Aesthetic Disgust in the Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales

How Disgust in Fairy Tales Contributes to Our Intellectual Understanding

Abstract

Conventionally, in accordance with the eighteenth-century view on aestheticism, people have often treated disgust as a preclusion to aesthetic pleasure. However, in her book Savoring Disgust: The Foul and the Fair in Aesthetics, Carolyn Korsmeyer challenges their incompatibility. She argues that when viewed through a cognitivist perspective, disgust can coexist with, or even enhance, aesthetic experience. Her work offers new perspectives through which to analyze the Grimms’ fairy tales, many of which include graphic or grotesque elements now considered unsuitable for modern audiences. Stories such as Cinderella, where the stepsisters cut their feet to fit into the glass slipper, once derived part of their impact from the discomfort modern versions censor. This paper is especially concerned with Disney’s modification of the Grimm fairy tales to become more “aesthetically pleasing.” By tracing the transformation of these tales from their unsettling eighteenth-century depictions (Grimms’ fairy tales) to their “more pleasurable” contemporary forms (Disney adaptations), this paper argues that the erasure of disgust from fairy tales overlooks the powerful and meaningful role that disgust has historically played in storytelling.