They have been used for that purpose in the German school curriculum, and William Bennett, the conservative moralist, has included several of them in his Book of Virtues: A Treasury of Great Moral Stories (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), a volume of improving literature for children. There is, of course, absolutely nothing wrong with this, but it probably doesn’t work. To be sure, virtue is presented movingly in the tales, as in “Star Dollars,” where in an act of radical Christian charity a little girl gives her last rag of clothing to another child in the snowy forest, or in the self-sacrificing love of the many siblings who try to rescue each other from harm. In more typical examples, virtue is rewarded with wealth and position, as in the best middle-class Protestant morality. Kindness to beggars, for example, pays off, these unattractive characters usually turning out to be wealthy and powerful beings under enchantment who reward good behavior handsomely.

But it is not clear that children actually respond to this pattern as the moralist might hope, as suggested by the unpredictable laughter at “The Juniper Tree.” By the same token, the tales may not really function, as Jack Zipes fears, to perpetuate an unjust social order by instilling bourgeois virtues of industry, obedience, and submission to patriarchal authority. There is great variety among the tales and a great range of meanings and morals; some apparently have no moral at all beyond a good laugh. Among the 200 in the Grimms’ final edition, there are romantic stories of love, enchantment, and rescue, but also tall tales, animal fables, crime stories, funny stories about spectacularly stupid people, and bawdy fabliaux like “The Wedding of Mrs. Fox,” in which all but the youngest child will sense a dirty joke. In many cases the hero wins out through the virtues of courage and perseverance, but in others cunning and deceit carry the day.

The tales embody and gratify many desires, some of them contradictory: desires to have terrifying adventures, to know the cruelty of the world, to survive danger through one’s own cleverness and beauty, to see one’s enemies harshly punished, and finally to be recognized as king or queen and paired forever with a royal mate. Yet human beings also desire suffering, as history demonstrates all too well, if only to feel more intensely. Indeed, we want experience, although some varieties—such as the horrors of war, torture, and rape, the grisly murders and mutilations that both terrify and fascinate—are best had vicariously, as in reading “The Feather Bird” and “The Robber Bridegroom.” Here the moral lessons, if there are any, tend to be overshadowed for the reader by the sensational violence of the content. Taken together, the tales seem animated by a kind of anarchic energy that finally overwhelms moral and social lessons.

The patriarchal pattern is often undercut in the same way. In “The Shoes Which Were Danced to Pieces,” for example, the twelve princesses who defy their father by slipping out of their locked bedroom every night are finally reined in by an old soldier, who follows them to their underground dance hall and is rewarded by the king with the hand of the eldest princess; thus the authority of the father-king is reestablished. But the most memorable elements of the story are the thrilling secret staircase under the bed, the underground lake and castle, and the trees with leaves of silver, gold, and diamond. The brilliant fantasy world of the rebellious girls is far more important to the reader than the actions of the king or the old soldier.

Another rebellious princess, in “King Thrush-Beard,” mocks all her suitors until her father forces her to marry a beggar and work as a serving maid. But in the end things turn out well for the choosy girl, who discovers that her beggar husband is actually a king. The Jungfrau Maleen, in the tale of that name, refuses the marriage arranged by her father, who walls her up in a tower. After digging her way out with a bread knife, the determined Maleen tracks down her true love and wins him back from a counterfeit bride, who loses her head for her evil deeds. Even Rapunzel, the quintessential imprisoned maiden, manages to find a lover and get him into her tower at night by using her hair as a ladder, then survives for years in a desert as the single mother of twins. It is not the prince who rescues her, but she who saves him, by curing his blindness with her tears.

There are many examples of clever, active, and even heroic young women. In “The Robber Bridegroom,” the heroine tricks a cannibalistic murderer and brings him to justice, and in “The Feather Bird” another heroine rescues herself and her two sisters from a wizard who is really a serial sex killer. In a number of moving tales, a sister protects or rescues her brothers, as in “The Six Swans,” “The Seven Crows,” and “The Twelve Brothers,” where the sister offers her life for those of her brothers.

Peasant women are often presented as bold and cunning. In “The Peasant’s Wise Daughter,” the girl gives her father practical advice, rescues him from prison, figures out a riddle, marries the king, saves a poor man from the king’s cruelty, escapes a death sentence, and finally brings her difficult husband to heel. Clever Grethel, in the story of that name, eats and drinks the food and wine she had prepared for her master’s dinner party, then covers up her misdeed by sending him off in pursuit of his guests armed with a carving knife. In “Old Hildebrand,” a wife conspires with her lover, the village parson, to get rid of her gullible husband by sending him on a pilgrimage.

Even though there are not really enough adventurous heroines to go around, the female reader can easily identify across the barrier of gender with the male hero, as in reading a novel. If this were not possible, women would be barred from access to more than half the world’s great literature. In reading stories such as “The Golden Bird,” the girl imagines herself into the skin of the adventurous male protagonist rather than withholding her interest until a princess with whom to identify appears on the scene.

There are numerous contemporary attempts to write fairy tales with correct messages, some of them charming and successful. But many suffer from the imaginative flatness produced by good intentions; they have no subtext, only a text, and the provocative richness and ambiguity of the Grimm stories is lost. Those who want to subvert the originals often fail to notice the extent to which they subvert themselves. “Little Red Riding Hood,” for instance, contains an explicit moral—don’t stray from the straight path, don’t talk to strange wolves—that has been applied in a variety of contexts by parents, teachers, mythologists, feminists, even Nazis.