“The Thousand Skins”, one of the fairy tales collected by Grimm Brothers portrays the fact of an incestuous marriage within a royal family. In the story, a king proposes to his own daughter. In spite of oppositions, the king makes his own daughter as the new queen. His former queen left a will before she died, which said the king had to remarry a woman more beautiful than she was, and whose hair had to be blonde. The king followed his wife's will, and found that his own daughter was the best woman for him to remarry. The former queen's will symbolically expressed the need of sustaining the orthodox royal family structure and more prosperity of the kingdom. It was their own daughter who had proper status, fortune, and welfare
In the 19th century, people did not accept such story of a king marrying his own daughter as a fairy tale. “The Thousand Skins” was revised by the Grimm Brothers in the 19th century, because of the obvious expression of the “incest taboo”, since the king married his own daughter. The revised story has the king's daughter rejecting her father's proposal, and marrying another king. In the revised version, marriage between the king and his daughter had been eliminated completely. However, the revision made the story lose its true meaning.
Incestuous marriage in “The Thousand Skins” has a great significance: Incestuous marriage has been prohibited, since it believed to be unhealthy for genetic makeup. But the recent eugenic study reports that the percentage of disabled offspring produced by incestuous marriages is quite low. Hence, there is a theory that suggests humans tend to lose sexual interest in those they nurtured. It means humans recognize their relatives by social interactions, not by biological fact. This theory was presented. by Westermarck in 1891, and had been ignored until Wolf presented his research about infancy marriage among Taiwanese tribes and children brought up in Kibbutz. Wolf employed the Westermarck's theory that introduces the new dimension to view the idea of “incest” itself, and made the Westermarck's theory come to life again.
“The Thousand Skins” originally tells the story of incestuous marriage among the members of royal families until the modern age. In an aristocratic family, the father does not raise his child. Therefore there is no socially constructed relationship between father and child, and there is no reason to avoid sexual relationship, because they have no such relation as father and daughter.
However, the notion against the “incest taboo” led the Grimm Brothers to rewrite the story and present the new concept of marriage, which is “marriage for love”. This concept demonstrates that for people to marry they do not need any status nor fortune but only need love. But marriage for love was not socially recognized until the 19th century. To change the concept of marriage, the Grimm Brothers found a way of emphasizing the beauty of women. “The Thousand Skins” is the best example that displays the conceptual change of marriage during the 19th century, and reveals the fact of incestuous marriage.
Women living in this modern world make a great effort to look physically better in order to reach a marriage for love. They strive to go on a diet because they believe that if they are beautiful, they will have truly happy marriages. Are they victims of the Grimm Brothers?

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