Reclaiming the Female Storyteller in the Nineteenth Century: Strategies of Adaptation and Resistance in the Works of Laura Gonzenbach and Carmen Sylva

ABSTRACT This article explores how women writers and collectors of fairy tales in the nineteenth century situated themselves within different contemporary tropes of the tale-telling woman in order to follow their own social and political agendas. By focussing on fairy tales written by Laura Gonzenbach (Sicilianische Märchen, 1870) and Carmen Sylva (Pelesch-Märchen, 1883), this paper shows how these writers apparently adapted to and embraced stereotypes of the female storyteller — particularly women’s alleged role as intermediaries, rather than editors, of fairy tales, and their supposed inherent connection to nature. However, historical contextualization as well as in-depth textual analyses expose how the writers in question instrumentalized these tropes in order to follow their own agendas, namely: amplifying women’s voices and questioning gender categories (Gonzenbach), and laying claim to power that is legitimized by a connection with nature (Sylva).

strongly, especially their opposition to the French conteuses who told and published their famous contes de fées at the French court in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.These tales, written by authors such as Madame d'Aulnoy or Madame de Murat, did not fit neatly within genre boundaries, and often engaged critically with issues of class and gender. 3The tales were popular in the German-speaking lands as well and therefore caught the Grimms' attention, who were quick to denounce them as 'lowly' and 'empty' in a subsection of the third volume of the Kinder-und Hausmärchen titled 'Nachahmer': Die Märchen welche nach der Gräfin Aulnoy im Anfang des 18ten Jahrh. in ziemlicher Anzahl erschienen, stehen alle viel tiefer und sind fast immer aus leeren Phantasien, ohne Anhalt an eine lebendige Idee hervorgegangen […] ein Gemisch von sogenanntem orientalischen Zauberwesen und modern schäferlichen Liebesgeschichten ohne wahren Gehalt; die Gestalten darin haben kein Leben und keine eigenthümliche Natur. 4ile the conteuses' French nationality may well have played a role in the brothers' aversion towards these women given the Grimms' stark anti-Napoleonic sentiments, 5 their wording here gestures in particular towards the paradigms they constructed around what folklore shouldand should notbe.These French tellers' tales, according to the Grimms, are 'oriental' and 'modern' as opposed to firmly rooted within a national tradition; they are 'mixtures' as opposed to intact and authentic narratives rescued from the past; they are derived from 'fantasies', which implies the employment of creativity, as opposed to having been taken from the mouth of an amorphous Volksgeist.It becomes very clear here that within the Grimms' understanding of fairy tales, 'the emphasis is not on individual creativity but rather assumes an amorphous creative energy attributed to a people as a whole'. 6Accordingly, the ideological construction of the female storyteller by the Grimms styled women as mere transmitters of the Volksgeist; more than that, it drew on gendered stereotypes that reinforced women's connection to the Grimms' conceptions of folklore, particularly women's alleged embeddedness in nature and their 'natural' roles within the domestic sphere.This process of ideological tailoring can be witnessed particularly in the Grimms' description of Dorothea Viehmannthe only one of their female sources explicitly acknowledged by namein the preface to their famous Volksmärchen der Deutschen.In an account of meeting this female storyteller, the editors declare her uncanny memory and her ability to recount 'alte Sagen' without a trace of 'Verfälschung', Viehmann's most remarkable trait: Sie bewahrt diese alten Sagen fest in dem Gedächtniß, welche Gabe, wie sie sagt, nicht jedem verliehen sey und mancher gar nichts behalten könne; dabei erzählt sie bedächtig, sicher und ungemein lebendig mit eigenem Wohlgefallen daran, erst ganz frei, dann, wenn man will, noch einmal langsam, so daß man ihr mit einiger Uebung nachschreiben kann […].Wer an leichte Verfälschung der Ueberlieferung, Nachlässigkeit bei Aufbewahrung, und daher an Unmöglichkeit langer Dauer, als Regel glaubt, der müßte hören, wie genau sie immer bei derselben Erzählung bleibt und auf ihre Richtigkeit eifrig ist; niemals ändert sie bei einer Wiederholung etwas in der Sache ab, und bessert ein Versehen, sobald sie es bemerkt, mitten in der Rede gleich selber. 7ehmann, as can be seen here, functions as a preserver and medium for fairy tales, who stays true to their 'original' content without making any changes to them.The description of her precision and ability to transmit and 'slow down' her rendition of a story almost makes one think of a tape recorder, or a dictation device.The passage is also evocative of female prophetic figures such as Kassandra or various oracles in narratives of classical antiquity; these women served as the mouthpiece for higher powers and were, despite being revered by many, scrutinized for whether they made 'mistakes' in communicating their messages.Viehmann is thus drawing not on her own creativity, as the French conteuses did, but is performing the function of a vessel for the Volksgeista reliable, untainted source of authenticity for the bourgeois male collectors and editors.
