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Fairy Tales Are Actually Scary…
Posted on
October 30, 2008
by juleslife
Found this interesting article….
Fairy tales: Scarier than you think
The original versions of tales like Sleeping Beauty were never meant for children.
By Mary, Quite Contrary
Unless your childhood was devoid of cartoons and storybooks, you should be quite familiar with tales featuring the likes of Cinderella, Snow White and Sleeping Beauty. They’re all saccharine sweet and full of happily ever after, which masks the fact that they are based on gruesome, bloody tales that were never meant for children. Sleeping Beauty, for instance gets more than a kiss from her Prince Charming in the original story, written by Giambattista Basile in 1636. Instead, she gets raped and subsequently gives birth to twins.
Fairy tales originated as women’s stories passed down orally as a means of rebelling against oppression, political censorship and the literary establishment at that time. Usually violent and with a moral to boot, they became more palatable when Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm started collecting these tales from German peasants and Charles Perrault started retelling them in neighbouring France. These eventually evolved to become the well-loved stories we know today. Here’s a look at three fairy tales popularised by Disney.
Cinderella – mutilation
Both Perrault and the Grimm Brothers wrote versions of this tale, which differ vastly in plot and characterisation. In the Perrault version, for instance, Cinderella actively sources for transportation to the ball, suggesting that the rat trap might be a good place to find a coachman, instead of standing around looking bewildered as she does in the Disney version. She is also as scheming as her stepsisters, pretending to have been woken from sleep by their return and feigning surprise when they tell her about the mysterious princess at the ball.
All this pales in comparison to the Grimms’ account. In it, as in Perrault’s version, the ball is not a one-off affair but a two-day festival. On her first night out dancing with the prince, Cinderella manages to disappear when the clock strikes 12. On the second, night, however, the prince shows himself to be far from charming and gallant. He orders that the stairs be tarred with pitch. Cinderella’s left slipper gets stuck. Happily, she sustains nary a sprain and sprints off into the night.
The obsessed prince hunts her down, but the evil stepmother insists that her two daughters force their feet into the tiny shoe so either one of them can marry him. To expedite things, one cuts off her toe; the other, her heel which really, is no less than what some women would do for a pair of Louboutins. It doesn’t work and the prince eventually finds and marries Cinderella, who receives her stepsisters’ eyeballs as a wedding present from the birds (the ornithological version of the fairy godmother). An eye for an eye, as they say. Or four.
Snow White – cannibalism
Old Walt cut his animation teeth on this fairy tale, which became the first full-length animated feature to be produced by Disney. One stark difference between this version and the original telling is the Queen’s motive for asking the huntsman to kill Snow White and bring back the heart. In the cartoon, all the Queen wants the heart for is proof that Snow White is dead, completely omitting the Queen’s intent to have the heart for dinner. The huntsman, however, doesn’t have the gumption to do it and brings back a pig’s heart for the cook to salt, after which we imagine the queen had a grand time smacking her lips over a good stew.
In some versions, the Queen doesn’t stop at the heart. She must have been on a high-protein diet, because she asks for Snow White’s liver, lungs, intestines and even a bottle of her blood stoppered with a toe. Wonder if she ate the toenail too?
The Little Mermaid – murder and suicide
Of the three cartoons we’ve covered here, The Little Mermaid deviates most from Hans Christian Andersen’s account. In the Disney version, Ariel goes to Ursula the sea witch to trade her voice for a pair of legs so that she can become human and pursue the Prince. Ursula, however, uses Ariel’s voice to bewitch the Prince and nearly succeeds in marrying him before she is overthrown and Ariel struts down the aisle in a poufy dress, keeps her gams and gets her voice back. Joy.
In Andersen’s version, however, the witch warns the mermaid before cutting off her tongue and turning her tail into legs that she will die and turn into sea foam if she fails to hook the prince. The mermaid gets to shore and moves in with the prince who, sadly, treats her like a sister. He soon falls in love with a princess and they get hitched.
Desperate to save the mermaid, her sisters swim to shore sporting 10-dollar haircuts. Their hair has bought time from the witch – if the mermaid kills the prince, she will get her tail back and live another 300 years before she dies and turns to sea foam. If she doesn’t, she will die at sunrise. The mermaid can’t do it, and in a fit of depression, kills herself by jumping off the ship. And you thought Korean celebrity suicides were dramatic.
I replied to this article with this:
This is a good post but it lacks a few details.
Firstly, In the little mermaid, after she throws herself from the ship she if saved by the daughters of the air and is able to buy her soul if she does good deeds, like bringing the rain or a cool breeze on a summers day.
