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Author
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Comment
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karlacaicedo
Registered User
(1/17/06 5:06 pm)
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violence in fairy tales
I am writting an extended essay for mi IB diploma about violence existing in fairy tales. how violent acts all over men's history has been transmitted to children in their own simple language.
for example, in snow white. you see how snow white's stepmother intended to kill her for such a wrong reason.she escapes and starts living with 7 men she doesnt know. then the stepmother comes again and poisons her. what a horrible person!and finally the dwarfs come and kill her so horribly.. or the lino king,how mufasa is killed by the stampede.who didnt cry in that part of the movie as a child?
how can such horrible happenings can be called stories for little children?why did the authors include so mucho violence in kids stories?why are these the classic stories that every kid in the world has read, and not others that dont have this violence?is this the reflection of the society:violence hidden as nice,lullaby stories?
where can i find more information about this topic?is there a way i can find the author's or diney's opinion about this?
thank you very much ;)
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Helen J Pilinovsky
Registered User
(1/17/06 6:48 pm)
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Re: violence in fairy tales
Well, there are a few important things to consider in choosing this topic. First off, generally speaking, fairy tales were not aimed specifically at children: in many countries, and many periods, to the contrary, they were either reserved for adults (for an example of this, look at Russia - Jack V. Haney writes about this in a very accessible manner in his An Introduction to the Russian Folktale) or enjoyed by all members of the community (as was apparently the case across most of Europe up to the 17th century - you might want to consult Jack Zipes, Marina Warner, Nancy Canepa, or Maria Tatar, just to give you some idea of authors who've addressed the issue of intended audience). It was really only with Charles Perrault's Contes de me mere l'Oye (Tales of Mother Goose) that fairy tales began to be targeted at children (and it appears that he had his tongue firmly in his cheek when he wrote that collection), and the broad publication of the Brothers Grimm Kinder-unt-hausemarchen (Children's and Household Tales) that fairy tales began to be uniformly marketed for the young. In fact, when the Grimms produced their first edition, it was a scholarly volume aimed at adults - when it became popular among mothers (likely because of the name of the collection), the Grimms went back and revised many of the stories to make them more "age-appropriate" in following editions! What's curious is that although they removed many of the sexual overtones which had been present in the stories up to that point, they retained the violence, because in their culture, scaring children into good behavior was an appropriate way of socializing them (for more on this, look at Maria Tatar's The Hard Facts of the Grimms Fairy Tales).
As for violence in the tales themselves ... it's important to remember that, for the most part, these tales were created in a period when the world was more violent, when it made sense for children to be informed of the dangers that surrounded them, sometimes in a highly exaggerated form, to instill in them the values that would both enable them to be good members of society, and to survive. At their core, that's why they're still valuable today, even when they are targetted at a very young audience: if you're interested in reading stories which grew out of adult author's rememberances of having read those "violent" stories as children, stories which told them that they were not alone, and which provided them with an internal template for growth, look at Terri Windling's The Armless Maiden and Other Tales For Childhood's Survivors - it's a beautiful, heart-wrenching collection. Hope this helps a bit, and look forward to hearing more of your thoughts ....
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Veronica Schanoes
Registered User
(1/17/06 7:14 pm)
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Re: violence in fairy tales
You know, Helen, I've been thinking--was their world more violent, or just violent in different ways? Illness was undoubtedly more violent, but the concerns with rape, child abuse, etc. are certainly present-day concerns as well. And while our medical care is better, guns weren't as effective or as widespread. I'm not sure that their world was more violent; I'm more of the mind that the type of violence has changed and that it is less overt in certain demographic groups.
Didn't we have a thread on this recently? Hmm. We touched on it here.
Edited by: Veronica Schanoes at: 1/17/06 7:14 pm
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Helen J Pilinovsky
Registered User
(1/17/06 8:51 pm)
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Re: violence in fairy tales
Hm, interesting point (I somehow completely missed the previous thread). I think it's a difference partially of violence affecting different demographic groups, and also partially a difference between how segmented the different demographics are, if that makes sense.
