#fairytale analysis

And a timeless tale

You might have heard that in vedic posts on the internet Bharani and Ashlesha are almost always talked about when topics of femininity, mother nature, primordial feminine, female passivity, raw sexuality and feminine harshness (in any sense) are being discussed. And for good reason too. Bharani and Ashlesha_ two mleccha nakshatras associated with feminine planets (Bharani's nakshatra lord Venus and Ashlesha's rashi lord Moon) and saturated with feminine symbolism, are both connected to primordial, raw, pure power of passive femininity.

I'm going to explore Ashlesha's role in this in a less sexual and more internal context.

Do recommend this for Jyeshtas, Revatis, Bharanis and Punarvasus too, as the themes are going to be familiar to all of these, in different ways.

The medicine and the poison, the monster and the pure angel

To start with, Ashlesha's main symbol_ the coiled serpent, already spells danger. Something is reaching its critical point and cannot be contained, for better or for worse.

Ashlesha's power is vishashleshana shakti ("Vish" means poison, "ashlesha" means control). Ashlesha, having the power to control its energy, power and reactions, learns how to be immune to things, out of necessity.

In a way, Ashlesha's power is to simply have power over things, but that exchange of energy between you and the thing/person you're controlling can be dangerous.

4th house and the sign of Cancer deal with the spiritual/mental/emotional safety of the person, 4th house sitting at the bottom of the zodiac wheel. Being a water sign and ruled by the Moon, it is related to extreme vulnerability and energy flow. Moon is dependancy. Ashlesha's nakshatra lord_ Mercury, is the nervous system. Ashlesha is the very force that binds and connects your emotions to your nerves and their sensations.

Sidenote: Ashlesha is about nourishing(Moon's sign) the nerves(Mercury ruled), Hasta is about controlling(Mercury's sign) the nourishment(Moon ruled).

Those reptilian instincts, that primal awareness and animalistic conciousness that Ashlesha leaves you with are as vulnerable as they are scary. To the person themselves, they have been stripped bare of their defences, and no matter how hard they try to find a way to be safe, it feels like the only safety is in no defence. Building or cultivating defence is not natural to the pure, passive Ashlesha. It requires some kind of action, and any action, in its essence, requires the disregard of absolute receptivity_ the state in which Ashlesha is naturally in (Bharani too, by the way).

Ashlesha is about not lying to yourself about your weaknesses, it's about knowing how vulnerable you really are. In a way, it's also about testing the limits of pain to know how much you can hurt, how much of that pain you really feel and have been repressing, how much of it you can handle. It's about settling in your nature and slowly gaining strength, so that your weaknesses are not really weaknesses, but just parts of you that have not yet reached their full potential. It's not a place of excess, but a place of economy and necessities.

From the viewpoint of the feminine, it's their natural place_ the watery, sensitive, impressionable, pure force. But it does not want to stay in that one place. It's known that still water is dangerous, it's been associated with all kinds of unpleasant things. Being in the state of Ashlesha is like that_ it's like the water that has nowhere else to go and wants to flow (release) with any opportunity to do so, but there's danger there too.

For the feminine in that state, there is danger in staying and there is danger in going.

There is a lot of concern for purity because it recognizes that it needs to move on but it absolutely cannot do so without doing it correctly, or the purpose will be defeated and all the work will be wasted.

Some hate medicine, some favor all kinds of vaccinations. Ashlesha needs to build immunity but it's also paramount for it to feel everything with as little interference as possible, preferably none at all. Purity has to be radical.

So, there is struggle and patience built into them. But whatever they do, in the end, their strength, their energy, their power is growing towards a critical point. It's like if you take a sensation from one part of the body to the other or if water goes from one end of the vessel toward the other_ it's still there, the only temporary relief might be moving that energy inside you, waiting more and more impatiently for that perfect opportunity to release.

So we go back to the start_ the coiled serpent, the dangerous force, the deep need.

In terms of sexual energy, the feminine is both intensely desirous and incredibly cautious. The need/desire of Ashlesha to move on to the next stage while waiting indefinitely to do so because of safety concerns can be interpreted as the desire/need for sexual experience, and the fear of abuse/not being pure anymore. The theme of the complete passivity is intertwined with this nakshatra, as if the origin and rules that were set in Bharani demand to be fulfilled.

The law of nature and the passive feminine are restrictive and suffocating to masculine, active forces. If the feminine does not settle and gain power through her natural passivity (flow, receptivity, being as opposed to doing), then she's at the risk of being annihilated.

The result of Ashlesha nakshatra: "destruction of the victim"

No mention of who the victim is. The point is, that in Ashlesha, a place of dependancy, attachment and control, where everyone is either the abuser or the abused, there is no place for mercy. The stronger one wins.

This is the game of subtelty and ruthlessness_ trying to gain some sense of humanity after feeling like a dangerous, vulnerable animal_ a monster that wants to take, because it's an innocent creature that has little.

But no matter how much you wait, how much you gain, it's all going to turn to poison, unless you can dare to oppose.

To break the chain_ it's a risk, but what else is there to do when safety becomes a cage?

But the smart, calculative Ashlesha knows the dangers, it just waits for when it's strong enough to attack, it waits until it knows every medicine and poison, until it hurts so much that it does not hurt anymore, so that when it faces the enemy, the victim will no longer be a victim, but an opponent, who has been hiding its strength under the covers of fragility, who uses what others called a weakness to strike. Until the poison is medicine and the tears are poison, it waits. But when the milk turns sour and the gentle touch suffocates, it's ready to go.

The tale of Snow White

🍎🪞

Crediting Claire Nakti for mentioning this association in her Ashlesha video

Snow White's story is a great example of how Ashlesha's energies play out.

I'm not going to go into too much detail of why it's related to Ashlesha, as I think it's going to be obvious as I go on, but the key associations are: the pure young woman (reinforced by the symbolism and imagery that her name evokes), the controlling feminine authority, danger, poison, power struggles.

I love the 2012 film "Mirror Mirror", because it does not hesitate to show the power struggle between Snow White and the evil queen. The struggle is depicted mostly through metaphors and/or symbolism in the original tale.

It'd be great to mention that Snow White's tale is said to be based on actual real life women. The first_ Margaretha von Waldeck who lived in the 16th century Germany, died young and as evidence by her last letter suggests (her handwiting indicated that her hand was shaking), she died by being poisoned, and it was also known that her stepmother was jealous of her. She also lived in a town where children had to work in the mines (inspiring the seven dwarves).

In "Mirror Mirror" Snow White is played by Ashlesha moon 🐈‍⬛ Lily Collins, and Evil Queen is played by Magha moon 🐀 Julia Roberts.