Precisely because folktales were seen by the Grimms as part of a 'natural' undercurrent running through a nation's population, they claimed to use mainly female sources, drawing on women's alleged deep connection with nature and their associated predisposition towards family life.This trope, which drew stronglyon women's ability to give birth, had taken hold in the emerging scientific discourses of the eighteenth century. 8The nature-boundedness of their sources was in fact so essential that, as Ruth Bottigheimer and Heinz Rölleke have uncovered, the Grimms' true sourcesnearly all of them well-educated young women from bourgeois urban families 9remained largely unnamed, and were replaced instead with loose descriptions such as 'aus Hessen', 'aus Zwehrn', 'wird vielfach in Hessen und in den Maingegenden erzählt', 10 rendering them effectively part of the German landscape.Heinz Rölleke in his detailed study of the origins and narrators of the Grimms' tales points out that these omissions were most likely due to the Grimms being uncomfortably aware of the bourgeois nature of most of their sources, and that they therefore avoided mentioning them even in their correspondence. 11n turn, their discomfort suggests that 'true' female sources of fairy tales, those who were able to tap into the Volksgeist, should remain uneducated: 'Aber es ist doch ein grosser Unterschied zwischen jenem halb unbewussten, dem stillen Forttreiben der Pflanzen ähnlichen und von der unmittelbaren Lebensquelle getränkten Entfalten und einer absichtlichen, alles nach Willkür zusammenknüpfenden und auch wohl leimenden Umänderung; diese aber ist es, welche wir nicht billigen können.' 12 The 'half unconscious' and 'silent' growth of plants which is contrasted here with creative modification and intention can be read as a metaphor for the attributes of the ideal female storytellerunconsciously drawing from a pre-established source, content within itself, and not public-facing.
These descriptions illuminate in a strong way, also, how the Grimms' ideals of the female storyteller and the emerging undercurrent of bourgeois values at the beginning of the nineteenth century fed into each other.Closeness to nature formed only part of the role that was constructed for women during the rise of the middle class, beginning in the late eighteenth centurytheir association with birth and motherhood led to the construction of the female sphere as one that was private, domestic, and focused around care. 13 In turn, fairy tale publications came to draw on this female image: depictions of female storytellers still to be found in fairy tale collections today gained popularity during this time, not least that of the old maid reading stories to children. 14Again, the image of the domestic storyteller is intertwined with a lack of creativity which is idealized: as Mererid Puw Davies argues, the shift to women being depicted as reading tales from books 'undermines women's creativity because the woman narrator can no longer be thought to be making up her own tales, but reads out tales written by a male authority'. 15The image of the female storyteller constructed not only, but first and foremost by the Grimms, was thus built on three cornerstones: the storyteller was shown to be merely an intermediary between Volksgeist and editor; she exhibited a close connection to nature, which was sometimes embodied in her rural upbringing; and she belonged to the domestic sphere.This image became pervasive and still shows its influence in the popular media of our time. 16o what extent did historical women storytellers accept and adapt to their depiction by the Grimms?Exploring the case studies of Laura Gonzenbach (Sicilianische Märchen, 1870) and Carmen Sylva (Pelesch-Märchen, 1883), I argue that these writers embraced the tropes surrounding the female storyteller, but instrumentalized them in the process to follow their own agendas.Whereas Laura Gonzenbach at first glance acted only as an intermediary between rural Sicilian women and the German editors she was working for, she also used this status to amplify the female experience through the tales she selected, which questioned gendered hierarchies of power.Carmen Sylva, whilst relying heavily on her image as a woman deeply rooted in nature for her self-fashioning, drew on this trope to present herself as a powerful queen based on her inherent knowledge of and intimate relationship with Romania's landscape.By turning to the texts themselves for analysis, I will highlight also how the two tropesthat of the intermediary and that of embeddedness in natureare used by women writers both separately, as is the case with Laura Gonzenbach, or in an interwoven fashion, as with Carmen Sylva.
