In Defense of Real Fairy Tales
From The Wall Street Journal Speakeasy blog:
An email arrived in my inbox recently. I was in the midst of planning a visit to a rural elementary school to share “A Tale Dark and Grimm,” my adaptation of Grimm’s fairy tales. The email arrested my planning:
“I am afraid I have bad news. My colleagues and I are afraid we will not have administrative support should a parent challenge your wonderful book… As you might guess, this is a very conservative community and while we have your book on our shelves and can stand by it 100%, we are fearful that asking some of our teachers to read it aloud will be met with resistance… I feel like I am not defending the First Amendment by declining to have you visit … but this is not the year to borrow trouble.”
Scared off by fairy tales? Indeed.
. . . .
While adults wring their hands over whether children should be exposed to the real Grimm, young people themselves have no such ambivalence. In my visits to schools I have witnessed the introduction of Grimm tales to thousands of children—elementary students in urban London, middle schoolers in rural Texas, high school students in suburban Baltimore—and the reaction is always the same: enthusiasm that borders on ecstasy.
. . . .
Why, contrary to adults’ expectations and apprehensions, are fairy tales so perfectly appropriate for these children?
There are a few answers.
The first is the simplest. The real Grimm fairy tales enthrall children because they are bloody. Kids, boys and girls alike, love bloody stuff. Horror is among the best selling genres for children. Violence, from “Tom and Jerry” to “GI Joe,” has always sold well. The children I meet literally cannot believe that Cinderella’s step-sisters dismember themselves to get the slipper to fit. And they really cannot believe that adults have been peddling the sweet, anodyne version of the story all this time, when there was another version that was so much cooler.
. . . .
In fairy tales, as in dreams, we are every character. Cinderella is so enduringly popular not because of her clearly delineated character traits, but because every child has felt neglected or belittled. She is not a character you would recognize on the street, or want to have a play-date with, like Huckleberry Finn. Details are scarce and carefully chosen. We may hear about the color of Cinderella’s gowns, but we will never hear about the color of her eyes. Cinderella is an empty box that the child puts himself in.
. . . .
In most fairy tales, the great wide world takes the form of a forest. Bruno Bettelheim, the great psychoanalytic interpreter of fairy tales, explains, “Since ancient times the near-impenetrable forest in which we get lost has symbolized the dark, hidden, near-impenetrable world of our unconscious.” Forests are where our fears turn into wolves, our desires into candy houses, where our fathers turn us loose to fend for ourselves, where the emotional problems we face at home are physicalized, externalized, and ultimately conquered. Where tears are transformed into blood.
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I love fairy tales and apart of my love for them is their darkness. Most of my writing is dark so that’s what I’m attracted to. Some of Grimm’s tales weren’t that dark. I would like to do a Sleeping Beauty story. Some of the old folklore around that story is dark.
To begin with, most children are blood-thirsty, gruesome little things. Their capacity for revenge and slaughter is greater than we’re willing to recognize. And so I don’t think most of these tales would bother the majority of children to the extent adults think they would. Secondly, these stories are empowering for the reader–they present a seemingly insurmountable problem, one cast upon them by cruel personages or cruel fate, but with pluck and courage and cleverness, and sometimes the beneficent help of an “other”, the hero/heroine solves the problem. That’s an empowering message. And they have a happy ending–a message that perseverance has a reward; that the wicked are punished and the just are rewarded. In the ‘true’ old Grimm tales, the reward wasn’t “Disney-fied”–a castle and love and money–but there was still a reward.
Who wouldn’t want their children to learn these lessons?
Some of the original tales had no happy endings, though — Little Red Riding Hood didn’t get the woodcutter originally, if I recall correctly, and then there’s the baffling tale of the Sausage, the Bird, and the Mouse…
http://www.erstwhiletales.com/bms-00/ — they do others, but that’s the odd one I’m thinking of.
