From Sights Unseen to Must-See Sights: Reviewing Grimm Iconography in the Fairy Tale Classroom2 7 3 DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0017 From Sights Unseen to Must-See Sights: Reviewing Grimm Iconography in the Fairy Tale Classroom Matthew O. Anderson Furman University Abstract: Generations of American college students first encounter Grimm fairy tales as children through Disney film adaptations and often struggle to overcome the nostalgic, visual connections they have when approaching the fairy tales again as adults. My main goals in the classroom are to unsettle my students’ associations and assumptions that have been preconditioned by those films, and to help them take an active role in the storytelling experience. Analyzing a range of fairy tale illustrations can help students unsettle their assumptions and reset their expectations as they (re)approach the text. This article shares some of the unsettling, illustrated collections that my students and I have found useful for productively contaminating fairy tales. Each of the collections explored forces the reader/ viewer to engage directly with questions of textual fidelity, publication and reception history, and narrative focalization. Taken together, they are useful tools to help students disenchant the Disney spell and explore the delightful and disturbing depths of the fairy tales’ form, content, and context. Keywords: Brothers Grimm, fairy tales, illustration, iconography, teaching I would like to preface this article with a confession: my interest in Grimms’ fairy tales is as much about inspiring bold student adaptations in my fairy tale seminar as it is about exploring and adapting the specific content(s) and form(s) of the tales themselves. By far the biggest challenge I face when preparing students to take ownership of those narratives involves unraveling the strong, often totalizing bonds that they have created to specific iterations of a given multiform text. Generations of American college students - including myself - first encounter Grimm fairy tales as children through Disney film adaptations and often struggle to overcome the nostalgic connection they have when meeting the fairy tales again as (young) adults. With this in mind, my main goals in 274 Matthew O. Anderson DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0017 the classroom are to unsettle my students’ associations and assumptions that have been preconditioned by those films, and to help them take an active role in the storytelling experience. In my fairy tale seminar, I use Maria Tatar’s Classic Fairy Tales anthology to A) introduce students to English translations of classic and contemporary fairy tale narratives and B) engage them directly in the storytelling process. The anthology’s organizational concept makes this task easy for the instructor: by positioning stories in direct dialogue with similar narratives that she describes as parts of the same fairy tale multiform, Tatar’s anthology forces readers to engage with a wide spectrum of similar stories . In the introduction to the volume, she claims that “fairy tales are always more interesting when something is added to them. Each new telling recharges the narrative, making it crackle and hiss with cultural energy” ( xiii ). This creative spark starts with the crackle and hiss of the texts they read, but soon the students are making their own additions: as their fairy tale horizons expand, they take on new roles as critics, editors, and authors of their own fairy tale adaptations. One of my primary aims in those classes is to revive the aura of those fairy tale texts by helping students stake claims on them. To borrow Jack Zipes’ provocative term from Sticks and Stones , I want students to get comfortable “contaminating” a fairy tale, that is, to “enrich it by artfully introducing extraordinary motifs, themes, words, expressions, proverbs, metaphors, and characters into its corporate body so that it will be transformed and form a new essence” (103). That may sound great, but it is often easier said than done! I have found that, in this instance, a picture really is quite literally worth a thousand words. Analyzing a range of fairy tale illustrations can help students unsettle their assumptions and reset their expectations as they (re)approach the text. In this article, I will share some of the unsettling illustrations that my students and I have found useful for contaminating fairy tales. In his Afterword to George MacDonald’s fairy tale The Golden Key, W. H. Auden states that “the way to read a fairy tale is to throw yourself in” (85). Fairy tales are stories that encourage - and frequently demand - active reader engagement to produce meaning. They invite readers into their magical worlds and share imagination, terror, and wonder with their audiences and co-creators through the act of telling. In practice, the fairy tale text’s invitation to “throw oneself in” is intermittently “throw themselves out” to the reader. From the nineteenth century on, illustrations and other visual accompaniments shaped reader engagement with all aspects of those magical, fairy tale worlds. Over the course of the nineteenth century, as silent reading gradually overtook oral storytelling as the primary mode of consuming and disseminating