The Grimm brothers' 'The wilful child'
Issue three: traditional tale, with discussion questions and writing prompts
Welcome to our traditional tale for Issue three of The Orange & Bee, the Grimm brothers’ ‘Das eigensinnige Kind’ (The wilful child1).
This story was added to the Grimms’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children's and household Tales) in the second volume of the first edition, published in 1817. It’s not clear who their source was for the tale, though the Grimms note that the story was a Hessian tale. Their annotation for the tale reads:.
Hessian. The hand growing out of the grave is a widespread superstition, and not only concerns thieves, but also trespassers on consecrated trees (see Schiller’s [Wilhelm] Tell, Act 3, Scene 3)2, and parricides (Wunderhorn, 1. 226). In Pauli’s Schimpf und Ernst3 there is another story of an arm stretched out of a grave. When a flower or a written paper grows out of the grave, from the mouth of a buried man, as a token of his guilt or innocence, it is but another form of the same idea.
It is also said and believed that the hand of any who strikes their parents will grow out of the earth; thus the Fuchsthurm, on the Hausberg, near Jena, is the little finger of a giant who had beaten his mother.
Because the tale is so short—two small paragraphs—I’ve provided both the original German first, and then my translation.
Von einem eigensinnige Kind
Es war einmal ein Kind eigensinnig und tat nicht, was seine Mutter haben wollte. Da hatte der liebe Gott kein Wohlgefallen an ihm und es ward krank, und kein Arzt konnt’ ihm helfen und bald lag es auf dem Todtenbettchen. Als es ins Grab versenkt war, und Erde darüber gedeckt, so kam auf einmal sein Aermchen wieder hervor und reichte in die Höhe, und wenn sie es hineinlegten und frische Erde darüber legten, so half das nicht, er kam immer wieder heraus. Da mußte die Mutter selber zum Grab gehen und mit der Ruthe aufs das Aermchen schlagen, und wie sie das getan hatte, zog es sich hinein und das Kind hatte nun erst Ruh unter der Erde.
From one eigensinnige child
Once upon a time there was a child who was so eigensinnig that they did not do what their mother wanted. God was not pleased with the child, who became ill. No doctor could help them and so soon they lay on their deathbed.
When the child was lowered into their grave and covered with earth, their little arm suddenly reached out. When the arm was pressed down, and covered with fresh earth, it didn't help. The child’s arm came out again and again. The mother had to go to the grave herself and strike the little arm with a rod. When she had done that, the arm withdrew, and the child rested peacefully beneath the earth.
The very slight changes to this tale between the first and final editions of the KHM reflect Wilhelm’s ideological editorial intention to ensure the tales were told in a compact and simplified style. A voice that was intended to represent the voice of the somewhat mythical peasant class of oral storytellers that the brothers suggested their tales were gathered from (despite the fact that the majority of the Grimms’ sources were neither peasants, nor oral narratives).
In the Grimms’ German, the gender of the child is indeterminate, an ambiguity I have retained in the translation provided above. Most translations into English, however, render the child either male or female. The classic Margaret Hunt translation of 1884 renders the child a girl, and uses the term ‘wilful’ to describe her. Zipes’s more recent translation of the first edition renders the child a boy, and uses the term ‘stubborn’.
What’s in a word?
You’ll have noticed, perhaps, that I’ve retained the German word eigensinnig/e in my translation’s title and opening sentence. This is because one of the things that most interests me about this story relates to the meaning of this word. As the contemporary German writer Enzensberger says:
Eigensinn is a word that doesn't translate very well into English … It's not selfishness. It's not obstinacy. It's not intransigence.
I would add that eigensinn is not wilfulness, with, in English, it’s negative connotations of inappropriate or unwarranted disobedience, particularly in children, women, queers, and other infantilised Others.
Hans Magnus Enzensberger goes on, trying to explain to an English critic the meaning of the word eigensinn, which he uses in the title of his experimental historical novel about Kurt von Hammersmith, the last commander of the Reichswehr before the Nazi takeover. (The title of his book is Hammerstein, oder der Eigensinn.) Enzensberger says:
You might say it’s a sense of having your own value system. That's a quality that I find very interesting, because it's almost beyond a person’s control. When I first came to England after the war, people used to speak of someone being a “man of character”: that might be a good translation. In spite of the pressures within his milieu, Hammerstein somehow didn't budge. He couldn't. It saved him from the opportunism of the other generals (Enzensberger, cited in Oltermann).
You can see how important this notion of a person’s moral character is in the context of a novel about the actions of Germans during the Second World War, and particularly in relation to the Holocaust. For Enzensberger, then, the word eigensinn refers to a person with a strong internal moral compass.