I don’t mean a happy ending as in finding “twue luv”, I mean happy as in overcoming an adversity–winning against evil. That’s a message I think is right for kids, who so often feel powerless against things bigger than they are. They can learn that it helps to have an ally–a brother helping you through the forest, a woodcutter, a fairy godmother. That you don’t have to go it alone. But also that wit can overcome braun, that a house of brick is better than a house of straw, that friends can give you shelter and help. That things aren’t always what they seem (a wicked witch with a beautiful face or house of candy), but sometimes ugly can hide good (Beauty and the Beast), so never take things at surface value. Those are great life lessons.
I used to hate the Little Mermaid (the non-Disney version) because she doesn’t get the handsome prince in the end, but I rather like that her unrequited love is rewarded with a chance at an eternal soul (and I loathed the stupid prince!)
The Little Mermaid isn’t one of the Grimms’ fairy tale, but one of Hans Christian Andersen’s who had a tendency to write really depressing fairy tales (don’t get me started on The Little Match Girl). There’s also a difference between Andersen and others along the same line like Wilhelm Hauff (who isn’t all that well known outside Germany) and the Grimms, because the Grimms collected folktales, while Andersen and Hauff wrote new fairy tales.
Beauty and the Beast isn’t Grimm either, but one of Charles Perrault’s, though there is some overlap between the Grimm and Perrault tales, because French fairy tales got into Germany with the Hugenot refugees (and some of the young women who told the tales to the Grimms were from Hugenot families) and later via Napoleon and his troops.
Otherwise I completely agree with you. I grew up with the original Grimm and Andersen tales and literally had them read to me as bedtime stories. And it certainly didn’t hurt me. There have been some attempts by educational reformers in the 1960s and 1970s to eliminate fairytales as “too gruesome”, but they never caught on in Germany, because the Grimm tales are part of our national heritage. I grew up in the location of one of the tales and have visited the supposed actual locations of many other tales. Even spent a night in Sleeping Beauty’s castle (which is a hotel these days) at one point.
The Disney versions were just one of the many interpretations for me. When I asked my parents why a lot of the scary stuff was missing from the Disney versions, i was told that the reason was that American kids are easily frightened. I guess it’s rather the parents who are easily scared. Besides, I always preferred the Czech film adaptions anyway. Now the Czechs know how to do fairytale movies.
For gruesome fairytales, how about The Juniper Tree. Now that one is probably the most gruesome of the Grimms’ tales. Interestingly, the “original” version included in the Grimm collection is in Lower German, which is kind of difficult for children to read and understand, even if you come from the area where Lower German is spoken, like me.
Little otik. Forget where the film is from but it might be Czech. Great modern-set version of what feels like an old fairy tale although not one I knew….
The tales are actually not Grimms’ or Perrault’s. They belong to the people who told them in the cultural perspective of their times, in their actual lives of war and strife and weddings and funerals and huge infant
death rates. The tales were taken by ‘collectors’ and they did not given credit, except a couple names of tellers left in Grimm’s later notes. The stories often belonged to the tribal and indigenous tribes of their times, often called by the better off, ‘peasants.’ The versions of fairytales of the people in their various christianized versions by the Grimm brothers in particular, and so forth, are without their true roots. The tales make far more sense when one knows the times, the cultures, and the original tellers.
The Bird tale is a gruesome one indeed and nobody makes it out alive! I’m guessing the moral is that the grass ISN’T greener on the other side, and each person’s work has value and hidden hardships that another person might not see. Hadn’t seen that one before. Thanks for pointing it out!
*nod* Some folktales aren’t uplifting — they’re morality stories/horror stories, akin to, “If you go make out in the woods, the Horror Movie Monster will Kill You First.” (Or, “don’t send the sausage to gather wood; something will eat it.”)
Folk tales/fairy tales are a real mixed bag. (Ursula Vernon, on her blog, has been known to do running commentaries when reading some of the odder ones.)
This.