folklore and fairy tales, DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0017 Reviewing Grimm Iconography in the Fairy Tale Classroom 275 more prominent, ubiquitous, and vibrant illustrations took on a larger role in determining how these stories were perceived and remembered by readers. Illustrations not only transmitted a clear sense of what readers should “throw themselves” into while reading, they also made clear what details readers should “throw out” when engaging with the narrative. Even in our twenty-first century world awash in dynamic, digital media, physical book illustrations can still exert a powerful influence on the reader’s experience of the fairy tale text. As children’s literary scholars Maria Nikolajeva, Perry Nodelman, Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer, and others have noted, illustrations are not functionally limited to amplifying the meaning conveyed by a text’s verbal register; they can in fact challenge and subvert canonical and conventional readings of the textual narrative. For familiar fairy tale collections with well-worn iconographic traditions like Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s Kinder- und Hausmärchen ( Children’s and Household Tales ) , critical visual reinterpretations have great potential to unsettle the reader and their assumptions about the content and character of a given tale. For this reason, they are a particularly effective means to help students reframe and engage with fairy tale narratives whose terse, straightforward language often belies the depth and breadth of meaning(s) they contain. After providing a brief sketch of their early nineteenth-century visual history, I will explore a range of visual interventions across five illustrated collections of Grimms’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen that I have found useful in the fairy tale classroom: 1) Frank Flöthmann’s Grimms Märchen ohne Worte (Grimms’ Fairy Tales Without Words , 2014); 2) Maurice Sendak’s The Juniper Tree and Other Tales from Grimm (1973; re-republished in 2003); 3) Shaun Tan’s photographed sculpture work for Grimm Tales for Young and Old ( Grimms Märchen , published in 2013) and The Singing Bones (2016); 4) Natalie Frank’s gouache paintings for Tales of the Brothers Grimm (trans. Jack Zipes, 2015); and 5) Corwin Levi and Michelle Aldredge’s Mirror, Mirrored: A Contemporary Artist’s Edition of 25 Grimms’ Tales (2018). Each of these collections force the reader/ viewer to engage directly with questions of textual fidelity, publication and reception history, and narrative focalization. Each of them can be useful tools to help students disenchant the Disney spell and explore the delightful and disturbing depths of the fairy tales’ form, content, and context. Let’s start by winding back the clock. 2012 marked the 200th anniversary of the Grimms’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen initial publication, and many publishers across the globe produced illustrated editions to commemorate the occasion. In the 212 years since their initial publication, images have become integral elements of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, and a quick Google Image 276 Matthew O. Anderson DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0017 search will return thousands of red riding hoods, gingerbread houses, and sleeping beauties. Yet however ubiquitous these fairy tale icons are today; they were not always a central feature of the Grimm fairy tales. The first edition appeared in two parts - one published in 1812 and the other in 1815 - neither of which was illustrated. In 1819, the second edition was published with only the frontispiece and half title by Jakob and Wilhelm’s lesser-known Malerbruder, Ludwig Emil Grimm. The frontispiece depicts the final scene from the eleventh tale in the collection, “Brüderchen und Schwesterchen” (“Brother and Sister”) - a now lesser-known tale with a similar narrative frame to “Hansel and Gretel.” The title page is purely decorative, with wreathlike ornamentation evoking a garden of familiar narrative delights. These two visual accompaniments reflect the staid, bourgeois publishing conventions in Berlin and across Prussia and the rest of the German Confederation. This and subsequent nineteenth-century editions were designed to grace the bookshelves of respectable family homes. The Grimms’ fairy tales were presented quite differently in England. The first English-language translation - German Popular Stories, translated by Edgar Taylor - appeared in 1823 with numerous copper etchings by George Cruikshank, the caricaturist most famed for his later work with Charles Dickens. According to Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer and Vanessa Joosen, the success of the Cruikshank edition “especially contributed to the tales’ popularity as children’s literature,” a popularity that shows no sign of waning two hundred years later as the “multiplicity of meaning that fairy tales carry still leaves ample space for contemporary illustrators to exploit” (“Introduction”). Cruikshank’s copper engravings capture pivotal moments in the stories with levity and wit, establishing a playful tone that generations of subsequent illustrators would seek to emulate. The rest of this early history of