Childism and Grimms Tales (original) (raw)
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On the Use and Abuse of Folk and Fairy Tales with Children
Children's Literature Association Quarterly, 1978
Prologue When I first wrote the following essay in 1977, I was greatly angered by what I felt to be the authoritarian tone and fallacious arguments of Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment, which is still widely used and acclaimed as a great and perspicacious study of fairy tales. Little did I know at that time -and little did the general public know -that my critique of his work was minor and temperate compared to the critiques of his activities as a psychologist and his published works that followed his death by suicide in 1990. Two excellent biographies, Bettelheim, a Life and a Legacy by Nina Sutton 1 and The Creation of Dr. B.: A Biography of Bruno Bettelheim by Richard Pollak, 2 go into great detail about the scandals and the sad and troubled life of this famous man. After reading them, one could easily come to the conclusion that he was a charlatan, forger, liar, bully, and oppressor -which he was. But he was also extraordinarily dedicated to helping disturbed children and experimenting with practices and ideas that would enable them to function "normally" and happily in society. He deeply believed that human beings could be changed through psychotherapy and that they could successfully adapt to their environment if enough proper care and attention were paid to them. The difficulty is that Bettelheim undermined his life's work and good intentions by using dubious methods and experiments that have harmed numerous people and by disseminating ideas about therapy and literature that are misleading. As we now know, Bettelheim was fond of exaggerating the truth and concealing his ignorance by forging stories about himself and intimidating critics and adversaries with phony knowledge and unsubstantiated claims. For instance, he never studied with Freud in Vienna. He spent very little time in a concentration camp to grasp fully the desperate situation and the fortitude of the prisoners. He was fortunately released through the influence of family friends. Later, in the United states, he never did adequate research in studying the effects of concentration camp life on the victims. He lied about his academic credentials and background in psychology when he came to the United States. According to many children and counselors at The Orthogenic School in Chicago, he was abusive, secretive, and authoritarian and never allowed experts to witness the practices and processes that he developed to cure troubled children. In fact, the 85% success rate that he claimed for the School has never been proven or documented. His written English was so poor that all his books had to be doctored. He never read fairy tales to his children or developed a method of using fairy tales with children. His knowledge of children's literature, reading habits, and preferences was abysmally low. As Alan Dundes, one of the foremost scholars of folklore in America, has carefully demonstrated, many of the ideas in his book The Uses of Enchantment were plagiarized from Julius Heuscher's A Psychiatric Study of Fairy Tales: Their Origin, Meaning and Usefulness (1963), nor does Bettelheim evince any understanding of folklore. The list of his forgeries and crimes is endless. But does that mean that we must condemn everything that he did and wrote? The simple answer is: of course not. Bettelheim was a cultivated man of doxa, an opinionated man, who represented his opinions as truth. As Sutton and Pollak make amply career, he was deeply disturbed most of his life -traumatized by his father's death due to syphilis and by his experiences in the concentration camp that left him somewhat paranoid and ambivalent about his Jewishness. He was also filled with rage that he "successfully" managed to channel through his work and through living life through fictions, as Pollak has astutely observed. 3 He could be charming, brazen, and pathetic, and he left indelible marks on all those who knew and worked with him. Yet, the extent to which anyone could appreciate the "essential" or "true" Dr. Bettelheim is in doubt. The truth about him and his life may never fully be known, but we can certainly determine what is fictitious and abusive in his writings. In is in this spirit that I am reprinting the following essay with some slight changes. What I intuited in 1977 is, I believe, valid as we enter the twenty-first century.
Fairy Tales and Their Relevance: A Synopsis on Violence Against Women
Fairy tales and folk tales alike were popularized in the seventeenth century as a means of educating children on the prominence of moral nobility and discipline through the embodiment of fantasy and magical enchantment. Presently, literary scholars are attempting to understand if the moral underlying's and lessons of fairy tales are still relevant and valuable to children born in the new millennium. Little Red Cap (1812) by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, and Bluebeard (1697) by Charles Perrault are both quintessential tales of the early seventeenth to mid-eighteenth century. By examining these particular tales through a feminist lens, one can conclude that the some of the earliest children's literature remains significant to the modern era, as the tales can be interpreted as illustrations of the quintessential issue of violence against women.
Fairy Tales and Political Socialization
2018
The concept of childhood is one of the many facets of modernity that entered Western consciousness in the seventeenth century. It emanated from the historical mutations of the post-Renaissance era that set in motion what Norbert Elias calls the civilizing process, one that spawned a repressive mode of socialization in tandem with the cultural and ideological hegemony of the new power elite. Accordingly, childhood became a metaphor for oppression targeting not only children, but also women, the underclass, the social outcast, and the colonized as they all were deemed “incompletely human”. From mid-nineteenth century on, however, childhood began to evince a liberating potential in tandem with the changing direction of modern Western civilization. This ushered in an alternative concept of childhood inspired by the shared characteristics between the medieval and modern child that finds expression in the works of distinguished literary figures of the Victorian era. What followed was an e...
