A fairy tale is a short story of the folklore genre. Fairy Tales usually feature magic, enchantments, and mythical or fanciful characters. Here are some common elements and/or themes.
- Fanciful Characters: Fairies, dragons, elves, talking animals, witches, and royalty.
- Magical Settings: In distant kingdoms or enchanted forests.
- Moral Lessons: Good over evil, kindness, or the dangers of greed and vanity.
These are typically stories we choose as parents to read to our children and grandchildren, sometimes even at bedtime. Some typical ones might include Three Little Pigs, Little Red Riding Hood, Alice in Wonderland, and Sleeping Beauty. There are also movies like the Wizard of Oz and Bambi. Pretty benign stories, or are they? Let’s explore that.
Reacquaintance with Fairy Tales
As some of you may know, I am an addicted gamer to cryptogram-type puzzles. In my phone app, there is a daily puzzle devoted to a different city every month. Additionally, there is a book-type puzzle. Pages and pages of text from books. Lately they have been from less know fairy-tale-type books. A couple months ago it was 1,000 Leagues Under the Sea. This past month, it was The Tale of Peter Pan (or Wendy and Peter).
Having just finished Peter Pan, I began thinking about these types of stories. The ending of Peter Pan was very sad for me. Peter bringing Wendy and her brothers back to their parents in London. Then, with Peter leaving them, and promising to come back often. But as things go, he didn’t come back for several years. Time during which Wendy grew into a woman, married, and had a child of her own.
Peter returned to the same open window in the nursery and, seeing a child, assumed it is Wendy. But then he also sees Wendy as a grown woman. How sad. He confronts her about growing up and ends by saying, “You Promised”.
Making Promises
That’s what finally got me thinking about these types off stores. How often do we make promises that we are unable to keep? One incident immediately popped into my head. When my son was young, as a single working Mom, I promised him one summer that I would take him swimming on the coming Sunday. Saturday was always laundry, cleaning, and grocery shopping. He patiently waited for Sunday, but when we woke up it was pouring rain. Of course, there was no trip to the beach, but I heard the “You Promised” all that day.
So as parents, we don’t necessarily mean to cause our children grief, but it happens. Let’s take a look at those benign stories I mentioned above.
The Not Benign Stories
I’ll start with Peter Pan, since that is the one freshest in my mind. This is a story about a “boy” who can fly and refuses to grow up. A boy who flies through a nursery window and entices three children to fly with him to a magic land called Neverland. They fly off, leaving their parents grieving their lost children.
Neverland turns out to be an island with many dangers. There are many adventures and mishaps, but the most gruesome is the account of Peter fighting the pirate who also occupies the island – Captain Hook of the Jolly Roger. During the fight, Peter cuts off Hook’s right hand (which is bad enough), but he then feeds the hand to a crocodile. Oh yuck. How is that a great image for your children at bedtime?
Let’s look at some of the others. There is Alice falling through a hole into what the author calls Wonderland. Great image to go to sleep with, i.e. falling through a hole. But how about Dorothy and ToTo blowing off to OZ. Will that leave a child fearing a strong wind that might blow them away? As a child, my Aunt was fearful of the wind, and one story my Grandfather repeated often was about her wanting him to stop the wind.
Even some of the lesser ones: a wolf blowing houses down, a wolf in the grandmother’s clothes waiting for the child to come to eat her, a woman being fed a magic apple to put her to sleep. Oh yes, the wicked step-mothers treating orphan children badly.
And finally there is Bambi. There is nothing that bothers me more than seeing or reading about an animal’s death. I’m just a horrible softie with that. With Bambi, not only does the mother die, but here is this poor “child” being left an orphan.
My Final Thoughts
I’m not a psychiatrist or psychologist, but I am just wondering about the things we plant in our children’s minds, not just with these type of stories but even with the other side of them. The princess stories with the glamor. And then there is a whole other topic of the video games with the wars and killings. How do we teach our kids the reality of the world?
Post Script
It’s a bit later since I wrote this page. I am now reading the original manuscript of The Wizard of Oz. Of course I saw the movie a long time ago, but I don’t remember any of this in the movie, and it’s just as well. Dorothy and the Scarecrow have just come across the Tin Man. After a whispered request for oil and being loosened up, he is now telling them how he became tin.
It was a two page detail of how he was once a real human woodsman. A wicked witch put a hex on his axe, which caused the axe to attack him and chop off all his limbs and body parts, including his heart. A Tinsmith saved him by replacing all his parts with tin, except his heart. He now wants to join Dorothy on the Yellow Brick Road to ask the Wizard of Oz to restore his heart so he can love again.
Pretty gory stuff to tell a child in a story. An axe, with a witch’s hex, that can attack a person and chop off their head.