Not gonna lie...pretty proud of myself. This took some extensive reading and research but it was very pleasurable to do. So far, it's 2/3 of what I've done, after first revision...the topic is fascinating...so take a look! Don't have a working title yet either....
The publishing history of the Grimms’ Children’s and Household Tales is one of continual revision. The
first 1812 edition expanded to six more in the brothers’ lifetime, not
counting, of course, numerous contemporary anthologies. The early editions were
not aimed for an audience of children; in fact, the brothers were primarily
concerned with the scholarly preservation of the German volk, viewing themselves as “patriotic folklorists, not as
entertainers for children” (O’Neill). They wanted to document German oral
tradition, folklore that mirrored a medieval world view with all its “stark
prejudice, its crudeness, and barbarities” (O’Neill).
Jacob and Wilheim talked with,
listened to, and wrote down 40 something persons’ oral rendition of various
tales, most of them from women. Many of the tales resembled Charles Perrault’s earlier
French Mother Goose Tales, and others
can be traced back to even earlier Italian versions. What became clear is the
cultural migration of these stories across geography and time. It is in
roadhouses, barns, and especially spinning chambers that medieval women told
these tales as a form of entertainment to escape work drudgery; as the stories
traveled from one mouth to another, from one country to another, elements were
added, deleted, exaggerated, reduced.
By coincidence, the Grimms’ first
published collection dovetailed with the flowering of children’s literature in
Europe, and so for financial and prestigious reasons, the brothers began to
reedit their tales to suit a new younger audience; Wilhelm Grimm says that
“there is much to be improved and added---something that will also prove
favorable for sales,” as he took more literary freedom with writing the tales
as well as deleting scholarly footnotes from the first edition (Tatar 12). Thus
each edition underwent more revision, usually resulting in the deletion or
softening of themes of incest, violence, pre-marital sex, and the injection of
explicit condemnation of deviant behavior (Tatar 12).
Parents began reading these tales
to their children because “they approve of the finger-wagging lessons inserted
into the stories: keep your promises, don’t talk to strangers, work hard, obey
your parents” (O’Neill). No longer read for its scholarship, parents of 19th
and 20th century Europe and America used the stories as cautionary
tales of morality for their children. Furthermore, the link with morality tales
has “fallen prey to ideologues and propagandists” (O’Neill). The Third Reich
read Little Red Riding Hood as a symbol of the innocent German people and the
Big Bad Wolf as Jewish. At the end of World War II, Allied commanders banned
the tales’ German publication because they believed that the stories
contributed to Nazi savagery. In the 1970s, college campuses in Europe and
America condemned the tales as espousing a sexist point of view.
From individual parents to
historical leaders to scholars and students, the link between the tales and
childrens’ morality is assumed. As evident in parents’ use of them as cautionary
tales and in the Allied commanders’ assumption that the stories may have
influenced German character to be cruel, many people believe there is a link of
causality. The censoring of these stories began with the Grimm brothers themselves
(as they prepared for the sale of each new edition) and moved on to being
abridged, excluded from school reading lists, and further sterilized and through
picture books and movies. The ultimate sterilization is with Disney, who
sweetens the material by giving the dwarfs (once peculiar and fantastical)
names like Sneezy and Happy (O’Neill). Today’s audience knows not about the
incest and violence of the original Snow White but rather see only the
happily-ever-after cute Disney
version.
Is there still merit in reading the
original 1812 publication? I, along with scholars Bruno Bettelheim and Maria
Tatar, argue that it is crucial to do so. The original text not only opens up a
fantastical world of characters and events but also enriches our knowledge when
read through literary, historical, psychological, and cultural lenses.
Specifically, I’m interested in re-evaluating the way fairy tales are read,
taught, and culturally handed down to children; often simplistic, moralistic,
and black and white, these stories in their original form, and through
contextual knowledge, are anything but. When read to and guided by
parents/teachers in the right way, children exercise their imaginative,
reflective, and even moral thinking through original readings of fairy tales.