My family are Dutch, and in Dutch we have a very similar word: eigenwijs. Eigen, meaning ‘own’ and wijs meaning ‘wise’. A person who is eigenwijs is someone who stays true to their own wisdom, their own sense of what is good and right. While it is sometimes used negatively, my Dutch relatives use it mostly to describe people they admire: such as the 300,000 Amsterdammers who took to the streets to protest the pogroms during the mass strike of February, 1941.
My oma also frequently used it to refer to herself when she was being admirably wicked and subversive. When having a cigarette after summiting a particularly steep mountain, for example, or after weeding out a particularly neglected corner of the garden.
Or, flatteringly, to refer to me when I was true to myself. Ah, she said, when I came out as queer, Jij bent eigenwijs. Ik ook. (You’re eigenwijs. Me too.)
Sara Ahmed’s Willful subjects
The feminist philosopher Sara Ahmed uses ‘The wilful child’ in the introduction to her 2014 book, Willful subjects, a book that interrogates the history of wilfulness as an accusation made by some people against others. The translation she provides (Margaret Hunt’s version, dating from the late 1800s) genders the child as female, which is perhaps key to the ways that Ahmed links accusations of wilfulness to women and girls, as well as to other marginalised folk.
In a blog post reflecting on the importance of the image of the child’s arm projecting from the earth to her exploration and inhabitation of wilfulness, Ahmed writes:
To become feminist can often mean looking for company; looking for others who share that becoming. This search for feminist companionship began for me through books; I withdrew into my room with books. It was willful girls who caught my attention. In writing my book Willful Subjects I formalized my pursuit of willful girls into a research trajectory. Once I began to follow the figure of a willful girl, I found she turned up all over the place. It was by following this figure that I came to encounter new texts, ones that had a ghostly familiarity, even if I had not read them before. One of these texts was titled ‘The willful child.’
… What is striking about this story is how willfulness persists even after death: displaced onto an arm, from a body onto a body part. The arm inherits the willfulness of the child insofar as it will not be kept down, insofar as it keeps coming up, acquiring a life of its own, even after the death of the body of which it is a part. Note that the rod, as that which embodies the will of the parent, of the sovereign, is not deemed willful. The rod becomes the means to eliminate willfulness from the child. One will judges the other wills as willful wills. One will assumes the right to eliminate the others.
We might note here how the very judgment of willfulness is a crucial part of the disciplinary apparatus. It is this judgment that allows violence (even murder) to be understood as care as well as discipline. The rod becomes a technique for straightening out the willful child with her wayward arm.
This Grimm story forms part of a tradition of educational writing that Alice Miller (1987) in For Your Own Good calls ‘poisonous pedagogy’4, a tradition that assumes the child as stained by original sin, and which insists on violence as moral correction, as being for the child. Just consider that in this story the only time that the child is at rest is when she is beneath the ground. By implication, when the child gives up or gives up her will, when she stops struggling against those she must obey (her mother, God) when she is willing to obey, she will be at ease.
A little later in the same essay, she writes:
Willfulness: persistence in the face of having been brought down … even after the willful child has been brought down, something, some spark, some kind of energy, persists. The arm gives flesh to this persistence. The arm has to disturb the ground, to reach up, to reach out of the grave, that tomb, that burial.
We can twist the morbid ending into a feminist plot. The arm is at rest not because she has been beaten but in order that she return to her work; so that she can come up again.
Discussion questions
In my introduction and framing of the tale, I’ve noted that in the Grimms’ German-language version of the tale, the gender of the child is ambiguous, or undeclared, while Hunt’s 1884 translation makes them a ‘girl’, and Zipes’s more recent translation renders them a ‘boy’. How does the gender of the child influence your response to the story? What might have influenced these two translators (among many others!) in choosing to gender the child, and/or to gender them either male or female?
I’ve talked a bit in the introduction/framing of this tale about the notion of wilfulness, or eigensinn/eigenwijs, including by introducing Sara Ahmed’s interest in wilfulness (willfulness) in relation to political and personal forms of resistance. What do you make of the idea that the child in this story is wilful, and that wilfulness is their main moral flaw: the reason that they fall sick and die? What alternative word or words might you have used to translate the Grimms’ eigensinnig/e, rather than ‘stubborn’ or ‘wilful’?
Have you ever been called wilful, either in a positive or negative sense? Have you ever been punished or ostracised for acting wilfully? Alternatively, have you ever embraced wilfulness as a form of resistance, or celebrated the wilful resistance of another? What wilful characters (historical or fictional) do you admire?
This tale (an example of ATU779) does not fall within the ATU Index entries for tales of magic, or fairy tales (300 to 749), but instead within the range of religious tales (750 to 849). What do you think makes this story like or unlike a fairy tale?