*** Little is known about Laura Gonzenbach's life and circumstances; the limited knowledge we do have relies on the findings of only a few scholars, most prominently Jack Zipes, Dorothy Noyes, Rudolf Schenda, and Laura Rubini. 17ccording to these writers, Laura Gonzenbach was born to Swiss-German parents in Messina in 1842; her father was a Swiss consul as well as a merchant, and as such, the Gonzenbachs were part of the small German-speaking Protestant elite which inhabited Messina and Palermo in the nineteenth century. 18onzenbach was highly educated and spoke multiple languages, including German, Italian, and French; however, much of her young life was spent in the rural countryside of Sicily, where she most likely was taught the Sicilian dialect as one of her first languages by servants.Through her multilingual education, Laura Gonzenbach fulfilled, in many ways, the role of the perfect intermediary; she was therefore prompted by the editor Otto Hartwig, who had met her during his time spent as a preacher and educator in Messina, to collect fairy tales for him.While he initially only asked for a few, Gonzenbach returned to him with more than ninety tales which stemmed, according to Adam Zolkover, 16 Jack Zipes, The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012). 17Jack Zipes, 'Laura Gonzenbach and her Forgotten 'primarily from lower and lower middle-class female informants'. 19While this collecting practice gestures towards a significant degree of agency regarding the selection and number of sources for the fairy tales, she left the publication of the Sicilianische Märchen to Hartwig, who subsequently included a scholarly appendix by the renowned fairy tale scholar Reinhold Köhler.
On the surface, Gonzenbach embraced the treatment of the tales as mainly a source of scholarly interest; judging by her letters to Hartwig, she was concerned with retaining the tales' authenticity in her transcriptions: 'Nun möchte ich Ihnen auch noch sagen, daß ich mein Möglichstes gethan habe, um die Märchen recht getreu so wieder zu geben, wie sie mir erzählt wurden.' 20 Gonzenbach's efforts which she describes here are concomitant with the idea of women functioning purely as receivers, not as editors, of tales.However, it is worth noting that Hartwig did depend on her not only for approaching tellers, but for translation purposes too; her role as a gatekeeper, translator, and selector of the tales can therefore not be denied.More than that, when considering the Sicilianische Märchen, not only does the almost entirely female selection of tellers stand out, but so do the texts themselves: they amplify the female experience, often featuring heroines rather than heroes, and challenge patriarchal power structures.Gonzenbach's focus on female perspectives aligns with her own embeddedness in a proto-feminist environment: her sister, Magdalena, was a prominent figure in early feminist thought in Sicily who argued for the improvement of women's educationher translations of proto-feminist authors such as Fanny Lewald and members of the Berlin Kaffeterkreis received much public attention. 21According to Jack Zipes, Magdalena had a considerable influence on her sister and was 'most responsible for Laura's education', as their mother died when Laura Gonzenbach was five years old. 22This investment in female education continued in later generations as well: Helene Klostermann, who was Laura Gonzenbach's niece, also spent a great amount of time with her aunt and later became a renowned pedagogue and director of a girls' lyceum in Bonn. 23While none of these contexts necessarily allows us to jump to easy conclusions regarding Laura Gonzenbach's motives to present the Sicilianische Märchen in the way that she did, they do imply her proximity to and potential involvement in movements that aimed to dismantle gender inequality.The content of the tales themselves, as I will argue, supports the assertion that Gonzenbach was not only motivated to place women at the centre of her readers' attention, but also to question gender and its real-life implications as a social construct, thus threatening 'natural' male supremacy.
In some of the tales, this challenging of patriarchal power is done through the inclusion of cross-dressing heroines.In the tale 'Zafarana', for example, the eponymous heroine is at first abducted by a bewitched prince in the shape of an old man, whom she now must serve.However, after disobeying him she is cast out and forced to wander an unknown wilderness.When she comes across a farmer sitting in front of his house, she asks him for his clothes in exchange for her own, richly decorated ones: 'Gebt mir eure Männerkleidung,' antwortete Zafarana, 'so will ich euch meine Kleider geben, und Alles was ich hier im Bündelchen habe.' Der Bauer wollte nicht, denn er sah, daß Zafarana's Kleider viel schöner waren als sein schlichter Anzug.Zafarana aber bat so lange, bis er einwilligte, in seinem Häuschen die Kleider wechselte, und sie Zafarana übergab (SM, p. 52).
