Saturday, October 11, 2014

Fairy Tales and Fear

An anonymous commenter recently wrote in response to my post on Fairy Tale Endings that people tend to forget, when criticizing fairy tales for being dark and violent, how dark much of classic children's literature is. And it's true-maybe not picture books on the whole, but I remember having a conversation with a friend years ago about how many children fantasize about being orphans. We see this trend in children's literature, as many childhood heroes are indeed orphans-from Hansel and Gretel in their parents' attempts to abandon them in the woods, to well-loved characters such as the Boxcar children, Mary of "The Secret Garden", or the children who enter Narnia (again not technically orphaned, but separated from their parents and I don't think any reference is ever made to their parents except to explain them away at the beginning of the books).
"Hansel and Gretel", John B. Gruelle

Partly, getting rid of parents is the only way to create a child-centered world; a realistic book about children would be pretty limited if they had to ask their parents for permission before going on spectacular adventures. Through orphaned characters, or characters whose parental figures are the enemy, the children can achieve independence and become the central figures of the story, moving the action along instead of responding to a world where all of their actions are dictated by parents and school teachers.
Dark Chamber of [Snow White's] Evil Queen, Tours Departing Daily

Fairy tales deal with our primal fears, such as abandonment, or being prey to wild creatures. G. K. Chesterton defended the scarier elements of fairy tales by saying, "All this kind of talk [of keeping fairy tales away from children] is based on that complete forgetting of what a child is like...if you kept bogies and goblins away from children they would make them up for themselves...One small child can imagine monsters too big and black to get into any picture, and give them names too unearthly and cacophonous to have occurred in the cries of any lunatic...fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed."

Well known authors have reflected on their remembrances of fairy tales in childhood-Samuel Taylor Coleridge remembered reading is father's copy of Arabian Nights over and over again, and how he looked at the book "with a strange mixture of obscure dread and intense desire." Charles Dickens recalled being terrified by his nurse's tales, yet returned to those same tales by alluding to them repeatedly in his works.

Michael Kotzin discusses Dicken's use of fairy tales in his essay, "Charles Dickens and the Fairy Tale as Social Commentary." He says that, in childhood, Dickens recognized the dual aspect of fairy tales-fun and terrifying-and reused those same ideas in his adult writings as he discovered that the real world was the same way. He saw horrors that were the natural, unavoidable way of things-disease and natural disaster-but also horrors that were inflicted by people, or society in general, and used fairy tales satirically to criticize political beliefs or groups of people.

Dickens used fairy tale images to make the ordinary extraordinary-in writing a personal letter about the beauty of the buildings in Paris, he tells a friend that "the Genius of the Lamp is always building Palaces in the night." Using fairy tales as a common frame of reference, his works can have a childlike wonder to them. But though he used fairy tales in fun, he also used them in serious ways at times, in making social commentary. He saw in fairy tales the potential to connect with real world scenarios. He "drew upon fairy tale motifs, narrative patterns, and fairy tale-type characters and settings to help people sense romance in the everyday world and grasp the need for moral improvement. His popularity then and now owes some legacy to the magic and mystery of the traditional fairy tale." (Remember, Dickens is the one who is often quoted as having wanted to marry Little Red Riding Hood as a child.)
William Christian Symons

But of course, you can go too far; you shouldn't push violent and gory stories at very young children. It's one thing for an academic to argue about the value of preserving folklore the way it originally was, and another thing for a parent to be awakened by a child who had a nightmare because of a story they read before bedtime.

But at the same time, fairy tales are wonderful because they provide us with different ends of the spectrum-the terror of tapping into our fears, but the wonder and enchantment of the supernatural, and the possibility of happy endings.

What are your recollections of reading/watching fairy tales as a child, in terms of how scared you were?

10 comments:

  1. That was my comment. :)

    As a parent myself, I definitely don't advocate material before it's age appropriate or a child themselves is ready. I should have elaborated it depends on the age group, because at a certain point, we recognize something is missing. I think that's why the classics endure, they have truth underneath in the tale. My comment had come from a conversation I had with someone about the Potter books and they felt they'd grown too dark, but I said Harry became a teenager, he can't stay the same Harry as the first books. It wouldn't ring true with all he'd been through.

