Friday, April 2, 2010

Fairytales, Good for Your Kids or Not? (Little Mermaid? Courageous Princess?)

Sit down. You have a decision to make./ One way will be thorny and full of pain. One way will be orderly and full of pain./ Eventually the heart will be empty and open/ and then you will give back the pain....—Terry Ehret, “Behind Broken Hill Temple”, from Lucky Break

Driving home from yet another evening parent meeting, I catch out of the corner of my eye a deer daintily side-stepping into the brush. The thin flicker of white rimming the black dagger of her tail mirrors the lit borders of the clouds, all of us bathed in that ethereal blue of back-roads on a half-moon night. I’m thinking about REM, specifically Peter Buck writing, “To me, Losing My Religion feels like some kind of archetype that was floating around in space that we managed to lasso.” Because the kids are home with Grandma, I can crank it up and lean over the steering wheel, afford a swerve as I search the sky and ponder a discussion thread concerning fairytales posted recently on She Writes (http://www.shewrites.com/) that was initiated by writer Allyson Lang (who posts at www.northsidefour.blogspot.com).

Do you read fairytales to your children—given the manner in which female heroines are portrayed, endangered, damaged, in need of rescue? And how might our boy and girl childrens’ psyches be affected? These and other questions were considered.

I am barely emerging from the “blind symbiotic cocoon” passage of motherhood during which one is in the business of teaching one’s child to construct boundaries while still being, as a parent, somewhat merged with that child. My youngest weaned, I’m surprised to find one of my dearly held assumptions morphing: I no longer believe my children will emulate everything they hear, read or see.

I’m not advocating over-loading one’s two-year-old with fairytales. Every parent has to sort out the right time and place to introduce certain stories. But I fare better trusting that my children’s psyches come equipped for dealing with our state of humanity, planetarily. I’m praying they come into their incarnations wired to survive. Eventually they’ll have to sort through the various group-thinks of our people.

As I pull up the steep, uneven, pitted gravel lane to my house, CD skipping furiously at the last lunge over the deepest pothole, the list of questions goes on. What are we attracted to in fairytales, repelled by, and why? What might be to our specie’s advantage to living steeped in certain agreements about which roles each sex will play? Where is the source of one’s power? Why is it so easy to give away?

And, why so easy to sit in the van, alone between the dank trunks of the redwoods, watching for signs of light through the upstairs blinds, pretend I’m not home yet, listen one more time to Man on the Moon, wonder which songs will obsess my children when they are teenagers.

Thinking about the teenage years (my own) I’m grateful for the grim brutality portrayed in some fairytales (take Bluebeard, for example) for the simple message: you too can survive this or that horrific situation (male/female skirmish, child/parent/relative passage, or some other tale of abandonment or betrayal). I remember as a preteen (burgeoning with the siren’s vibrancy of youth) encountering predatory sexual male behavior (from boys wired with an equal ferocity for the hunt) and how fairytales helped me breathe… precisely because they take the amorphous emotional treacheries we all must navigate and pour them into 3D form, that once named, you can ride along with the heroine and contend with (battle, evade, or succumb): a failed magician, a Sea Witch, a pair of addictively beautiful red shoes capable of dancing their wearer to death.

Clearly, I’m not talking about Disney’s oversimplified versions of fairytales either. As a nineteen year-old exchange student in Denmark, I read H.C Anderson’s Den lille Havfrau (Little Mermaid) in Danish. So rich, in which the choice to trade one’s voice for legs to win a landbound lover is not rewarded—the little mermaid suffers very real consequences. While she garners a dance, a little time with the object of her desire, she does not get to stay on and live happily ever after, but evaporates in the morning to the voices of her sisters singing her soul a pathway to the stars.

Or at least that’s the version I remember, puzzled together with my newbie exchange student’s handle on the language. The shock of the little mermaid’s demise—that depth of sorrow, reflected a far more accurate truth about one aspect of the female experience, often unmapped, unacknowledged. Offset, for me, by the spiritual comfort of the sisters’ voices bordering her journey into the next realm.

And now as a mother, I’m grateful for the whole cast of characters misbehaving in fairytales in varying degrees. For their universal appeal, with the unfortunate hero or heroine suffering a fatal flaw, some common-sense block or predisposition to thinking the best of others…which is the case with most of us ambling through our childhoods. For some fraction of a decision, then, you might side with a “lesser” character, until your moral compass “trues.” At any rate, I love how you get to sort it out in the quiet of your own heart.

