Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
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“The Bloody Chamber is such an important book to me,” he says. “Angela Carter, for me, is still the one who said: ‘You see these fairy stories, these things that are sitting at the back of the nursery shelves? Actually, each one of them is a loaded gun. Each of them is a bomb. Watch: if you turn it right it will blow up.’ And we all went: ‘Oh my gosh, she’s right – you can blow things up with these!‘”
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Disney’s Sleeping Beauty doesn’t work, he says, is because “it’s not a story. It’s the opening to a story. The first versions we have of it make more sense but are less kind to human nature.
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The story is really about the nightmare of your mother–in–law being a monster.”
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Grimm in 1812, most of the characters we now know as wicked stepmothers were mothers. “There were a lot of monstrous mothers,” Gaiman says, “who pretty much uniformly became step–mothers”. Snow White’s stepmother was her biological mother in the original; Hansel and Gretel’s stepmother, who sends them out to starve in the woods, was their mother in the first instance. Of all the historical revisions of fairy tales, perhaps none was as dramatic as the self–censorship of the Grimms themselves.
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Their book began as a philological project at the birth of a unified Germany. The Grimms – who also, as part of the same mission, compiled a dictionary – began to collect folk stories. These were not, as has been supposed, the tales of the masses, but stories gathered from among the bourgeoisie. The project was a matter of cultural and national record – it was not intended for children.
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it wouldn’t do for children to see biological mothers as jealous of their own pubescent daughters. And although he wasn’t very worried about violence, Grimm was concerned about sex: by 1819 – and certainly in the last edition of 1857 – those same stories had become prudish and pious. “So now,” Gaiman says, “a pregnant Rapunzel doesn’t say to the witch: ‘this is really weird, my belly is swelling and I don’t know why’ – which is how the witch knows that a prince has been visiting her. Now, she says ‘you are so much lighter than the prince when you climb up my hair’. And you go: Oh! I thought you were smart but no, you’re a moron.”