One thing I always try to keep in mind when I think of children was my experience of reading Ender’s Game at 10. That book shows children as vengeful, hurtful, scheming, manipulative…and also loving and kind and courageous. But I felt like, at the time, it was the truest depiction of children in a book that I had ever read. Too many people, looking back on childhood, either forget what it was really like or think they can make it not like that for their children by taking out the references to bad things. IMO all that does is postpone children’s ability to deal with adversity and recognize bad things and bad people for what they are.
This is why I love and write fairy tales. Excellent article.
As a child, I disliked the Grimm fairy tales. Can I be the only child who found them cruel and alien with few characters I could relate to?
You weren’t the only one.
I was definitely *not* in the liking horror camp!
P.S. I clicked over and read the full article and it was really interesting! The tone set at the front of the article changed quite a bit toward the middle.
There are still somethings I would disagree with. (Like just because he never heard from upset parents didn’t mean there were any. I once read “Dragon Slayer’s Academy to my daughter’s second grade class and one little boy couldn’t stand to hear the full showdown – and this was a book where they “killed” the dragon by telling bad jokes!) But I do think he makes some interesting points. And yes, regardless, the real fairy tales gave me nightmares when I was young – I have a really vivid imagination.
E.S., when my daughter was young she got a book out of the school library that gave her nightmares. It was a story about children who didn’t go to sleep having their eyelids cut off by some weird man. I read it and found it repulsive and disturbing and put it in the bin so it wouldn’t traumatize any more children – I thought if I merely complained it would end back on the shelves.
Oh, yuck! That definitely would have disturbed me. I probably would have discussed it with the librarian, but I can certainly understand your reaction.
I try to have an on-going discussion with my kids’ teachers about different books that are assigned that they like and dislike and why. My thinking is that if it is bothering my kids, there are other kids too who are bothered who are scared to speak up. Different readers have different likes, and I think the most important thing is that people putting books in the hands of kids know and acknowledge things that might be difficult for different kids and take that into consideration.
I was exposed to Grimm early enough that I dislike Disneyfied fairy tales to this day.
Grimm’s Fairy Tales was primarily a folklore collection for adults. Like with murder ballads, kids just enjoyed getting to listen in.
Well, maybe it’s just me who enjoyed the murder ballads.
When I was really young, I felt a lot more like Lexi, especially since the book in our house was a huge heavy hardback and was colored a sinister sage green. But after I was old enough to read Lord of the Rings without being turned back by the Rider, I was able to read the fairy tale books without being scared of them.
I grew up reading Andrew Lang’s collections of Fairy Tales (the colored books) and many of the Grimm tales were in there. I loved them!
That’s why I write YA urban fantasy now, with amoral faeries that live by a different code. It’s all the fairy tales fault! Well, those and the MMOs I played, later on…
I think whether or not a certain type of fairy tale is good for kids depends entirely on the kid. Why do people always lump kids all together as if they don’t have their own personalities and their own likes and dislikes? Only the parent can really know if their child is going to be ok with a particular telling of a tale.
My children are all very different. We watch a lot of Japanese animation in our house and one of the movies we like, Spirited Away, has lots of Japanese spirits that can be a bit freaky. But one of my daughters is funny. She’s fine with the monster “No Face” who eats people and grows into a huge black blob with gaping maw, but she CANNOT stand it when the little girl’s parents get turned into pigs. She always runs away during that part.
My other daughter grew up on animes full of fighting and demons and walking dead (or Salambies, as she called them) but for some reason she’s utterly terrified of the banshee in the old movie Darby O’Gill and the Little People, even though it’s the most fake looking FX ever.
I remember being scared to death of the tunnel scene in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory even though all it is is flashing lights, strange pictures and Gene Wilder’s creepy voice.
Just like adults, kids are afraid of different things depending on their personalities. And some kids are afraid of dark fairy tales and rightly so.
