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Comment
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Jess
Unregistered User
(1/2/05 6:10 pm)
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non-perfection not needed
Hmmm,
I just looked at this thread. I think that if you have a near-perfect childhood, fairy-tales help you to confirm that. They are an escape into a place where there is a need to escape, evil and everything that is missing in your near perfect life. They bring in a nice, safe thrill. They stimulate your imagination. They enable you to problem solve outside of your warm cacoon. They let you see female conquerers and male heros that are different from your father (I had no brothers). They showed chivary and romaticism. They made you question twice people's motives. In other words, there were lots and lots of reasons to read fairy tales.
Just speaking from experience here. Not a scholar. Just one very loved, very lucky person.
Jess
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Jess
Unregistered User
(1/2/05 8:13 pm)
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And I almost forgot
being the youngest of three girls with two incredibly beautiful, intelligent and talented sisters, there was a certain line of stories I loved, in which the youngest was the most beautiful, intelligent and talented. ;)
Jess
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Helen J Pilinovsky
Registered User
(1/2/05 10:50 pm)
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Re: Real life is no fairy tale.
Dear Rumplestiltskin1964:
I think that the source of the confusion lies in the ad hominem nature of the remarks which you addressed to Veronica: while differences of opinion are lauded on the board, as are challenges and even disagreements, we tend to couch them in the basis of demonstrated knowledge as opposed to personal (and subjective) perceptions of others experiences. So disagreeing with someone's statement is held to be an inalienable right ... but doing so on the extrapolation of their probable life outside the board is frowned upon. I won't push this too much further - no one likes to be chastised, and I'm in no great position to be the one performing the chastisement - but regardless of whether Veronica lives in a gingerbread house, or lets Mother Hubbard's spare heel (to extend the fairy tale metaphor), the opinions which she holds are quite valid.
I agree with them quite heartily, myself: the idea that fairy tales are a form of escapism is very damaging to the discipline, and, at its core, untrue. Historically, fairy tales serve etiological and cautionary purposes with a far greater frequency then they do those of entertainment ... and, as a few people have argued above, almost anything has the same potential for escapist practice. The main reason that fairy tales, in particular, come in for the brunt of such reasoning can in all probability be traced back to the Victorian bowdlerization of fairy tales into children's tale - occupation for those who, given recent social shifts, had none, properly speaking, a bit of calumny which has stuck to them stubbornly.
Going back to your original question regarding the stepmother, there are some different opinions on this: some scholars, like Tatar, speculate that the reasons behind many of these editorial changes were psychological or sociological in origin (to distance the idea of mothers doing harm to their children from the popular view). However, there are some historical scholars who explore the probability of both natural and adopted mothers acting against their offsprings interests: I'd recommend Robert Darnton's The Great Cat Massacre as a possible line of exploration. Why should this be hidden, however, regardless of the precise nature of the relationship? That's a very difficult question. My off-the-cuff, immediate response would probably be, simply, that individuals prefer to optimistically model themselves on their ideals, and not their darker awareness of reality - not so much to say, "My mother should have been .." but rather, "When I am a mother, I will be ..."
Just my two cents.
Best,
Helen
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Jess
Unregistered User
(1/3/05 12:52 am)
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Another thought
I think also that the reason for the change from mother to step mother might be that the use of a mother figure as the evil one is so against what our natural instincts tell us "should be" that it is a startling premise to begin a story. The idea that the one to be most trusted is evil could have been something that jarred the sensitivities of the "Victorian era". Of course the very contrast might well have been the reason for using a mother in the first place as the evil figure.
So too, some of the stories, Donkeyskin, Rapunzel, the White Cat, and others have mothers who weren't evil, but the result of their actions or words produced evil (child taken away, child subject to incest, etc.). Over time, these types of mothers in stories could have evolved into the evil itself with the story contrivance. In other words, instead of having a selfish mother who trades her child for salad without believing it will be done, we simply start the story with the mother developing a hatred of the child and wanting to be rid of her. From there the evil seems so harsh that we exchange the evil mother for an evil step-mother, never recognizing that the original mother wasn't necessarily intent on doing evil things. Does this make any sense?
