As part of my study of the Greek language, my mother-in-law is having me read and memorize the famous Little Red Riding Hood in Greek. When we started going over it the other day, my mother-in-law exclaimed "you know, I don't know what kind of fairy tale this is. It is horrible. What kind of mother would send her small child out in the woods with a wolf? I loved the story as a child, but as I grew, I started to realize how terrible it is."
I had to laugh, and she did too. I, of course, had never thought about it that way. But it is rather questionable now, isn't it?
6 comments:
I never liked fairy tales either. When I was little, I thought they were gruesome and I had nightmares. When I had my son and started to read him some of the "classics", I noticed that most of the evil characters were women. Cinderella, Hansel & Gretel, Snow White etc. The witches were always women and the stepmothers were always horrid. The fathers were usually portrayed as victims of women's cruelty or completely unaware. Thank God fairy tales were saved Shrek, Nemo and The Incredibles.
Yeah, like the father in Hansel and Gretel. He dumped his kids numerous times on the request of his new wife. That's because they kept finding their way home. Then after their traumatic experience with the witch. They go home and all's OK because the stepmother has left and it's only the father.
Well I'm sorry but county services need to be informed! He's not fit to have kids!
ooooooh this is one of my favorite topics! :) I wrote a long post on this over a year ago, analyzing gory fairy tales from Germany & Austria (most of these tales are originally from around here): http://stitchdiaries.blogspot.com/2004/06/gory-fairy-tales.html and then I got so engrossed in the topic I did the same for gory lullabies (German and Spanish ones): http://stitchdiaries.blogspot.com/2004/06/gory-lullabies.html
What's up with all this torture, killing, maiming, cutting off of body parts in children's literature? I think we have to keep in mind that those stories are really REALLY old, possibly medieval, passed on for centuries orally before they were collected and written down by the Grimm brothers. At those times like in the 16th century and earlier, it could have been life threatening indeed to wander off into the forest alone (not only because of wolves, crime was a huge problem as well). Hence the moral core of each fairy tale which they try to get across in a gory/scary way: "If you walk off alone into the forest, the wolf's gonna eat you. So never, ever, EVER walk into the forest alone!" Kind of simplistic but well, maybe it worked.
It's really interesting to see how modern adaptations have tried to modify some of the violence. I have a copy of Little Red Riding hood in which the poor wolf never even gets to nibble at grandma. Grandma scrambles up a closet and hides there. The father never kills the wolf but just "gets him". Hehe. I grew up with the gory versions but for my own kids the new ones will do just fine. It is also interesting that my daughter doesn't seem to mind all the violence, either (neither did I when I was young). I suppose children will differ in this respect.
ugh this html stuff ...
I try to post the links again:
gory lullabies
gory fairytales
Hänsel & Gretel has an interesting sociohistorical core as well - the whole notion of witchcraft, which was big in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. And the central topic of poverty. Which was a huge, HUGE problem back then. Nowadays we cannot imagine a poverty so stark that we'd send out our kids into the forest because we can no longer feed them. But I think back then this was not uncommon. This probably used to happen more often than we think (maybe this STILL happens in certain parts of this world only we just don't care to know about this ...) ?
OK I'll stop now! Sorry for monopolizing this topic! As I said, fairy tales are a passion of mine! ;)
Fairy tales are quite interesting - although I haven't always given them much thought. The basics of most fairy tales (the innocent princess, the handsome prince who rescues her, the evil stepmother, witch, dragon, etc.) seem to have their basis in the majority of medieval literature, specifically Arthurian Romance - which is chock full of tales of women in distress and knights saving them. The women as evil theme probably comes from the host of evil characters in medieval lore - the "bad" witches and the like. Regular men in these stories (ie. men who were not knights) often "fell" to these women.
Obviously, a big part of the basis of fairy tales is the mindset of the time period, along with highlighting things that were especially feared (the unknown and dark forest - which was often associated with Satan, which carries over to America with the Puritans). So I guess they seem wrong to people today, but back then, this type of world was very real to them.
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