I grew up on a mix of the bowdlerized (“Disneyfied”) versions of the tales and the real thing I got from the books I checked out. So I knew growing up that there were differences. I can’t remember preferring one to the other, except that having images affixed to the storybook tales was a plus for me (I learn visually).
Imagine my horror when my girls were old enough to listen to us reading the original tales to them–and they said, “But Mom (or Dad, who read to them as much as I did), that’s not the REAL version! Where’s the teapot who’s really the housekeeper?”
I realized what a disservice Disney & Co. had done to my kids. They assumed there was one real version, and that was the watered down, nutrition-free pablum they saw on the videotapes.
And yes, what they prefer depends on the individual child. Any statement that begins “children like” is inherently false. However, I tremble for these schoolchildren who are getting an untrue message. They’re prohibited from reading any but gentle, sanitized books, yet what do they get in the cinema and on TV? Sheesh.
Grimm’s fairytales were even controversial and thought not to be appropriate for children when they were released in the 1700s.
I’m afraid I disagree with the article. I think kids may like alot of things, including grisly fairytales, but that doesn’t mean those things are good for them.
Kids don’t have the psychological defense structure to screen things out. Stuff gets absorbed into their psyches. In addition, they don’t communicate as well, nor are they always in touch with themselves, so they may not even know what is or is not bothering them.
I think that what kids need most is: wholesome. Good for them. We are building brains and psyches. Just like you need vitamins and nutrients to build strong bones, you need good wholesome building blocks to build a healthy neurological system and internal psychological structure. That means you do not expose children to horror, to excessive violence and to age-inappropriate practices, including sexuality.
Some people say that exposing children to these things will help them deal with the reality of the world. I believe this is wrong. I believe what helps children deal well with the reality of the world is an internalized sense of safety.
I agree with what you’re saying, but I don’t think fairy tales and good, wholesome literature have to be mutually exclusive. Some fairy tales are a lot darker than others.
For some children, speaking from experience, the stories and fairy tales are exactly what gives them a sense of safety when the world around them isn’t safe. Fairy tales can serve as portals to somewhere emotionally safe, and they can act as maps (a lot of them do contain good moral lessons and make a point of the good usually winning over the evil) when they don’t have good maps to model themselves after.
That said, I think it’s important for fairy tales to be introduced in thoughtful ways. Not all kids are the same, just as not all fairy tales are the same. Too much gore, violence, and sex is being pushed at kids as it is, so there are some fairy tales I don’t mind that are sanitized. (Sleeping Beauty is a really good example of one where I prefer the Disney version.
)
“Kids may like a lot of things, including grisly fairy tales…”
This reminded me of friends who let their 4-year-olds watch Jurassic Park and said they loved it. But when the kids spent the night with us they were scared of the dark. When we asked them what they were scared of, their answer? Dinosaurs! But I don’t think those kids were permanently scarred. They still seem well adjusted. But we still didn’t show the movie to *our* 4-year-old.
And I too worry about the development of kids’ psyches. I wish I could remember the study I read about the high rate of teen depression and suicide and how teens are prone to it because of the developing structure of the adolescent brain. It makes me wonder whey they assign so many depressing books as required high school reading!
Even so, I think Danyelle has a point that the most important thing is that different types of literature are introduced in thoughtful ways. I think more open discussions between teachers and educators about the books that kids are exposed to at school would be really helpful so that the pros and cons of different books being required can be weighed. (I think there is a difference between required reading, available reading, and reading that’s available if you want to go get it.)
I read the original versions as a child and found them disturbing and unsatisfying from a storytelling perspective (the protagonists of the story often came to a bad end for no reason I could discern). One set was more disturbing than the other. I think it might have been the Grimm’s that were actually lighter in tone than the Hans Christian Anderson? Not sure. But one set was so disturbing that there were only a few tales I would willingly reread. I wouldn’t say they scarred me for life! They were just, in my opinion, bad stories. I read voraciously at that age and gravitated to stories I liked better.