illustrated Grimm editions is as long and storied as the list of prominent artists and illustrators who have revisualized and reinterpreted their fairy tales since the early nineteenth century. Just as they did with other bestsellers and perennial successes, publishers in Germany and across Europe and the US released new editions that leveraged cutting-edge illustration techniques to (re)frame and (re)sell the stories to a new generation of child readers. Fairy tale imagery proliferated as the wood-engraved relief prints and hand-colored copperand steel-engraved intaglios of the early nineteenth century gave way first to full-color, chromolithographic inserts in the late 1800s, and eventually photographic reprints by the time Disney began adapting Grimm fairy tales for the silver screen in the late 1930s. Art and book historians frequently locate the “highlights” of this visual history around the turn of the twentieth century, when Arthur Hughes, Walter DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0017 Reviewing Grimm Iconography in the Fairy Tale Classroom 277 Crane, Arthur Rackham, Kay Nielsen, and many, many other representatives of the so-called “Golden Age of Illustration” produced ornate gift books with beautiful, full-page color illustrations. One prominent example is the 1882 Household Stories, from the Collection of the Brothers Grimm, featuring Walter Crane’s illustrations (or, as he calls them, the stories “done up in pictures”) to accompany his wife Lucy’s translations. Paola Spinozzi calls the illustrations to this volume “meticulous visual narrations of the verbal narrations” that “construct their meaning through direct reference to the text. The aim […] is not to create counter-narratives but to capture and render the appeal of the story. They exemplify narrative illustration” (265). Crane’s title image combines many familiar elements - female storytellers, animals, books, and a child proxy for the young reader - and places them in a house of stories. Like Ludwig Emil Grimm’s title image and the works of his Golden Age counterparts, Walter Crane’s illustrations emphasize faithfulness to the fairy tale’s content and present the fairy tale collection as a safe, familiar, and welcoming narrative home. Crane’s tendency toward narrative fidelity is mirrored in the iconographic continuity that links all illustrated editions of the Grimm fairy tales. In her article “Fairy Tale Illustrations and Real World Gender,” Ruth B. Bottigheimer notes that the iconographic legacies of well-known fairy tales like “Rapunzel” or “Dornröschen” are so fixed that they may preclude visual reinterpretation entirely: “preexisting iconographic traditions like towers and roses play a large part in the image content of such fairy tales’ illustrations, so that Rapunzel without her tower or the sleeping princess without her bed, thorny rosebushes, and kneeling prince are nearly unthinkable” (143). Since the late nineteenth century, Grimms’ visual icons have become so culturally ubiquitous that they were and are often immediately recognizable even outside of their immediate narrative contexts. Fidelity to this legacy is further reflected in the various “heritage,” “vintage,” and “original” labels attached to contemporary collectors’ editions, which prioritize and signal the desire to belong to this narrative and iconographic continuity. Yet, despite the breadth and depth of this illustrative visual history, Disney film images and the affective connections they engender are what continue to dominate student associations with the Grimm fairy tales today. In his provocative article “Breaking the Disney Spell,” Jack Zipes suggests that these films represent the final victory of the technical and the visual arts over the oral (and textual) fairy tale narrative. Disney’s animated films, he argues, are “intended to both smash the aura of heritage and to celebrate the ingenuity, inventiveness, and genius of the animator” (424). While the animators make some direct visual allusions to the dress, architecture, and landscapes of late 278 Matthew O. Anderson DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0017 nineteenth-century chromolithographs, they introduce much more visual material into the narrative that push Disney’s own narrative inventions - from dopey dwarfs and anthropomorphized animal sidekicks abetting the heroine and/ or stepmother to buffoonish parents plotting marriage alliances that will produce royal grandchildren - into the foreground. In this light, the Disney films become the endpoint of the Grimm fairy tales’ medial and rhetorical history: in 1812, the Grimm’s record orally disseminated folklore which is then codified and calcified into a textual narrative, which over the course of the nineteenth century is continually censored, reshaped, and embellished with visual adornments for a younger, bourgeois readership, before its visual and narrative history is co-opted as source material for the burgeoning film industry in the early to mid-1900s. The illustrated editions I explore below complicate the overall picture, but it is difficult to dispute the complete break that Disney introduces into this reception history. The enduring popularity of Disney adaptations - and particularly the success of the Grimm “princess” films