When my daughter was 7, my brother’s sweetheart Maria (formerly employed in the comic industry) brought us Rod Espinosa’s The Courageous Princess, a 235 page graphic fairytale starring Mabelrose, a tomboy of a princess who finds herself in the snare of a dragon named Shalathromnostrium. Shal ruthlessly lectures the captive Mabelrose at one point, “No one will rescue you! Not now, not ever. No one will rescue a second class princess from a poor kingdom…You will learn to like living here…You will be mine for a long time.” And…as you can guess, Mabelrose has to draw on her own strength and intelligence to escape and find her way home.

We enjoyed Espinosa’s vibrant colors and his dramatic pacing, from panels of starlight and vast aerials above the thundering waterfalls to a close-up of Mabelrose sleeping in the safety of a tree house in the kingdom of Leptia. You see Mabelrose nestled in the folds of a purple blanket, her legs curving to fit the oval room, books and sewing baskets tucked into shelves made of the tree’s twisting inner branches. In the same black backdrop of the panel, is the forest’s eye view of the bedroom, just a dim orange glow emanating from the porthole window spanning an empty knot in the trunk.

I have no idea how the next generation will re-interpret fairytales, but I love that I can either go to the bookstore (or more likely Google) and scope out alternative choices for my children, or get busy and join the conversation, take some responsibility (lasso my own archetype), by writing something myself.

Not long before I was scheduled to fly back to the states after my stint as an exchange student, my host-sister Ulla and her family took me to see H.C. Anderson’s humble home, and later, in Copenhagen, to a harbor, where just above the slate gray water line, sat a small, unimposing statue of the Little Mermaid. In my mind, she soared colossal, rivaling the Statue of Liberty. In reality, she can’t be more than three feet or so tall, and, I imagine, facing east for love of sunrise.

The Courageous Princess: http://www.antarctic-press.com/

8 comments:

Ethel Rohan said...

Excellent, thoughtful post, Tania.

I am in the "subversive fairy tales re-imagined and reinvented" camp. The "boy-saves-girl" and "girl-marries-boy-and-lives-happily-ever-after" story lines have done so much damage;Right up there with Ken and Barbie and the Disney channel.

I can't, and shouldn't, protect my daughters from all this, but I can offer them options, other tellings, and I can talk to them about what I find problematic and damaging.

It's tough all this, it really is. Like parenting isn't hard enough already :-)

Tania Pryputniewicz said...

Thanks Ethel. Am going to search out a good fairytale dictionary, if there is such a thing, (I'm sure there is) and do some playing around this year.

Always appreciate your thoughts.

Penina said...

Tania your blog is super amazing and this post made me think of Amaterasu, the Japanese Sun Goddess. This is a legend about sibling rivalry. Amatersu has a brother who is the Storm God, Sussano…He is a drunk and very jealous of his sister’s power. He wants to be the sun. So he trashes Amaterasu’s rice fields and throws excrement on the floors of her holy temples. She becomes depressed and shuts herself off in a cave. She has had it, she swears she’ll never leave her cave this time. The earth without the sun? Well, everything begins to die and the evil spirits multiply and wreak havoc. There are different interpretations on how the Sun Goddess finally leaves the cave but every interpretation involves a mirror. The people devise a plan to get Amaterasu out of the cave, they bring a large oval mirror so she can see how beautiful she is. The people have a loud party with drums and singing, laughter…Amaterusa says she’ll just take one little peak and that’s when the people hold the mirror up to her. She says to herself – “Is that really me? Am I that beautiful?” Then she takes her rightful place in the heavens. This interpretation is from the book: Goddess, by Jalaja Bonheim. Just thinking about the state of affairs today - Amaterasu represents for me what is happening, the real outcome of when a woman shuts herself off inside her cave – the outcome is not pretty. I'm going to share this story with my nieces. Thank you for your writing and reflections Tania. You should write a fairytale. I would defintely share your fairytale with my nieces...Penina

Tania Pryputniewicz said...

Penina,

love hearing from you here...isn't Amaterasu featured as The Sun card, I think it is in The Motherpeace deck (those magical round tarot cards...though I also love some of the images from the other round deck, Daughters of the Moon)? I love thinking about Amaterasu's story, and the metaphor of re-emerging from the dark, and the clever use of the mirror to break the spell of how one might see oneself (as less than, when the opposite might be true).

Do you have a blog address yet?

C.R.E.W. said...