    As for what scared me, the banshee from Darby O Gill and the Little People. Wonderfully spooky topping to a great movie growing up.

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    1. It definitely depends on the age group, and of course each child is different in how they perceive the world and what they're ready to handle. While we of course want to avoid traumatizing kids with scary stories, at the other end of the spectrum would be the concern with kids who have too much of a fascination with death and violence. But I like your comment about "we recognize something is missing"-at times we definitely crave more realism, because otherwise we don't believe the happy ending, or it rings false.

      Yes I agree about Harry Potter, it's almost like it changes genres through the series, but in a way that is appropriate. I would classify the first three books as children's books, and when it gets to the fourth it gets debatable as to whether they're young adult books. Still very good, but I'd be cautious about giving them to young children to read.

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  2. The only fairy tales I knew when I was younger were the Disney movies, like Snow White and Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella, but they were all on tape so whenever there was a part with a witch doing something scary, it was taped over so it always skipped that part. I don't ever remember being frightened by fairy tales till I was older and started reading the Grimms on my own. I think we are too afraid of our children being afraid because when I was younger, I wanted lots of dangers and excitement in stories like the Boxcar Children and Cam Jansen but those never got very dangerous at all. They were "safe" adventures and I got tired of them after a while. That made me not want to read books very much till I turned ten and was finally allowed to read the Door Within - a Christian fantasy book - and I was intrigued by it. Also, the first Narnia movie was really special to me when I was 8, when it first came out about nine years ago (wow!).
    Hm... I think that's partially why I started writing stories. Because there didn't seem to be enough danger to me. It's not that I wasn't easily scared. It's just that what scared me was more gore and horror and bugs than danger free from that.

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    1. That's so interesting, that you even craved more danger! It echoes what the anonymous commenter above said, about how we recognize something is missing if there is no danger, no evil, in a story book world...

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  3. I don't remember reading fairy tales that much as a child, and if I did they were Disney versions and not the originals. However, I used to read a lot of ghost stories and local folklore, and my brother would tell me scary stories. I remember him convincing me there was a monster in out attic, but instead of being afraid of it I wanted to go and feed it haha! So stories didn't scare me, but then again I had (and still have) an incredibly over-active imagination. Therefore I was great at scaring myself. So the point about children making up things which are scarier than literature is true for me! I think it's healthy for children to be exposed to monsters, because then they can learn the difference between fiction and reality, and how to overcome them. There are many parallels between real life and fairy tales, and Dickens notes. Sometimes real life is scarier than stories, and then it's by reading stories that you can cope with it.

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    1. I wasn't scared of monsters or ghosts when I was a child either, but I was terrified of natural disasters. I would lay awake at night worrying about earthquakes and tornadoes, even volcanoes (in Chicago! I was paranoid). So yes, I think all kids are going to be scared of something, even if they are relatively sheltered in their entertainment. "Sometimes real life is scarier than stories, and then it's by reading stories that you can cope with it."-Amen!

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  4. I remember never being able to last past the first ten minutes of Disney's Sleeping Beauty for years because Malificent always scared the daylights out of me--the girl certainly knew how to make an entrance!

    Fast foward to 2001--the original Kingdom Hearts was released, and when I heard Malificent was the boss you had to fight at the pivotal moment in the story, it felt so good to have a kind of revenge against a character that had always frightened me for years!

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    1. Disney villains can be terrifying! This is why, when people make comments about Disney's versions being dumbed-down and sanitized, I want to ask them, have you actually seen the Disney movies? They're still pretty scary, especially for young children! I was scared of the Beast when he lost his temper in the West Wing when I was four

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    2. I was scared of the Beast in that scene as well! And I had a schoolfriend who was terrified of the queen in Snow White, when she turns into an old woman.

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    3. I think Snow White's Queen is hands down the scariest. Especially if you go on the Disneyland ride. When everything is so close up and you're in dark rooms and don't have control, it's way freakier than watching a movie from the comfort of home

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