Snow White (1937), Cinderella (1950), and Sleeping Beauty (1959) - not only conditions human expectations and interpretations of the story’s narrative content (setting, music, themes, conclusion, moral etc.), but the preponderance of online discourse on these films feeds artificial intelligence models too. If you ask ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini or any of the other large language models (LLMs) that have emerged in the past few years to reproduce the text (or, in the case of DALL-E, the visuals) of any Disneyfied fairy tale, their predictive text algorithms will, predictably, return content that corresponds to the Disney film version of that story. How can new generations of readers and students resist this tendency and reset their expectations to meet the story with a fresh pair of eyes? Newer illustrated collections of Grimm’s fairy tales offer a variety of starting points for such a reset. Frank Flöthmann’s 2014 Grimms Märchen ohne Worte (Grimms’ Fairy Tales Without Words) , eschews the fairy tale text entirely. His illustrations reposition visual icons from the canon of Grimm illustrations within and alongside other iconographic traditions to present the fairy tales exclusively through non-verbal registers. In Flöthmann’s case, Grimm icons are filtered through the visual registers of stick drawings, children’s comics, and digital-era logograms or emojis. His two-page spread for “Rotkäppchen” (Little Red Cap, fig. 1) artfully and playfully combines conventional editorial markings, street signage, and the structure of comic book panels to (re)present the fairy tale text without words. DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0017 Reviewing Grimm Iconography in the Fairy Tale Classroom 279 Fig. 1. Two-page spread for “Rotkäppchen” (Flöthmann 4—6) Working through the syntax and content of the visual narrative can be a good starting point for helping students identify the most significant, most conventional icons for each fairy tale. However, it gives them less to sink their teeth into when considering alternatives. Grimms Märchen ohne Worte substitutes sequential visualization for textual narrative, the illustrations reproduce a similar sanitized and truncated version of the narratives they visualize. Like Disney’s cell animated films, Warner Brother’s Looney Tunes, or other comic strip or cartoon creations, Flöthmann’s text treats themes of sex and violence with a wink and a nod, robbing them of their force or consequence. Other illustrators have used conventional means to exploit adult reader familiarity with Grimm iconography to unsettling effect. One of the best-known twentieth-century collections is Maurice Sendak’s The Juniper Tree and Other Tales from Grimm, which was first published in 1973 and re-released in 2003. Sendak’s visuals are at once familiar and foreign - his pen and ink illustrations recall the look and feel of early nineteenth-century copper engravings like Cruikshanks’, while his round and whimsical figures allude to the Romantic cherubs of German illustrators like Adrian Ludwig Richter (Bodmer 134). However, the settings and situations that these figures are depicted in suggest alternate readings of canonical framing devices and fairy tale scenes. Many of Sendak’s revisualizations also connect individual Grimm fairy tales to the oral 280 Matthew O. Anderson DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0017 storytelling frame. In one example (see fig. 2), the witch in Hansel and Gretel adopts the posture and pose of the grandmotherly narrator - a clear visual allusion to the figure frequently depicted at the beginning of illustrated collections 1 . Unlike many of the genial, smiling storytellers in Mother Goose and other Grimm editions, the gaze and grin of Sendak’s grandmother suggest a figure more ambiguous in nature. The direct glance, exposed canines, and hand gesture that appears half wave, half hex, suggest something uncanny about the figure - and the stories she will tell. Fig. 2. Frontispiece for “Hansel and Gretel” (Sendak 1973), front matter With other illustrations in the volume, Sendak takes a darker tack than many of his predecessors, “avoiding the obvious images and repositioning them as stories for adults” (130). Take, for example, his perspective on Rapunzel. Historically, most illustrators chose to portray this scene from outside the tower, emphasizing Rapunzel’s distance from the prince. Sendak, by contrast, focalizes the image through Rapunzel’s perspective. The foreground is uncomfortably close, DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0017 Reviewing Grimm Iconography in the Fairy Tale Classroom 281 suggesting a stifling domestic space utterly separate from the flat, decorative castle and landscape that Rapunzel gazes longingly towards. Her hair hangs out the window, hardly visible - and the prince is absent entirely. Like the narrative protagonist, we are powerless to escape the narrative prison. Illustrations like these are an excellent starting point for exploring more drastic visual interventions in the source material. More recent, and more extensive reworkings and adaptations, like Neil Gaiman’s trio of graphic novels Hansel & Gretel (2014) ; Snow, Glass, Apples (2019) ; and The Sleeper and the Spindle (2019) refocalize the narrative around minor characters or “villains” and reframe established themes, characters, and conflicts in the visual vernacular of the graphic novel. The illustrators that Gaiman collaborated with each bring something different to his adaptations. Lorenzo Mattotti’s black-and-white lithographs for Hansel & Gretel use atmospheric darkness and light to capture the stark dichotomies between despair and hope and hunger and satiety in the story. Chris Riddell’s work in The Sleeper and the Spindle recenters the figure of a conscious Briar Rose - a figure most frequently, famously, and often exclusively portrayed in a comatose state. Finally, Colleen Doran’s unflinching depictions of blood, sex, and violence in Snow, Glass, Apples help ground the reader in Gaiman’s bleak, brutal narrative world and justify the queen’s vendetta against her vampiric, romantic rival, Snow White, as the only means for survival. Australian artist Shaun Tan’s photographed sculpture work stands out amongst recent illustrated treatments of the Grimm fairy tales for its creativity and poignance. For each tale, Tan meticulously sculpts, stages, and photographs evocative figures that capture the raw, primordial qualities of the story and its key figures. Tan’s work was commissioned to accompany the German (re)translation 2 of Philip Pullman’s Grimm Tales for Young and Old ( Grimms Märchen , published in 2013) , but also appeared in a 2016 English-language collection entitled The Singing Bones. The most salient feature of Tan’s work in Grimms Märchen and The Singing Bones is its inversion of the text-image hierarchy - in Tan’s hands, the images dominate. Whereas the English-language edition of Pullman’s text eschews illustration completely, these two editions accentuate Tan’s minimalist sculpture. This is most prominent in The Singing Bones, which jettisons Pullman’s complete text translations in favor of succinct captions. In this collection, Tan reduces or refines each fairy tale to one central scene, theme, or figure. Tan’s choice of material and form for his illustrations reflects this desire to reduce the tales to their “elemental” qualities: “by paring down and sandpapering these small figures - between 6 cm and 40 cm in height […] Tan has distilled each tale down to its essence and achieved what he calls the bone-like structure of 282 Matthew O. Anderson DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0017 the tales” (Lathey). In his illustration for Little Red Cap, we see the eponymous figure perched on a chaise-like wolf, accentuating the danger lurking behind seemingly familiar appearances. Fig. 3. Illustration for “Hansel and Gretel” (Tan 19) Similarly, in his illustration for Hansel and Gretel (Fig. 3), Tan’s witch arises from behind the gingerbread house to capture and imprison the distracted children. The artist’s material choices connect the witch to her magic - she and her house are sculpted from the same clay, and the silver dragées or edible sprinkles, connoting an appealing but unnatural hunger, are mirrored in her eye. Examples such as these present unique opportunities for students to reflect on the central tensions in each of the individual fairy tales, as well as identify and explore continuities and connections between them. One recent collection that has received insufficient scholarly attention was conceived by the fine artist Natalie Frank. Inspired by Jack Zipes’ 2015 retranslation of the 1812-15 first editions , Frank created a series of 75 gouache and chalk DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0017 Reviewing Grimm Iconography in the Fairy Tale Classroom 283 pastel pieces, which were exhibited in 2015 at the Drawing Center in New York City and the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas - where I was fortunate enough to view them as a graduate student. In her accompanying art book, Tales of the Brothers Grimm (2015) , Frank’s artwork is paired with 36 tales from Jack Zipes Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm: The Complete First Edition. In an essay accompanying the collection, art historian Linda Nochlin writes, “Frank’s versions of the familiar and not-so-familiar tales are un-syrupy and anti-Disneyesque, sometimes gruesome. Cruelty and crude eroticism, magic and bizarre fantasy, mark their folkloristic roots; weirdness and irrationality distance them from both everyday life and the moralism of happily ever after” (250). These traits are on full display in Brier Rose III, which emphasizes the objectification and sexual violence inherent in the moments preceding her awakening. In this painting, the princely “savior” is a leering rapist straddling the vulnerable body of the non-consenting, comatose princess. While this rendition reflects an understanding of this scene common among scholars, his stands in stark contrast to the chaste images of gentle, decidedly sexless awakening common to illustrated Grimm collections. In a similar fashion, Little Red Cap I raises the sexual subtexts present in some versions of the protagonists’ final confrontation with the wolf to the level of visual text - a vivid, disrobed Little Red Cap stands facing a reclining wolf lewdly gesturing at his genitals. The opportunity to work with complex and disturbing scenes like these drew