Reforming the Feminine ContentLiterary Rebels Part II: Scary Good Fairy Tales
Once upon a time, I encouraged Christian parents to raise their children to be rebels. I boldly continue to preach mutiny.
“…The times grew worse and worse, and soon the children heard their mother say to their father, “All is gone again. We have but half a loaf left, and then we must starve. The children must go; we will take them deeper into the wood, so that they may not find the way out this time. It is the only way we can escape death ourselves.
The children had heard all this as they lay awake in bed …[Hansel] tried to comfort Grethel, saying, “Do not cry; sleep in peace; God will not forsake us.”
Grimm’s Fairy Tales were originally published in 1812 as Children’s and Household Tales. They are a collection of folk stories accumulated by Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm in an effort to preserve the endangered oral tradition of story telling in Germany.
It is imporant to remember the time in which the stories were penned. During medieval times, throughout Europe children were often neglected and abandoned, like Hänsel and Grethel. Accused witches were burned at the stake, like the evil mother-in-law in “The Six Swans.” The cruelty in the stories was not the Grimms’ fantasy; rather it reflected the law-and-order system of the old times.
Fairy tales allow us to express “our utopian longings,” says Jack Zipes of the University of Minnesota, whose 1987 translation of the complete fairy tales captures the rustic vigor of the original text. “They show a striving for happiness that none of us knows but that we sense is possible. We can identify with the heroes of the tales and become in our mind the masters and mistresses of our own destinies.”
As a Christian, this really rings true. Inherently we long for perfection and happily ever after ~ and there is a faint, so faint! memory buried deep within my soul, only vaguely aroused from time to time, that recalls some buried sense of a perfect happiness before the Curse. Jesus is ever calling me to that redeemed state. I sense a profound longing to “be” whomever my Creator originally intended. Fairy tales for this life, maybe. But my Bible promises perfection and happily ever after will culminate in heaven. Fairy tales remind me of that.
Fairy tales also provide a workout for the our minds. Some would argue that fairy tales can be the “great comforters.” By confronting fears and phobias, symbolized by witches, heartless stepmothers, and hungry wolves, we can even help our children confront anxieties and fears ESPECIALLY when taught with relentless vigor the unwavering Biblical truths about God: His power, His Might, His readiness to save, His omniprescence, His Promises, His mysterious working of all things out for good in humble servants.
For much of the 19th century teachers, parents, and religious figures, particularly in the United States, deplored the Grimms’ collection for its raw, uncivilized content. An American educator in 1885 railed: “The folktales mirror all too loyally the entire medieval worldview and culture with all its stark prejudice, its crudeness and barbarities.” Offended adults objected to the gruesome punishments inflicted on the stories’ villains.
In the original “Snow White” the evil stepmother is forced to dance in red-hot iron shoes until she falls down dead.
In “The Goose Maid” a treacherous servant is stripped, thrown into a barrel studded with sharp nails, and dragged through the streets.
The wolf actually falls dead with one blow from the hunter in “Little Red Cap”, unlike the sanitized version we bought on Amazon, where he “runs away, never to be seen again.” Where’s the justice or clarity for our children in that ending? In a society where violent criminals are increasingly protected by the overhauls to the legal system, I guess we could expect no less than an overhaul to fairy tale villains as well.
Although one must be prudent and apply wisdom to the sensitivities and ages of individual children when introducing Grimm’s Fairy Tales, the moral lessons and justice are confused by the literary bleeding hearts seeking to sanitize the stories. Children need stories about absolutes that are easily correlated with their Bibles and memory verses like, Whoever sows injustice shall reap calamity. Proverbs 22:7
Oh, what a tangled web do parents weave when they think that their children are naïve. Ogden Nash
Even though some protective parents shy from the Grimms’ tales because of their reputation for violence, many others keep reading 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.
SIMPLE SIMON TIPS:
HOW TO RELATE BIBLICAL THEOLOGY WITH FAIRY TALES
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LOOK for vintage copies published before the 1930’s. Abebooks.com is a great resource for reasonable prices. One-syllable versions were popular and easy to find.
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READ THE STORY FIRST AND LOOK FOR SIMPLE THEMES. In Hansel & Grethel, for instance, you can draw on themes of trusting Jesus (seen in Hansel’s courageous words to his sister); godly wisdom, Christ-like bravery, and Fatherly care (seen in Hansel’s actions); God’s omnipotence and special care for children throughout the story. Grab your concordance and look up a passage that correlates with trust, wisdom, etc.
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Negative can be useful truth. As with Hansel and Grethel, not all parents are good parents, and many a wife’s carpings and poor advice has been foolishly relented to by wimpy husbands. A continual dripping on a rainy day and a quarrelsome wife are alike. Proverbs 27:15
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Happy Endings. Heaven usually happens at the end, a great springboard to conversation:
Hansel & Grethel: ”Their sorrow was now at an end, and they lived in great peace and joy.”
The Frog Prince: “Then the prince wed his true bride, and they lived in great joy and peace.”
The Town Musicians of Bremen: “From that time the thieves would not go near the house, and as the four friends liked it well, they made it their home for years.”
Little Red Cap: “In a trice he had aimed and fired his gun, and thus Little Red Cap’s life was saved.”
Old Sultan: “The dog and the cat looked up and saw the wolf, who was so full of shame for his acts that he was glad to come down and make peace with the dog.”
Repentance works for me too.
Coming Up: The Story of Beowulf. Why Every Boy Should Read This
My father gave me Grimms fairy tales for Christmas. I shared the Cinderella story in 2nd grade when we had to bring a fairy tale to class. My classmates cringed, because the step sisters cut off their heels and toes to fit into Cinderella’s glass slippers.
Funny! Yikes! Yes, this is the original version, I can only imagine their horrified looks~did you get in trouble?!
These are delicate issues to weigh out, and certainly in the current public climate, prudency reigns in many areas, including literary choices as read to the public masses. I’m sure many Christian consciences bristle at the thought of reading fairy tales in original version, and I accept that and respect the same. But at least wrestle it out. Understanding how we got to the politically correct climate socially is interesting, and there’s even a politically correctness with Christianity we don’t often see, right. Sometimes I feel pressured to exist and think like Br’er Rabbit stuck on the Tarbaby~it would be my thought that as Christians we should at least be intellectually willing to extract ourselves from the tar here and there where Jesus allows, and see if that really is. If you eventually go back to being stuck with Tarbaby, fine! But wrestle, please women, wrestle.
A brilliant Christian author wrote: “Today many readers and critics have set up for literary choices a kind of orthodoxy. They “demand” realism of fact which may, in the end, limit rather than broaden the literary scope. They associate the only legitimate material with the movement of social forces, with the typical, with fidelity to the way things look and happen in normal life. We have become so flooded with sorry fiction based on unearned liberties, or on the notion that fiction must represent the typical, that in the public mind the deeper kinds of realism are less and less understandable.”
Bad things happen because we live in a cursed, dangerous, wicked world. It has always been; it always will be. Without giving a heavy unhelpful bent to that, fairy tales nevertheless give a reap what you sow morality, and many consider God in the dark woods. In any case, I for one would have given anything to be a fly on the wall that day at your school. It was read in innocence, and you really gave that story time a little Tabasco. I’m sure they’re not scarred too badly.