This exchange of clothes reveals the symbolic value of garments for the heroines in Gonzenbach's tales: for Zafarana, even a simple man's clothes provide an adequate trade-in for even the richest and most decorative of women's clothing, as they will grant her access to a far wider range of social positions and economic opportunity; a man's persona will always be above a female one in a malecentred society, as is proven by the heroine's journey which she now continues as a man.She soon arrives in a city and seeks out the local castle; the king's coachman takes a liking to the ʻschöner Jüngling' and manages to get her a job as a stable boy (SM, p. 52).The ease with which a woman is able to attract work merely by taking on the guise of being male is showcased by the fact that all she needs to do to accomplish this is wander up and down in front of the castle in order to attract the necessary attention: 'dort ging sie geradewegs vor des Königs Schloß und spazierte auf und ab'a formulation which inverts the female-associated trope of the paid sex worker wandering near male centres of power (SM, p. 52).Here however, Zafarana merely has to perform maleness through her clothing and her confident male strut and is thus granted easy access to male structures of power symbolized by the castle.Having arrived, Zafarana deftly fulfils her duties as stable boy; unfortunately for her, the king's daughter falls in love with her.At first she demands that Zafarana become her page, and afterwards demands she marry her.Zafarana repeatedly refuses, fearing discovery (ʻ"Ach, Prinzessin", antwortete Zafarana ganz erschrocken, "thut das nicht.Euch gebührt ein großer, reicher König, nicht ein armer Bursche, wie ich es bin"'), which leads to the princess turning to her father in anger, lying that Zafarana has propositioned her (SM, p. 53).The ʻstable boy' is therefore to be hanged.In her last minutes on the scaffold before her execution, Zafarana remembers a spell given to her by the bewitched prince before he cast her out, and using it she calls on him, who comes to her rescue.
He in turn 'proves' to the king that his daughter has lied about being propositioned by having Zafarana return to wearing queenly women's clothes ('königliche Frauenkleidung'): it is evidently perceived as an impossibility that as an aristocratic woman Zafarana could have propositioned another woman.Unfortunately for the princess, this turn of events means that she is hanged in Zafarana's stead: 'Da erkannten Alle, daß sie ein Mädchen sei, und die Königstochter musste an ihrer Statt sterben' (SM, p. 54).The story ends with the prince taking Zafarana to his kingdom and with the words: ʻSo lebten sie denn glücklich und zufrieden, wir aber haben das Nachsehen' (SM, p. 54).
This final sentence not only brings the reader back into the economic reality of the female tellers, implied through the 'wir'; it also reflects the ambiguity of the tale's ending from a female perspective.Zafarana's monetary and social status in the end is reinstated; however, she is stripped of the power of male opportunity and influence, which in turn is exercised over her through her husband as he makes the decision to take her back.In the end, the true power of liberation still lies with the husband; the patriarchal organization of society cannot be escaped, not even through clever ruses.Equally, however, the tale demonstrates how these gendered power structures are based on mere superficialities, seeing as Zafarana was perfectly capable of living a male lifeall she needed to do so was male garments.Gonzenbach's situatedness within the proto-feminist sphere therefore becomes apparent in this tale: acknowledging the pre-existing power structures, she also foregrounds the challenge posed by women by selecting this tale for translation and publication, which claimsthe equality of men's and women's capabilities of ascending within the social hierarchy.