Natalie Frank to undertake this project. In a 2015 interview with Artforum, she described the appeal and unique challenge of illustrating the Grimm fairy tales: Arthur Rackham did them, Gustave Doré did some, and Walter Crane, David Hockney, and Maurice Sendak have all done illustrations, but no fine artist has ever tackled a large group of them. When I started to read these fairy tales, I was so taken by them. I’d never read anything like it - they’re so dark, sexual, and violent, and yet I sensed that there were such incredible roles for women in these stories, which I’ve never noticed in most fairy tales. (Bradley) One of the most fraught in Frank’s collection is “All-Fur.” Also translated as “All-Kinds-of-Fur” or “Thousandfurs,” “All-Fur” is Zipes’ rendition of Grimm tale number 65, “Allerleirauh,” a lesser-known tale about humiliation, loss, and royal incest. Following the death of his golden-haired wife, a king sets his eyes on his own daughter as the object of his affection and proposes an incestuous marriage. To forestall this, the princess makes a set of - what she deems - impossible demands: three dresses, “one as golden as the sun, one as silvery as the moon, and one as bright as the stars,” and “a cloak made up of a thousand kinds of pelts and furs” one from each animal in the kingdom (Epstein). When the king manages to procure these items, the princess flees with the cloak. Disguised as 284 Matthew O. Anderson DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0017 an animal, she returns to the castle as a kitchen servant but, after thrice proving her worth in the kitchens, is eventually discovered. The story ends with her apparently 3 marrying back into the nobility in a neighboring kingdom. Fig. 4. Natalie Frank’s illustration “All Fur II” from Tales of the Brothers Grimm (2015) The figure of “All-Fur” appears in each of the three images inspired by the story - first, as a visual counterpart to the beautiful, golden-haired princess, then, as a composite figure incorporating the animal connections (Fig. 4), and finally, as a portrait of the princess caught between forms. While the princess appears in each of Frank’s paintings, the king’s unsettling lust takes center stage in All Fur I, the Bacchanalian indecency of his exposed testicles further accentuated by his donkey head. Frank’s decision to foreground the tale’s unresolved concerns about incest recomplicates its otherwise straightforward conclusion - the res- DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0017 Reviewing Grimm Iconography in the Fairy Tale Classroom 285 toration of the princess to the royal family. In this and other images like Fig. 4, the garish contrast between natural, earth tones and “bright, obnoxious colors” is intended to “create an unnatural look” that highlights the unsettling, uncanny elements present in the fairy tales (Bradley). In the same interview, Frank mentions the “carnivalesque slippage” of women exploring gender roles as a central motivation. There is also significant slippage in content between tales - a feature present across oral folklore that Frank wanted to maintain in her art: In these tales you can find everything: sex, violence, magic, animals, transformations. Also, because they were oral tales, many of them contain elements of each other. For instance, Cinderella appears within many other tales as a subset of that story, as in “All-Fur” - one of two stories about incest. I wanted to show some of the well-known tales, such as “Snow White,” and “Briar Rose,” which is “Sleeping Beauty,” but I also wanted to include some of the more obscure ones like “The Ungrateful Son.” (Bradley) Recombined with their source texts, interpictorial paintings like Natalie Frank’s unsettle and - to borrow Jack Zipes’ term once more - contaminate the Grimm fairy tales. Scenes like these compel all students - including those who might otherwise be inclined to dismiss or rationalize uncomfortable contexts of incest or sexual violence - to stop and reflect on the stated and unstated aspects of the narrative. Reading her images alongside and against the sanitized and staid visual (and textual) conventions that preceded them provokes confrontation with the often-uncomfortable subtexts lurking at the edges of the textual narrative. Beyond drawing interpictorial connections within the collection of Grimm fairy tales, fine art illustrations can also be used to help students see the (dis)continuity of their visual interpretation over time. Michelle Aldredge and Corwin Levi’s Mirror, Mirrored is a fascinating combination of fine art and translation that reframes and represents the Grimm fairy tales through their visual history. The collection features original artwork from twenty-nine “established and emerging artists” to accompany E. Yumiko Blackwell’s reinterpretation of Margaret Hunt’s 1884 English-language translation of the seventh edition (1857) of the Grimm fairy tales. Alongside the reimagined text and images, Mirror, Mirrored reorganizes a smaller selection of twenty-five stories into four seasons: Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall. In her preface to the volume, Michelle Aldredge describes the Grimm’s fairy tales as a folkloristic “rescue operation” intended to preserve. Mirror, Mirrored is a rescue