Secondly, Fairy tales evolved out of creations myths and legends, not as the author of this post asserts as a feminist grassroots movement. While it is true that quite a few fairy tale tellers and writers where women there is little to no evidence in the literature or history to support to contention that fairy tales were rebellion against a patriarchal society.
Finally, the scary elements of the fairy tales have to be viewed in the social context in which they were written. These tales were told during times when disease like consumption (TB), leprosy, scurvy and anthrax (the black death) were common, and with little to no understanding of bacteria and viruses these diseases seemed to be killing people seemingly at will. Death was not a state of non-life but a real entity who stalked the land and stole the souls of loved ones. These were scary times in which to live, if the rains did not come then there would be no food to feed the family, the woods still held untold monsters and demons and illness struck without warning or compassion. The governments of the time still used punishments such as hanging drawing and quartering. This involved hanging by the neck until almost dead, being cut down, being tied to a post where your belly was slit open and your entrails allowed to fall out, where they were then burned, the boby would then be cut up into pieces and each piece sent off to different areas where they would be placed on a spike at the entrance to the city and left to rot. They also used drowning, torture, beheadings, strangulation, stoning and other assorted methods of punishment and execution. When viewed in context the fairy tales like where Cinderella receives her sisters eyes as a present (eye gouging was yet another form of punishment although less common at the time of the fairy tales being written) is actually pretty damn tame.
Other than that, it is great article.
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Now this is an interesting article not only because it shows my favourite type of Fairy Tales, the unedited original versions, were actually very violent, dark and gothic in nature but it also shows some common misconceptions about fairy tales.
All fairy tales serve a purpose for the society in which they exist. One may well imagine that the story of Hansel and Gretel was used to warn against the dangers of wondering into an unknown forest, or that of Little Red Riding Hood being used to educate children of what we today call stranger danger. Fairy tales offer a mirror to the society in which they exist, showing not only that which we wish to see but also that which we do not. If we look at the fairy tales of today we see that they are very sterile, very saccharine. They communicate none of the pain or suffering that a great many people experience every day. However this is not surprising as we see that most people have become very introspective - concerned for only theirs and their own. Whether this is a function of our newly emerged globalised world where information can be transmitted and accessed in the blink of an eye is not for me to speculate. However we see that many people although having a knowledge of the pain and suffering around them wish to live in a fantasy of this 'world is good and everything is fine'. How many people in larger cities even know their neighbours let alone have a personal connection with them. These people wish to live in a fantasy world that their neighbours are happy and healthy, that there is nothing wrong in the world and all is good.
The same is true of fairy tales from long ago. In times past people could not insulate themselves from those around, each person in a village was required to help sustain a village. Blissful ignorance of your neighbours problems was not a luxury they could afford. Often it was only by the collective efforts of the entire village that everyone could survive. A blacksmith had no time to plough fields to grow grain and a farmer had no time to forge shoes for his horse, so a symbiotic system grew out of necessity. As such when one person experienced illness, legal troubles or was assaulted it was very soon common knowledge. One person’s pain became the village's pain. Bearing this in mind, as well as the fact that at the time church and state were one and the same, to be in trouble with the law often meant that you were destined for the eternal damnation of hell fires, there was a much larger emphasis than today on teaching the socially correct ways to live life.
Many of the original fairy tales that we know today are based on much older oral traditions. These were stories handed down from father to son, mother to daughter designed to instruct and teach. They were dark and gothic, violent and often resulted in fatalities for the protagonists not because they wanted to scare but because they wanted to teach the 'right' way to live. Unlike our current system the penal system of old was very harsh to those who transgressed against the rules of society. In many cultures even minor transgressions could result in floggings, torture or mutilation. Slightly more serious transgressions could result in death via a myriad of ever more gruesome methods. The pressure to teach and instil not only children but all members of society with a healthy respect for the law of the day was paramount.
When it came time for the writers to put pen to paper many found that the stories as they were told were far too violent, gruesome and blood thirsty for 'civilised' society. So they pared back much of the old traditions and presented instead a sanitised version, still with enough violence and gore to titillate the reader but not so much as to make them run for the hills screaming. Over time we have become more insulated from these humble beginnings, if we need something we can just go to the shops. We need not wait for the trees to fruit to eat an apple, nor do we need to raise an animal for meat. With the advancements of medical technology death has become more and more removed from us. We see these stories as dark and scary today not because they are blood thirsty but because we have forgotten from were we have come.
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