Similar implications can be found in the tale 'Von dem klugen Mädchen'.In this story, a man is continuously mocked by his brother because he only has seven daughters, as opposed to the brother's seven sons.Whenever the brother sees the man, he shouts: 'O Herr Bruder, ihr mit sieben Blumentöpfen und ich mit sieben Schwertern!', indicating the higher value of his kin (SM, p. 114).In order to settle this dispute once and for all, the youngest daughter proposes a challenge: the fathers are to send their respective youngest child on a quest to steal the prince's crown.Whoever returns with it first shall be declared the winner.The two youngsters then set out on their journey, and the son fails to overcome the very first obstaclea riverbecause he does not want to get his feet wet (SM, p. 115).The girl on the other hand crosses the river and convinces a peasant boy to swap clothes with her, enabling her to take up a position at court as the prince's secretary.The prince grows fonder of his secretary by the day, but cannot shake the suspicion that he is not, in fact, a man: 'Wenn er aber ihre schönen weißen Hände betrachtete, so kam ihm immer der Gedanke: Das ist ja keine Männerhand.Giovanni ist gewiß ein Mädchen!' (SM, p. 115).He tries finding out whether his suspicion is true through various ruses; one day, he invites 'Giovanni' to join him for a dip in the ocean.The girl then pretends to have forgotten her towel and returns to the castle; there she tells the queen that the prince requires his crown to be taken to him.After she is given the crown, she saddles a horse and flees, but not without leaving a note for the prince to let him know that he has been duped: Jungfräulich kam ich, Jungfräulich geh ich weg.Gefoppt ist der Prinz Gar schlau und frech.(SM, p. 117) When the prince comes to look for the girl and finds the note, he sets off after her because he wants to marry her.In the meantime, the girl has returned home triumphantly as the bearer of the crown.Her cousin, who is still sitting by the river at this point and trying to empty it of water with the shell of a hazelnut, finally gives the prince directions to the girl's house.The prince finds her there and exclaims: 'Du sollst meine Gemahlin sein!'a comical assertion, given that the girl currently still holds power over his crown (SM, p. 118).Nevertheless, the youngest daughter's challenge of patriarchal structures ends here: she and the prince are married and live in the castle with their families, returning to pre-established structures after the heroine's ritual spectacle of cross-dressing.
In both these tales, the women's acts while cross-dressing can be viewed as an intensification and specification of the threat posed to patriarchal structures through women.Once a male persona has been acquired by the protagonists, they take on the lives of men with remarkable ease.They fulfil work that is normally done by men and perform it equally well regardless of whether it is physical labour as a stable boy or intellectual labour as a secretary.Men's inherent sexual attractiveness as well as their sexual self-assuredness are also questioned through the cross-dressing women: in 'Zafarana', a woman in disguise is coveted not just by any woman, but by a princess, destabilizing the desirability usually warranted to aristocratic males in more traditional fairy tales.In 'Von dem klugen Mädchen', a woman disguised as a man makes the prince doubt his sexual preferences.While he is supposedly convinced that Giovanni is in reality a woman, in the song he repeatedly sings about his secretary he seems less sure about this: Here, Giovanni has 'Frauen Art und Weise' and 'fine hands', but is not said to be a woman, indicating the prince's genuine confusion and, most likely, confusion in face of being in love with a man.The predetermination of sexual attractiveness between genders is thus questioned.This forms a further crucial aspect of male anxiety that is intensified through the tales, namely men's fears of being duped, or, as Mark Chinca puts it, 'outflanked by female mobility'. 24In 'Zafarana', the king does not see through the alleged page's disguise, and neither does the prince in 'Von dem klugen Mädchen', begging the question: if a man cannot tell the difference between gendersand neither can a woman who desires men, for that matterwherein lies the birthright of male supremacy?Gonzenbach poses this question as part of a long tradition of female storytellers, not least among them Madame d'Aulnoy or Madame de Murat.These women often included cross-dressing in their stories, which 'by highlighting the performativity of gender and gender relations […] also call into question the production of other modes of power that claim a "natural" status to sanctify their existence and dominance', as Lisa Brocklebank has argued, including institutions such as the family. 25Gonzenbach's tales therefore precisely follow the line of tradition of fairy tales which the Grimms, as outlined earlier, despised and opposed.
Clearly, as the analysis of two of the Sicilianische Märchen has shown, the tales' content and composition problematize Gonzenbach's role as merely a female intermediary for the male editor who, as imagined by the Grimms, oversees and orders the collection of 'authentic' fairy tales.Critics such as Jennifer Fox have pointed out that Herder's ideas on the Volk and the passing down of cultural narratives, which formed the basis of how the Grimms conceptualized fairy tales, suggest an explicitly patriarchal line of cultural tradition. 26Gonzenbach however, much like her heroines, evades the imaginary of the male-managed fairy tale tradition Not only did Gonzenbach's socialization and education grant her a considerable amount of control over the collection and translation processes, but the tales she chose to hand on to Hartwig question gender hierarchies altogether, thus rendering some of the attributes ascribed to women in the nineteenth century, such as that of being natural intermediaries, obsolete.*** While Gonzenbach drew on the trope of the female intermediary to challenge gender hierarchies in a more hidden manner, Carmen Sylva fashioned herself publicly as a storyteller deeply rooted in nature to claim intimate knowledge of, and therefore power over, the Romanian landscape.Born as Elisabeth zu Wied, a princess from the German Rhine region, she was crowned Queen of Romania in 1881 when her husband, Karl von Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, became King of Romania after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, which had previously ruled the country, in 1878.As was the case in other South-Eastern European countries such as Serbia and Greece, Karl was a monarch who had been elected to alleviate the country's political instability and secure a military alliance with Prussia.However, justifying the new German dynasty's rule on an ideological level remained a challenge for the royal couple.