The world is just as violent as it ever was, and children are still as liable to it as they ever were, but somehow, across the "target demographic" of "normal" children, I think they're ... muffled ... from it in a way that they weren't prior to the 19th century.
We do idealize childhood today, and decide, sometimes arbitrarily, what is and is not appropriate for children (leading to outrage whenever an artist publishes a comic book with adult content, or when a video game manufacturer produces a game which is suitable only for ages 18 and up ... it's seen as a sullying of a "child-friendly" medium). Yes, we write openly about abuse, and violence, but very little of that is aimed at young readers ... fairy tales are still one of the few available forms which might potentially speak to those parts of them which are reacting, emotionally, to the violence that they're subliminally aware of, even when it doesn't affect the individual children in question directly.
Also, in terms of societal segmenting, I find myself thinking about the mores of the periods which produced the fairy tales, and the manner in which everything is encoded ... yes, we as modern readers understand that the mutilation of the heroine of "The Armless Maiden", is a way of silencing her, that the desires of the father in "Donkeyskin" are a code for incest ... and in all likelihood, listeners of the period did as well. But it wasn't ... explicit, which is perhaps what made it acceptable across the board, both for children who were more mature than they are today, and for adults who wouldn't necessarily think of their subject matter as being appropriate. Today, when an artist wants to reference anything of that nature, whether in terms of violence or sexuality, it's completely out there, splitting the demographic further - this is for adults, this is for children.
In many ways, that only furthers the divide ... total innocence until a certain age, and then total disillusionment (well, ideally - god knows I knew more than my parents thought I did). I don't think it's a question of whether the world was more violent across the board in the past - as you point out, it wasn't. I think it's a question of why, now, we split everything up the way we do ....
In the past, those violent, though not generally explicit, tales were available to broader audiences: today, we save the R-rated material for ... well, the age at which the R-rating is allowed. It's not a question of greater or lesser violence, but a question of when we think it becomes appropriate. I can't help but feel that it's a case of treating the symptom, but not its underlying condition - pretend it's not there, and you'll raise a healthy generation.
Until they hit the evil adolescence, of course. What a silly culture we are ....
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DividedSelf
Registered User
(1/18/06 9:46 am)
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Re: violence in fairy tales
I think it's a really interesting question whether or not the world is more or less violent than it used to be.
Isn't violence essentially a response to threat? - the sort of threat that challenges something essential - one's purpose, say, or physical survival... This would include things like social/economic injustice as being a direct threat to a person's sense of worth/identity.
And of course a lot of violence results as an inappropriate response when an attack is perceived but not actual.
So I'd say whether the world is a more/less violent place largely depends on two things: (1) the extent to which the world is a fairer place; (2) whether we are better able to cope with unfairness (or correctly understand a source of threat and deal with it appropriately).
Wouldn't like to express a view about (1)... But I would argue that (2) is necessarily the case on the assumption that the sum of knowledge is always increasing - and in the area of emotion especially so over the last century.
Also, I reckon ultimately (2) is the more fundamental. For one thing, we're probably all of us descended (if you go far enough back) from people who thought it was okay to beat up your kids. And again, if the wisdom to deal with injustice was universal, there probably would be a lot less injustice in the first place.
Things like the "Armless Maiden" anthology simply would not have been understood 100 years ago.
(I only read this a few months ago, by the way. It's very mixed, and sometimes very hard reading - but I think anyone would find some beautiful things in there and as a whole it's an important piece of work, precisely because it's the sort of thing that strengthens (2). Why not published in the UK though?)
Re violence in stories and in stories for children, I think children (7+ at any rate) have no difficulty at all with any amount of violence in stories. The problem with violence is when it is used specifically to challenge or scare the audience. This generally uses especially graphic depictions of blood and people's insides in a real, right here and now kind of way, or else it subverts "fairy tale" expectations by having a character you're kind of rooting for suddenly and brutally despatched. However, violence can be handled in a way which reassures the audience of their own safety. (See Agatha Christie for extreme examples of this.) It's like a rollercoaster ride - so long as you know you're safe, the more pseudo-risk the merrier (well, for some, anyway - not me, I pass out!)