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Jess
Unregistered User
(1/3/05 12:55 am)
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Editing
in the paragraph above, it should read "without the story contrivance."
Sorry.
-J
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Rumpelstiltskin1964
Registered User
(1/3/05 2:13 am)
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Re: The facts about stepparents.
It seems clear that fairy tales do infact tell us quite alot about reality but in a way that distances us from that painful reality. As brig notes above: "It's just too dangerous for a small child to recognise the bad side of one's parents." Fairy tales, on this logic, are presented in symbolic form and it is up to the reader to find the obvious truths that linger just beneath the surface.(As noted above, fairy tales were very popluar during the Victorian era because they told simultaneously what was really happening beneath the calm bourgeois exterior without explicitly mentioning words such as incest, abuse, abandonment, which, of course, were taboo.) The fact is that children are born into a world of chaos and confusion and it is the parents, especially the mother, who are the first contact with reality. If, as the child matures, the mother withdraws her love for one reason or another, say the birth of another sibling, then the first child's grasp of reality may become disarranged. If the mother continues to give the secondborn more attention than the firstborn, then the latter may withdraw into a fantasy world and start to resent his mother. However, this resentment cannot go too far because the child instinctually knows that his mother is all he has and is vulnerable without her. From this point on, the child develops a love-hate relationship with its mother, loving her but resenting being dependent on her love. So, instead of upsetting the source of its love, the maturing child manufactures mother-substitutes to blame for his unhappy predicament. And this was how the wicked stepmother was born.
But the myth of the wicked stepmother also has a basis in fact. For example, Steven Pinker, in his masterly study 'How the Mind Works', quotes "one study of emotionally healthy middle-class families in the US, where only half of the stepfathers and a quarter of the stepmothers claimed to have 'parental feelings' towards their stepchildren, and fewer still claimed to 'love' them." And later he quotes a study by Daly and Wilson which "found that stepparenthood is the strongest risk factor for child abuse ever identified. In the case of the worst abuse, homicide, a stepparent is 40 to 100 times more likely than a biological parent to kill a young child, even when confounding factors - poverty, the mother's age, the traits of people who tend to remarry - are taken into account." The fact that children from well-to-do families may have stepparents who abuse them may explain away the paradox that it is not just the poor who seek refuge in the soothing waters of fairy tales?
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AliceCEB
Registered User
(1/3/05 8:58 am)
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Re: The facts about stepparents.
Rumpelstiltskin, I'm not sure which body of fairy tales you consider soothing since a great many are not. As Helen pointed out, fairy tales were written, most often as cautionary tales, and only when relegated to childrens' tales through the romanticism of Victorian sensibilities did they lose a lot of their edge. Many still are far from soothing: if you read Struwwelpeter, one child after another meets a gruesome end. The book was phenomenally popular at the end of the 19th century and at least until the mid 20th century. I remember my siblings and I reading it as children in the 1960s and 70s--we were completely fascinated by these deliciously awful tales. Hans Christian Anderson wrote loads of tales with unhappy endings. The Arabian Nights are filled with people wrongfully killed, relegated to poverty and abuse--although that might not be the immediate thrust of the tales. Take a look at Charles Vess' gorgeous The Book of Ballads to read disturbing tales, told as sung ballads, that were heard by all people, including children. There's nothing sugar coated there.
I agree that literature of all kinds provide escape for large numbers of people, but I don't think it's possible to reduce the motivation of everyone as to why they read fairy tales to only one thing. I think your insight about the scientific study of affection and stepparenting is correct. But I don't think that all children or adults read fairy tales because they are seeking refuge from awfulness. Some may, and in that regard, you may be right. But I don't think I'd extrapolate further.
Best,
Alice
Edited by: AliceCEB at: 1/3/05 9:25 am
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AliceCEB
Registered User
(1/3/05 1:52 pm)
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P.S.
You might want to look at the following thread from the archives entitled "What Fueled Your Fairy Tale Obsession?": www.surlalunefairytales.com/boardarchives/2004/aug2004/whatfueled1.html
In it you'll find a sampling of what brought some of the folks who read this board to their interest in fairy tales. The reasons are as diverse as the people who frequent the board.
