deems the goose girl’s self-discovery complete at the end of three years, which go unrecognized by the goose girl, who “matures within the diverse temporalities of the realm; she falls out of time into an opportune period of ‘arrested development’” like a butterfly in a chrysalis or a child in the womb.[18] Freeman discusses the concept of “temporal drag…a pull of the past on the present…[and] a productive obstacle to progress.”[19] This force manipulates the realms inhabited by the three protagonists as they don their animal skin drag and embark upon a rite of passage ending in self-becoming. Fairfield invites readers to acknowledge Princess Mouseskin as a prepubescent child, who is queer in her “nongenerative sexuality” and “at ease with places of transition and ‘in-betweenness.’”[20] It is within liminal spaces of enchantment where potential for transformation of gender, species and identity take place. Mouseskin enters her “‘interval of the animal,’ during which the child can carve out time for herself wherein normative identities do not yet hold sway,” while Bearskin, who exists in a realm of coerced transformation, experiences stretched time and absurd tensions between visceral rejection and financial acceptance.[21] Within their transformative realms of nonnormative temporality, the characters enact their queer potential through altered experience and sideways growth.
Each of the three protagonists is marginalised through rejection by family members for the performance of nonnormative behaviours, gender roles and societal expectations. According to Meyertholen, the fact that “normative categories of sex, gender and desire take shape at the social center implies the marginalized existence of nonnormative constructions: the queer elements and subjectivities not fitting into society.”[22] Bearskin is excluded when he is no longer useful/productive. Outside of wartime he is unable to perform societal expectations for masculinity and is left with nothing but his gun, an impotent phallic symbol in the context of everyday life. He is further marginalised by the devil when he is coerced into transforming and takes on a repulsive visage. Desperate to support himself, Bearskin agrees to the terms “just as long as it won’t cost me my soul,” his embodied identity.[23] Disgusted by his animal appearance, the sisters of Bearskin’s betrothed attempt to intimidate her using violent sexual language – “he’ll eat you up” and “you must do what he wants” or “he’ll growl.”[24] They also throw in a potentially queer-coded statement of “bears dance so well.”[25] Both the goose girl and Princess Mouseskin are rejected by their fathers for comparing their love for him to their love of salt. The kings seem to repudiate both their way of thinking and their inadequate performance of daughterly fawning. Alternatively, Fairfield posits that the king may have been appalled by the “uncontrollable sexual and abject resonances” of their sensual metaphors.[26] Either way each daughter is “punished for her father’s inability to understand her,” the common denial of the queer child,[27] who is “troublesome to the heteronormative kinship system and…a target for abuse by that system, yet full of potential to shape a radically altered version of herself, if she can find her way to a new experience of family.”[28] Through their collective marginalisation, the characters recognise queer possibilities outside of their biological families.
Opportunities for queer kinship are prevalent in the tales through chosen families and other queer relationships, which “contest the privilege granted to the nuclear heterosexual family unit and seek to expand the spectrum of relational arrangements.”[29] The goose girl enters into a culturally inappropriate relationship with an older woman in search of maternal safety and personal growth through intergenerational knowledge. The relationship between the girl and the wise woman is complicated by the asynchronous temporality and symbols of fertility and sensuality present in the enchanted realm. Sexual innuendo is apparent after the witch brings a handsome, but feminine man home. “The old woman finally slid off the young man” and immediately tells her daughter to go inside as “it is not proper to be alone with a young man. No need to add oil to the fire.”[30] Another scene, drenched in menstrual, moon imagery depicts the man “stick[ing] his head between the leaves as far as he could and look[ing] straight at her,” a line which infers sex between two people who have been previously identified as not conforming to socially dictated gender roles.[31] At the end of the tale, the witch confronts the goose girl’s biological parents with the reality that her nonnormative experience living with chosen family has not been morally or otherwise detrimental. The girl no longer needs parental support because her tears of rejection, or pearls of wisdom/lived-experience are “worth more than [their] entire kingdom.”[32] Living as a man, Mouseskin becomes the personal servant of a king, an intimate relationship that would not be socially acceptable if she was performing femininity. In one sexually charged exposition, “Bearskin was sitting alone and wishing with all his heart that the seven years were over [when] he heard someone moaning loudly in the next room.”[33] He encounters a man who is initially scared of his appearance, but is persuaded to stay through kind words. When Bearskin solves his financial problems, the grateful man offers one of his daughters to “get [him] back into shape,” thus re-conforming to societal norms.[34] These queer kinships offer prospects for acceptance through non-familial channels.