operation of another kind - an attempt to “visually liberate” the Grimm fairy tales from “narrow interpretations.” After all, Aldredge reminds us, the “best art opens up meaning instead of closing it down” ( xi ). Like Natalie Frank’s 286 Matthew O. Anderson DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0017 illustrations, most of the works in Mirror, Mirrored are intentionally both individual and interpictorial - inviting and utilizing comparison, contrast, and cross-contamination to explore, rather than define, the meaning(s) of the stories. Co-editor and illustrator Corwin Levi’s collages are interwoven throughout the entire collection - sometimes as ornament, sometimes as whole or twopage spreads that connect two or more different stories. Taken as a whole, they present as a fascinating history and commentary on the iconographic traditions and trajectory of the Grimm fairy tales. In the preface to the volume, Levi describes his collages as “repictions” or “repicts” that condense, contrast, and (re) present an amalgamation of decades of Grimm illustrations as a visualization of the stories’ iconographic history. The repicts are all rich visual texts that utilize visual (re)iteration to explore iconographic trends, tendencies, and contrasts. Fig. 5. Little Red Cap repicted by Corwin Levi Some of the most potent are his repicts for Little Red Cap ( Rotkäppchen ), seen in Fig. 5 above. His first repict portrays an array of red and white hoods - the most recognizable icon from the tale, and one that he has (re)imbued with symbolism DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0017 Reviewing Grimm Iconography in the Fairy Tale Classroom 287 through side-by-side iteration. At end of the story, Levi’s final collage highlights Little Red Cap’s rescue. In this repict, Levi positions Henri le Montaut’s 1865 wood engraved depiction of the hunter cutting open the belly of the wolf as a visual frame and then places smaller images of the hunter - and not Little Red Cap or her grandmother - emerging from its innards. Levi’s choice to highlight the hunter figure alludes to two branches of the multiform’s reception history: 1) to the success and popularity of the Grimm iterations of the Red Riding Hood multiform which feature him prominently, and 2) to others, such as Charles Perrault’s Le Petit Chaperon Rouge, in which Little Red Cap is devoured and not saved at the end. Like the hunter in the Grimm fairy tale, Levi slices open the belly of the story and allows excess, suppressed, and half-digested meaning to (re)emerge into the narrative. How many times has this story been told - and what kinds of fears and figures can emerge through its retelling? In this and all his illustrations for Mirror, Mirrored , Levi’s work deftly dissects the fairy tales’ iconographic tradition while also cleaving or hewing to it intensely. Both his prefatory comments and the repicts themselves affirm the role of the verbal and visual editor in shaping and guiding the reception of the Grimm fairy tales. His strategies of reposturing, repositioning, and reframing the familiar can help push students to move past conceiving the fairy tale narrative and its illustration only as it presents itself and begin critiquing that presentation and exploring alternative moments and means for representing it as they believe it should be seen. Jack Zipes warns of the seductive veneer of the Disneyfied fairy tale: “The diversion of the Disney fairy tale is geared toward nonreflective viewing. Everything is on the surface, one-dimensional, and we are able to delight in one-dimensional portrayal and thinking, for it is adorable, easy, and comforting in its simplicity” (“Breaking the Disney Spell” 434). Each of the illustrated collections I have detailed above punctures that veneer and push readers/ viewers to pause, reflect, and explore. Testing the “readability” of Frank Flöthmann’s visual narratives can help students appreciate the prevalence and ubiquity of Grimm icons, while Natale Frank and Corwin Levi’s interpictorial artwork can help them see the connective tissue - both between individual stories and over lifetimes of storytelling. Similarly, Maurice Sendak’s illustrations and Shaun Tan’s sculpture work can be introduced as interventions and interruptions of the iconographic continuity that accompanies most illustrated collections of Grimms’ fairy tales. Many other textual adaptations and visualizations than the ones listed above may be used in and out of the classroom to help student readers break the Disney spell. In my fairy tale seminars, I always budget at least one or two full class days for students to get their hands on as wide a variety of illustrated editions 288 Matthew O. Anderson DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0017 as I can tote to the classroom. Comparing and contrasting dense visualizations of the same or similar stories can help students recognize the significance of artistic and editorial decisions in the storytelling process and explore what might have been otherwise . I find that foregrounding their engagement with a given fairy tale on the level of its visual interpretation also primes them to be open to a variety of critical interpretations of the same text(s) - perspectives that they will encounter through secondary literature in Maria Tatar’s Classic Fairy Tales anthology. In their own way, each of these artist’s interpretations challenges and reframes the interpretive horizons of the fairy tale text, transforming previously buried subtexts into points of visual emphasis and renewed semantic contention. In this context, what once were unseen sights become must-see sights. Notes 1 Stephen King reuses Sendak’s original illustrations for his adaptation of Hansel and Gretel (Harper Collin’s Children’s Books, published in September 2025). 