Best,
Alice
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Rumpelstiltskin1964
Registered User
(1/7/05 3:30 am)
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Re: The wicked stepmother in Cinderella.
What about this as a possible interpretation of the wicked stepmother's mistreatment of little Cinderella in the fairy tale of that name?
Once upon a time there lived a young girl by the name of Cinderella. Cinderella was very sad because her genetic mother had died and her father had remarried a most dreadful woman with two frightful daughters. Cinderella was treated very badly by her stepmother BECAUSE CINDERELLA WAS NOT GOING TO PASS ON ANY OF HER STEPMOTHER'S GENES; and thus any resources the woman gave to Cinderella would have been wasted. Further, when a lavish ball was held at the Palace, Cinderella was not allowed to go. For Cinderella's stepmother knew full well that Cinderalla would probably meet a handsome Prince with lots of resources and mate with him. And in doing so Cinderella would deny the stepmother's genetic daughters the aforementioned reproductive opportunity, preventing the stepmother's genes from being passed on.
Moral: 'When the parent is unrelated to the child, we should expect there to be little parental investment because the child offers no hope of enhancing the adults genetic posterity.'
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midori snyder
Registered User
(1/7/05 6:01 am)
ezSupporter
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Re: The wicked stepmother in Cinderella.
Hmmm...that just seems such a reductive argument. I suppose the narrative can be reduced to a biological moral. But it seems contradictory to other relationships that often appear in the narratives. For example, the Fairy Godmother who appears in Cinderella in a fantastic way replaces the function of the loving mother...though she too can be considered a nonbirth mother and certainly isn't passing on any genes. And often in narratives involving girl's rites of passage even blood relatives are violent or potentially dangerous.
My own feeling is that in narratives that feature the rites of passage of young women there is a tendency for the events/family life of the young girl to be particularly violent or dangerous at the home of birth (such as the abusive father or brother in many Armless Maiden narratives, or Donkeyskin; or the dangerous stepmother in Snow White or Cinderella, ). Young men in their rites of passage return home after their journeys and transformation into men to take over the roles of their fathers. But girls do not. In exogamous socities they leave home and they do not return, but instead carve out new identities in what becomes a house of marriage. In the narratives, by creating these very dangerous and violent possibilities for the the young woman at home in the beginning of the tale (and sometimes reintroduced throughout the tale), it is assured that the girl will leave (as she must), move outward toward the world that awaits and have no reason or ability to return to the home of her birth.
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tigermiep
Registered User
(1/9/05 6:47 pm)
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Re: The wicked stepmother in Cinderella.
I believe it was Maria Warner who pointed out the double meaning of "belle-m^ere" in French. This word can mean both stepmother and mother-in-law. In a culture where young brides were sent away to live with the husband's family, often sharing a household with his mother, tales offered a warning and an opportunity for commiseration regarding the kind of life a girl could expect at the hands of her "belle-mere". Casting the belle-mere as a stepmother rather than a mother in law might disguise the nature of the story a bit.
on the topic of fairy tales in general and the "unrealistic" view they present, I posit that while modern re-tellings have simplified the tales and arranged them to adhere to contemporary societal expectations, the originals seldom promised any sky-blue-pink ever-afters. Aschenputtel has a very different ending than the Disney Cinderella, and has no singing mice.
also, who says fairy tales are necessarily about the external world? I choose to read them far less literally, and I believe strongly that the children to whom i tell the tales experience them on a deep "soul" level, if you would call it that, which leads far beyond the surface characters and events to the underlying message of human growth, change, and development. In the tales, we meet our own shadow side. we seek to unite our finer nature with our deeds in the world, and we learn to choose bravery, sacrifice, perseverance, loyalty, wisdom, and gentleness over cowardice, avarice, giving up, self-advancement, cruelty and might. these are qualities that lead to fullness of life in the Real World and to engagement with our lives rather than escapism or fantasy.
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Rumpelstiltskin1964
Registered User
(1/10/05 12:09 am)
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Re: The wicked stepmother in Cinderella.