Elisabeth, who took the pen-name Carmen Sylva, thus began a comprehensiveand highly successfulcampaign of self-stylization which involved the national and international press.In many of her publications as well as in interviews and articles, she presented herself as a 'poet queen' with strong ties to nature, as indicated by the meaning of her pen-name: the song, the wood. 27he Pelesch-Märchen can be seen as the centrepiece of this campaign.The tales, consisting of twelve fairy tales invented entirely by the Queen, made their first appearance in 1883 in the Romanian language, and were translated into German a year later.Every tale explains how a certain landmark, often a mountain of the Bucegi massif in the region around the river Peleş, came by its name, such as the Jipi mountain range.
Carmen Sylva drew heavily on the topos of women as connected to nature in order to establish a narrative in which she had an intimate relationship with the Romanian landscape.To achieve this, she instrumentalized press releases as well as the tales themselves.Many articles written on her emphasize her idyllic childhood spent in Castle Monrepos among the trees, including an autobiographical piece she wrote for The Sunday Strand.In this piece, aptly called ʻA Child of the Forest', the Queen writes: Now you can imagine how much the forest told me, especially on my solitary walks.The storm-wind was a special friend of mine.When it made the oaks and beeches sway and groan, sawing the branches asunder till they came crashing down; then I would tie my little hood over my brown hairit was not white in those daysand with my two big St.Bernard dogs by my side I would race through the forest, avoiding all the beaten tracks, and listen to its voices.For the forest told me stories all the time. 28e anthropomorphization of elements of the natural world is a classical fairytale trope which in turn feeds into Sylva's role as a female narrator who has a 'special' relationship with nature.Indeed, it is implied that the stories she writes down come directly from nature's lipsan imagewhich, as noted in my introduction, we also find in the Grimms' early nineteenth-century depictions of storytellers.Across many of the autobiographical pieces she released over the course of her life, Elisabeth continued to reinforce this form of fashioning herself: the Queen, having retained her early ties to nature, presents herself as capable of listening to it and therefore as having access to the deepest, most ʻnatural' form of knowledge available to humankinda knowledge which has the power to transcend national borders and, by extension, can justify a German's rule over Romanian land.This image was essential for Elisabeth's 27 Washington Post, 8 March 1891, p. 9; 'A Real Literary Queen', Washington Post, 12 October 1890, p. 16. 28 Carmen Sylva, 'A Child of the Forest.By Carmen Sylva.Elizabeth: Queen of Roumania', The Sunday Strand, 19  (1901), 297.
public acceptance within Romania as well as abroad: whereas her charity work, her efforts as a war nurse and as a founder of schools were also taken up by the pressemphasizing in particular how she was improving ʻan enthusiastic but half-civilised people'it was her self-fashioning and reception as a naturerooted woman that enabled her to become the true storyteller of the Romanian nation who could lay claim to its origins and mythical history. 29It is thus no coincidence that Elisabeth preferred to be known internationally by her penname Carmen Sylva, 30 rather than by her German name.The reinforcement of the author's continued intimate relationship with nature is one of the Pelesch-Märchen's main ideological tasks.This can be seen, for example, in the tale 'Der Pelesch'.Here, Sylva introduces the river Peleş to her readers as the source of the tales she is providing in her collection: 'Ich habe viele, lange Stunden bei ihm gesessen und ihm zugehört […].Das will ich euch nun alles erzählen.' 31 In the process of telling the readers about the river, she anthropomorphizes it, giving it the appearance of a young man with stereotypically Romanian features: 32 as a 'Geselle', which is indicative of a grown man, Sylva's manner of speaking is similarly compassionate and mildly mocking ('der ungeduldige Krauskopf') in a way that is evocative of how a mother might speak about her temperamental child.It was not unusual for Sylva to interweave the trope of the caring motherly storyteller with that of her embeddedness in nature, as her autobiographical article in The Sunday Strand also demonstrates.Here, we find another instance of such self-fashioning, paired with the trope of the intermediary of natural forces.In depicting her relationship with the river in this way, Sylva creates an air not only of intimacy, but also of superiority in relation to Romania, which is represented in the specificities of the river's anthropomorphic form.
