Grim stories
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Here is one hand
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Linked in the article (9 min read)
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Lamarckism
12 min read
The article discusses Lamarck's law of use and disuse with the blacksmith's arm example as a 'phantom limb' in academic discourse. Understanding Lamarckian inheritance theory provides crucial context for the author's analysis of how bodies and labor are conceptualized in philosophical tradition.
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Canadian Indian residential school system
12 min read
The article recounts Maria Campbell hearing the Grimm story from nuns at her residential school, connecting the tale's disciplinary message to colonial violence against Indigenous peoples. This historical context illuminates how the 'willful child' narrative functioned as a tool of cultural erasure and forced assimilation.
Where do you go when you follow the words?
I was following the word willful, and I found a story, “The Willful Child.”
Once upon a time there was a child who was willful and would not do as her mother wished. For this reason, God had no pleasure in her, and let her become ill, and no doctor could do her any good, and in a short time she lay on her death-bed. When she had been lowered into her grave, and the earth was spread over her, all at once her arm came out again, and stretched upwards, and when they had put it in and spread fresh earth over it, it was all to no purpose, for the arm always came out again. Then the mother herself was obliged to go to the grave, and strike the arm with a rod, and when she had done that, it was drawn in, and then at last the child had rest beneath the ground.
It is a grim, Grimm story.
A word led me to a story. And that story led me to a body, to an arm that kept coming up, before it too was beaten down.
It is like a scene from a horror film.
Well Grimm stories, as moral fables, are horrifying. The morally wayward mostly end up dead.
Buried in a story. Or by one.
But that arm was just so full of life. Can we catch it when it is still rising?
That arm lent me a hand, helping me to notice other arms in the archives.
When I was following the word use, for instance, research that led to a book, What’s the Use, I kept noticing references to the blacksmith’s strong arm. Arms (and hands) often signified the labourer. I was reading about Lamarck’s law of use and disuse, which refers not only to how organs are strengthened by use, or weakened by disuse, but suggests that, if certain conditions are met, the effects of use are inherited as modification of form. When the blacksmith’s arm is used to exemplify Lamarck’s laws, it is implied that the sons of blacksmiths are born with stronger arms, inheriting what they need to do the work more easily.
The strong arm is not really how a work load is eased but acquired. That’s quite a load.
If the blacksmith’s strong arm
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