The Victorians sanitized the original fairy tales in order to make them both acceptable to their bourgeios culture and to promote marriage and the patriarchal family structure. But fairy tales during this era also facilitated escapism. Why? Well, a bourgeios society is a sterile, monotonous, safe and predictable society in which people very quickly get bored with their humdrum lives. Reading bowdlerised versions of Cinderella and Hansel and Gretel helps to placate some of the passion and wanderlust that is a natural feature of our human condition. An old Chinese proverb sums this up nicely: 'Read 1,000s of books, travel 1,000s of miles.' Perhaps the reason why the original fairy tales were so honest in their portrayal of nasty reality was that people were happier living in their small communities close to nature and didn't need to fly off to Never Neverland with Peter Pan?
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AliceCEB
Registered User
(1/10/05 9:59 am)
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Re: The wicked stepmother in Cinderella.
Rumpelstiltskin, I will not try to change your world view. But don't assume that people were necessarily happier "living in their communities close to nature." Life was nasty, brutish and short (I'm forgetting who said this...), and, as you point out, being in the middle-class provides a safer and more predictable existence. Unless you have some means to begin with, going back to nature is a tough and sometimes very lonely experience.
The fairy tales read today were written down, requiring education on the part of the author. Although I cannot generalize what the lives were for all these authors, I think it's safe to say that the most were not among the vast agrarian poor. The audience for these writings had to be able to read and have the money necessary to buy books (which were, until the mid-twentieth century, relatively expensive commodities)--a legacy of bourgeois society.
There are a significant number of threads on this board that compare fairy tales with horror (e.g. www.surlalunefairytales.com/boardarchives/2002/apr2002/areftchildlike.html ). If I were to describe reading fairy tales as escapism, it would be to see them as a thrill best viewed through the filter of book--although I think that that is a much too reductionist view of fairy tales. They are not all one thing or another. They reflect a large number of mores, and readers take from them the messages that best reflect their world view. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a relativist: Cinderella's stepmother is a figure of evil in the tale. HOwever the why she is evil depends on the way the author writes her and the way the reader perceives her, and the reader keeps changing over time. (Actually the author of that particular tale did too :) .) Some very smart people have studied versions of tales and tried to ascribe interpretations with enormous insight, but ultimately, for those of us who are not academics, what we get out of a tale is a personal experience, not easily pegged.
Best,
Alice
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Rumpelstiltskin1964
Registered User
(1/10/05 11:09 am)
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Re: The wicked stepmother in Cinderella.
Yes, Alice, the verdict is out: Life in the ancestral environment was indeed "nasty, brutish and short".(Thomas Hobbes said that in his tome on Political Philosophy, 'Leviathan' written in 1651.) So why then do I romanticise the past? Well, like Jean Jacques Rousseau, I feel that modern day city-living has become rather banal and artificial. Please don't get me wrong: Modern-day living has equiped us with a host of gadgets and contraptions that have enhanced our qualitly of life, most notably the Internet, which allows us to engage in dialogue about the wicked stepmother amongst other things. However, sometimes I crave something natural, something green, something that pulsates with life, and that's why I tend to look back to an imagined bygone era like all Romantics tend to do. Getting back to fairy tales: You are correct when you say that most authors of fairy tales were not "among the vast agrarian poor". In fact, this evening I've been reading Jack Zipes' 'The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood', in which he equates the changing evolution of the aforementioned tale with the Western civilzing process. Thus, it was well-heeled individuals like Charles Perrault who re-wrote the original bawdy tale and turned Ms Hood into "a pretty, defenseless girl, who moreover may have been slightly vain because of her red hood". And there is no doubt in Zipes' mind what Perrault had in mind when re-working these stories: "Within the French civilizing process, Perrault's tales provided behavioural patterns and models for children which were intended to reinforce the prestige and superiority of bourgeios-aristocratic values and styles. Like the civilizing process itself, the tales also perpetuated strong notions of male dominance . . . " It was up to the Grimms to completely destroy the power and intergrity of the original tales and turn them into bourgeois propaganda. Finally, it would be left to charlatans like Joseph Goebbels and the Nazis to usurp the fairy tales from the Grimm Brothers and turn them into brain-washing tracts that promoted the almighty Father(the Woodcutter) and demoted the Mother(Little Red Riding Hood) to nothing more than a "pretty, defenseless girl".
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