Nevertheless, the personified Peleş is also given his own voice in 'Valea Rea (Das böse Tal)', which he uses to affirm the close relationship he has with Carmen Sylva.In this tale, the river speaks in a long monologue, deepening the empathetic understanding which Sylva has for the nation's landscape.Peleş begins by complaining about not being able to reach his beloved, the little river Doftana, due to the larger river Prahova, who is depicted as a stately old woman ('So ein mächtiges Weib, die alte Prahova!' (PM, p. 233)) keeping the two lovers apart.As in 'Der Pelesch', the embodiment of human emotions within nature is shown in the iteration of these emotions through natural occurrences; for instance, Doftana expresses her sadness by overflowing: 'Manchmal seufzt sie so, dass sie davon ganz aufquillt und dann wird es ihr in ihrem Bette zu eng, das nicht für starke Gefühle berechnet war' (PM, p. 233).The Peleş then continues to speak of his life and its challenges, one of which is to provide water for Castle Peleş which is being built at the time of the story taking place.Initially, the Peleş inhibits progress by antagonizing the springs beneath the mountain upon which the castle is to be built, causing a 'conspiracy': Ich habe unter all den kleinen Quellen im Berge hinten, im Ausläufer von Piatra Arsa, eine Verschwörung angestiftet, so dass jedes Mal, wenn die Menschen alles schön ausgegraben und heruntergekratzt hatten und anfangen wollten zu mauern, meine kleinen Freunde anfingen, zu drücken aus Leibeskräftenund bautz!lag die ganze Erde wieder drunten!(PM, p. 236) However, he eventually learns that the castle is for Carmen Sylva, whom he calls his 'friend'; after an initial emotional crisis on having heard this, he goes quiet and submits himself, and his friends the springs, to the service of the queen: As is implied through the river's statement, Carmen Sylva's claim to an intimate and knowledgeable relationship with Peleş is echoed by the Romanian landscape itself at the end of the collection.Not only is the establishment of the queen's new castle, a symbol of her power, endorsed by nature; the river even ends its own 'revolution' for her, implying that nature itself stands as a protecting force for Sylva (PM, p. 237).
It thus becomes clear that her alleged connection to nature serves Sylva not only in depicting herself as an authentic medium for the Romanian Volksgeist, but also in claiming power through and over it.This display of her own might sets her usage of this trope starkly apart from that of the Grimms', which involved women such as Viehmann who were shown to be rural, uneducated, and harmless.Their connection to nature was supposedly passive, a product of their impressionability and lack of abstract thinking; it therefore followed that what they received from the Volksgeist needed to be ordered and edited by intellectually superior men. 33Sylva in the Pelesch-Märchen on the other hand not only takes control of narrating her relationship with nature, but depicts it as her gateway to power; through the intimate understanding she has of nature, she is able to influence it and convey its messages, which are embodied in the Pelesch-Märchen.This association of power and a strong connection with nature is a recurring theme throughout the different tales featured in the Pelesch-Märchen.Female characters who exhibit such a connection are, in fact, often queens, or become queens because of their abilities.Princess Vijelia in 'Das Hirschtal', for example, who is made queen later in the story due to her strength and endurance, not only holds power over nature, but partially consists of it: Die Königstochter stand auf einem Hirsch und hielt deren zehn an goldenen Ketten in einer Hand, während sie mit der andern eine Peitsche schwang, so lang wie eine große Schlange, so leuchtend wie der feurigste Blitz.Ihre Gestalt schien in den Himmel zu reichen und ihr Haar umflatterte sie wie eine dichte Wolke, die auf Augenblicke die Sonne verbarg.Statt der Sonne strahlten die Sterne in ihrem Gesicht und die Zähne, die ihr lachender Mund sehen ließ beim Jauchzen und Singen.(PM, p. 168) Vijelia's unity with and command over nature is made explicit in this passage: the princess is riding a staga wild animal of the forest not known for its tameabilityand is holding another ten of them by the leash, the 'chain' of course being an explicit symbol for dominance over a subject.Furthermore, the stars shine from her face and teeth in lieu of the sun, which she blocks with her hair; this implies at the same time her embodiment of natural phenomena as well as her dominance even over themthe sun, in this case.We are reminded here not only of pagan deities -Artemis, goddess of the hunt, was sometimes depicted in a chariot pulled by deer in Greek art 34but, in Christian iconography, of Mary of the Apocalypse, 'a woman clothed in the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head'. 35hrough this imagery, Sylva further reinforces the association of power held by women, and their embeddedness in nature.