There is tiny chance that Lily is Pushya moon but that would only be true if she was born before one in the night, so I'd say she's Ashlesha, especially after observing her.

The beginning of the movie: the queen is sitting on her lavish golden throne (Magha's symbol), dressed in an equally lavish golden dress (Sun's color), positioned above Snow White, who is forced to kneel before her. The Queen is weaving her insults and humiliations into her words that seem genuinely caring at first, even Snow White falls for it in the beginning. That's how the feminine repression and bullying works in Ashlesha_ it's all the more powerful because it's gradual and seems non-threatening, especially to masculine people.

As always, the villain and the hero are determined by which nakshatra is the focus of the story. In this case, from Ashlesha's perspective, its enemy nakshatra_ Magha, is obviously the villain. This theme of "whose story is this" is another display of the power struggle in this transition. I highly recommend watching this film, because for all of its jokes and slight changes, it still retains the original message.

"The kingdom fell into an icy despair..."

_ narration from the queen

Ashlesha's yoni animal is the male cat, Magha's is the male rat, its enemy yoni. As Magha comes directly after Ashlesha and begins the second stage of nakshatras, marking the start of the sign of Leo, together they also mark the first gandanta point.

The Evil Queen is a blatant example of a Magha character, especially symbolically. It is implied and then obvious that she married the king for power and material advantages. Her ego is almost cartoonishly bloated, and all of these qualities are amazingly contrasted to Snow White_ a quieter character, who is naturally humble and subtler, not as direct as the rat yoni Magha.

In the beginning of the film she's dressed in a more golden dress, symbolizing her merging with and submission to the queen, stuck in the helpless state. After she gets the bravery to sneak out into the town, she wears a hooded cape the color of cooler, brighter yellow (more her coloring). When she comes back to attend the ball, she wears a pure white (symbolizing her purity and cool energy, resonant to Ashlesha) dress as her swan (grace, humility) costume. The Queen is dressed in bright red as a peacock (confidence, vanity, pride). That white dress is the one she stays in as she runs away and finds the home of the seven dwarves, the same white as the snow in the forest. In this adaptation, the whole kingdom is in an eternal winter under the queen's enchantment, just like the Ashlesha stage.

As she finds dwarves, they quickly become each other's allies and supporters, and, in a way, it taught her her own power. As she was gathering strength to attack and become the new ruler of the kingdom, she already was a ruler of her new tiny kingdom (dwarves_ her new family).

In the Ashlesha stage there is a separation from the things you were clinging to. At first it's seen as a tragedy, but with distance and time, the individual realizes that it needed solitude. Snow White is forced to run away (because of danger, to literally not die), but she thrives away from the queen (restrictive, abusuve influences). There's another side to this: an avoidant person, aware of its sensitivity, who does not realize how much they crave real connection. Attachment to the "wrong" people and environments and longing for the "right" ones is the issue here, along with the paradox of needing to escape and move on (critical point, built up tension and energy) but risking the much needed purity by doing so (just what I've discussed above).

Since a lot of the time the vulnerable Ashlesha feels dependant on outside forces, the movement is forced, for better or for worse, but it never recoils completely or gives all of its energy away, as it feels like it has to remain guarded.

Snow White learns to fight on her own, with the support from a genuinely nurturing environment.

She starts to wear a blue dress (cool toned, contrasting Queen's gold and red) while she's literally fighting on the side of the Queen's exiles.

When the prince joins her and the dwarves, they hear the "beast" that has been terrorizing the kingdom. She locks everyone else in the hut so that she alone can face the enemy (even though they don't let her), which is a key point in retaining your power in the state of Ashlesha. Her desire to face it alone shows not only the growth of her bravery, but mainly, her strength, as it was precisely what allows bravery for her.

Transition to Magha

There's a blatant display of power from snow white, right at the end, after she reclaims the kingdom (and at the end she's wearing a blue dress with a bright golden-orange ribbon_ finding her own power and embracing it, without losing herself). It's the last test and a chilling reminder that Ashlesha's stage is prolonged, almost never over, and can subtly sneak up on you and defeat you if you lower your guard.

At her wedding with the prince, she's given a ripe, red apple.

"And so it was Snow White's story, after all"

_ the magic mirror.

She gives the Queen her apple back, finally cleansing herself completely from that poison and using it to harm her enemy. Now she's the one in power, repeating the queen's own words back to her.

The result of Ashlesha nakshatra: the destruction of the victim.

The individual moves to Magha nakshatra_ ruling, power, lineages, detachment from the body (Ashlesha is the attachment to the body), and takes their own place on their throne.

...

Gif credits to @tecrystali , @xiaolanhua , @elvencantation .

Pictures are from Pinterest.

Indeed that's the thing with fairytales, a thing that sometimes people miss a lot as they go down the "Fantasy must be hyper-realistic" road... But fairytales are not meant to be realistic in the least (I checked not so long ago an interview from Perkins about "Gretel and Hansel" where he explained he chose to mix eras in terms of clothing and architecture styles precisely to highlight how intemporal fairytales are).

And the whole class system thing is also just very, VERY symbolic. As many people have noted since the psychanalytic era of fairytale interpretation, the whole "royalty" thing is just meant to reflect not a precise royalty but just a given family unit. Because when you look down into it, be the hero a princess or a woodcutter's son, the story is always just about a family, and mother, father, brother, sisters figures. [Unless the protag has zero family, in which case the story will be about their wacky adventures and how they get out of it]. The "royalty" is an accessory, deep down, in fairytales, which explains why there can be so many kings and queens around and why - as you point it out - it is all deeply unrealistic.

In fact you can see, when checking through the history of fairytales, how the social rank of the characters keep changing depending on who tells the tale. Take madame d'Aulnoy for example. Her fairytales all involve princesses, kings and queens. That's because it was the logic of the time - when you want to make art, for an upper-class educated audience, for courtiers and nobility, at the time of the supreme monarchy, well you don't just go writing stories about poor peasants. It is like how the genre of the "tragedy" in theater had, for the longest time, to be about upper-class people, kings and/or demigods, because else it wouldn't be a "tragedy" (there was this whole thing of class divide where royal characters were for upper-class stories like tragedies, and lower class protags immediately turned it into a comedy ; it was a system that was battled by the 18th century onward). Yet she still tried to use faithfully and to maintain well-known "nurse stories" of the time, a material which clearly used "lowly peasants" as protagonists. Resulting in her having to play around with the social situation in very humoristic ways - the fact it was humoristic in fact helped "ease" the idea of subjecting noble characters to such grotesque and ridiculous adventures. Cunning Cinders? Of course they are three girls whose parents are too poor to take care of them... But they're still princesses! Just impoverished royalty kicked off their kingdom. The Orange Tree and the Bee? Yes the protag falls in love with the daughter of the ogre... But she is just a princess, adopted by the ogre and unaware of her background! Fortunée discovers she is NOT the daughter of a poor peasant but truly the orphan of a royal couple who was hidden there by a fairy ; and the three sisters of "Princess Pretty-Star" are clearly not food-friers living in the wood because they were born like this, they're just poor princesses forced to live there after losing their throne and fortune.

