Analysis of the Violent Content in Grimm Brothers' "The Story of the Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was."

1113 Words5 Pages
Cornejo Bernal Sergio Leonardo Paper 1 Pillys Herrin Temas Selectos de Teoría 19/02/2014 Analysis of the violent content in Grimm brothers' "The Story of the Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was." Maria Tatar makes clear in her article Sex and Violence: The Hard Core of Fairy Tales that the Grimm brothers were apparently disgusted by the sexual aspect of fairy tales, but they considered proper for children to include violent content in those same tales, this paper will analyze the violence of one of those fairy tales an analysis to the possible justification to the violence and, when possible, non violent alternatives to the actions of the characters. The tale named The Story of the Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was tells the story of a man who is entirely useless, however he has one unique trait, he is immune to fear, however he feels a deep interest in shuddering, which he can't do because he feels no fear, thus he embarks on a quest to learn how to shudder, which he blindly believes could be his job, provided he would know how. While he is dim witted, his quest takes him to achieve something no one else did and earn riches from that, but not without breaking a few bones before. In the beginning he is hired by a sexton who believes he could be easily scared by the sight of a ghost and decides to pretend being one, however the young man, even though he is dim witted, has some common sense and believes the would be ghost is likely a criminal, and thus solves his issue by pushing the sexton down the stairs. If the Grimm brothers wanted to punish the sexton for trying to trick a young man then the punishment is far beyond the reasonable measures, however it seems apparent that the man's disgrace is only for comedic effect, since the young man's father considers his son unworthy upon hearing of his unintelligent solution to a simple problem,

More about Analysis of the Violent Content in Grimm Brothers' "The Story of the Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was."

Open Document