Bettelheim focuses on the
fantastical and magical element of fairy tales and how they can help exercise children’s
imagination in guiding them to deal with and grow through various psychological
stages. Tatar focuses on the importance of unveiling the historical, socio-cultural
background of the tales, the Grimms, and the women who told them, as a way to
contextualize the central themes in the stories and to critically analyze
various strains of censorship that the tales have undergone. Both authors lead
us back to the original for very convincing reasons: the importance of
childrens’ imagination and personal connection for mental growth through
reading of stories, as well as the need for critical, analytical scholarship to
historicize stories that morph with various cultural milieus.
I argue that a combination of these
two approaches is best. Children read the original versions of the tales can
dwell in the imaginative land of growing protagonists, helpful creatures, and
defeated antagonists, a space that draws empathy and psycho-developmental
connection with their own lives. Meanwhile, an adult/teacher who provides
immediate, relevant, and thought-provoking context to specific stories opens
the child’s reflective and moral mind. An open discussion of how the child makes
sense of the story and the context is a fruitful exercise in thinking about not
only the story land but also the real world. As a specific example, in the
final section, I will analyze through the psycho-developmental, as well as the
critical contextual lens, the tale of Snow White. By reading the original story
while providing certain contextual information, an adult/teacher is able to
have the child think about relevant themes like violence, gender, beauty, and
labor.
Is there a link between reading the
stories and morality (for good or for bad)? For Bettelheim, perhaps, but not in
the conventional link of causality that reading of violence will cause people
to do violent things; rather it’s about opening the door of imagination and
thought in children, so that the tales act as a guide and a resource to how
moral situations are handled. Tatar is more cynical about that link; what she
does do is expose how the purpose and reception of the tales change with
culture, time, and people, thereby showing ultimately that society reads into
the stories their own moral values and judgements. Combining the two scholars
in a pedagogical approach to reading fairy tales to children, I argue that
these stories open the door to reflections and conversations about morality,
and a reflective conversation with various perspectives and ample context is
the best place to start.
A
Pyscho-developmental approach to the Grimm’s Fairy Tales
Bruno Bettelheim argues for
children to be read the original versions of fairy tales because they offer a
greater space for imaginative thinking as well as the working out of various
psycho-developmental stages in a child’s life. The original earlier versions of
these tales have “poetic qualities and enchantment,” where “true meaning and
impact of a fairy tale can be appreciated” (19). Interest in the types of
stories should be left to the child, not the parent; it is “always best to
follow the child’s lead… if a child does not take to the story, this means that
its motifs or themes have failed to evoke a meaningful response at this moment
in his life”(18). For Bettelheim, coming from a psychological developmental
perspective, children are drawn to certain tales because those stories offer
greater personal meaning; stories help illustrate, elucidate, or illuminate
various issues concerning the child’s mental state consciously and unconsciously.
The structure of the original fairy
tale is set up in a way that “possess[es] a multifarious richness and depth
that far transcend what even the most thorough discursive examination can
extract from them” (19). He says that “the child’s need for magic” can be found
in the otherworldliness of fairy tales, a place where deliberate vagueness
(once upon a time…) offers a space for the child to insert her own imagination,
being a part of the story-making process (62). Bettelheim is not concerned by the gratuitous violence,
declaring that children think animalistically until puberty. What is meant here
is that children animate the inanimate. Bettelheim cites and example given by
Ruth Benedict in his article “Animalism” in Encyclopedia
of the Social Science: when a door slams on a child, the child pushes the
door back because she thinks the door did it to her on purpose (49). I’m not
sure how believable it is to argue that all children think animalistically all
the time, because it’s easy to imagine a scenario in which a child (or adult)
pushes the door back simply because she is angry; however, it is plausible that
children are prone more to animalistic thinking than adults. This animation of
the inanimate maps on well with the talking beasts, helpful birds, and
intentional animals found in the Grimm’s tales.
