Corpus
Our Corpus
Since there are many translations and editions of the Grimm's Fairytales, we have decided to use one source for our research. The collection, included below, was compiled by D. L. Ashliman, who was a professor at The University of Pittsburgh. His site allows us to view English translations of many of the works, in addition to offering a comparison between the 1812 and 1857 editions. https://sites.pitt.edu/~dash/grimmtales.html
Our Stories
Considering the scope and timeline of this project, we have decided to limit our research to a subset of the stories. Included are the stories we are investigating:
- Little Red Riding Hood
- Rumplestiltskin
- The Robber Bridegroom
- Frau Holle
- Rapunzel
- Hansel and Gretel
- Sleeping Beauty
- Snow White
- The Singing Bone
- Girl Without Hands
- Hans-my-hedgehog
- Iron Heinrich
About the Grimms
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, popularly known as the Brothers Grimm, were academics and librarians. These two brothers compiled different fairytales into what we now know as the Grimm's Fairytales. However, the first collection of 53 stories wasn't published during their lifetime. It wouldn't be until 1812, when a different collections of stories was published by the brothers. Different versions of Kinder- und Hausmärchen, which translates to Children's and Household Tales, would be translated all the way up to 1857. The 1857, or 7th edition, is the final version and is what serves as the basis for many of the versions translated and published aftet the brothers' death.
The Methodology
Markup Methodology
For our project, we’re interested in seeing how the relationship between gender and action is portrayed in Grimm’s fairytales and if this changes over time. To do this we looked at both well-known and lesser known tales with two versions of each tale from different years. The stories we chose were: Little Red Riding Hood, Rumplestiltskin, The Robber Bridegroom, Frau Holle, Rapunzel, Hansel and Grettle, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, The Singing Bone, Girl Without Hands, Hans-my-hedgehog, and Frog King. We used a collection compiled by a previous Pitt professor, D. L. Ashliman. This collection contains translations from the original German to English with versions from different parts of the 1800s.
Each tale’s version was marked up according to our schema. This schema consisted of three elements: descriptor, action, and empty. Descriptor was further broken down into the attributes of type and gender. Type had the values of positive, neutral, and negative. We used type and its values as a way to see how genders were portrayed not only by their actions but by their description. This was done so that we could compare the language used to describe female characters versus male characters to see what this told us about how the Grimm’s fairytales portrayed gender.
Additionally, we looked at the actions of these characters, ascribing the attributes: agency, gender, and willingness. Agency had a value of either active or passive and willingness had values eager, neutral, and hesitant. These action attributes and their values are the meat of our argument. They allow us to see how gender in the tales were actually allowed to act. Our empty element was for a happy ending, which all of our stories had. We chose to include the happy ending element because we thought that it would be interesting to show whether a story had a happy ending and women were portrayed in a more positive light or if the story did not have a happy ending and the women were portrayed in a more negative light, and vice versa with men.
Bibliography
Our Project
Story Sources
- Compilation and translation of all versions of the tales were provided by D.L Ashliman. Tales were selected from the collection at the discretion of the developers.
Adapted Code
Code from the following sources were adapted to create site features:
- Interior content panels - http://aesop.obdurodon.org/
- The navigation bar - W3 Schools navigation bar tutorial and StackOverflow
- Animated buttons - W3 Schools button styling tutorial
- AJAX implementations - W3 Schools AJAX tutorial
Images
- Background - Pixabay
- Book cover (About Page) - Flickr (unmodified)
- Illustration of Grimm Brothers (Methodology page) - Wikemedia Commons