To understand this evolution, it is necessary to understand the milieu in which it took place. In the 1700s children were not perceived as needing protection from portrayals of violence primarily because life was harsh and most children died during infancy or childhood. Violence and death in children's stories of the 1700s take on a different light when viewed in the context of high infant and child mortality and the increasing, universal practice of abandoning unwanted children at the local foundling hospital or on church steps. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, children were routinely required to attend public executions to witness the cost of criminal behavior. The romanticized depiction of an afterlife, superior to the life of this world, served to help children cope with the brutal facts of their lives.
Given these realities, children's literature was motivated by a belief that children needed written material to educate them and prepare them for life. The majority of books published for children through the 1800s can be compared to James Janeway's A Token for Children: Being an Account of the Conversion, Holy and Exemplary Lives, and Joyful Deaths of Several Young Children (Parts 1 and 2, 1671–1672). Writers of this era commonly agreed with Janeway's position that they held a sacred duty to salvage the souls of those who were not too young to go to hell. The exemplary stories in A Token for Children were also designed to provide
Like many of Grimms' fairy tales, Hansel and Grethel (1823) provides a vivid description of violence not only toward the characters' antagonist, but children as well.
BETTMANN/CORBIS
comfort to children facing the tragedy of a sibling's death or confronting their own mortality when visited by some dreaded disease.
Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm's Cinderella stressed punishment more than earlier oral versions. In the first version (1697), taken by Perrault from the oral tradition, Cinderella forgave her step-sisters for mistreating her and introduced them at court. The Grimms' first version (1815) has Cinderella's sisters turning pale and being horrified when she becomes a princess, while in the second edition sisters' punishment is to be blinded by pigeons pecking out their eyes.
In the Grimms' Hansel and Grethel (1823), there is a description of how horribly the witch howled when Grethel pushed her into the oven and how ". Grethel ran away leaving the witch to burn, just as she had left many poor little children to burn" (Owens 1981, p. 57). The use of violence as punishment is typical in fairy tales, even for minor misdeeds. This tendency is evident in the stories found in Struwwelpeter. In these tales, Little Pauline plays with matches and goes up in flames, and Conrad the Thumbsucker has his thumbs sliced off. Maria Tatar observes that "the weight is given to the punishment (often fully half the text is devoted to its description) and the disproportionate relationship between the childish offense and the penalty for it make the episode disturbing" (Tatar 1992, p. 34).
The removal of sexuality from children's fairy tales paralleled the evolution of housing in Europe. By the seventeenth century, living arrangements had evolved to provide segregation between quarters for working, food preparation, and sleeping. Usually there was a main room used for dining, entertaining, and receiving visitors, but servants and children began to have their own smaller, adjacent rooms. During this same century fairy tales began to transform into works intended primarily for children. The transformation of living spaces parallels the changes that greatly impacted children, including attitudes regarding teaching proper behavior and attitudes toward dying and death.
The obvious changes over time in one fairy tale— Little Red Riding Hood —parallel the changes in attitudes toward death, children, and their education. The earliest known oral version from Brittany would not be considered suitable children's entertainment in the twenty-first century. In this early version, Little Red Riding Hood is unwittingly led by the wolf to eat her grandmother's flesh, to drink her blood, and to perform a provocative striptease for the disguised wolf before climbing into bed with him. She escapes from the wolf when she goes outside to relieve herself. Because its primary purpose was to entertain adults, the story was not encumbered with the admonitions and advice that later came to distinguish versions intended for children.
The earliest written version of Little Red Riding Hood was in French, in 1697, by Charles Perrault. In this version, the grandmother and Little Red Riding Hood are eaten by the wolf and perish. Although Perrault did not have Little Red's mother warning her before leaving for her grandmother's house, he did conclude the story with a moral suitable for the intended children's audience: Do not speak to strangers or you, too, may provide a wolf with his dinner. The death in this story is later moderated in the Grimms' retelling. They introduce an additional character, a hunter or woodcutter, who slices the wolf open and releases the victims alive.
In a popular nineteenth-century retelling of Little Red's tale, the grandmother is eaten by the wolf, but Little Red survives, learning to pay closer attention to her mother's words: "For she saw the dreadful end to which / A disobedient act may lead" (Tatar 1992, p. 39). Another version emphasizes avoiding needless suffering. Here is the depiction of the wolf killing the grandmother: "[The Wolf] jumped up on the bed, and ate her all up. But he did not hurt her so much as you would think, and as she was a very good old woman it was better for her to die than to live in pain; but still it was very dreadful of the wolf to eat her" (1933, p. 20).
In later versions of Little Red Riding Hood the hunter arrives in time to shoot the wolf before he eats either Little Red or her grandmother, or the wolf escapes through an open window or becomes Little Red's pet. The moral, or message, of the story also evolves with the transformation of events. In the traditional, oral version Little Red was not warned by her mother of the dangers of talking to strangers, and cannot be seen as naughty or disobedient. In Perrault's original written version, the mother does not give Little Red any cautions, while in later versions she often gives Little Red many instructions and admonitions. Upon rescuing Little Red from the dire misfortune she brings upon herself, the hunter/woodcutter inevitably lectures her on obedience and on what can happen if she disregards her mother's warnings. The role of death in the changing tale diminishes as the tale evolves. Rather than being the graphic and unmourned event Perrault depicted, it becomes muted and is eventually relegated to the periphery of the readers' attention or disappears entirely.
Fairy tales do not always hold the promise of a happy ending. For example, Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid (1846) has been distorted over time. In the original version the Little Mermaid chooses death for herself rather than murdering the Prince, and thus leave her form as a mermaid. The Little Mermaid would only regain her form as a mermaid if she murdered the prince. She does not do this and so she dies and becomes a daughter of the air. After 300 years of good deeds she then can gain a human soul and enter heaven and join the prince there. The very morning that the Little Mermaid sacrifices herself and spares the Prince, he marries a princess from another land whom he mistakenly believes rescued him. Only in Disney's bowdlerized version does the Little Mermaid manage to displace the "other woman" and marry the Prince, an alteration partly justified by casting the other princess as the evil sea-witch in disguise.
The classic fairy tale Bluebeard (1729) also presents a problematic ending. In this tale, one of three sisters marries a wealthy but mysterious man, distinguished primarily by his blue beard. After the wedding she is given access to all of Bluebeard's possessions, but is forbidden to use one small golden key. She inevitably uses the key, and discovers the bloody bodies of Bluebeard's previous wives. Upon discovering his wife's transgression, Bluebeard prepares to add her to his collection. At the last moment, her brothers suddenly appear and save her by hacking Bluebeard to pieces before her eyes. Although the latest wife did not meet the fate of her predecessors, is it really a happy ending to have her brothers murder her husband? Her disobedience is a necessary part of the story, yet there is no clear resolution of her dilemma. The fast and easy way to conclude a fairy tale is to recite, "and they lived happily ever after," yet a close look shows that many fairy tales do not have a "perfect" ending.
When fairy tales existed solely as oral tradition, storytellers could personalize their version to suit the time, place, and audience. As stories were printed, they began to reflect more enduringly the nature of the time and place in which they were recorded. Thus it seems odd that parents continue to read to their children—often without the slightest degree of critical reflection—unrevised versions of stories imbued with values of a different time and place. L. Frank Baum, the originator of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), recognized this predicament and recommended that it was time for a new set of "wonder tales"; he suggested that previous fairy tales be classed as "historical" (Tatar 1992, p. 19). Indeed, denoting traditional fairy tales as "historical" would help distinguish the changes that have occurred in the years since they were recorded. It would also encourage parents and teachers to critically examine the material available to children.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.