Anti-Tales in Question: A Study on "Cinderella" of The Grimm Variations (2024)
2024
The Grimm Variations is an episodic anime series released on Netflix in April 2024. The series is composed of six classical stories of fairy tales inspired by the Brothers Grimm stories, from Cinderella to Little Red Riding Hood, from Hansel and Gretel to the Town Musicians of Bremen. The nature of the variations in the series does not come from the transfer of the stories as they are, but rather from certain changes in their content. The shifting rendition in each episode, however, comes with what we might call "a dark twist" and poses the question of "what if" Cinderella was not depicted as a passive heroine, and the Little Riding Hood was the one that hunts the wolf? These varied questions and answers are what classify this series as the composition of anti-tales, a phenomenon that is succinctly utilised by the feminist subversions of classical misogynistic stories. A comprehensive study of all episodes would be such a vast subject for this article. Therefore, this article limits itself to the critical standing of the first episode, "Cinderella". The purpose of this article is to investigate the critical feminist standing of the Cinderella story as an anti-tale in its 2024 rendition on a comparative basis with the classical story of the Brothers Grimm version.
Exploring Adolescent Reality: How Fairy Tales Explain Uncomfortable Truths
Classic fairy tales, such as the ones told by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, were stories that shed light on the uncomfortable truths of the world. Their horrific origins often involved scenes of rape, incest, torture, cannibalism, and other revolting occurrences that are teeming with brutal moralities. These tales were meant to emulate truth, and as children would grow older the idea was that they could subconsciously recall the messages from these tales as they cope with the injustices and contradictions of life... That is the opening lines of this essay which seeks to explore how modern young adult literature utilizes fairy tales to reclaim a genre that has long since been "disnyfied." That is to say, fairy tales have become censored in such as way that many of the original morals have been all but stripped away. However, by exploring modern literature that sheds light on how horrible the world can be, we may actually be preparing our students with a better understanding of how the world works. In this world, there may not always be a happily ever after. It is our job to prepare students for hardships so that they can, not only endure, but feel free in the classroom to come to us and be open out their problems. This paper demonstrates just that as it looks at Patrick Ness's A Monster Calls, Ransom Riggs Miss Peregrines Home for Peculiar Children, and Christine Heppermann's Poisoned Apples.
Lectora: revista de dones i textualitat, 2021
The main aim of this study is to explore if and, if so, how Rabih Alameddine, Kim Addonizio, and Kellie Wells have managed to sustain, replicate, disregard, or redefine the patriarchal ideology customarily associated to gender issues within the fairy-tale tradition. What is really striking is that, several decades after the revisionist project undertaken by the "Angela Carter generation", these new voices experimenting with the field of fairy tales still feel the need to revisit the same mythemes and fight against the same ideology and values that pervaded twentiethcentury retellings of fairy tales. The subversive potential of the fairy tale retellings seems to have been surpassed by the powerful agenda of a patriarchal social system, which, despite the social, psychological, and political changes, still retains its status quo.
Cinderella Wants to Decide: A Feminist Study of Several Versions of This Fairy Tale Over the Years
2014
The literary fairy tale, present along history since the Middle Ages, is a device that portrays the ideology, politics, values, and morals of a society. However, they have also worked as an acculturation device for many centuries now. The language used in these tales is a key element, for it is selected by the tale collector or the tale writer with a purpose. A clear example is the fairy tale "Cinderella". People with power, men in the majority of cases, have articulated some specific discourse in order to reproduce or, rather, create, a reality in which men are strong while women are weak, men are active while women are passive, men are the leaders while women are the followers, just to mention a few dichotomies. Male collectors of fairy tales such as Basile, the brothers Grimm, and Charles Perrault have used their power as storytellers to reproduce a hierarchical structure of society, namely, patriarchy. These biased ideas on women, which the literary fairy tale has help...
Forever Young: Childhoods, Fairy Tales and Philosophy
Global Studies of Childhood
Fairy tales play a substantial role in the shaping of childhoods. Developed into stories and played out in picture books, films and tales, they are powerful instruments that influence conceptions and treatments of the child and childhoods. This article argues that traditional fairy tales and contemporary stories derived from them use complex means to mould the ways that children live and experience their childhoods. This argument is illustrated through representations of childhoods and children in a selection of stories and an analysis of the ways they act on and produce the child subjects and childhoods they convey. The selected stories are examined through different philosophical lenses, utilizing Foucault, Lyotard and Rousseau. By problematizing these selected stories, the article analyses what lies beneath the surface of the obvious meanings of the text and enticing pictures in stories, as published or performed. Finally, this article argues for a careful recognition of the complexities of stories used in early childhood settings and their powerful and multifaceted influences on children and childhoods.