Brothers Grimm and sisters grimmer: The transformation of the Grimms' 'Little Red Cap,' 'Ashputtle' and 'Little Snow White' in Tanith Lee's 'Bloodmantle,' 'When the Clock Strikes' and 'Red as Blood'

Although Jakob and Wilhelm Grimms' Kinder- und Hausmarchen stem from oral sources, they are clearly removed from orality. The brothers made significant changes between transcribing the tales from their oral sources and publishing them. As they removed the Marchen from orality, they muted the female voices that had long been intimately connected with their telling. Moreover, they diminished the tales' female-specific themes, and incorporated into them the polarized view of woman-as-angel-or-demon that was a predominant feature of nineteenth-century Western ideology of gender.; Contemporary writers, most notably Angela Carter, Anne Sexton and Tanith Lee, challenge the Grimms' gender paradigms. Especially Lee's tales reestablish a strong link between women and folk tradition; she expresses in her stories contemporary ideologies of gender without sacrificing the tales' perhaps most important function: enchantment. This thesis will focus on Tanith Lee's versions of the three most famous tales by the brothers Grimm: "Bloodmantle" (her version of "Little Red Cap"), "When the Clock Strikes" ("Ashputtle") and "Red As Blood" ("Snow White").; Each chapter of this thesis devotes itself to a single tale and its transformation, dealing first with the Grimms' and then with Tanith Lee's version. Each seeks to evaluate how the Grimms polished grammar and style, and to assess how they altered each tale's content and theme, in order to demonstrate how they removed the tales from both orality and the female sphere. Then, each chapter will show how Lee in her versions of the tales restores some of the characteristics frequently associated with the oral tradition. Each will elucidate how Lee's tales revive the close connection between women and folklore, and at the same time depart from the Grimms' tradition of fairy tales.