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Author
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Comment
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PBanzer
Unregistered User
(4/10/05 11:45 am)
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Children's perception of 'unfair' fairy tale endings
Hello,
I'm working on my thesis on children's perception of good and evil in children's literature (Fairy Tales and R.Dahl).
Often it is said that in fairy tales there's normally a clear-cut, well developed plot of good vs evil and conflict resolution of good winning over evil in the end. However, the amount of tales that break this pattern is huge. Tales like Grimm's 'The Wonderful Musician', 'The Death of the Hen', Andersen's 'The Red Shoes' or even 'The Tin Soldier' aren't really what I would call tales that satisfy children's sense of justice, are they? Tricking animals into traps, chopping off a witch's head out of greed and getting away with it... does that not slightly disturb children? Any comments on their needs for justice/ reactions to unfair endings?
Also, how do kids react with regards to some of the real nasty punishments of the evil characters? (snow white etc)
THanks for your comments!
Patricia
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Helen
J Pilinovsky
Registered User
(4/10/05 11:52 am)
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Re: Children's perception of 'unfair' fairy tale endings
Something that might be helpful for your research: _Powerful Magic: Learning from Children's Responses to Fantasy Literature_, by Nina Mikkelsen, coming out in July.
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DerekJ
Unregistered User
(4/10/05 12:15 pm)
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Re: Children's perception of 'unfair' fairy tale endings
Can't recall the source, but heard it quoted:
Think it was Chesterton who once wrote about an audience of kids
openly disappointed at the changed ending of a performance of "The
Blue Bird" where the Dog didn't get to chase the Cat
at the end, "because Adults are heartless and like peace, while
Children are good and like justice".
(And many of Andersen's stories seemed to exist in their own authored ether of Self-Allegory, so it's hard to put the "unfair" romantic-tragedies of the Little Mermaid or Steadfast Tin Soldier in with the same unattributable too-many-cooks broth as genuine folktale...)
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Veronica
Schanoes
Registered User
(4/10/05 12:35 pm)
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Re: Children's perception of 'unfair' fairy tale endings
When I was a little girl, "The Little Matchgirl" horrified
me. Well, before it horrified me, it confused me. Because I read
it, and it seemed to me that the little girl died in the
end. But I knew that couldn't be how the story really ended,
because that wasn't fair, and she was the heroine, so what kind
of ending was that? So I went to my mother and said that I didn't
understand the ending, because it kinda seemed like the little girl
died, but I knew that wasn't right. And my mother explained to me
that indeed that was what happened. And it's the first time I remember
really being disturbed by the ending of a piece of literature.
On the other hand, I loved the gore and violence. The more,
the better, as far as I was concerned. And it didn't have to be
directed toward the bad guys either. I was a bloodthirsty little
brat before I learned what violence actually meant. As long as the
good guys won in the end, I didn't mind some sadistic pleasure at
their expense.
Edited by: Veronica Schanoes at: 4/10/05 12:40 pm
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DerekJ
Unregistered User
(4/10/05 1:01 pm)
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Re: Children's perception of 'unfair' fairy tale endings
>> When I was a little girl, "The Little Matchgirl" horrified me. Well, before it horrified me, it confused me. Because I read it, and it seemed to me that the little girl died in the end. But I knew that couldn't be how the story really ended, because that wasn't fair, and she was the heroine, so what kind of ending was that?<<
Never really thought of Matchgirl as a "fairytale", even though Andersen wrote it, and it ends up included in his fairytale collections for its fantastic elements.
Seemed like one of the artistic "self-allegory" pieces, for its own sake rather the story's:
One popular theory points to Andersen's longtime friendship with Charles Dickens--
Which has caused some to suspect that "A Christmas Carol"--with
its symbolically-personified spirits dispensing allegorical observations,
and its moral-lesson Happy Ending--was Dickens' attempt to write
a Hans Christian Andersen story...While "Matchgirl", with
its social-tragedy of a poor starving waif dying in the snow, was
Andersen's attempt to write a Charles Dickens story.
