Modern Themes

There is a growing perception that children are capable of understanding dying and death as natural processes, and that over time they assimilate a number of such experiences. Since the 1970s adults have begun to recognize the difficulties they experienced as a result of being sheltered from awareness of death and have begun to seek ways to allow children to become aware of the reality of dying and death. Since the mid-1970s hospice programs have enabled several million dying persons to receive care in their homes. As a result, some children have been exposed to meaningful death experiences. Increased awareness of the lethality of AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome) also makes it important that even the tales told to children reflect current perceptions of dying and death.

Scholars maintain it is important to consider the implications of fairy tales in modern times. Perhaps it is time to begin transforming them to reflect the tremendous changes that have occurred in a world increasingly forced to accept the limits of medical technology, with death again being acknowledged as a necessary and inevitable counterpart to life.

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, taught children that the world is not a safe place. The New York Times best-seller list for September 30 revealed that the new Lemony Snicket book, The Hostile Hospital, outsold any of the Harry Potter titles that week. Also that week there were four Snicket books and four Harry Potter titles in the Top 10. The Lemony Snicket books are an eight-book series dubbed "A Series of Unfortunate Events." The series tells the story of the Baudelaire orphans, good children to whom bad things happen. In the first book Mr. Poe, a family friend, comes to the beach to tell the children that their parents have died in a fire, and their mansion is destroyed. The narrator cautions that everything to come is rife with misfortune, misery, and despair. Children who are protected by parents from awful truth instinctively know the world is not an absolutely safe place and one way of releasing the tension is to read about someone who is much worse off than they are. Each time the Baudelaire children find a satisfactory situation, something goes wrong. Count Olaf, a distant cousin who takes them in first, is interested only in their money. Kindly Uncle Monty, with whom they next reside, is murdered. Aunt Josephine throws herself out of a window, or at least that is the way it appears. In spite of all the terrible things that happen to the three children, they manage to survive.