Fairy Tales in the News
June 22nd, 2005 at 11:27 pm (Books)
I’ve been very irritated lately at the articles surfacing in the news and in the “blogosphere”.
A recent study looked at a number of female victims of domestic violence and discovered that most of them identified with passive female fairy tale heroines and believed that, like the fairy tale heroines, they could change their partners if they only loved them enough. The article, of course, implies that this has more to do with the images in the fairy tales than anything else and that perhaps it is dangerous to read fairy tales to girls. I *hate* when I read this kind of thing. It is so backwards. It isn’t the fairy tales’ fault that women delude themselves like that. If girls are read classic fairy tales (a variety of them, not just twenty versions of Cinderella), the picture they get from them should be much more healthy and well-rounded. I think that if women are getting the wrong ideas from fairy tales than it has more to do with our attitudes and thinking about fairy tales than it does with the stories themselves. Read Bettelheim if you need further arguements about that, he is much more qualified to discuss it and eloquent about the subject than I will ever be.
Fairy tales are not the problem and studies that say they are need to dig deeper. It’s more complicated - a lot more complicated.
This article reminded me of another article on fairy tales that also made me angry. This one has many of the same problems the domestic abuse study does, and made me just as angry when I first read it. It states that fairy tales mess up women’s value systems when it comes to physical appearance. It also misses the point.
Fairy tales are not bad. Read your kids fairy tales. Read the articles, but think about them as well. They are not looking at the big picture, just a little thing they can track. Lesson 1 in fourth grade science is that just because when “A” happens, so does “B” it does not mean that “B” is caused by “A”. These studies totally missed that day, it seems.
Eva said,
June 23, 2005 at 3:49 pm
I agree that these studies were probably looking more for a scapegoat than for actual ways to help women who are in a domestic abuse situation. After all, the don’t appear to have looked at how these women identified with other common cultural icons and perceptions of women.
I can’t say I particularly like Beauty and the Beast, but I think they are blowing its affect way out of proportion.
I’m betting children get much more of their system of values and beliefs directly from their parents (and possibly indirectly from the stories their parents might select for them at a young age).
A better conclusion is probably, choose stories for your kids that you are comfortable with, the stories that you feel fit in with your own view of the world. Not reading a child any stories at all is not going to make them more well rounded or healthy, it’s just going to make it difficult for them to understand the consept of “for pretend” as opposed to “for real”.
Viv said,
June 23, 2005 at 5:48 pm
Eva said it best. I also think that it’s not right to blame fairy-tales. There’s a lot of good ones out there where the woman is wily, clever, smart and gets stuff done because of those traits. Unfortuantely, I think that people are used to associating fairy tales with Beauty and the Beast (which I thought was great when I was a kid, but didn’t think about it as deeply as these researchers — and wasn’t Beast a kind person, but ugly?), Cinderella and the more popular ones.
I guess that I wouldn’t be uncomfortable reading my kids fairy tales, but they’d also get Walter the Farting Dog and a bunch of other goofy books that are fun to read.