The Tale of Sleeping Beauty

When Tartar's talks about the original folk tales as being cleaned up in content and in prose by the Grimm brothers so that they would not be rejected by the “sensibilities of the reading public,” it sounds like they're taking the stories of one social group, the folksy people, to make them acceptable to another social group, the literate public. The 'sensible reading public' were offended at the crudeness of the folk's tales, with readers such as Heinrich RoS, calling the Grimm's first and more authentic edition, “real junk.” These as well as financial pressures caused the Grimms to practically abandon their original intentions which was to preserve the authentic tales as a cultural treasure in a scholarly work. Instead, the Grimms bowed to pressure and rewrote the tales so that they would sell. This sounds like one social group exercising its power over the other and robbing it of their own culture and stories.

One big difference between Jacob and Wilhelm's “Briar Rose,” and Charles Perrault's, “Sleeping Beauty,” is that Perrault include a moral epilogue at the end. He says that, ...