As I have shown, Carmen Sylva in her Pelesch-Märchen openly draws on the tropes of both the female intermediary and the female storyteller with a strong connection to nature; she also, as I have argued, embraces motherly and domestic attributes to achieve this.However, she completely subverts the implications of these tropes.Rather than reverting into the private space and letting male editors handle her allegedly Volksgeist-induced outpourings, she confidently uses the attribution of a connection with nature to women to not only claim, but also deepen her sphere of power.Through her tales, Sylva not only depicts women who are connected with nature as powerful, but she also fashions herself specifically as a storyteller who, by virtue of her intimate relationship with nature, is able to understand it, convey its stories, and gain its favour.By extension, her Pelesch-Märchen are implied to be powerful narratives, taken directly from the mouth of nature.*** My two case studies have shown that the French conteuses' tradition of selfassertion and critical engagement with gender discourses did not die out with the Grimms' efforts to reform the image of the female storyteller.Rather, the tropes established by the Grimms were embraced by the authors examined here and reinterpreted to suit their respective agendas.Laura Gonzenbach took on the role of the passive intermediary on the surface, but foregrounded female voices and concerns through her choice of sources, as well as her selection of tales.When we turn to the content of the Sicilianische Märchen, the subversive nature of the stories becomes even more apparent, as narrative elements such as cross-dressing question the parameters of gender roles and gender oppression as social constructs.Carmen Sylva in her Pelesch-Märchen drew on her alleged connection with nature as a female storyteller to depict herself as a ruler with power over the natural realm, rendering her a queen without national borders.This claim to power is reinforced in her tales through the depiction of powerful women with a strong connection to nature.
Reading Gonzenbach and Sylva shows us that we need to look beyond the superficial conformism of many women writers in the nineteenth century and question the function that embracing certain stereotypes and tropes had for them.The findings of this article point us in three key directions: Firstly, women writers made ideological use of their cultural association with fairy tales, wrought to some extent by the Grimms themselves when they established a connection between the female storyteller and fairy tales.The integration of figureheads such as Dorothea Viehmann into the Grimms' ideological construct of what an 'authentic' fairy tale should be reinforced gendered roles and power imbalances, but at the same time gave women power over the tales through their alleged connectedness to the Volksgeist.
Secondly, women writers from different social backgrounds embraced tropes of the female storyteller on a performative level whilst in fact following their own social and political agendas.However, the overtness with which this was done differs depending on their position in society; being Queen of Romania, Carmen Sylva of course had more access to public media and was in less danger of social estrangement through her self-fashioning.Laura Gonzenbach, a middle-class woman, did not publish the tales herself, but reported back to a male editor; therefore, her strategies needed to be more subtle and could not include direct 'manipulation' of the content.
This leads me to my third point: not only must we look beyond apparent conformism on the level of textual analysis, but we must also examine the relationships between storytellers, collectors, and editors.For the Grimms and their contemporaries, it was essential that what came from the mouth of the Volksgeist via women passed through their intellectual 'filter' before publication to ensure a patriarchal line of tradition.As I have shown, Laura Gonzenbach did find ways of circumnavigating her editor's authority to a certain extent, building particularly on her role as a translator as well as collector.The interlingual and translingual recording and publication of fairy tales by women must therefore be examined more rigorously alongside in-depth textual analyses.

Notes on Contributor
Anja Rekeszus recently completed her PhD at King's College London, which explores how women writers of the nineteenth century expressed their socio-political opinions through transcultural fairy tales.She is now looking to integrate ecocritical perspectives into her future research whilst continuing to draw on her folkloristic findings.