Are Fairy Tales Out of Fashion?
By: Libby Copeland
Libby Copeland is a writer in New York and a Slate contributor. She was previously aWashington
Post reporter and editor for 11 years. She can be reached atlibbycopeland@gmail.com.
It’s no surprise that many parents have stopped reading fairy tales to their young children
because they’re too scary, according to a new study by a British television channel.
Why should they? Many were never really meant for children, not when the original folk
tales were first gathered by collectors like the brothers Grimm.
In Off With Their Heads! Harvard academic and fairy tale scholar Maria Tatar writes
that before Little Red Riding Hood was a cautionary narrative about not veering from the
narrow forest path, it was a “ribald story with a heroine who spends a good part of the
narrative undressing while provocatively asking the wolf what to do with her bodice, her
petticoat and her stockings.” It was, in other words, the sort of story told by half-soused
adults well after the kids were snug in bed. In time, as collectors sanitized the original
folk tales, lascivious parts were erased (as with an early version of Rapunzel, in which
the prince’s daily tower visits result in Rapunzel expressing surprise that her clothes are
so tight). But the violence remained and was even exaggerated, Tatar writes, to
emphasize moral lessons. The Grimms introduced birds to peck out the eyes of
Cinderella’s evil stepsisters, the better to illustrate just how bad they’d been.
I don’t recall being read fairy tales as a very small child, though when I was 9 or 10, I
became fascinated by the Grimm ones, mostly because of what they communicated about
lives that seemed nasty and brutish and indeed quite short. Was the past really like that?
The magic seemed unbelievable, but the cruelty clearly came from a real and depraved
place: An evil queen is forced to dance herself to death wearing red-hot iron shoes (Snow
White); a prince falls in love with a dead girl and begs permission to take ownership of
her lifeless body (ugh, same); a man abandons his children in a forest to starve at the
behest of his wife, though for some reason, only the wife gets blamed (Hansel and
Gretel). Some early Grimm collections included a story called ''How Some Children
Played at Slaughtering,” which is as bloody as it sounds.
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia this summer argued that California shouldn’t be
permitted to ban the sale of violent video games to kids because the games were no more
violent than fairy tales. But his words could just as easily be an argument against the old
folk tales—not against selling them, but certainly against treating them as bedtime fare
for little ones. “Hansel and Gretel (children!) kill their captor by baking her in an oven,”
Scalia wrote. He’s not the only one who feels that way. “I'm 51,” writes one parent at
the Huffington Post. “I remember my parents telling me many of these fairy tales at
bedtime and it scared the bejeebus out of me." A commenter at the New York
Times writes, "They were creepy when I was a kid, and now seem creepy and
inappropriate as an adult.”
There’s a tendency to jump to the conclusion that because modern parents are squeamish
about violence in fiction we must be wussy and overprotective. But is it also wussy that
we don’t spank anymore, or tell our children that they’re wicked? We don’t look at
violence in the same way as we used to; it is not a threat for bad behavior, nor is it God’s
punishment for sin. I’m sometimes troubled by reading even the most modernized
versions of fairy tales to my daughter, who is 2½. It’s not that Walt Disney didn’t do his
best to excise the violence from these creaky folk tales; fairy tale scholar Jack David
Zipes has called him “that twentieth-century sanitation man.” But the lessons these
cleansed tales impart are not ones I wish to teach, even if they are canonical to Western
culture. Little Red Riding Hood is to blame merely for being curious and veering off her
path to pick flowers. Beauty leads to happily-ever-afters. We have a Cinderella book, a
gift from a friend, and when I read it to my daughter, I try to soften the wickedness of the
evil stepsisters and stepmother. I omit the worst things they say— “a simple washer girl
like you is no fit for royal company!”—and I make it so Cinderella doesn’t cry. Still,
there’s no way around the basic premise that passivity and tears are rewarded. (I’m
convinced Cinderella syndrome is why not enough of us ask for raises; we’re waiting for
our bosses to notice how great we are. And I’m not the only one who believes Disney
princesses aren’t the best role models for little girls.)
If altering fairy tales seems like politically correct white-washing, I would counter that it
is the tradition of these folk tales to be changed by the era they’re in. We’re the fools if
we treat them like gospel. As Zipes points out, Frenchman Charles Perrault altered the
tale of Cinderella when he recorded it in the 1600s, making the protagonist submissive
and industrious. In earlier oral versions, which “emanated from a matriarchal tradition,”
Cinderella is more the mistress of her own fate. One Italian version has her killing her
stepmother.
I suppose I could confiscate our daughter’s Disney-fied Cinderella book, but that feels
like a step too far. She’s a pretty major figure, and our daughter will come across her
sooner or later. I would rather take charge of this story than let someone else tell it. And
when our daughter is much older, able to grasp historical context and possessed of that
child's fascination with darkness, I hope she’ll read the historical versions of the tale,
including the one where Cinderella chops off her stepmother’s head, and another in
which Cinderella’s stepsisters chop their feet to fit them in that glass slipper. They’re all
delightfully sinister—just not for a toddler’s ears.