2 Gillian Lathey provides an excellent analysis of the strange, tortuous, transnational publication history of this work in “Nostalgia, Novelty and Innovation: the illustration of Grimms’ tales in the UK in the twenty-first century.” 3 This is one of many possible interpretations of the story’s conclusion. For more on the ambiguity surrounding her re-entry into the monarchy, see Margaret Yocom’s “‘ But Who Are You Really? ’ Ambiguous Bodies and Ambiguous Pronouns in ‘Allerleirauh’” in Transgressive Tales: Queering the Grimms , edited by folklorists Kay Turner and Pauline Greenhill (2012). Works Cited Aldredge, Michelle. “Preface Two: Fairy Tales, Now More Than Ever.” In Mirror, Mirrored: A Contemporary Artist’s Edition of 25 Grimm’s Tales, viii-xiii. Harrisville, NH: Gwarlingo & Uzzlepye Press, 2018. Auden, W. H. “Afterword.” In The Golden Key . By George MacDonald. Illustrated by Maurice Sendak. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967: 81—89. Bodmer, George. “Arthur Hughes, Walter Crane, and Maurice Sendak: The Picture as Literary Fairy Tale.” Marvels & Tales 17, no. 1 (2003): 120—137. Bottigheimer, Ruth B. “Fairy Tale Illustrations and Real World Gender: Function, Conceptualization, and Publication.” Relief 4, no. 2 (2010): 142—157. Bradley, Paige K. “Natalie Frank Speaks About her Exhibition at the Drawing Center.” Interviews. Artforum, 7 April 7 https: / / www.artforum.com/ interviews/ natalie-frankspeaks-about-her-exhibition-at-the-drawing-center-51436 DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0017 Reviewing Grimm Iconography in the Fairy Tale Classroom 289 Epstein, Ian. “Natalie Frank’s Grim Fairy-Tale Art.” Vulture, 7 May 2015. https: / / www. vulture.com/ 2015/ 05/ natalie-franks-grim-fairy-tale-art.html. “Exhibitions - Natalie Frank: The Brothers Grimm.” Blanton Museum of Art. 10 August 2022 https: / / blantonmuseum.org/ exhibition/ natalie-frank-the-brothers-grimm/ Flöthmann, Frank. Grimms Märchen ohne Worte. Cologne: DuMont Buchverlag Gmbh, 2013. Gaiman, Neil. Hansel & Gretel. Illustrated by Lorenzo Mattotti. New York: Raw Junior LLC, 2014. Gaiman, Neil. Snow, Glass, Apples. Illustrated by Colleen Doran. London: Headline Publishing, 2019. Gaiman, Neil. The Sleeper and the Spindle. Illustrated by Chris Riddell. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019. Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm: The Complete First Edition. Translated by Jack Zipes. Illustrated by Andrea Dezsö. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014. Joosen, Vanessa and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer. “Introduction: The Legacy of the Grimms’ Tales in Picturebook Versions of the Twenty-First Century.” Strenæ 18 (2021). Accessed 10 August 2022 http: / / journals.openedition.org/ strenae/ 6515 Lathey, Gillian. “Nostalgia, Novelty and Innovation: The Illustration of Grimms’ Tales in the UK in the Twenty-first Century.” Strenæ 18 (2021). Accessed 10 August 2022. http: / / journals.openedition.org/ strenae/ 6648 Levi, Corwin. “Preface One: Words and Pictures.” In Mirror, Mirrored: A Contemporary Artist’s Edition of 25 Grimm’s Tales . Harrisville, NH: Gwarlingo & Uzzlepye Press, 2018: vi—vii. Levi, Corwin and Michelle Aldredge, eds. Mirror, Mirrored: A Contemporary Artist’s Edition of 25 Grimm’s Tales. Translated by E. Yumiko Blackwell. Harrisville, NH: Gwarlingo & Uzzlepye Press, 2018. Marta, Karen. Tales of the Brothers Grimm. Bologna: Damiani, 2015. “Natalie Frank: The Brothers Grimm.” The Drawing Center. 10 August 2022 https: / / drawingcenter.org/ exhibitions/ natalie-frank-the-brothers-grimm Nochlin, Linda. “Natalie Frank: The Dark Side of the Fairy Tale.” In Tales of the Brothers Grimm. Bologna: Damiani, 2015: 249—254. Pullman, Philip. Grimms Märchen. Translated by Martina Tichy, illustrated by Shaun Tan. Stuttgart: Aladin Verlag, 2013. Sendak, Maurice. The Juniper Tree and Other Tales from Grimm . Translated by Lore Segal and Randall Jarrell, New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2003. Spinozzi, Paola. “Accurate Reproduction, Ingenious Representation: Lucy and Walter Crane’s Household Stories, from the Collection of the Bros. Grimm (1882).” Word & Image 30: 3 (2014): 261—272. Tan, Shaun. The Singing Bones . New York: Arthur A. Levine Books, 2016. Tatar, Maria. “Introduction.” In The Classic Fairy Tales. New York: Norton, 2017: xi— xxvi. 290 Matthew O. Anderson DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0017 Zipes, Jack. “Breaking the Disney Spell.” In The Classic Fairy Tales. New York: Norton, 2017: 414 — 435 . Zipes, Jack. “The Contamination of the Fairy Tale.” In Sticks and Stones: The Troublesome Success of Children’s Literature from Slovenly Peter to Harry Potter. New York: Routledge, 2001: 99—125.