It's said that fairy tales are emotionless or emotionally flat. I don't really agree with this. I think they translate powerful emotion into simple event. Love EQUALS risking all for the prince/princess. Anger EQUALS killing the monster. Anguish EQUALS having your eyes torn out by thorns. Etc.
This is the reason why fairy tales are so powerful for me. It's the pinnacle of the "show-not-tell" dictum.
I think a lot of kids are really turned off by the Disney "all princessy" version of fairy tales, but really respond to the bloody violence of some of the Grimms' say. When the bird/son in The Juniper Tree kills the stepmother by dropping a mill wheel on her head, I think children are not in the least threatened by this, and can understand it totally - not as an endorsement of murder or revenge, but as a depiction of pure-form anger. The awful stuff earlier in that story could be threatening to some kids I think, for all sorts of reasons - unprovoked murder of the central character, emotional abuse of the daughter, and the disturbing relish with which the father unknowingly eats his own son wouldn't necessarily make a lot of sense to many children (but would to others).
Obviously, in the case of children, you have to judge the content according to what you feel your audience can handle. But in general I think violence in children's stories is not only appropriate but important - so long as the threat it represents is understood and appropriately contained by the story teller.
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AliceCEB
Registered User
(1/18/06 12:11 pm)
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Re: violence in fairy tales
Whether we live in a more or less violent society depends, I think on where you live. It's arguably the case that violence has decreased in North America and in Europe where violence and pogroms against religious and minority groups was the norm until about the mid-20th century. Poverty, and the brutality that was part of it, was also more visible--classes in fact mixed more then than they do now: every middle class home had servants. Such violence would now be protested and (hopefully) the perpetrators brought to justice, and there has been some effort to soften poverty's brutality. However, what's true in North America and Europe is not the case everywhere in the world: in many (but certainly not all) South American countries, violence against the poor continues. In countries like Peru and Columbia, organized violence by armed factions continue to exist. For the same token, I wouldn't want to be in Darfur or Chechnya at the moment.
Having said that, I also think it's hard to compare the knowledge of violence now vs. then: modes of communication have changed drastically. A 150 years ago, a village in Bohemia received news about what was going on in Prague after several weeks. The news about what was going on in the next village might take days. Now we are witness to the aftermath of car bombs in Bagdad on a nightly basis. We may not be bodily threatened, but the carnage is more constant.
But I do think it's fair to say that life (back when) might not have felt so much more violent as more brutal: disease, physical accidents, burns, etc. were more common and visible to adults and children. Fingers and toes did get chopped off, by accident, more than we care to remember. And a deformity was life-defining. So tales hearkening back to that time, would have these elements as well.
Best,
Alice
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Veronica Schanoes
Registered User
(1/18/06 12:25 pm)
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Re: violence in fairy tales
Absolutely agreed, Alice. The only slight difference I have is that I think the brutality of life in the first world depends on your class, among other things. Living in the US when you don't have health insurance is, in my opinion, pretty brutal, and living in certain kinds of violent, poverty-stricken neighborhoods would make it more so. It's like...if you take the average 60-year-old woman of the upper-middle professional class, and stand her next to the average 60-year-old woman of the working class, you're likely to see big physical differences, starting with teeth and moving onto skin and other things like that (the Times ran an article about this, God, ages ago now). In some ways, I think that divide and the concomitant brutality of life has gotten worse and more obvious, not just over the past few hundred years (when medical care wasn't good, nobody was immune from the ravages of illness and accident), but over the past fifty--in the US in the 1940s-1960s, it was possible for unionized factory workers to own homes, take vacations, buy "luxury" items in a way that I think is no longer possible as those jobs have disappeared, and the gap between the classes in the US has widened.
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DividedSelf
Registered User
(1/18/06 1:29 pm)
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Re: violence in fairy tales
I think people might be confusing violence with standard of living. Whilst the standard of living in the "1st world" is measurably greater than it was, this is no measure of happiness or satisfaction. Higher standards of living relative to other contemporaries might be. But that goes hand in hand with corresponding lower relative standards of living and increased dissatisfaction, so that would kind of cancel out of the reckoning.