Mind you, with madame d'Aulnoy, we are speaking here of old-timey literature, which, especially in France, ADORED those plot-twists and "secret royalty reveal" because of the very strict social hierarchy of the "Old Regime", which was carried from real-life to literature. Royalty could only marry royalty or nobility. When Perrault wrote his Puss in Boats or his Toads and Diamonds, he was being subversive and shocking for his time, hinting at the bourgeoisie-weddings that were happening and disturbing the social order (see Molière's use of bourgeoisie in his comedies). Similarly madame d'Aulnoy's "The Golden-Haired Beauty" is deeply surprising and shocking for having a mere servant marrying a queen... But this willful confusion between the social classes in the literary fairytales got fused with the symbolic use of crowns and thrones in oral folktales.

Oral fairytales where the father becomes the king simply because he is the supreme master of the family, where the protagonist is a prince because you better project and want to live the fairytale if it is about a prince ; where the princess is banished from her kingdom in the beginning because her status of princess represents the happiness at the start of the tale and her leaving her kingdom is the symbol of her living her family and/or childhood and/or early life behind ; where the happy ending can only be by marrying royalty because how else would you signify in an old world a supreme and definitive form of happiness? The result becomes this weird status, the same way the place and time of fairytales does not matter, the social class also starts losing any meaning... Though it still has some.

Well friends, it has officially started. I have received requests to roast the new Live Action Snow White, the moment it appears and I don't even want to see it hahah. I have been working on a new video essay about the glorification of male abuse in Gerwig's movies, and I hope to release it before Christmas.

Here are my thoughts about the original animated Snow White from the 1930s and the fairy tale and the meaning of the prince. When I post this I have not seen Gerwig’s live-action Snow White and I don’t know if I have the stomach to watch another movie where she tries to shovel white feminism down my throat. According to the leading actress and the director, there is not going to be a prince in the movie, dwarfs are idiots and Snow White is a girl boss.

To be honest I don’t think Greta Gerwig cares at all about feminism or any of the original sources of her movies. I think she only cares about fame and money. The reason why I dislike white feminism or pop feminism, however, you like to call it, is because it is never about equality. It always tends to be more about misogyny. It is not about equality to all genders, body types, or races, it is all about ”I am superior to you”. When I heard that she was going to direct the live-action Snow White, my first thought was ” That is very ironic”, because at its core Snow White is a story about the destruction of narcissism, but when it comes to this live-action, all I see is Snow White messaging ”I am not the fairest of them all, am superior to you all”.

But what if I don’t want Snow White to be a girl boss? What if I like her just the way she is? with all those Beth March vibes and all.

The prince is not very present in the 1937 animation, which I think is a bit of a shame, he seems like a good guy. I would have given him more screen time. There is a German story called Richilde, which is an early retelling of Snow White and it is believed to have inspired the Brothers Grimm to write their own version. In Richilde after the prince saves Snow White, they actually start plotting together against the evil queen. It is quite nice that there is at least one version, where the prince is more active and I always support a couple getting to know each other before the wedding.

I always thought that the evil queen killed Snow White’s parents. We know that she wants power. Maybe she killed the first queen and tricked the king to marry herself and I guess she left Snow White alive, because killing her might cause suspicions and perhaps she wanted a free slave to herself.

When I think about the prince, I think he is a crucial part of Snow White’s recovery. Specifically recovery from trauma. Let’s imagine she is five years old when the queen murders her parents. Queen forces her to be a slave at her own home. She needs to do the laundry, cook her meals, and wash the stairs. Together with all that labour, she very likely experiences physical abuse and emotional abuse. You can not show this directly in a Disney film, but I’d say the scene where the old witch brings her the apple, is a very good example of emotional manipulation.

If you grow up in this kind of environment, where someone is a narcissist, there is always gas lighting. We know that Snow White likes to think the best of people, she might have thought something in these lines ”oh the queen didn’t think I was productive enough today, so she only gave me dry bread to eat, at least she remembered me”.

Small gestures of caring, might appear bigger in the mind of the victim, than they are in reality. She eats the apple because she feels sorry for the old woman, but also because the witch is pressuring her to eat the apple, and Snow White is conditioned from a very young age, to believe that abuse is normal.

Another 13 year old girl in the middle ages, might not have done the same, not if they recognized that it was manipulation. Narcissistic people play mind games, so much that they twist your views on reality.

It is possible that when Snow White lives in the palace, other servants were told not to be friends with her, otherwise the queen would punish them, which would also explain why we only see her having animal friends at the palace.

She has a kind heart, which is why the dwarfs like her and the prince falls in love with her, but if we think about her trauma,

this 13-year-old girl has faced years and years of emotional and physical abuse from the queen.

The queen killed her parents and made her to be her slave,

Snow White was forced to escape to the woods at night, which can be a scary experience even for an adult,

queen tried to kill her friends,

the queen tried to kill her more than once

the queen put her into a coma.

That's a lot of trauma. She is 13 years old. It’s child abuse.

The way I see it, the prince represents the possibility for Snow White to heal from the trauma. Sometimes you hear stories of people who have been abused as kids, and there are those who thrive, and those who are prisoners of their trauma, The people who thrive, are the ones who have at least one person in their life who helped them through the traumatic experience. It can be a spouse, a friend or a good therapist.

It would be very difficult for Snow White to find a trauma therapist from Middle Age Germany, but with the Prince, there is a promise of a better future, and him being stable person and someone who unconditionally loves Snow White, she can recover from these traumatic experiences and get that emotional support from him and truly live happily ever after.

P.S. Since the live action is a Gerwig film, bet your life, any form of male abuse is normalized and there is going to be a big speech from a leading lady, how the world is against her, because she is a woman. If instead of pop feminism, she would focus on trying to fix the unequal system that she is always complaining about, maybe her characters wouldn't have these problems..

but then she could not be the center of attention, could she?

A few years ago, I attended this workshop about storytelling and the ancient legends of Great Britain (where I live), and the host said that as a society we are suffering from a ‘crisis of metaphor’. What he meant was that we tend to take things too literally and therefore miss symbolic significance.

