From Sights Unseen to Must-See Sights: Reviewing Grimm Iconography in the Fairy Tale Classroom

Generations of American college students first encounter Grimm fairy tales as children through Disney film adaptations and often struggle to overcome the nostalgic, visual connections they have when approaching the fairy tales again as adults. My main goals in the classroom are to unsettle my students’ associations and assumptions that have been preconditioned by those films, and to help them take an active role in the storytelling experience. Analyzing a range of fairy tale illustrations can help students unsettle their assumptions and reset their expectations as they (re)approach the text. This article shares some of the unsettling, illustrated collections that my students and I have found useful for productively contaminating fairy tales. Each of the collections explored forces the reader/viewer to engage directly with questions of textual fidelity, publication and reception history, and narrative focalization. Taken together, they are useful tools to help students disenchant the Disney spell and explore the delightful and disturbing depths of the fairy tales’ form, content, and context.