While Hans Christian Anderson and the Brothers Grimm are household names when it comes to fairy tales, very few people are acquainted with Charles Perrault. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm published their first volume of Children’s and Household Tales in 1812, and Anderson followed in 1835 with his initial installment of Fairy Tales. Perrault, however, released a collection of fairy tales in 1697 – over a century earlier – under the title Tales and Stories of the Past with Morals.
Although containing only eleven stories, the volume includes such classics as The Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood, and Cinderella, all of which were later copied by the Brothers Grimm. For reasons never fully understood, Charles Perrault left his name off of Tales and Stories of the Past with Morals, crediting the volume as the “Tales of Mother Goose” instead.
On the television drama Grimm, the fairy tales of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm are true stories written to help future descendants fight the supernatural beings contained within Children’s and Household Tales. Portland police detective Nick Burkhardt is one of those descendants and follows in a long line of “Grimms,” who have been ordained with the ability to “see” such creatures for what they really are and prevent them from causing harm.
While Grimm may be the title of the show, however, the creators of the series have borrowed from the stories of Charles Perrault as well. Not only have shared fairy tales like The Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood, and Cinderella been used in various episodes, but Perrault’s Bluebeard – which never appeared in Children’s and Household Tales – has also been adapted to fit the Grimm storyline.
“There was once a man who owned grand houses in the town and country, gold and silver dinnerware, tapestries and gilded carriages,” the story of Bluebeard, as transcribed in The Complete Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault by Clarion Books, begins. “But, sadly, he also had a blue beard. This made him so ugly and frightening that women and girls fled at the sight of him.”
Despite the deformity, the daughter of a nearby noble family agrees to marry him after visiting his estate and experiencing the wonders of his land. Shortly after the marriage, Bluebeard went on a business trip, leaving his wife alone in the mansion with only one rule – she was not to enter a room in the basement. Curiosity got the best of her, however, and when she unlocked the door, she found the rotting remains of Bluebeard’s previous wives and a floor covered with blood. When Bluebeard returns and discovers that his new wife disobeyed him, he tells her that she must now join his former lovers in death.
In the episode of Grimm entitled “Lonelyhearts,” meanwhile, the death of a young woman – along with reports of additional missing women of the same age – leads Nick Burkhardt to a bread-and-breakfast known as the Bramble Haus. The location is arguably just as beautiful as the lands owned by Bluebeard, including a garden filled with rare flowers and a majestic fountain in the center.
While the owner of the Bramble Haus is not disfigured like the original Bluebeard, his meek demeanor hardly makes him much of a “lady’s man” just the same. It turns out, however, that he has abilities that go beyond outward appearances. In essence a goat-like creature known as a ziegevolk, he can secrete pheromones that attract members of the opposite sex.
“They like to have a lot of females hanging off their every word,” Burkhardt’s supernatural ally Monroe explains. “Not exactly the monogamous type. They live for the rut, picking out the choicest females for breeding.”
Like the Bluebeard of Charles Perrault, the ziegevolk of Grimm also has a secret room in his basement that is kept locked at all times. Instead of dead bodies, however, it contains a number of women locked inside cages, held against their will so that the owner of the establishment can later use them for sexual pleasure. Nick Burkhardt is ultimately able to rescue the women, but while the brothers of Bluebeard’s bride both save their sister and kill Bluebeard, the ziegevolk of Grimm is merely arrested for his actions.
The classic fairy tale Cinderella is also given the Grimm treatment in the episode “Happily Ever After.” As told by Charles Perrault, the title character was raised by a stepmother who “couldn’t bear the young girl’s goodness, for it made her own daughters seem even more hateful. She gave her the vilest household chores – it was she who cleaned the dishes and the stairs, she who scrubbed Madam’s chamber, and the chambers of those little madams, her stepsisters; she slept at the top of the house in an attic, on a shabby mattress, while her sisters had luxurious boudoirs, with beds of the latest fashion, and mirrors in which they could study themselves from head to toe.”
On Grimm, the narrative begins after the female protagonist has been whisked away by a modern day prince. When the young man faces a financial setback, he turns to his wife’s stepmother for assistance but is refused. The stepmother is soon found murdered afterwards, with the girl’s godfather emerging as the top suspect.
Grimm quickly turns the classic Cinderella fairy tale on its head, however, by making the appropriately named Lucinda the antithesis of her original namesake. “I kept watch on her all those years and made sure she never lost control,” the godfather tells Nick Burkhardt. “As long as she got everything she wanted, it worked. But she has no conscience. She’s uncontrollable and made those people’s lives miserable.”
Thus instead of being the quietly suffering victim of Cinderella, Lucinda is the true villain of “Happily Ever After” – a materialistic and immoral person who is not above murdering her stepmother to get what she wants in life.
Grimm likewise contains a narrative molded after The Sleeping Beauty, with elements of the fairy tale appearing in the final episode of the television series’ inaugural season and first two installments of the second.
In the initial episode of the show, Nick Burkhardt is told of his Grimm abilities by his Aunt Marie before she succumbs to cancer. “I know you love Juliette, but you need to end it and never see her again,” she tells Burkhardt in regards to his girlfriend. “It’s just too dangerous.”
Burkhardt doesn’t take her advice and instead tries to shield his love interest from the horrors that now confront him. Despite his best efforts to protect Juliette Silverton, she becomes an unwitting pawn when a former hexenbiest named Adalind Schade seeks revenge against Burkhardt for negating her witch-like abilities.
In The Sleeping Beauty, an elderly fairy casts a curse on the newly born daughter of a reigning king and queen, declaring that the young princess would one day prick he finger on a spindle and die. The king did his best to protect his daughter by removing all spindles from the palace, but the girl nonetheless found one when she was sixteen years old and the curse was fulfilled – although it had been amended by another fairy to falling into a 100-year sleep instead of death itself.
Adalind Schade uses a cat to administer her own poison to veterinarian Juliette Silverton in the form of a scratch from the pet. The effect is the same, however, as Silverton falls into a deep coma that baffles the medical doctors attempting to find a cure for the mystical “curse.” Much like the original Sleeping Beauty, Juliette can only be awakened by the kiss from a prince who is pure of heart – although it turns out that the person is not Nick Burkhardt.
Fairy tales were originally an oral form of storytelling that went back centuries before Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm collected them in Children’s and Household Tales. Although Charles Perrault didn’t actually write The Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, he was the first to transform them into written words and release them under the moniker of The Tales of Mother Goose.
The television drama Grimm has taken these fairy tales of old and placed them on the small screen, reinventing them yet again. Although the series takes its name from the most famous collectors of fairy tales, the narratives of Grimm owe just as much to the works of Charles Perrault as they do the Brothers Grimm – even if he is better known as “Mother Goose.”
Anthony Letizia