Myth and magic - the first feminists? [theguardian.com]
Extremely interesting...I’ve heard of this Countess D’Aulnoy, but only in passing...I think with reference to the background to the Cinderella story which I think I always knew had originated in France. We have to remember that France and Germany are neighbouring countries, and in fact large parts of eastern France...the Alsace/Lorraine areas in particular have been both French and German at different times in their histories. It’s entirely within the bounds of credibility that the Brothers Grimm would have heard of these French fairy-tales and incorporated them in their anthologies when collating folk and other tales. Air-brushing women out of history as innovators and inventors is still happening today...remember the Hidden Figures movie of 2016 about the NASA women scientists. There are plenty of other cases too..in fact too numerous to mention.
The Cinderella tale has its roots in Strabo, the Greek geographer at latest. The D’Aulnoy redaction is another layer of this.
Interesting, and a new piece of literary history to me. But I do think that they are straw-manning the brothers Grimm, since they were not really on the same page or the same place at all.
@Allamanda I don't think that the Grimms addressed them at all, not to write them out, but because as collectors of folklore, ( and they did credit their female sources, ) they were not in the same literary world as writers of imaginative fiction living in another country and another era. That would be like asking a writer of science fiction today, to credit A, Conan-Doyles, Shelock Holmes books. It is posssible that modern views of litrary history have made the Grimms into an elephant in fairy tale the room, but that is hardly their fault.
@Allamanda Yes it seems that may well be correct. I googled it and quite soon came up with this, from a creditable source.
"The brothers gained a reputation for collecting tales from peasants, although many tales came from middle-class or aristocratic acquaintances. Wilhelm's wife Dortchen Wild and her family, with their nursery maid, told the brothers some of the more well-known tales, such as "Hansel and Gretel" and "Sleeping Beauty". Wilhelm collected a number of tales after befriending August von Haxthausen, whom he visited in 1811 in Westphalia where he heard stories from von Haxthausen's circle of friends. Several of the storytellers were of Huguenot ancestry, telling tales of French origin such as those told to the Grimms by Marie Hassenpflug, an educated woman of French Huguenot ancestry, and it is probable that these informants were familiar with Perrault's Histoires ou contes du temps passé (Stories from Past Times). Other tales were collected from Dorothea Viehmann, the wife of a middle-class tailor and also of French descent. Despite her middle-class background, in the first English translation she was characterized as a peasant and given the name Gammer.
It seems that the brothers were either deluded or dissembling, yet I can not really see it as a feminist revision, since the brothers still always stated that there main sources were female. It just seems that they were upper class rather than working class females.