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snigglefaerie
Unregistered User
(4/10/05 1:25 pm)
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punishment
I remember reading fairy tales, such as "The Juniper Tree," and being horrified when the evil step-mother slammed the chest lid on the boy's head. I didn't understand how any mother could be so cruel. Even when the boy gets back at her in the end (by dropping the millstone on her and crushing her to death), I was thoroughly disturbed and shaken. The theme of cannibalism in there was gross too.
In "The Goose-Girl," I was disconcerted by the maid's demise: to be dragged in a nail-lined barrel by a horse until she died. I never could take pleasure in anyone else's pain, even if they deserved it.
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Aer
Unregistered User
(4/10/05 1:36 pm)
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Re: Children's perception of 'unfair' fairy tale endings
I know that as soon as I learned the true story of the Little Mermaid
(I think I was around , the Disney happy version seemed pointless.
It is hard to explain without sounding either stupid or superior
(and I don't want to sound like that)... I was a very... spiritual?
pious? I don't know... a very something child, and I loved it when
fairy-tales included God, so the fact that the Little Mermaid wanted
a immortal soul appealed to me, and I didn't find the true ending
sad.
Personally I liked sacrificial gore (the youngest sister cutting off her pinkie for the key to the door in the seven ravens) I liked in that it was a sacrifice. I do remember listening to the Red Shoes, I didn't really like it, it was a morality tale (and funnily enough I never liked morality tales, even though I did like spiritual stories), but I don't think it effected me negatively or anything. I do remember dancing around the room after I heard it so I don't think I got the moral, hehe.
I never liked my fairy tales censored. I enjoyed Disney movies (still do actually), but I loved knowing the real story too, and I felt gypped if it was sanitized for me. I think that the gore can be quite important in the stories. I think the only fairy tale that gave me bad dreams was Hansel and Gretel, and even that wasn't a traumatizing bad dream, especially since it ended happily... I really think kids are very resilient and can handle it.
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AliceCEB
Registered User
(4/10/05 2:15 pm)
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Re: Children's perception of 'unfair' fairy tale endings
Since you're looking at Dahl's works as well you might find this
article posted on Lou Ander's blog interesting: www.louanders.com/2005/04/golden-tickets-to-hellwilly-wonka-tour.html,
comparing the travel into Willy Wonka's chocolate factory with Dante's
Inferno, and considering the "just desserts" of the naughty
children.
Food for thought, anyway.
Best,
Alice
Edited to add: Will you be considering Strewwelpeter (sp?) or Shock-Headed Peter as well--the deliciously awful cautionary tales where children are cruelly punished for misbehaving? On the one hand I was fascinated by the blood and guts of it as a child, but on the other, I found the punishments extreme and cruel.
Edited by: AliceCEB at: 4/10/05 2:20 pm
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Aer
Unregistered User
(4/10/05 2:45 pm)
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drat
I can't register here... so I can't edit my post but where this
little guy is it should be "around age 8" but because
I had an 8 next to a ) it made the emodicon...
I was just thinking though that this is an apt quote for this thread. It is by Andrew Lang, and it was in the introduction to one of the Fairy Books but I forget which color it was. It is one of my favorite quotes though.
"There are grown-up people now who say that [fairy tales] are not good for children, because they are not true, because there are no witches, nor talking beasts, and because people are killed in them, especially wicked giants. But probably you who read the tales know very well how much is true and how much is only make-believe, and I never yet heard of a child who killed a very tall man merely because Jack killed giants, or who was unkind to his stepmother, if he had one, because, in fairy tales, the stepmother is often disagreeable."
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evil
little pixie
Registered User
(4/10/05 3:10 pm)
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Re: drat
Actually I've heard Dickens wrote _A Christmas Carol_ for the money and based Scrooge on himself.
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avalondeb
Registered User
(4/10/05 5:32 pm)
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Re: drat
I remember when I was little that some of the ending confused and upset me.
- Jack and the Beanstalk - I was very upset that the giant dies falling from the beanstalk. I thought it was just plain wrong that Jack stole from the giant, killed the giant for trying to retrieve his property, and got away with it.
- The Red Shoes - I was very upset that the little girl gets her feet chopped off. All she wanted was pretty shoes. I didn't see how a just God could punish her so harshly for a bit of vanity.