"I’m not advocating over-loading one’s two-year-old with fairytales. Every parent has to sort out the right time and place to introduce certain stories. But I fare better trusting that my children’s psyches come equipped for dealing with our state of humanity, planetarily. I’m praying they come into their incarnations wired to survive. Eventually they’ll have to sort through the various group-thinks of our people."
I congratulate you, Tania. You have a trust in the innate compass of your children, that they are able to discern life's challenges well enough to make productive choices. That is a great foundation to instill in your children, the belief that they can choose effectively which group-think that they will align themselves with. In my opinion, this is primarily for what a fairy tale is recited; at least it used to be, before these tales were re-written, sanitized, and Americanized.

"As I pull up the steep, uneven, pitted gravel .... the list of questions goes on. What are we attracted to in fairytales, repelled by, and why? What might be to our specie’s advantage to living steeped in certain agreements about which roles each sex will play? Where is the source of one’s power? Why is it so easy to give away?"
These are valid questions that I never contemplated. I believe that the sex roles in fairy tales is not to be taken literally, but rather it is used as a stereotype for that aspect of one's personality; a girl can represent the vulnerable and trusting aspect of one's self, the boy can represent the boldness & independence seeking to make itself known to his parents. As far as "where is the source of one's power"? I cannot answer this, but I have often thought that the book of Samson and Delilah in the Christian Bible is not an account of two historical people, but rather a fairy tale that was originally told to children in order to illustrate to them the consequence which can befall a person who reveals what is the source of his strength. The person whom you tell will use this against you; therefore, tell no one the source of your inner strength.
To Ethen Rohan, I agree that the "girl-marries-boy-and-lives-happily-ever-after" can be a damaging lesson to teach youngsters. I believe that the original intent of fairy tales was to craft a scenario for a child which foretold of dire consequences for the wrong choices in life.

C.R.E.W. said...

As an example, in 'The Handless Maiden' the miller promises The Evil One (Devil) what is in his backyard in exchange for countless coins of gold. This story shows what can happen when a person unknowingly trades away something of priceless value for the short term reward of immediate wealth. The key in telling a fairy tale is that the storyteller must himself or herself know what is the moral of the story and keep this in mind when telling it. The Disneyesque fairy tales have misconstrued the "happily ever after" message. It is actually not related at all to the act of the man/boy marrying the woman/girl of his dreams. The lesson in the original fairy tales is that when a person struggles through the challenges in his life, he will come to know all parts of himself. When he is able to integrate the lessons he's learned, then he shall become complete. The "happily ever after" means NOT that he will never be sad again, but rather that he will be able to meet any problem that life throws at him and defeat it. By using an example that children already know about (a man and a woman getting married), the story teller weaves a myth which illustrates the benefit to living true to yourself, as the Handless Maiden does, and that your struggles will be rewarded in a way that you cannot now foresee. Using the analogy of marriage to represent becoming 'whole' 'complete' is a good one. I believe that Disney's writers do not comprehend what is meant by most fairy tales, as they have been re-written and re-interpreted. The Ugly Duckling by Hans Christian Anderson originally was quite different from the Americanized version. In his original tale, the duckling is shunned by the whole tribe and leaves home in shame. He meets up with two game ducks in a lake. They, too, comment on how ugly he is but tell him that they're on their way to meet up with some hot chicks. They come across as two studs looking to get laid. They say that they can't promise him anything, but if he hangs with them they might throw him a bone (an ugly female duck). The two studs fly from the lake and shortly after --- BLAM! BLAM! The two ducks fall from the sky into the lake and the water turns red with their blood. It is the first day of duck hunting season. Apparently, American writers would rather shield their children from reading about the obstacles life will present them (or at least to scrub clean any hints that people will bleed when hurt, that death happens when least expected, and perpetrate the myth that happiness is obtainable and is permanent once it's achieved).

Tania Pryputniewicz said...

C.R.E.W.,

Thank you for your thoughtful and thought-provoking responses. I've been thinking now about Samson and Delilah and what you said about revealing the source of one's power, and find a couple of conflicting ideas surfacing. I can see protecting one's source of power; I can also see the power that comes in helping others on their path to their own power. But that is probably better framed with a different parable. Two different kinds of power under discussion, I think.

Thanks for looking at the subject with me.

Tania Pryputniewicz said...

C.R.E.W.,

"The lesson in the original fairy tales is that when a person struggles through the challenges in his life, he will come to know all parts of himself." Thanks for reminding me of this aerial pov...and I also enjoyed your reminder about the metaphor of marriage as one for wholeness (within the self).

Like returning "home" to have the pieces rearranged so they make sense to the soul, not just the veneer of personality.

Worth a reread--Ugly Duckling (original) and The Handless Maiden; thanks again for your insights.