An area where I see this happen over and over again is our interpretation of fairytales - namely, this idea of a princess being saved by a prince, and the modern notion that it teaches little girls they need a man to rescue them.

This is valid, but only because we fail to teach little girls (and boys!) the true meaning of such tales. In fact, the most well-known fairytales date back not just centuries but millennia, because they contain elements of older myths. For instance, the three fairy godmothers in Sleeping Beauty are the three fates found in Norse and Greek mythology - who also appear as the three witches in Macbeth. The notion of an apple of temptation in Snow White, too, has its origins in ancient Greek legend - not to speak of its allusion to the Garden of Eden.

The reason such tales have persisted in popular culture for so long is that they speak to something deep inside us, and this goes well beyond just promoting the idea of a girl needing a man to save her. For this reason, there are books out there psychoanalysing classic tales as if they were dreams, from both a Freudian and a Jungian perspective. We also got taught to analyse stories in this manner in my English degree, once upon a time.

As a brief example, I’ll return to Sleeping Beauty. As a little girl, she's hidden away and protected from all eyes, especially men’s eyes, as if trying to keep her young forever. Her parents refuse to allow her to touch that magic spindle, which is a symbol for puberty and awakening sexuality. I mean...a needle, and a bloom of blood?? However, this growth is inevitable. Despite how much they try to keep her from being exposed to the outside world, Aurora finds the spindle anyway and falls into a deep sleep.

This sleep not only affects her but the whole kingdom. Everyone goes unconscious, other than the witch / dragon. The prince then has to fight through thorns to reach the princess and defeat the dragon. A crucial question is: why would he do this? Surely there are easier princesses to win! And if we look at the Disney rendition, he literally just saw Aurora talking to squirrels and owls and immediately fell in love with her, instead of thinking she was a bit odd. All of this tells us we can’t take it literally.

The dragon and thorns are the internal defensive measures to try to keep out the prince, who represents everything that was being repressed - the awakening moment that will bring Aurora into the adult world the parents and fairies were so keen to hold her back from. In this sense, we can say that the witch and the prince are both other aspects of the princess. In other words, there is no girl in need of saving by a man. The man is part of the young woman. She is saving herself. There is no kiss to wake her up magically - this is symbolic of her emotional awakening and transition into adulthood. This is why she is named Aurora, a reference to the dawn.

We can look at every popular fairytale in this way and see that each character is an archetype. Each of us, male or female, holds all these archetypes within us. So, fairytales are not merely stories but ways of symbolically exploring growth experiences and journeys we all go through. In this way, even a little boy hearing one of these tales can relate to the princess. Every boy is the princess and prince - every girl is the princess and prince.

What is key is making sure that the symbolism is strong. Don’t explain all of this to young kids and ruin the magic. But as our children grow and begin to be aware of the symbols, we can explore it with them and teach them that each and every one of them has the power within to be their own Prince Charming and free themselves from any 'evil spell'.

Note that I will not speak of the book itself or the reception of the book in English-speaking countries, but I want to talk about its reception in France and an impact it had on France. Today, numerous elements of the book have been debunked or criticized, coupled with many people misunderstanding the intentions of Bettelheim or misinforming about the context of the book or how it had to be read. As a result, today there is a tendency to crap on this book or laugh about it when we talk about fairytales analysis. However this book had a great importance in France when it came to "save" fairytales.

Before going into the general, as a brief piece of personal experience - which isn't exclusive to me, as others also shared this. This book actually was what got me into the analysis and study of fairytale. Or rather, when I read it as a pre-teen, it made me discover that... fairytales could have depths. Fairytales could have hidden meanings behind being simple children stories. It made me consider how these stories could be taken and reinterpreted as so many allegories and metaphors, it opened my eyes to a certain visceral, psychic, social aspect of these tales, and without this book I certainly would not have been into fairytales as I am today.

Not that this book is the ultimate resource of fairytale analysis - and the entire process of a psychological reading of fairytales is someting that exists but should not be taken into account when trying to explain them (fairytales being the produce of the encounter between literature and folklore). However, this book stayed a door-opening key for me, outdated maybe, overthinking stuff I guess, but that at least allowed me to glimpse into the "great beyond" behind these stories.

And now for my actual point... How Bettelheim's book saved fairytales in France. This is something I learned when studying the life and work of Pierre Gripari - in a book called "Pierre Gripari, un passeur d'écritures" by Inna Saranovska.

When Bettelheim's book reached France in the late 70s, fairytales were in a bad spot when it came to cultural authorities. Already fairytales had been reduced in people's mind to simple, naive children stories only good for making American cartoons (cough cough, Disney). But those of Perrault were still evoked and studied in schools (little schools for little children) because it was part of the heritage of France, of French culture, and the evolution of French literatue...

However what happened in the 70s? The very serious project of just burying fairytales was brought forward. The talks by politics and school authorities were simple: let us stop teaching fairytales to children in school, let's remove fairytales from school libraries, we do not have any use for them anymore, let them be forgotten. On one side, as I said, there was a discredit due to them being seen as silly children story, and thus no real pedagogic or "useful" chilren literature. But on the other side, there were very concrete and serious political business involved - fairytales were seen as antithetic, and opposed, to the principles of the modern Republic of France. Fairytales were seen as backward antiquities that went against what a great democratic nation should be. For example, people really did took issue in the fact that fairytales depicted monarchies, with kings as absolute authorities, and where a happy ending meant to end up prince or princess. For them, it was literaly teaching children to favor and idealize monarchy when they should rather learn about democracies and republics, and while it might seem silly today, it was serious back then and what almost led to the complete erasure of fairytales from school programs.

But then came Bettelheim's book. A book which proved to these folks that fairytales could be of a deep, psychological, social use to children. A book which taught these authorities to see beyond the "silliness" of these children stories or the "backward social message", and which told them how these stories could contain and express the deep fears, the secret desires of children, and help them grow up and deal with familial, social relationships. The book was a best-seller in France, and it completely changed the higher-ups opinion, and convinced tem fairytales should indeed be maintained in school - because fairytales were now "serious" due to being part of the very serious and praised domains of psychology and psychanalysis (which was all the fad and rage in the second half of the 20th century France).

And as such - no matter what you might say about the book's uality today - it can still be thanked for actually "saving" fairytales in France.

I have spoken before about the "original" version of the Brothers Grimm fairytale - aka the first edition of the text, and how it changed and evolved up to the story we know today. Many of these changes are well-known by the public - for example how the wicked stepmother was originally a wicked MOTHER (but the Grimm changed it because they had a mother-worship thing going on) ; or how the whole "duck scene" where the kids are helped crossing the river by birds was added later and not present in the original text. Some are less known, such as the fact that the "heavenly wind" rhyme was not part of the original text, or how Hansel's prison was originally not some sort of stable like in the final text but a tiny hicken coop.