Writing prompts
The image of a hand shooting up from a grave is a vivid and memorable one. In this tale, it is partly used to reinforce the idea that the child is so wilful that their will is still being exerted on their body after death.
The Grimms noted that this image was, during their lifetime, associated with thieves, trespassers, parricides (children who kill their parents), and children who strike their parents. They also describe the way that some legends are inscribed on the landscape, so that you can point to the Fuchsturm (literally, fox tower) in Jena as evidence of the legend’s veracity.
A variant of the tale from Kuhn and Schwartz’s Norddeutsche Sagen, Märchen und Gebräuche (1812-1881) is very similar to the Grimms’ tale, but focuses much more on the hand as local legend, and relic:
In the church at Lunow5, three quarters of a mile from Oderberg, there is a chopped off, dried-up hand on display. It is clenched into a fist and holds a switch between its fingers. It comes from a son who, in a godless manner, once struck his father. God himself punished him, for when the son died and was buried, his hand emerged from the grave. However often they reburied it, it always reappeared. Finally they beat it with a switch, thinking that it would then return beneath the earth, but that did not help. So they chopped off the hand, put the switch in its fist, and placed it in the church at Lunow as an eternal warning to godless children.
The hand of Lunow is a real historical object, and has—in recent years—been examined by scientists to determine the gender of the person it once belonged to. Not quite a sacred relic—not like a fragment of the True Cross—it’s easy to imagine the hand, shriveled and dark, eternally wilful, being shown to a child whose wilfulness its parents hope to curb.
Prompt #1: Consider the landscape, including the built environment, around where you live. Is there a structure or landform that strikes you as particularly compelling or peculiar? As the relic of a forgotten legend?
Write a short narrative in which you tell the story (perhaps a legend, or urban legend) behind the structure/landform. You could make it a cautionary tale, or perhaps the tale of a long-lost heroic figure.
Prompt #2: Write a list of character traits that you’ve been told you have, either in the past or more recently. Is there one that bothers or interests you more than the others? One that you strongly want to either deny, or embrace?
Write a legend or fairy tale style of story in which it is the defining characteristic of the main character.
Prompt #3: Combine these two ideas by writing about a character with a defining characteristic you share, and how their story led to the formation of a particular feature of the landscape, or built environment.
References
Ahmed, S 2016, ‘A feminist army’, at feministkilljoys, 19 October, <https://feministkilljoys.com/2016/10/19/a-feminist-army/>.
Oltermann, Philip 2010, ‘A life in writing: Hans Magnus Enzensberger’ in The Guardian, 15 May, <http://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/may/15/hans-magnus-enzensberger-interview>.
Zipes, Jack (trans.) 2014, The complete first edition: The original folk & fairy tales of the Brother Grimm, Princeton University Press, Princeton & Oxford.
Zornado, JL 2001, Inventing the child: Culture, ideology and the story of childhood, Garland Science, New York & London.
A note on spelling! I have used ‘wilful’ throughout my own commentary and translation, as it’s the preferred spelling in Australian English. Sara Ahmed, and some others I have quoted, use the spelling ‘willful’ (with two Ls), which I have retained in any direct quotations from their work.
The relevant line from the play is delivered by Walter: ‘He tells us there's a charm upon the trees, / And if a man shall injure them, the hand / That struck the blow will grow from out the grave.’
First published in 1522, Schimpf and Ernst (Joke and Earnestness) is a collection of Schwänke (didactic stories, suitable for use as part of a sermon).
Joseph L Zornado writes, in Inventing the child: ‘Because the child is willful, stained by original sin and destructive, the adult must enact decisive and punitive measures so that the child will not grow up “full of weeds”’ (2001, p. 79)
The hand of Lunow is a real relic, however fantastical the story may be. Scientists have tested the hand to determine the biological sex of the person it belonged to …
At the end of your commentary, you mention that this tale actually falls under the religious tales category. This makes so much sense to me, in light of the religious atmosphere and history of Western Europe. To me, I see the parent as the church and the child as the potential religious subjugate. In this lens, the gender of the child doesn’t seem to matter. What matters more is the power of dogma and the mentality that there is only “one right way” to view the world. Whatever moral compass the “child” has is viewed as wrong by the church and must be corrected. However, the “child” continues to stir the land even after death (or forced subjugation), and their moral compass lives on within the earth.
Very thought provoking!!
I do love the ambiguity of the child's gender - and I think it right for the tale. It is more about the discipline of the child than whether a boy or girl is more 'eigensinnig' (what a marvellous word to trip off the tongue!). Although, I immediately thought of it sitting alongside Clever Gretel, which is my one favourite Grimms' tale, and contains the epitome of a wilful hero... and one would never dare strike her down.