Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.
You all still don't understand? You believe that children must be put in ivory towers till they are 18 years old; then, we release them into the jungle, to be eaten by the tigers. A quarter of mothers now reject some classic fairy tales. I am shocked at this revelation I decided to dig deep into this theory. Here are the arguments:
1. Favorites such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Cinderella and Rapunzel are being dropped by some families who fear children are being emotionally damaged.
2. A third of parents refused to read Little Red Riding Hood because she walks through woods alone and finds her grandmother eaten by a wolf.
3. One in 10 said Snow White should be re-named because "the dwarf reference is not appreciated".
4. Most parents believe that they have given Hansel and Gretel a miss because the children were abandoned in a forest - and it may unnecessarily make their kids insecure. Also quite a few parents did not like to read The Gingerbread Man as he gets cheated and eaten by a fox.
5. Another very relevant criticism of fairy tales is that these stories impart the message that unattractive people are evil. Further, most protagonists of the fairy tales are damsels in distress with them, not having a mother who loves and cares for them, but in most cases these girls have a stepmother who is cruel, crafty and evil to say the least.
Remember that fairy tales are most often told by and to girls and women, this means that they will be most often maternal and female based conflicts. Further it is important to remember that no matter who was hearing the story such stories where most often told by adults, they then are not the stories children need to hear but the stories adults want children to hear. Parents rarely tell children stories to help them with their sexual longings, at least not in so obscure a way as many people seem to think they have. Certainly in the Twelve Dancing Princesses the story likely had such elements in them, it was after all about girls sneaking out at night to dance with boys. Such a story is much more blatant in its plot line however, and it involves no witches no major defeated opponents.
Think now of Cinderella and other wicked stepmother stories (keep in mind when examining the wicked step mother motif that Hansel and Gretel, and Snow White had the original villains as their actual mother, the Grimm's changed this in order to make the stories more acceptable). In many of these stories the young girl is successful because of the faith in their first mother’s words, their hard work and continued kindness and compassion. Of further importance is likely the punishment of the wicked step mother, in a time when stepmothers where common as women died young one of the primary cultural mores was that women should make good stepmothers. It would have been the fear of every women that when they died, their children should end up with a wicked stepmother, someone who cared little for their child, so the moral of these stories may have been that the stepmothers success and happiness might rest with the step daughter and failing to realize this could lead to punishment. There are likely many other meanings to such tales, but the repeated stepmother theme are likely due to the fear that one’s child would end up with an evil stepmother should the real mother die.
Also, the actual versions of the fairy tales are a lot bloodier and disturbing than you can ever imagine. Here’s an excerpt from the original Cinderella:
The nasty step-sisters cut off parts of their own feet in order to fit them into the glass slipper — hoping to fool the prince. The prince is alerted to the trickery by two pigeons who peck out the step sister’s eyes. They end up spending the rest of their lives as blind beggars while Cinderella gets to lounge about in luxury at the prince’s castle.
And here’s an excerpt from The Little Mermaid. The way Hans Christian Andersen wrote it:
The mermaid sees the Prince marry a princess and she despairs. She is offered a knife with which to stab the prince to death, but rather than do that she jumps into the sea and dies by turning to froth. Hans Christian Andersen later rewrote the ending slightly to make it read a little more pleasant. In his new ending, instead of dying when turned to froth, she becomes a “daughter of the air” waiting to go to heaven, which again means that she is dead.
In the over feminization of our culture - that is, letting women take the reins about how things should work - we've really squelched a lot of archetypal challenges/risks/rites of passage by which children learn and grow. I've spoken here at length about the problem of mothers not letting their boys be boys, instead trying to control their natural desires to move and make noise and explore and conquer. In so many areas, the male influence on the upbringing of children seems to have been completely suppressed as the mother puts control and safety first. In so many ways, women's tendency to overprotect - which has become dominant - is preventing today's children from reaching their potential.
Even when it comes to literature, top 10 fairy tales we no longer read:
1. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
2. Hansel and Gretel
3. Cinderella
4. Little Red Riding Hood
5. The Gingerbread Man
6. Jack and the Beanstalk
7. Sleeping Beauty
8. Beauty and the Beast
9. Goldilocks and the Three Bears
10. The Emperor's New Clothes
What is sad about well-intentioned parents filtering out traditional fairy tales (and I don't mean the Disney versions) is that they are eliminating an important traditional resource in the child's psychological development.
The prevalent parental belief is that a child must be diverted from what troubles him most: his formless, nameless anxieties. Many parents believe that only conscious reality or pleasant wish-fulfilling images should be presented to the child - that he should be exposed only to the sunny side of things. But such one-sided fare nourishes the mind only in a one-sided way, and real life is not all sunny.
Here is exactly the message that fairy tales get across to the child in manifold form: that a struggle against severe difficulties in life is unavoidable, is an intrinsic part of human existence- but that if one does not shy away, but steadfastly meets unexpected and often unjust hardships, one masters all obstacles and at the end emerges victorious.
Modern stories written for young children mainly avoid these existential problems, although they are crucial issues for all of us. The child needs most particularly to be given suggestions in symbolic form about how he may deal with these issues and grow safely into maturity.
It is characteristic of fairy tales to state an existential dilemma briefly and pointedly. This permits the child to come to grips with the problem in its most essential form, where a more complex plot would confuse matters for him. The fairy tale simplifies all situations. The figures are clearly drawn; and details, unless very important, are eliminated. All characters are typical rather than unique.
Contrary to what takes place in many modern children's stories, in fairy tales evil is as omnipresent as virtue. In practically every fairy tale good and evil are given body in the form of some figures and their actions, as good and evil are omnipresent in life and the propensities for bother are present in every man. It is this duality which poses the moral problem, and requires the struggle to solve it.
The figures in fairy tales are not ambivalent - not good and bad at the same time, as we are in reality. A person is either good or bad, nothing in between. One brother is stupid, the other clever. One sister is virtuous and industrious; the others are vile and lazy. One is beautiful, the others are ugly. One parent is good, the other evil...Presenting the polarities of character permits the child to comprehend easily the difference between the two, which he could not do as readily were the figures drawn more true to life, with all the complexities that characterize real people.
When you don't give children these stereotypes, you don't give them a moral code on which to develop their own lives. Fairy tales help to teach children an understanding of right and wrong, not through direct teaching, but through implication...
No comments:
Post a Comment