In terms of "sibling stories" when we look at the great patches of historical fairytales and older literary works, you will find a lot of people pointing out to the Italian fairytale "Ninnillo and Nennella" by Basile - but I have to strongly disagree with this claim, because while Basile's fairytale does contain the motif of "boy/girl sblings abandoned several times in the woods, using various objects to find their way back, until it fails and they are lost forever", beyond that the fairytale has little to no relationship with Hansel and Gretel. A more direct ancestry and relationship has to be found in the French fairytale. More precisely in Perrault's Little Thumbling, Le Petit Poucet, which is also a story about children abandoned in the woods due to a lack of food, that found their way back several times before the birds eat the bread, and that end up in the house of a man-eater, an ogre trying to kill them. But we are still quite away from the German tale - and it is another French literary fairytale that forms the "missing link" in this chain. Madame d'Aulnoy's "Cunning Cinders" (Finette Cendron). This story doesn't involve children, but four young women - however it still follows the Hansel and Gretel formula very closely. Abandoned by their parents in the wilderness, manage to get back several times before it fails, end up trapped in the house of man-eaters, and the titular character defeats the ogre by pushing hm into a fiery oven... Of course, beyond that d'Aulnoy has a ton of additional content - such as the ogre having a wife that must be beheaded ; the lost girls being helped by a fairy godmother ; and the second part of the story being an alternate Cinderella.

But all in all it shows a point I made previously, and talked about in my ogre posts: the structure and type of the "Hansel and Gretel" story is originally an ogre tale. All older versions of the story involve ogres, not witches - but since the German do not have "ogres" in their folklore, the ogress was replaced by a witch. And despite this replacement, the witch of the story keeps several ogre traits - such as a motif of "the elderly devours youth", the idea of the witch having a poor eyesight but a keen sense of smell, or the entire "maternal perversion" motif. Which is my next point.

"Hansel and Gretel" is a familial tragedy, like many other fairytales. But the family of Hansel and Gretel is an actually extremely bizarre one. You can see, once you know your folklore and fairytale lore, that despite it being considered a "classic" and a "foundation", this tale is actually a fragmented and pieced-together story that leaves numerous gaps and is much more muddled and confused than its equivalents and predecessors. What I mean by that is that, when you look at the familial relationships in this story, you will discover several remnants of an older and more commonspread familial structure that was erased, and only leaves bizarre analogies in the new set of characters the tale offers.

To be clearer. We know that Hansel and Gretel are siblings, and that they have two parents - the father and the stepmother, formerly mother. The witch is an unrelated character acting as an outside element - or so it seems. The fairytale actually establishes a parallel and a connection between the wicked stepmother and the witch. They are parallel characters, two wicked women that want the death of children, but whereas one wants to throw the kids out of the house to leave them to starve or be devoured by beats, so she can have more food herself, the other imprisons the children in her house and overfeeds them to devour them later. A more direct link is established whenn the children return home, at the end of the tale, and discover that their step-mother is dead.

Some dark and edgy adaptations will have things such as the stepmother being killed by her husband, or killing herself, stuff like that - but by the tale alone, on just reading the words, and the first impression it leaves on a child, is that the stepmother mysteriously dies in unexplained ways right after the children burned the witch in her oven. The fact that the two wicked women end up deceased for the tale to end happily, the fact the stepmother's death is left unexplained while the witch's death is graphic and fully presented, the fact the stepmother's death is announced after the witch was killed... It all leaves the impression that the two were connected, and that by some sort of "parallel magic", killing the witch triggered the stepmother's death.

This is something many adaptations picked up upon, and you find versons where the witch and the mother look a lot alike, or are played by the same person, or are the same being. (One can compare it to Russian variations of the stories of Baba-Yaga, where wicked stepmothers sometimes send their nice stepdaughters a la Vasilisa the Fair, to the Yaga's house claiming the Yaga is their "sister"). All in all this continues the idea that the witch is a perverse take on the mother figure - nourishing and protecting children only to gulp them down into her stomach. Which, by the way, is the very symbolism and essence of ogres: fathers that kill, mothers that eat.

But while this is the most famous of the "perverse family connections" in the tale, there is another people tend to forget: the connection between Gretel and the witch. I talked heavily of the difference of treatment the witch has between Hansel and Gretel in a previous post ("Why was Hansel the meal of the witch?"). People have noted the strange discrepancy of Hansel being the one locked up and fattened up to be eaten, while Gretel became an abused slave. Many modern adaptations played on this element by having the witch planning on not eating Gretel, but making her an apprentice in witchcraft, an heir to her house, and treating her like a daughter/witch in training. After all, she does malnourish her, so she seems not keen on the idea of eating her at first...

But these modern adaptations actually picked up on something deeper and more fascinating. You see, the witch not locking up Gretel and treating her as her slave seems to be a leftover from older variants of the tale, because there is a widespread archetype in fairytales known as "the witch's daughter" or "the ogress' daughter". In many ogress or man-eating witches tales, the antagonist has a daughter that assists her in her chores. Sometimes the daughter will secretely help the protagonist escape and be an ally - but these are quite rare, and most of the time the daughter is the one the witch/ogress charges of killing-cooking the protagonist. Then the protagonist tricks the daughter, kills and cooks her instead of themselves, and serve her to their monstrous mother, who believes she is eating the protagonist, when in fact she devours her own daughter. It is a very typical structure in those tales, found from the Baba Yaga legends to the Kabyle tales of the teryel.

The witch's daughter archetype also exists in fairytales where the witch is not a man-eater, but rather an antagonist that imprisons people, or that imposes impossible tasks - and here, the daughter will be a more benevolent figure that will secretly help the protagonist escape the witch and/or overcome the trials and tasks the mother imposes. In fact, in several of those stories, the protagonist fights for the right to love and marry the witch's daughter.

All in all, the fact that Gretel is treated as a slave and assistant to the witch, that she is to help feeding and fattening her brother, etc, etc, implies that her character in the story of the Grimm is a leftover of the "ogress' daughter" or "witch's daughter" of older stories. As a result it makes even more sense for adaptations to have the witch treat Gretel as some sort of surrogate daughter, and it makes the whole family picture of the German story very messed up. The witch who tries to eat the children might be their mother/step-mother, and Gretel might be the witch's daughter.