Another
psycho-developmental phase of children Bettelheim argues maps on well with
fairy tale themes is the tendency to think and act in extremes, another part of
what he calls animalistic thinking. Children are polarized in thinking the
world as either good or bad, beautiful or ugly, without comprehension of
“intermediate stages of degree or intensity” (74). This, Bettelheim argues,
occurs in the Oedipal period of the Freudian stage between 3-7 years old.
Children see the world as chaotic and are trying to deal with their own fledging
ambivalent emotions like love and hate, desire and fear. Bettelheim says it’s not a coincidence that
children are drawn to the fairy tale world where “figures are ferocity
incarnate or unselfish benevolence…essentially one-dimensional” (74). This
one-dimensionality is not limiting to the child because “‘presenting the
polarities of character permits the child to comprehend easily the difference
between the two, which he could not do as readily were the figures drawn more
true to life…ambiguities must wait until a relatively firm personality has been
established on the basis of positive identifications. Then the child has a
basis for understanding” (9). Thus, the educative focus for the child is the
working out of the concepts themselves. What are the characteristics of good?
What are the characteristics of evil? What is the difference between the two?
Bettelheim believes that learning about ambiguities should happen after the
Oedipal stage, where children have already made solid concept identifications.
Here again,
is a point that can be contended; solid identification of concepts need to
happen, yes, but that does not mean children cannot comprehend shades of gray
or be probed to think about the spectrum between two extremes. According to
Bettelheim, children would naturally think a character is evil, evil being a
permanent character trait rather than an action. It’s important to think about
the role of the parent who is reading the stories to the child. It is not good
for the child if all the parent does is wag her finger and teach the tales as
cautionary morality stories. Likewise, I see a problem with wholly letting the
child interpret what she wants in a tale without the parent guiding the child
to think, talk, and discuss about what’s happening in the stories and in the
child’s own interpretations. Bettelheim argues for the organic unfolding of
understanding by the natural mapping on of children’s psycho-developmental
stages with themes in the tales. He leaves it to the child to draw conclusions
based on what he read (influenced by what psychological stage he is in). This
sole dependence on reader reaction to a text is problematic because there is a
lack of critical thinking and varying perspectives. If children naturally see
the characters as black and white, then moral values and actions are also
either/or. The child may also already see the story a certain way because her
familial, cultural, and peer influences tint her perception. I believe that
this is when the role of the parent as teacher and guide comes in. A parent can
ask a child about her interpretation and opinions of the plot and characters
without making value judgements. More about how this type of guided thinking
can happen through story-telling will be discussed later in the final section.
MARIA TATAR’S
CONTEXUAL AND CRITICAL PERSPECTIVE
Germanic scholar Maria Tatar agrees
with the imaginative mapping on of Grimm’s themes with children’s (as well as
adults’) psychological realities and fantasies. However, she does worry that
some tales lend themselves more explicitly to moral value judgements than
others. When “undesirable traits like deceitfulness, curiosity, insolence come
to a bad end,” the transgression/punishment pattern “can instill fear in
children rather than confidence (192). This is where Tatar and Bettelheim
differ: instead of Bettelheim’s more optimistic belief that children’s
psychological state will guide them to certain stories that will in turn guide
them through specific psychological issues, Tatar is more cautious and
pessimistic about this type of guidance being a good thing or effective at all.
In other words, these stories, whether solely interpreted by children
themselves (via psychological curiosity) or interpreted for children by adults
(via cautionary finger-wagging) both have the possibility of misconstruing and
reading into the text what was originally not there.
In The Hard Facts of the Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Tatar sets out to set
the facts straight about these stories that have been linked with teaching
morality to children. In fact, the original intent of such tales were not meant
or linked to any type of moral or pedagogical purpose at all. Nor did medieval
people, the original disseminators and consumers of the stories, read into them
in those ways. Tatar historicizes the tales to reveal not only the original
context of the stories but also how various societies and groups have taken
liberal liberty with interpretation, resulting in convenient morality specific
to a certain socio-cultural context.
