Grimm Tales, Grimmer Myths

A pleasant way to help keep up one’s German is to read from the original edition of Grimms’ Maerchen. Today it was The Seven Ravens, which begins thus:

A man had seven sons, but never yet a little daughter, no matter how much he longed for one. In the course of things his wife again gave him good hope of a child, and when it came into the world, it was a maid. Joy was great, but the child was delicate and small, and it was decided she should be baptized, lest she die before a priest could be summoned. The father dispatched one of the boys to go quickly to the spring to fetch water for the baptism . . . .

And so the tale continues, the maiden surviving to deliver her brothers from their father’s curse.

I found myself pausing here, for I have spent the last several weeks reading, for my sins, feminist literature, a crude and false, but almost universal litany of which is the higher valuation historically placed on boys over girls. The Grimms’ tales, however, contain a great deal of evidence that, at least in the Germany that produced them, women were highly significant members of society, and girls, very often in the form of princesses doted over by their royal fathers, were highly valued—and not simply for utilitarian purposes, but, as in The Seven Ravens, for the sheer love and longing of fathers.

Upon further reflection, one finds history and literature full of Penelopes, Cornelias, Rachels, Portias, Cordelias, Beatrices, and Marys, women upon whom the highest values are placed by men simply because they love and long for women in all the ways men can do this, and to which loving and longing only mothers, wives, and daughters can, each in her own way, answer.

Have boys been valued “higher” in the minds of men who love women in this way? That depends upon what one means by “higher.” There are things boys are that girls are not, and they are valued for that, valued no less, but in a different way than girls can be. The feminist’s problem seems to be that she rejects the valuation, no matter how pure and heavy with love it may be, that the man places upon women. She wants instead the value men place upon other men, as the heads of human families and enterprises (so only in that sense higher—higher in place but by no means in love)—upon their fathers and their sons and their comrades.

But this can never be. She must take the love a man can give her as a woman, or renounce his love altogether. She cannot alter him to accept her on feminist terms without un-manning him—without making him less a prince, less a king, less a father, and so less a lover of women in all the ways that the man of these aspects can love her. She will have instead a poor, gelded thing—fit, perhaps, for the plough, but unable to sustain the life of the race, and no lover, especially of his emasculator.  The true Man will not have it; he will love someone else. Those who are attracted to feminism would do well to consider what feminists of the more hopeless but realistic variety have told them about the myth of Lilith being an appropriate metaphor for what lies at the end of their road.