Another motif that has been picked up by various adaptatons is the motif of birds. I remember long ago I stumbled upon a fascinating art series depicting the witch as a half-bird half-human creature - unfortunately the pictures are now lost in the vast pit of the Internet. More recently, another artist posted an image of Hansel in his cage, with the witch appearing a large, black bird above the cage, wearing a witch's hat.

All those art pieces reflected a true fact: "Hansel and Gretel" is a bird story. You have the birds that devour the bread crumbs, but also the pretty bird that leads the children to the witch's house, and the ducks that helps them cross the stream in the added ending of the Grimm. Some variations also have Hansel claim, when he keeps looking back at the house, that he is seeing a "pretty bird" instead of a "pretty cat" like in the Grimm's final text. As a result, some people did identify the birds that eat the breadcrumbs and/or the bird that leads the children to the house with the witch. The anime "Grimm's Fairy Tale Classics" notably depicted the pretty bird luring the children to the house as the witch's familiar.

A last note: The idea that the witch's house is made of tons of various candies and sweets was popularized by various modern adaptations and retellings of the story. In the Grimm tale, the house isn't made of candy. It isn't even made of gingerbread as so many people believe! While it is common for people to think of this tale as "the one with the gingerbread house", I don't know where that comes from. In the text of the Grimm, the house is merely made of bread, plain old bread, with sugar for the windows. There are however cakes that are said to cover the house, as ornaments. Maybe people in retellings decided to mix together the "cake"and the "bread" and decided to make it "gingerbread"? I don't know.

As I promised before, I will share with you some of the articles contained in the queer-reading study-book "Queering the Grimms". Due to the length of the articles and Tumblr's limitations, I will have to fragment them. Let's begin with an article from the Faux Feminities segment, called Queering Kinship in "The Maiden who Seeks her Brothers", written by Jeana Jorgensen. (Illustrations provided by me)

The fairy tales in the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, or Children’s and Household Tales, compiled by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm are among the world’s most popular, yet they have also provoked discussion and debate regarding their authenticity, violent imagery, and restrictive gender roles. In this chapter I interpret the three versions published by the Grimm brothers of ATU 451, “The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers,” focusing on constructions of family, femininity, and identity. I utilize the folkloristic methodology of allomotific analysis, integrating feminist and queer theories of kinship and gender roles. I follow Pauline Greenhill by taking a queer view of fairy tale texts from the Grimms’ collection, for her use of queer implies both “its older meaning as a type of destabilizing redirection, and its more recent sense as a reference to sexualities beyond the heterosexual.” This is appropriate for her reading of “Fitcher’s Bird” (ATU 311, “Rescue by the Sister”) as a story that “subverts patriarchy, heterosexuality, femininity, and masculinity alike” (2008, 147). I will similarly demonstrate that “The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers” only superficially conforms to the Grimms’ patriarchal, nationalizing agenda, for the tale rather subversively critiques the nuclear family and heterosexual marriage by revealing ambiguity and ambivalence. The tale also queers biology, illuminating transbiological connections between species and a critique of reproductive futurism. Thus, through the use of fantasy, this tale and fairy tales in general can question the status quo, addressing concepts such as self, other, and home.

The first volume of the first edition of the Grimm brothers’ collection ap[1]peared in 1812, to be followed by six revisions during the brothers’ lifetimes (leading to a total of seven editions of the so-called large edition of their collection, while the so-called small edition was published in ten editions). The Grimm brothers published three versions of “The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers” in the 1812 edition of their collection, but the tales in that volume underwent some changes over time, as did most of the tales. This was partially in an effort to increase sales, and Wilhelm’s editorial changes in particular “tended to make the tales more proper and prudent for bourgeois audiences” (Zipes 2002b, xxxi). “The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers” is one of the few tale types that the Grimms published multiply, each time giving titular focus to the brothers, as the versions are titled “The Twelve Brothers” (KHM 9), “The Seven Ravens” (KHM 25), and “The Six Swans” (KHM 49). However, both Stith Thompson and Hans-Jörg Uther, in their respective 1961 and 2004 revisions of the international tale type index, call the tale type “The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers.” Indeed, Thompson discusses this tale in The Folktale under the category of faithfulness, par[1]ticularly faithful sisters, noting, “In spite of the minor variations . . . the tale-type is well-defined in all its major incidents” (1946, 110). Thompson also describes how the tale is found “in folktale collections from all parts of Europe” and forms the basis of three of the tales in the Grimm brothers’ collection (111).

In his Interpretation of Fairy Tales, Bengt Holbek classifies ATU 451 as a “feminine” tale, since its two main characters who wed at the end of the tale are a low-born young female and a high-born young male (the sister, though originally of noble birth in many versions, is cast out and essentially impoverished by the tale’s circumstances). Holbek notes that the role of a low-born young male in feminine tales is often filled by brothers: “The relationship between sister and brothers is characterized by love and help[1]fulness, even if fear and rivalry may also be an aspect in some tales (in AT 451, the girl is afraid of the twelve ravens; she sews shirts to disenchant them, however, and they save her from being burnt at the stake at the last moment)” (1987, 417). While Holbek conflates tale versions in this description, he is essentially correct about ATU 451; the siblings are devoted to one another, despite fearsome consequences.

The discrepancy between those titles that focus on the brothers and those that focus on the sister deserves further attention. Perhaps the Grimm brothers (and their informants?) were drawn to the more spectacular imagery of enchanted brothers. In Hans Christian Andersen’s well-known version of ATU 451, “The Wild Swans,” he too focuses on the brothers in the title. However, some scholars, including Thompson and myself, are more intrigued by the sister’s actions in the tale. Bethany Joy Bear, for instance, in her analysis of traditional and modern versions of ATU 451, concentrates on the agency of the silent sister-saviors, noting that the three versions in the Grimms’ collection “illustrate various ways of empowering the hero[1]ine. In ‘The Seven Ravens’ she saves her brothers through an active and courageous quest, while in ‘The Twelve Brothers’ and ‘The Six Swans’ her success requires redemptive silence” (2009, 45).

The three tales differ by more than just how the sister saves her brothers, though. In “The Twelve Brothers,” a king and queen with twelve boys are about to have another child; the king swears to kill the boys if the newborn is a girl so that she can inherit the kingdom. The queen warns the boys and they run away, and the girl later seeks them. She inadvertently picks flowers that turn her brothers into ravens, and in order to disenchant them she must remain silent; she may not speak or laugh for seven years. During this time, she marries a king, but his mother slanders her, and when the seven years have elapsed, she is about to be burned at the stake. At that moment, her brothers are disenchanted and returned to human form. They redeem their sister, who lives happily with her husband and her brothers.

