Blackness in the Grimms' Fairy Tales

Abstract

Grimms' Children's and Household Tales (Kinder- und Hausmarchen; KHM) follow pre-Christian and Christian color symbolism that was prevalent from ancient to early modern times associating black almost exclusively with negative attributes or situations. Black is color of Mother Holle, where lazy daughter is covered with pitch; The Pink Flower, where cook is transformed into a black poodle; and The Bride and Black Bride, where Lord turns wicked stepmother and her daughter black.1 devil or other demonic forces are depicted as black Mother Trudy, The Peasant and Devil, The Grave Mound, and The King of Golden Mountain. Curses placed on virtuous characters involve The Seven Ravens, The Prince Who Feared Nothing, The Three Black Princesses, and Hans My Hedgehog. Black signifies menial work The Knapsack, Hat, and Horn, where charcoal burner is blackened with charcoal, and All Fur, where protagonist disguises herself with black soot and performs kitchen work. There are few exceptions to negative depictions of black KHM tales, and these exceptions reveal patterns of own; for example, beautiful black hair White forms part of ancient color triad of red, white, and black that Jacob Grimm described as the three colors of poetry (die drei Farben der Poesie; Grimm, Bedeutung der Blumen und Blatter, 140), but whereas Snow White's black hair is praised, black skin KHM is portrayed as undesirable. Moreover, keeping with ambivalent portrayals of dwarfs Grimms' tales, black dwarfs can be either helper figures (The Blue Light) or diabolical helpers-turned-tormenters (The King of Golden Mountain), but dwarfs' black or at times gray coloring seems any case to be associated with nonhumanness KHM tales.2On a basic level negative connotations of KHM reflect mythologies, both Christian and pre-Christian, that associate black with night, underworld, death, and moral and/or physical impurity3 For example, Jacob Grimm notes German Mythology (Deutsche Mythologie, 1835) that Hel, a being who Norse mythology presides over underworld, is black and half human-coloured (halb schwarz und halb menschenfarbig; Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie, 1: 258), a formulation that, as with dwarfs, exemplifies early European associations of black skin with nonhumanness. As for Christian connotations, Roger Bastide describes white and black as greatest Christian two-part division, with white symbolic of purity and black of diabolical (314). Scholars of color symbolism have tried to untangle complex history of how negative connotations of have influenced and been influenced by colorism (the discriminatory treatment of individuals based on skin color; Jablonski 168) and racism. of demons, for example, first appears symbolically Europe but gained an ethnic identity through numerous depictions of devil and demons as Ethiopian early Christian texts (Goldenberg 101), and socioreligious ideas of color led to stereotypes of blacks as evil and sinful and of enslavement as their just punishment (Allahar 41; see also Goldenberg 88-92, 105-6).4 In German-speaking lands interaction of symbolic connotations of with colorism and racism was shaped by what Sander Gilman describes as blackness without Blacks: stereotypes of emerged in a context where virtually no Blacks were present, and these stereotypes were composed of elements taken from external traditions and altered to fit certain needs of a radically different culture (Gilman, xi). It would be reductionistic to collapse all connotations of KHM into a colorist or racist context, but it is probable that European views of skin color influenced some portrayals of KHM and that, turn, negative depictions of nineteenth-century literary texts such as KHM reinforced existing colorist attitudes. …