The Rise of Terror in the Grimms’ Fairy Tales

Introduction: Fairy Tales and Other Horrors

“…With this story and destiny in mind, it may not be too far-fetched to consider 'gender horror' (the kind of horror experienced by a female fairy-tale character in an abusive domestic situation) a distinctive feature of retold fairy tales of the 'Carter generation' and beyond. Horror is not a phenomenon that has been introduced recently in fairy tales, to be sure, as the generic boundaries between classic fairy tales and the Gothic are well-established and well-researched (Piatti-Farnell 2018, 2021Tatar 1992Tatar , 2004Armitt [1998] 2009) but occasionally porous when it comes to plots or plot segments, themes, spaces, and characterisation: escape, imprisonment, and abandonment; castles, forbidden rooms, and other sites of seclusion; monsters and monstrous husbands; persecuted younger heroines and older women/men persecutors; death and mutilation; symbolic, attempted or real sexual assaults (one only needs to think of a few classic Italian and French versions of 'Sleeping Beauty'), all of this driven by fear and often based on an enigma. Jane Eyre, for example, is a classic case of a novel that sits at the crossroads of bildungsroman, gothic, and fairy tale.…”

“…Previous studies on fairy-tale horror have mostly focused on the literary and cultural context in which the Grimms' tales were first recorded and then significantly reworked, namely the late eighteenth and early to mid-nineteenth centuries, a period characterised by the literary dominance of the Gothic novel and of a very specific brand of horror: Gothic horror. Building on Tatar's analysis of the horrific aspects of Children's and Household Tales, in her two essays devoted, respectively, to fairy-tale horror and the Grimms' representation of terror, Piatti-Farnell (2018, 2021 has recently demonstrated the influence of Gothic horror tropes and plot mechanisms on the brothers' collection. Piatti-Farnell (2021, p. 286) claims that 'The scenarios of Grimm fairy tales are distinctly Gothic, and pivot on human experiences of suffering, punishment, and isolation'.…”