In this criticism of the Brothers Grimm, Maria Tatar delves into the reasons why Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm chose to accentuate violence and remove sexual content in their compilations. This criticism clues readers into the reason that fairy tales are viewed the way they are today—as children’s tales that have always been devoid of impure, sexually explicit ideas. Tatar begins by claiming that the fairy tales in Nursery and Household Tales were already violent before Jacob and Wilhelm altered them. However, they became even more violent when the brothers added explicit detail to certain scenes. These portions of the tales were originally left for the reader to imagine what violent acts occurred during them. In addition, Tatar acknowledges that the brothers removed all sexual connotations dealing with premarital sex, with premarital pregnancy seeming to be the most avoided. She then asserts that money problems were the root of this evasion of sexual content and all other changes that the brothers made to the original stories. Critics wrote essays pointing out the sexual content contained in the fairy tales and claiming that it was simply not appropriate for children, and while Jacob and Wilhelm originally wanted to keep the stories as true to the originals as possible, money was tight and they began to see a financial opportunity. By changing their audience from scholars to children, the brothers were able to make the extra money they needed to purchase necessities. Tatar furthers her argument by asserting that Jacob and Wilhelm created morals for many of the fairy tales, as well as introducing judgments of characters based on their own beliefs. She claims that the diligence and hard work that characterized the heroines of many stories came to be correlated with beauty and desirability. In addition, she notes that the brothers took every opportunity they could to glorify women willing to work. She also acknowledges the many types of tales that the brothers collected. She struggles to classify them under a traditional name arguing that they cannot all be considered fairy tales. She claims that the compilation they created contained oral folk tales, literary folk tales, oral fairy tales, and literary fairy tales, ranging from natural to supernatural settings as well as from oral folklore to printed literary texts. This presents a question: Why did the Grimm Brothers compile so many different types of tales into one single collection? Lastly, Tatar asserts that the fact that we can still compare the original fairy tales to the edited versions in Nursery and Household Tales keys us in to the beliefs and mentality of the Brothers Grimm. The changes they made can be analyzed and applied to the culture they lived in, showing us which beliefs they subscribed to and which beliefs they did not. In addition, searching for hidden meaning in their version of the stories is not a useless exercise, in her opinion. She even goes so far as to say that they “invite, indeed demand interpretation” (Tatar 38).