- The Little Mermaid - It upset me that after all her sacrifice and how her feet bleed all the time, she still didn't get the prince in the end.
- Little Briar Rose (Grimm version) - It upset me that the other princes died in the thorn hedge. It wasn't their fault that it wan't "time" for her to wake up! I actually had nightmares about that one.
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aka
Greensleeves
Registered User
(4/10/05 6:01 pm)
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Re: drat
I'm glad somebody finally brought this up. I wonder if some of these tales offend our sense of justice because it's somewhat different from that of audiences 150+ years ago.
I've always found "Rumpelstiltskin" to be profoundly unfair. The greedy father and merciless king go unpunished, and the miller's daughter betrays the only character who tried to help her. For some reason we are meant to accept this, because Rumpelstiltskin is *obviously* wicked: he's physically misshapen and makes incomprehensible bargains. But I was raised in a culture where dwarfism (and/or Jewishness, if you look at it as an anti-Semitic tale) doesn't equate with evil (or it's not supposed to, anyway). So as a child I wasn't sure why he was such a bad guy. I had a sense that, darnit, that miller's daughter ought to have KNOWN better, and it's her own fault she made such a stupid agreement, and don't come crying to me about it now!
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redtriskell
Registered User
(4/10/05 10:57 pm)
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children are bloodthirsty
I may be going out on a limb here, but... I think the violence in fairy tales is appealing to kids. It's direct. It frequently happens to people who *deserve* it. Being a child is scary now- how much scarier was it 100, 150, 200 years ago? I think imaginary violence serves a very important purpose as a catharsis. Particularly for the weak. Like kids. It's comforting to think that justice, especially a blood-soaked justice, will get the bad guys in the end. Even if it takes awhile. Of course, this is only my experience. I had a vile upbringing- if anyone, ever, had come along to dispense some painful, gory punishment to my father, I would have watched avidly and without discomfort. Because he was evil and deserved whatever he got. I LOVED fairy tales for the idea that the wicked get their comeuppance ultimately. And it was usually very bad for them.
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Veronica
Schanoes
Registered User
(4/11/05 1:41 am)
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Re: children are bloodthirsty
I agree with you, redtriskell, about the importance of violence in tales for children.
I've never understood what seems to the very common sympathy with Rumplestiltskin. I like the message of the story, that some deals can't and shouldn't be enforced, and that those deals include ones made under duress (the miller's daughter was going to be executed if that straw wasn't spun into gold) and those that involve taking a mother's child away from her. I've always liked the Frog Prince for the same reason: the princess gets what she wants when she finally takes a stand--bargains that can't be enforced include the promise to sleep with someone. That's one you're always allowed to change your mind about.
Plus, man, Rumplestiltskin, if you don't want people to guess your name, don't hang around in the forest singing it.
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Jess
Unregistered User
(4/11/05 3:10 pm)
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Scary times
I think that children were much more aquainted with real death 150 years ago than now. Siblings died - frequently. Mothers and fathers died. Friends died. Now it is an exception for a Western European or North American to die young. Furthermore, human frailty was more obvious. People lost eyes, teeth and limbs from infection. People contracted diseases that crippled them. There was no plastic or corrective surgery. The net effect was that stories involving death and dismemberment were not just an abstraction. These things could and often did happen, not in some distant war-torn, third-world country, but down the street or in your own home.
Handless maidens could exist and did exist. What was that story behind the beautiful handless maiden that worked in the market? What abuses did she have to suffer. What luck prevented the listener from being in her place?
On a positive note, the change in view of the world couldn't be more obvious than in impressions of the Little Match Girl. I think the idea of dying poor and alone because you were forced out of the house was not unheard of. The idea that your death could lead to something beautiful might have been a comfort - today the story is horrifying - we can't get past the death part.
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Writerpatrick
Registered User
(4/11/05 5:28 pm)
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Re: Scary times
There's a point which I don't think has been raised: when "fairy tales" were created, they weren't all children's stories. That's why they may be upsetting to children. The Grimms rewrote many of them to make them more suitable for children. It would be the same as classifying all popular films together.