The Grimm’s fairy tales, their
earliest versions, were oral stories peasant women shared with one another
while working (usually spinning the loom) long hours. There is no way to know
where these tales originated from or whether they’re based on reality due to
its oral nature, but what’s important to note that each new teller of the tale
had the liberty to embellish and subtract from the stories as they see fit.
These stories were told for entertainment, to pass the time away while manually
laboring. They were also tied to a specific class---working peasant women. Both
these factors directly and heavily influenced the content of the stories.
Originally, the “graphic descriptions of murder, mutilation, cannibalism,
infanticide, and incest” were not only issues that directly mirrored real life
in a certain class of the medieval social and economic structure, but also the
stories’ graphic and bawdy descriptions were primarily experiences of
entertainment and spectacle (preface XIV). Much like how contemporary horror
films are for the purposes of entertainment rather than moral pedagogy, ribald
and grotesque fairy tales were told for the same pleasurable diversion.
However gratuitously violent or
sexual the original oral stories were, they were based on certain feudal
realities. There was child abuse. There was incest. There was paternal and
fraternal cruelty. There were plenty of pre-marital pregnancies and
inequalities for women. The stories are rife with examples of how the medieval
worldview maps on to certain reoccurring plot structures. For example, there’s
a significant group of stories that begin with parents abandoning their
children (i.e. “Hansel and Gretel”) due to economic hardship, which Tatar
describes as “wholly realistic for premodern social conditions” (49). Cast out
children or stepmother child abuse were not uncommon. There are also a group of
stories that deal with mothers or stepmothers being jealous of their daughters
because of a sexual father-daughter attraction; the original Snow White had an
evil mother, not stepmother, who was jealous because Snow White’s father was
attracted to her (24). The motif of spinning and imagery of the loom (“Sleeping
Beauty”) directly reflects “spinning as a woman’s destiny” (49). Although the
tales do not faithfully record reality, there are significant points
documenting the cultural climate of when these stories were told (56).
Tatar then does something very
valuable in her book, which is to trace the changing cultural climate with the
changing way of telling and interpreting the stories. The most obvious shift is
the stories transitioning from multiplistic oral form to singular written
documentation by the Grimm brothers’ collection. The women who told them the
stories, some contributing more than others, had significant say in the plot,
characters, and pace of the tales, and then the brothers themselves took small
literary liberties to stylistically tie the stories all together. Thus, the
moving oral nature of the stories became frozen by a specific lens of written
documentation.
Furthermore, after the first
edition was published in 1812, the Grimm brothers decided to capitalize on the
lucrative nature of a flowering children’s literature market, thus began the
extensive editing out of unsuitable scenes, injections of straightforward moral
values, greater literary liberties, and picture illustrations. From the first
to the second edition, Tatar notes that “rather than allowing various figures
of the tale to reveal their traits through their actions…Wilhelm Grimm felt
obliged to stamp the tale’s actors with his own character judgement and thus
shaped his reader’s views of them” (30). His preconceived notions of sex and
class were influenced by the milieu of his time; likewise, Christian symbolism
and character values were infused into the texts. For example, Wilheim “seized
every opportunity for virtue of hard work, correlating diligence with beauty
and desirability” (29). All these 19th century German cultural
values contributed directly in morphing the tales.
After the Grimm’s death came the
creative and convenient interpretation of the tales by various political and
ideological groups. As mentioned in the introduction, Nazi Germany saw the
stories as national tales of purity, interpreting the innocent children in the
tales as the good German folks facing corruption by the big bad Jew. Later,
Allied forces forbade publication and public school teaching of the fairy
tales, fearing it contributed to a violent and grotesque German character
formation. Tatar stresses the double-edged sword that is the fairy tales: “the
simplicity of fairy tales allows interpretive pluralism to reign supreme” (51).
