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Essay / The Tale of Sleeping Beauty - 518
When Tartar speaks of the original folk tales as having been cleaned up in content and prose by the Brothers Grimm so that they would not be rejected by "public sensibility reader", it seems as if they are taking the stories of one social group, the popular people, and making them acceptable to another social group, the literate public. The "sensible reading public" was offended by the crudeness of the folk tales, with readers such as Heinrich RoS calling the first edition of the Grimms, the most authentic, "real smut". These pressures, along with financial pressures, caused the Grimms to virtually abandon their original intentions, which were to preserve the authentic tales as a cultural treasure in a scholarly work. Instead, the Grimms gave in to pressure and rewrote the tales so they would sell. It looks like one social group exerting its power over another and depriving them of their own culture and histories. A big difference between Jacob and Wilhelm's "Briar Rose" and Charles Perrault's "Sleeping Beauty" is that Perrault includes a moral epilogue. at the end. He says that, ...