In “The Seven Ravens,” a father exclaims that his seven negligent sons should turn into ravens for failing to bring water to baptize their newborn sister. It is unclear whether the sister remains unbaptized, thus contributing to her more liminal status. When the sister grows up, she seeks her brothers, shunning the sun and moon but gaining help from the stars, who give her a bone to unlock the glass mountain where her brothers reside. Because she loses the bone, the girl cuts off her small finger, using it to gain access to the mountain. She disenchants her brothers by simply appearing, and they all return home to live together.

In “The Six Swans,” a king is coerced into marrying a witch’s daughter, who finds where the king has stashed his children to keep them safe. The sorceress enchants the boys, turning them into swans, and the girl seeks them. She must not speak or laugh for six years and she must sew shirts from asters for them. She marries a king, but the king’s mother steals each of the three children born to the couple, smearing the wife’s mouth with blood to implicate her as a cannibal. She finishes sewing the shirts just as she’s about to be burned at the stake; then her brothers are disenchanted and come to live with the royal couple and their returned children. However, the sleeve of one shirt remained unfinished, so the littlest brother is stuck with a wing instead of an arm.

The main episodes of the tale type follow Russian folklorist Vladimir Propp’s structural sequence for fairy-tale plots: the tale begins with a villainy, the banishing and enchantment of the brothers, sometimes resulting from an interdiction that has been violated. The sister must perform a task in addition to going on a quest, and the tale ends with the formation of a new family through marriage. As Alan Dundes observes, “If Propp’s formula is valid, then the major task in fairy tales is to replace one’s original family through marriage” (1993, 124; see also Lüthi 1982). This observation holds true for heteronormative structures (such as the nuclear family), which exist in order to replicate themselves. In many fairy tales, the original nuclear family is discarded due to circumstance or choice. However, the sister in “The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers” has not abandoned or been removed from her old family, unlike Cinderella, who ditches her nasty stepmother and stepsisters, or Rapunzel, who is taken from her birth parents, and so on. Although, admittedly, “The Seven Ravens” does not end in marriage, I do not plan to disqualify it from analysis simply because it doesn’t fit the dominant model, as Bengt Holbek does when comparing Danish versions of “King Wivern” (ATU 433B, “King Lindorm”).1 The fact that one of the tales does not end in marriage actually supports my interpretation of the tales as transgressive, a point to which I will return later.

Dundes’s (2007) notion of allomotif helps make sense of the kinship dynamics in “The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers.” In order to decipher the symbolic code of folktales, Dundes proposes that any motif that could fill the same slot in a particular tale’s plot should be designated an allomotif. Further, if motif A and motif B fulfill the same purpose in moving along the tale’s plot, then they are considered mutually substitutable, thus equivalent symbolically. What this assertion means for my analysis is that all the methods by which the brothers are enchanted and subsequently disenchanted can be treated as meaningful in relation to one another. One of the advantages of comparing allomotifs rather than motifs is that we can be assured that we are analyzing not random details but significant plot components. So in “The Six Swans” and “The Seven Ravens,” we see the parental curse causing both the banishment and the enchantment of the brothers, whereas in “The Twelve Brothers,” the brothers are banished and enchanted in separate moves. Even though the brothers’ exile and enchantment happen in a different sequence in the different texts, we must view their causes as functionally parallel. Thus the ire of a father concerned for his newborn daughter, the jealous rage of a stepmother, the homicidal desire of a father to give his daughter everything, and the innocent flower gathering of a sister can all be seen as threatening to the brothers. All of these actions lead to the dispersal and enchantment of the brothers, though not all are malicious, for the sister in “The Twelve Brothers” accidentally turns her brothers into ravens by picking flowers that consequently enchant them.

I interpret this equivalence as a metaphorical statement—threats to a family’s cohesion come in all forms, from well-intentioned actions to openly malevolent curses. The father’s misdirected love for his sole daughter in two versions (“The Twelve Brothers” and “The Seven Ravens”) translates to danger to his sons. This danger is allomotifically paralleled by how the sister, without even knowing it, causes her brothers to become enchanted, either by picking flowers in “The Twelve Brothers” or through the mere incident of her birth in “The Twelve Brothers” and “The Seven Ravens.” The fact that a father would prioritize his sole daughter over numerous sons is strange and reminiscent of tales in which a father explicitly expresses romantic de[1]sire for his daughter, as in “Allerleirauh” (ATU 510B), discussed in chapter 4 by Margaret Yocom. Even in “The Six Swans,” where a stepmother with magical powers enchants the sons, the father is implicated; he did not love his children well enough to protect them from his new spouse, and once the boys had been changed into swans and fled, the father tries to take his daughter with him back to his castle (where the stepmother would likely be waiting to dispose of the daughter as well), not knowing that by asserting control over her, he would be endangering her. The father’s implied ownership of the daughter in “The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers” and the linking of inheritance with danger emphasize the conflicts that threaten the nuclear family. Both material and emotional resources are in limited supply in these tales, with disastrous consequences for the nuclear family, which fragments, as it does in all fairy tales (see Propp 1968).

Holbek reaches a similar conclusion in his allomotific analysis of ATU 451, though he focuses on Danish versions collected by Evald Tang Kristensen in the late nineteenth century. Holbek notes that the heroine is the actual “cause of her brothers’ expulsion in all cases, either—innocently—through being born or—inadvertently—through some act of hers” (1987, 550). The true indication of the heroine’s role in condemning her brothers is her role in saving them, despite the fact that other characters may superficially be blamed: “The heroine’s guilt is nevertheless to be deduced from the fact that only an act of hers can save her brothers.” However, Holbek reads the tale as revolving around the theme of sibling rivalry, which is more relevant to the cultural context in which Danish versions of ATU 451 were set, since the initial family situation in the tale was not always said to be royal or noble, and Holbek views the tales as reflecting the actual concerns and conditions of their peasant tellers (550; see also 406–9).2 Holbek also discusses the lack of resources that might lead to sibling rivalry, identifying physical scarcity and emotional love as two factors that could inspire tension between siblings.

The initial situation in the Grimms’ versions of “The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers” is also a comment on the arbitrary power that parents have over their children, the ability to withhold love or resources or both. The helplessness of children before the strong feelings of their parents is cor[1]roborated in another Grimms’ tale, “The Lazy One and the Industrious One” (Zipes 2002b, 638).3 In this tale, which Jack Zipes translated among the “omitted tales” that did not make it into any of the published editions of the KHM, a father curses his sons for insulting him, causing them to turn into ravens until a beautiful maiden kisses them. Essentially, the fam[1]ily is a site of danger, yet it is a structure that will be replicated in the tale’s conclusion . . . almost.