I don't think the medieval conditions of parts of the 3rd world really affect the argument either. The point is that if a significant part of the world is getting wiser - and I think it is - then the world as a whole must be wiser (more able to deal with instability etc.)...
An example of this is the psychotherapeutic efforts that have been made in the wake of the massacres in Rwanda and Sierra Leone. It's difficult to know how successful these might be, given the numbers, and the horrific levels of violence that were experienced there, including by very small children. But it's a systematic force against future violence, albeit a tiny one, that never existed historically.
It might be unlikely that the world is a less angry place than it was, but I do think it's probably growing in it's ability to cope with crisis, trauma, injustice... and anger... which ought in turn (in perhaps the very long run) to reduce misperception... which in turn ought to reduce overall levels of violence... which in turn ought to make the world a less angry place.... leading to a virtuous circle...
It isn't a matter of trying to determine and compare historical levels of violence. It's not a matter of measurement at all. It's a matter of patterns of development, of understanding and continued action upon it.
Edited by: DividedSelf at: 1/18/06 1:33 pm
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AliceCEB
Registered User
(1/19/06 9:31 am)
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Re: violence in fairy tales
Divided Self, I think you have an optimistic view of the influence of knowledge in our world--a view shared by many philosophers (and I am particularly thinking about the age of Enlightenment) and certainly one that I hope is correct. But I'm more pessimistic. We have accumulated more and more knowledge but, at the same time, have not managed to stop the anger that you mention. The 20th century saw both the greatest advances of science in known history and some of the bloodiest, cruelest, and most genocidal wars and internal conflicts.
Trying to see forward (knowing that I'm not any good at that)I don't view our future in the dystopic way that a lot of science fiction/fantasy depicts, but there is a lot of truth in those bleak stories. My hope is that there are enough people of good will in the world to influence our society so that we do use our accumulated knowledge to improve rather than to destroy. The common culture depicts these "do-gooders" as weak and that you need a take-charge, quasi-evil person to accomplish anything of note (I add that I do not agree with this view). Fairy tales, by contrast, provide the example of strength in goodness, overcoming evil, and that is part of where I see their relevance today.
Best,
Alice
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DividedSelf
Registered User
(1/19/06 10:57 am)
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Re: violence in fairy tales
I probably am being optimistic. And I agree, for every well intentioned psychotherapist there's probably someone in psy-ops working how best to freak us all out. Not to mention the role of psychology in advertising to make us pull our hair out desiring things we can't afford.
Nevertheless, I don't think the progress-for-good/ill equation is entirely symmetric. Progress makes power, which can be good or bad - but to be on the receiving end of that power is another matter. There is a limit to how broken a person can be... Being bereaved is being bereaved whether it's because of a smart virus or a cudgel. But we can always be stronger, better able to deal with our emotions, and if there is some upper limit to this, I don't believe anyone's near reaching it yet.
WMDs have the capacity to bereave people many times over, that's true, but is a massacre due to chemical attack in any way worse than a massacre by butcher's knives? I don't think your chances of recovery from psychological damage are especially affected by whether it was caused by something hi- or lo-tech.
People have always been killed, bereaved, tortured and abused. But only in the last few decades has there been a real systematic attempt to heal the survivors emotionally. I agree there is probably no appreciable decrease in world anger, because it would likely take at least a few generations to see the current micro-changes grown to visible proportions.
I think one of the things that makes me most optimistic is that violence as a response to threat or perceived threat is generally, except in a few very narrow cases, a bad move in terms of self-interest.
For instance, I think there has been a visibly growing repugnance towards physical punishment of children. It could do with growing a lot more, but I think the growth is there. It's not unrelated to privilege, I suppose, because it's a lot easier to be rational when you're not in fear of rent day. But it's more to do with education. The fact is that hitting a child is an incredibly impractical way of discipline - because in the long run it makes behaviour worse. There are much better ways, which teach and strengthen children rather than brutalising them - and which work almost like magic. It's in every parent's self-interest to treat their children with respect.
And those children, when they come to have their own children, will themselves be more peaceable.