Reduced to its essential components, each fairy tale “mounts a struggle between
any two entities with competing interests,” so this can be parent versus child,
aristocracy versus peasantry, master versus slave, or nation versus nation
(51). The imaginative subjective possibilities are endless, which is its most
alluring as well as dangerous aspect.
Thus Tatar agrees with Bettelheim
that children probably do see themselves in the stories as the child heroes,
who usually possess compassion, naïveté, and courage at the same
time (characteristics that map on to children). Likewise, in fairy tale world,
the least successful becomes the most successful; stories of the underdog
winning again map on to children, who perhaps see themselves as the underdog
among ruling adults. However, Tatar argues that although children may be able
to draw sympathy with the texts and find comfort and growth in successful
heroes, there are other elements of the text that may have not so optimistic repercussions.
The hyperbolic nature of fairy tales, in which a single false step is inflated,
in which missed opportunities are overstated, could instill excessive fear and
caution in children. For example, the
heroine in “Bluebeard” was told not to open a forbidden door, and once she did,
she saw excessive carnage--- “the bloodbath is simply too sensational a
spectacle for so minor a transgression” (164).
Tatar cautions against any
interpretation of moral direction in the tales, whether by parent, child, or
ideologue. What “originally functioned as a motor of the plot and as a means of
introducing villainy becomes a general behavioral guideline” (166). Likewise,
what was once burlesque gratuitous violence for comedic effect has been morphed
into an extreme violation/punishment interpretation. History has shown that
oral stories of gossip and entertainment can be changed into children’s
cautionary tales and even nationalistic symbols of character. Teaching and
interpreting the tales with a specific moral bent or intention is ultimately
doing a disservice to both the truth of the tales themselves as well as to the
reader/interpreter who is now only seeing the tales through one type of lens.
For children, this singular lens might be interpreted by the parents for the
children or by the children themselves (as they are old enough to be influenced
by other ideas in their environment that will influence their own
interpretation of the text). Personal reactions can be moral, or psychological
(Bettelheim), but if it does not include or take into account the knowledge of
the history and context of the tales and their subsequent changes, then the
stories have not been understood completely in their rich and troubling
complexity.
To compare and contrast Tatar’s
critical approach with Bettelheim’s psycho-developmental one, both writers
argue for the reading of the original edition of the Grimm’s fairy tales. For
Bettelheim, it is here that the stories are the most fantastical---a place
where children can insert their own imaginations. For Tatar, the original
edition comes closest to the stories’ oral tradition, a place where the
medieval socio-cultural and economic structure can be best seen and traced.
Both authors agree that a great element of the stories is their flexibility to
interpretation. The imaginative world of the stories provides manifold ways in
which readers can sympathize with or read
into the text. However, here is where the authors disagree. Bettelheim
takes a more optimistic view in which children’s own conscious and unconscious
psychological stages will guide them towards certain stories that will in turn
guide children through their own lives. Bettelheim’s view can be argued to
extend to adults as well---the theory that literature and texts are sites of observational
learning and empathy.
Tatar does not discredit the power
of the tales to guide children, but she does worry that such guidance may be
too subjective or may backfire and have deleterious effects. In other words,
two concerns arise when children interpret their own texts based on
psychological feeling/psycho-developmental drive. 1. What if the text instills
fear instead of confidence due to its fantastical nature and
transgression/punishment pattern? 2. What if the child just interprets the text
through the lens of whatever environment they are in that holds influence over
them (parent’s opinions, their schooling, the dominant culture they live in)? It
seems that these are the questions that Tatar would ask Bettelheim if they were
in conversation with one another. Tatar’s extensive research uses history to
unmask the layers of politicized and convenient revisions the stories have
undergone. Ultimately, she argues that interpretation of the tales alone,
without context, is likely to be erroneous because current values of judgement
and morality are different than those of medieval times from which the tales
originated from.