It's also important to note than "childhood" is a relatively recent invention. Hundreds of years ago when many of these stories were created, children started working as soon as they could. For the most part they were treated as young adults. And since death was much more commonplace, they wouldn't have been as easily disturbed by it.
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snigglefaerie
Unregistered User
(4/11/05 6:25 pm)
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Re: Scary Times
The tale "The Juniper Tree" was written around the time when fairy tales were still adult entertainment... since that's the case, how would it be entertaining for adults to read about the abuse of children and a cannibalistic father?
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cmoore0013
Unregistered User
(4/11/05 7:04 pm)
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Violence!
When I was a child, I seemed to like all of the original versions as well as the Disney ones. Now I only seem to like the original stories.
I had forgotton all about the original tales until 2 years ago, we studied a lesson in a textbook about different Cinderella tales. Among them were Ashenputtel, Yeh-Shen, etc. I was instantly hooked agian. The Ashenputtel story still gets reactons of "Oh Sick!" When the sisters cut up their feet.
The stories never scared me, I wanted the bad guys to be punnished in the end. I think Snow White's mother/stepmother is a good death sequence. She deserved it for try to kill her child. What an evil BI@@H!
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Veronica
Schanoes
Registered User
(4/12/05 12:53 am)
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Re: Violence!
The Philip Aries theory of childhood--that it didn't exist before the nineteenth century--is quite well known, but there is quite a lot of evidence against it, and I'm given to understand by friends of mine who study the middle ages and the renaissance that it really isn't accepted any more. Certainly the understanding and ideas of childhood were different than contemporary ones, but also certainly there was an understanding that childhood was different from adulthood.
Quote:
The tale "The Juniper Tree" was written around the time when fairy tales were still adult entertainment... since that's the case, how would it be entertaining for adults to read about the abuse of children and a cannibalistic father?
Well, I'm an adult and I find "The Juniper Tree" entertaining.
Lots of fairy tales are about abused children in one way or another,
and I think it speaks to the powerlessness of children in general
and the ways in which we have all felt powerless at one time or
another. Fairy tales tend to have the abused taking revenge, which
is satisfying, unlike real life. But you might just as well ask
why I find it entertaining to watch people get eaten alive by a
giant shark. Jaws is perhaps my favorite movie ever, and
there are lots of reasons for that. One is that the violence isn't
real; another is that it ain't happening to me; so that I can enjoy
the excitement of fear and violence without risking the pain and
damage it involves, to myself or to other people.
Edited by: Veronica Schanoes at: 4/12/05 1:18 am
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DerekJ
Unregistered User
(4/12/05 1:19 am)
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Re: Violence!
>>The stories never scared me, I wanted the bad guys to be punnished in the end. I think Snow White's mother/stepmother is a good death sequence. She deserved it for try to kill her child. What an evil BI@@H!<<
And then, of course, there's always the "Villain is unwittingly asked to choose his/her own punishment" variant endings, where the baddie dreams up creatively twisted ideas of rolling someone downhill in a barrel of nails, and then gets a surprise as to who it's for...Suggesting that even evil thoughts always get what they deserve in the end.
(And which, as we know, was lifted straight out of the story of Esther, but that's another topic.)
Although I prefer Rik Mayall's take on it, in one of the BBC "Grim Tales" episodes:
"...What?--No, that wasn't what I said! What I said
was, 'I'd give her a nice house, big car, lots of money, and--'
<pulled offstage>!"
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AliceCEB
Registered User
(4/12/05 7:14 am)
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Re: Violence!
The cathartic nature of watching violence done to others dates back to ancient times--thus the popularity of tragedies. It makes sense that this should be incorporated into folktales and fairy tales.
As a side note, at the time the Salons and Perrault were writing,
classicism was front and center among the arts in France--the standard
of beauty in literature being the classic forms of comedy and tragedy.
So although les contes de fees from that period don't necessarily
adhere to the classic form, the writers at that time were surely
influenced by them. (I realize this doesn't cover all the other
multitude of fairy tales around, but it was this morning's epiphany
for me, so I thought I'd share it. )
Best,
Alice
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