So, yes, I am optimistic in the long term, just so long as we can ride out the next century or so without making ourselves extinct.
(I bet there's scarcely been a war that wasn't at some level an extended piece of domestic abuse. Look at the Gulf, for god's sake, and the dynasties Bush and Saddam!)
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Gypsy
Unregistered User
(1/19/06 2:02 pm)
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Re: violence in fairy tales
Good question. Personally, I think its because parents told the stories to children, and added the violence to sort of say: Look. Life isn't all flowers and candy. Youve got to be tough to pull through in the world sometimes. Or perhaps it was added so children could find a moral in the story. Most of the villains met increasingly violent ends, and the good guys lived happily ever after. Maybe the older people who told it were trying to tell them that if they grew up to be wicked, only bad would come from it.
or it could be that they didnt think much of the violence. Most fairytales take place in times from either the Middle Ages-1800's. violence wasnt exactly uncommon then. They used to have public hangings all the time. maybe the violence was just part of their lives.
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Writerpatrick
Registered User
(1/19/06 4:46 pm)
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Re: violence in fairy tales
Not just violence, but death. Infant mortality up until the 20th century was high. Combined with elderly relatives living close and rural life (which would involve the slaughter and death of animals), people were use to death.
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Rosemary Lake
Registered User
(1/19/06 8:56 pm)
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Baum, Barrie, Ransome
[[ how can such horrible happenings can be called stories for little children?why did the authors include so mucho violence in kids stories?why are these the classic stories that every kid in the world has read, and not others that dont have this violence? ]]
One author who shared your attitude is L. Frank Baum. He wrote WIZARD OF OZ to be an 'American fairy tale' without so much fright and violence. You can find his original version at Project Gutenberg and elsewhere on the web. Later versions may have added some scary stuff, perhaps getting it from the movie.
A very different way to look at it is, look at cartoons children laugh at: Roadrunner vs Coyote etc. Characters are always getting cut in pieces or blown up, but it's not real. Oral tales could be told for a similar effect to one audience (then perhaps told for a scary or real-violence effect to a different audience).
When the nice children in Ransome's SWALLOWS & AMAZONS are playing, they talk about 'decks running red with gore'; and in Peter Pan there was similar stuff about children liking lots of gore etc. I'm sure at least the Ransome children's attutide is more like the Roadrunner sort of 'violence' than anything serious and real.
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Kevin Andrew Murphy
Registered User
(1/26/06 10:02 pm)
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Re: Baum, Barrie, Ransome
People have tried children's stories without violence. The result is the Care Bears and My Little Pony. Even with an extended marketing campaign, the kids don't care for them much.
The reason is that it's hard to tell any sort of thrilling adventure story without a threat of death, and to have a really good threat of death, you need a villain who's willing to kill a few people.
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Veronica Schanoes
Registered User
(1/26/06 10:34 pm)
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Re: Baum, Barrie, Ransome
In my opinion, My Little Ponies were far too popular.
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Eien
Unregistered User
(1/27/06 1:57 pm)
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Violence in The Wizard of Oz
In that case, and idea if the scene where the Scarecrow twists the necks of an attacking flock of crows was in the original? I found that and a few other scenes more than a little disturbing when I read The Great Illustrated Classics version a long time ago. Though I have since enjoyed researching information on the Oz books, and realize how much those who've only seen the movies are missing out on.
On a side note, I distinctly remember My Little Pony to be the more violent cartoon. They actually killed the villain on at least one occasion (it was a lava demon that powered itself up by turning into crystal, which blew itself into shards by the end of the story arc).
Though I'm not sure where you got "kids didn't like them" from. Both cartoons seemed pretty long them to have gotten poor ratings back when they first aired. Though I'm well aware the the second Care Bears movie was a flop.
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Eien
Unregistered User
(1/27/06 2:00 pm)
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Oops
I misread that as saying Care bears and My Little Pony "had" violence. My mistake.
On that note, the old cartoons really weren't what you might expect of shows meant to sell brightly colored plush toys. While not exactly dark, the original shows weren't xactly the candy coated fare of most modern kids shows, despite outward appearence.
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