The most palpable queer theme in the three tales is the transformation of the protagonists. Their transgressive gender identities are closely entangled with ideas of flexible social status and potential upward mobility. As a reaction to rejection each seeks “protection and anonymity through donning an animal skin,” but they ultimately reveal their actualized selves through the shedding of that skin.[35] In “The Goose Girl,” “the maiden removed the skin that covered her face… and laid it out on the ground so it could bleach dry in the moonlight. But how the maiden was transformed!”[36] Princess Mouseskin changes her appearance with the skin of a mouse in order to reclaim power through concealment and the performance of masculinity. Upon the discovery of her ring (vagina) she reveals herself, only to be crowned by the king, thus potentially usurping patriarchal authority.[37] Bearskin sheds his monstrous appearance and dehumanising name when he demands that the devil clean him to reveal his transmuted form. Although the characters are embracing the versions of themselves that were originally rejected, they are also metamorphosed by the enchanted intervals in their chrysalis-like skins and the layering of experimental identities.
Through queer readings of Grimm tales that reject generally accepted, heteronormative motifs and themes, readers are able to cocreate “broader insights about social resistance and its failures that prompt reflection upon the construction of institutional identities, their relational dynamics and their potential for disruption.”[38] Although there have been several recent forays into queer interpretations of the Grimm’s collection, there is still a wealth of material to be investigated. These ambiguous tales allow for queer potential through detecting veiled messages from the past and reflecting personal and collective values of the present.
Bibliography
Bacchilega, Cristina. 1999. Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies. 1st ed. Book, Whole. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. https://doi.org/10.9783/9780812200638.
https://bookshop.org/a/98718/9780812216837
Fairfield, Joy Brooke. 2012. “Becoming-Mouse, Becoming-Man: The Sideways Growth of Princess Mouseskin.” In Transgressive Tales: Queering the Grimms, edited by Kay Turner and Pauline Greenhill, 223-243. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
Magnus-Johnston, Kendra. 2014. “From Peeping Swans to Little Cinderellas: The Queer Tradition of the Brothers Grimm in American Cinema.” In Unsettling Assumptions: Tradition, Gender, Drag, edited by Pauline Greenhill and Diane Tye, 74-91. Logan: University Press of Colorado. Accessed October 4, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Meyertholen, Andrea. 2021. “Rumpelstiltskin’s (Queer) Secret: Nonbinary Bodies Buried between the Lines of the Brothers Grimm.” Marvels & Tales 35 (1): 36–61.
Orme, Jennifer. 2015. “A Wolf’s Queer Invitation: David Kaplan’s Little Red Riding Hood and Queer Possibility.” Marvels & Tales 29 (1): 87–109. https://doi.org/10.13110/marvelstales.29.1.0087.
Robertson, D. W. 1954. “Why the Devil Wears Green.” Modern Language Notes 69 (7): 470–72. https://doi.org/10.2307/3039609.
Seifert, Lewis C. 2015. “Introduction: Queer(Ing) Fairy Tales.” Marvels & Tales 29 (1): 15–20. https://doi.org/10.13110/marvelstales.29.1.0015.
Turner, Kay. 2015. “At Home in the Realm of Enchantment: The Queer Enticements of the Grimms’ ‘Frau Holle.’” Marvels & Tales 29 (1): 42–63. https://doi.org/10.13110/marvelstales.29.1.0042.
Turner, Kay, and Pauline Greenhill. 2012. Transgressive Tales: Queering the Grimms. 1st ed. Vol. 9780814338100. Book, Whole. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. https://go.exlibris.link/mnJFLdmr.
https://bookshop.org/a/98718/9780814334812
Zipes, Jack, trans. 2003. The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm. 3rd ed. New York: Bantam Books.
https://bookshop.org/a/98718/9780553382167
[1] (Magnus-Johnson 2014, 74)
[2] (2021, 36)
[3] (Meyertholen 2021; Orme 2015)
[4] (Seifert 2015, 15)
[5] (Seifert 2015)
[6] (Orme 2015, 93)
[7] (Turner 2015, 43)
[8] (Meyertholen 2021)
[9] (Turner 2015, 43)
[10] (Fairfield 2012, 223)
[11] (Robertson 1954, 472)
[12] (Zipes 2003, 518)
[13] (Zipes 2003, 616)
[14] (Zipes 2003, 343)
[15] (Turner 2015, 53)
[16] (Fairfield 2014, 228)
[17] (Turner 2015, 47)
[18] (Turner 2015, 52)
[19] (Turner 2015, 54)
[20] (2014, 229)
[21] (Fairfield 2014, 234)
[22] (2021, 39)
[23] (Zipes 2003, 340)
[24] (Zipes 2003, 342)
[25] (Zipes 2003, 342)
[26] (Fairfield 2014, 230)
[27] (Fairfield 2014, 231)
[28] (Turner 2015, 51)
[29] (Seifert 2015, 16)
[30] (Zipes 2003, 520)
[31] (Zipes 2003, 524)
[32] (Zipes 2003, 525)
[33] (Zipes 2003, 341)
[34] (Zipes 2003, 342)
[35] (Fairfield 2014, 224)
[36] (Zipes 2003, 523)
[37] (Fairfield 2014)
[38] (Meyertholen 2021, 39)
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