But first, the sister seeks her brothers and disenchants them. The symbolic equation links, in each of the three tales, the sister’s silence (neither speaking nor laughing) for six years while sewing six shirts from asters, her seven years of silence (neither speaking nor laughing), and her cutting off her finger and using it to gain entry to the glass palace where she disenchants her brothers merely by being present. The theme unifying these allomotifs is sacrifice. The sister’s loss of her finger, equivalent to the loss of her voice, is a symbolic disempowerment. One loss is a physical mutilation, which might not impair the heroine terribly much; the choice not to use her voice is arguably more drastic, since her inability to speak for herself nearly causes her death in the tales.4 Both losses could be seen as equivalent to castration.5 However, losing her ability to speak and her ability to manipulate the world around her while at the same time displaying domestic competence in sewing equates powerlessness with feminine pursuits. Bear notes that versions by both the Grimms and Hans Christian Andersen envision “a distinctly feminine savior whose work is symbolized by her spindle, an ancient emblem of women’s work” (2009, 46). Ruth Bottigheimer (1986) points out in her essay “Silenced Women in Grimms’ Tales” that the heroines in “The Twelve Brothers” and “The Six Swans” are forced to accept conditions of muteness that disempower them, which is part of a larger silencing that occurs in the tales; women both are explicitly forbidden to speak, and they have fewer declarative and interrogative speech acts attributed to them within the whole body of the Grimms’ texts.

Ironically, in performing subservient femininity, the sister fails to perform adequately as wife or mother, since the children she bears in one version (“The Six Swans”) are stolen from her. When the sister is married to the king, she gives birth to three children in succession, but each time, the king’s mother takes away the infant and smears the queen’s mouth with blood while she sleeps (Zipes 2002b, 170). Finally, the heroine is sentenced to death by a court but is unable to protest her innocence since she must not speak in order to disenchant her brothers. In being a faithful sister, the heroine cannot be a good mother and is condemned to die for it. This aspect of the tale could represent a deeply coded feminist voice.6 A tale collected and published by men might contain an implicitly coded feminist message, since the critique of patriarchal institutions such as the family would have to be buried so deeply as to not even be recognizable as a message in order to avoid detection and censorship (Radner and Lanser 1993, 6–9). The sis[1]ter in “The Six Swans” cannot perform all of the feminine duties required of her, and because she ostensibly allows her children to die, she could be accused of infanticide. Similarly, in the contemporary legend “The Inept Mother,” collected and analyzed by Janet Langlois, an overwhelmed mother’s incompetence indirectly kills one or all of her children.7 Langlois reads this legend as a coded expression of women’s frustrations at being isolated at home with too many responsibilities, a coded demand for more support than is usually given to mothers in patriarchal institutions. Essentially, the story is “complex thinking about the thinkable—protecting the child who must leave you—and about the unthinkable—being a woman not defined in relation to motherhood” (Langlois 1993, 93). The heroine in “The Six Swans” also occupies an ambiguous position, navigating different expectations of femininity, forced to choose between giving care and nurturance to some and withholding it from others.

Here, I find it productive to draw a parallel to Antigone, the daughter of Oedipus. Antigone defies the orders of her uncle Creon in order to bury her brother Polyneices and faces a death sentence as a result. Antigone’s fidelity to her blood family costs her not only her life but also her future as a productive and reproductive member of society. As Judith Butler (2000) clarifies in Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death, Antigone transgresses both gender and kinship norms in her actions and her speech acts. Her love for her brother borders on the incestuous and exposes the incest taboo at the heart of kinship structure. Antigone’s perverse death drive for the sake of her brother, Butler asserts, is all the more monstrous because it establishes aberration at the heart of the norm (in this case the incest taboo). I see a similar logic operating in “The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers,” because according to allomotific equivalences, the heroine is condemned to die only in one version (“The Six Swans”) because she allegedly ate her children. In the other version that contains the marriage episode (“The Twelve Brothers”), the king’s mother slanders her, calling the maiden “godless,” and accuses her of wicked things until the king agrees to sentence her to death (Zipes 2002b, 35). As allomotific analysis reveals, in the three versions, the heroine is punished for being excessively devoted to her brothers, which is functionally the same as cannibalism and as being generally wicked (the accusation of the king’s mother in two of the versions).

In a sense, the heroine’s disproportionate devotion to her brothers kills her chance at marriage and kills her children, which from a queer stance is a comment on the performativity of sexuality and gender. According to Butler, gender performativity demonstrates “that what we take to be an internal essence of gender is manufactured through a sustained set of acts, posited through the gendered stylization of the body” ([1990] 1999, xv). This illusion, that gender and sexuality are a “being” rather than a “doing,” is constantly at risk of exposure. When sexuality is exposed as constructed rather than natural, thus threatening the whole social-sexual system of identity formation, the threat must be eliminated.

One aspect of this system particularly threatened in “The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers” is reproductive futurism, one form of compulsory teleological heterosexuality, “the epitome of heteronormativity’s desire to reach self-fulfillment by endlessly recycling itself through the figure of the Child” (Giffney 2008, 56; see also Edelman 2004). Reproductive futurism mandates that politics and identities be placed in service of the future and future children, utilizing the rhetoric of an idealized childhood. In his book on reproductive futurism, Lee Edelman links queerness and the death drive, stating, “The death drive names what the queer, in the order of the social, is called forth to figure: the negativity opposed to every form of social viability” (2004, 9). According to this logic, to prioritize anything other than one’s reproductive future is to refuse social viability and heteronormativity—this is what the heroine in “The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers” does. Her excessive emotional ties to her brothers disfigure her future, aligning her with the queer, the unlivable, and hence the ungrievable. Refusing the linear narrative of reproductive futurism registers as “unthinkable, irresponsible, inhumane” (4), words that could very well be used to describe a mother who is thought to be eating her babies and who cannot or will not speak to defend herself.

The heroine’s marriage to the king in two versions of the tale can also be examined from a queer perspective. Like the tale “Fitcher’s Bird,” which queers marriage by “showing male-female [marital] relationships as clearly fraught with danger and evil from their onset,” the Grimms’ two versions of ATU 451 that feature marriage call into question its sanctity and safety (Greenhill 2008, 150, emphasis in original). Marriage, though the ultimate goal of many fairy tales, does not provide the heroine with a supportive or nurturing environment. Bear comments that in versions of “The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers” wherein a king discovers and marries the heroine, “the king’s discovery brings the sister into a community that both facilitates and threatens her work. The sister’s discovery brings her into a home, foreshadowing the hoped-for happy ending, but it is a false home, determined by the king’s desire rather than by the sister’s creation of a stable and complete community” (2009, 50)