Combining Bettelheim
and Tatar: A Pedagogical Approach to Fairy Tales
Both authors argue convincing
points of why fairy tales should be read in a certain way. Bettelheim’s
psycho-developmental approach brings to priority the naturally pedagogical
relationship between child and text, specifically the text as a site for
empathetic feeling and (conscious and unconscious) observational learning. Even
if the ideas read don’t immediately map on to a child’s psychological state,
Bettelheim believes that “these ideas…become available when the time is ripe
for the child to build his understanding on them” (Bettelheim 120). In other
words, a seed is planted in the preconscious mind and will ripen when certain
psycho-developmental stages progress. Tatar’s critical and historical approach
prioritizes reading and interpreting the text through contextualization---socio-cultural,
economic, biographical, and political. Depending on the version/edition of the
text a person is reading, a certain intention may be put in by the
author/editors; likewise, a certain intention may be brought by the reader
herself because she is reading a text through a specific
ideological/moral/cultural time.
A reading
that combines these two approaches would greatly benefit the reader as well as
do justice to the text. Specifically, for children, psychological intimacy as
well as critical, contextual knowledge can be felt and learned at the same
time. This is where the role of the adult comes in. The teacher, either parent
or schoolteacher, can guide the child to read and think about the text in both
these ways, without injecting finger-wagging morality. One can imagine picking
a story that a child is drawn to (as Bettelheim stresses to let the child’s
interest guide the reading), letting the child interpret the story her own way,
then asking why she read the plot or
characters in a certain light. The teacher can focus on key points of the text
that may be contentious/open to interpretation and probe the child on her view
of them---this offers valuable insight into how the child is reading the text
or what psychological stage or state the child may be going through that influences
her interpretation. The teacher needs to be keenly aware of opportune moments
to ask the child why she interpreted
a story a certain way. Since a child thinks and feels based on her own past
experience, chances are it is personal experience that has influenced her
thinking (Bettelheim 49).
By making
the link between the text and a child’s personal experience obvious, the
teacher exposes the child’s own thought patterns and psychological state.
Verbalizing the link and, more importantly, having the child herself see it is
bringing into consciousness the empathetic connection between child and text.
Here, Bettelheim’s connection between textual and psycho-developmental is made,
and as an extra step, the teacher and child have talked about the connection,
resulting in not only the organic mapping on of psychological state but also in
the creation of a reflective perspective of having the child think about why
that is.
The next
step is to bring in Tatar’s contextual and critical critiques. The teacher can
explain to the child that not everyone has interpreted the story this way. In
fact, here are several other possible interpretations of characters and
situations. The teacher can then go on to try to have the child put herself in
the shoes of characters other than the protagonist, even in the shoes of the
villain. What motivated the villain’s actions? Some stories lend themselves to
obviously evil and ridiculous villains, while some others are less clear.
Depending on the story, having a child try to trace the psychology and actions
of the villain, or other characters, can be a valuable exercise in reflecting
on other perspectives. Ultimately it’s about problematizing any black and white
morality conclusions the child may come to generalize without contextual help.
Finally,
Tatar’s historical context may help the child understand in a new light the
actions and motives of certain characters. Telling them about the poverty
during Hansel and Gretel’s time may help them gain greater understanding of why
the characters were abandoned rather than sit in fear or anger at the idea of
horrible parenting. Telling them about the inequality between men and women may
help them understand why Bluebeard’s wife was exposed to visual carnage, why
female curiosity was linked with punishment while in other fairy tales, male
protagonist curiosity usually lead to fortune. Even gratuitous violence can be
honestly explained to the child in terms of real types of violence in medieval
times as well as violence functioning as humor in the text. Offering apt
context, especially at points where the child interprets things as certainly
one way, helps the child reflect on the multiple and layered meanings of the
text, creating a richer, more nuanced understanding of fairy tales rather than
a pure visceral reaction to textual events and characters.
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