Max and Ruby is quickly becoming my favorite children’s show. Each episode is a slow-paced, whimsical tale of everyday life, told from the perspective of a child. Little Max is adorable, and has the coolest toys ever. Let’s face it, what kid wouldn’t want an ear splitter space cadet or a jelly ball spitting spider?
There’s only one thing that bothers me. Where is their mother? Ruby is only seven and Max is her little brother. But still, all this cake baking and bus riding and shopping trips totally without any parental supervision? Max and Ruby do not appear to have any sort of parental unit looking out for them. It isn’t as if theirs is a world completely without adults. Adults drive the buses and keep the shops. They have a grandma who makes frequent visits, elegantly making room for Max’s energetic boyishness and drawing it into Ruby’s perfectly planned tea parties.
But there is still no mom. Why?
As the passing thought fixed itself in my mind, I began to think about all the other children’s stories where the mother is either killed early in the story or is merely not present: Bambi, Snow White, Hannah Montana, Cinderella, Pinocchio, Tarzan, Heidi and Nemo, just to name a few.
The trend is so common in Disney films that many have asked why Disney hates mothers. And there’s that whole thing with the death of his mother. Some have concluded that this is all part of Disney’s plan to destroy the family. Most of Disney’s films are based on older stories, though, so none of that really makes much sense.
The fact is, mothers are powerful. They mean comfort and safety, warmth and nurturing. A story about coming of age, overcoming an obstacle, or finding independence becomes fundamentally different if a mother is present to guide and protect the child. The audience suddenly becomes less tolerant of a genuine challenge, or the mother is viewed as neglectful or the child as rebellious. Think of the Lizzy Maquire movie, if you’ve seen it. A teenage girl goes on a class trip to Italy and sneaks off on the drill-sergeant like principal to hang out with a teenage pop star. The movie is about Lizzy finding herself, but what would it have been about if it were a family vacation and it were her mother she were lying to?
Mothers are powerful, and in literature it seems easier to dispose of their influence in someway in order to allow the child to face a challenge or grow to maturity. Unfortunately, as a culture we seem to believe this. Somehow, we believe that a child can’t mature, deal with challenges or be properly socialized except when removed from the influence of the immediate family and placed in school.
I’m still not exactly sure why.
Power of story! Now you’re talking my language, Dana. (And don’t forget all the wicked stepmothers and witches as mother surrogates.)
Over at her blog, Beck has been doing Halloween (i.e., eerie) takes on innocent children’s books. She focused on Max and Ruby and the missing mother one day.
http://frogandtoadarestillfriends.blogspot.com/2009/10/halloween-5.html
One can only hope she doesn’t read her children these versions!
Ah, JJ Ross, I used to wonder about the wicked stepmother/witch thing. Women weren’t heroines…those who sought power were to be feared for they were evil.
Then I thought maybe it wasn’t that, but that to have the mother figure be evil was more insidious, more reviling, and adding an element of seduction to her evil.
Oh my, suburbancorrespondent. And no kidding…I hope she is not reading those to her children just yet. Reminds me vaguely of a story about Pooh Bear I read messing around on the internet once that made me physically ill. I still can’t get the heroine addicted Pooh out of my head.
Great post. It is definitely a recurring theme. Many of the shows are like that now.
Not only that but I always notice in adult shows like “Everybody Loves Raymond” the kids were hardly ever around. It’s weird how they are trying to paint the family.
Dads are made out to look like lazy idiots. Mom’s are made to look like they are too busy to nurture the kids.
It’s all part of a plan to discredit the family. It is sad that Hollywood has soo much control.
We are starting to get very protective of what the kids watch. They don’t watch much tv as it is.
I always figured that the mothers were missing in some stories, because in a child’s mind, a good mother is often taken for granted. I grew up in a lovely stable home, but to be quite honest, my mother didn’t figure prominently in my thoughts or memories, precisely because she was always there, working away, taking care of things. Kind of like the appliances. As I have gotten older, I appreciate my wonderful mother quite a bit, but when I was young she really didn’t figure much in my and my brother’s adventures.
Ooh, I hadn’t thought about the background children. If they take on too much of the story, it becomes a children’s show. Interesting thought to explore, thank you!
I always thought it was about the child’s mind and view of starring in his or her own story too, needing to grow apart and be heroic etc, but no! Nor was this all to destroy the ideal family and mother, but rather to preserve them in some separate perfect (and pious) fantasy where good is rewarded by not having to deal with the harsh reality! This is so interesting –
The absent mother, or women against women in the old wives tale: Lecture delivered at the Erasmus University Rotterdam on January 18, 1991
by Marina Warner
I did the little Google search inside the book thing, and read a few pages around 28-30. Here’s the gist:
Fairy tales were the television and pornography of their day, the life-load-lightening trash of pre-literate people. . . .fairy tales “repeat the child’s hankering after nobler, richer, altogether better origins, the fantasy of being a prince or princess in disguise . . .” the mother “necessarily dies before the story begins to make way for the narrative’s malevolent catalysts” and in the case of the Brothers Grimm e.g., drafted and redrafted along “increasingly pious lines. . .to infuse Christian fervor, emboldening the strokes of the plot, meting out penalties to the wicked and rewards to the just and defining their separate characteristics along even broader lines, to conform with Christian and social values.”
Thus the disappearance of the biological mother from such harsh material — to sustain their feminine ideal of unsullied loving motherhood, actual mothers had to disappear and be no part of the unpleasantness. In the face of harsh and dangerous reality for families, their idea of protecting and preserving ideals of motherhood and family, was to literally banish it!
Reading this made me picture collectible doll mothers preserved up on a high shelf from real imperfect children who would love them (to death) like the Velveteen Rabbit and the Skin Horse if they were allowed to really be there to love the children back . . .
And check this out!
Pg 23 – we imagine the story being told through the child’s eyes but remember, it was being told TO the child traditionally, not a story created BY the child. So who is telling it? Why, often it’s the “real mother” putting her own story into the narrative voice and thus into the child! Or stranger yet, it is the older crone (offering herself as a sort of fairy godmother to the child?) or even a stepmother (not trying to scare the child but again, offering herself as the good mom figure against a frightening world in which the child has no mother at all.)
Another point is that “marriage” in these stories is so often both good and bad, one union the cause of misery for the children and then another union their escape.
Interesting…but I’m not so sure the Brothers Grimm had much to do with infusing stories with Christian piety. They were linguists and social historians, searching in fairy tales for a pre-Christian ethos which they believed was preserved as a sort of collective conscience within the fairy tale.
It actually seems to be the subsequent popularity of fairy tales that sanitized them and adapted them to suit a broader audience beyond the backwoods where the Grimm brothers were collecting them. It turned from a semi-scientific study to one driven by editors and publishers who knew there was money to be made.
There was also a decidedly political side to the collection, as the Grimms sought to demonstrate a cultural unity through the similar tellings of these stories. They used this to further the idea of Germany as a single nation and wanted the various principalities to unite.
At any rate, this is an interesting read, from Books and Writers.
OK, and THIS was interesting. At the end of that previous link, we find that allied commanders banned the publication of Grimm’s fairy tales because they thought it contributed to Nazi savagery. I wonder what it was like for them to have discovered just how violent the originals were as opposed to the watered down Disney versions we’re accustomed to?
Anyway, The Christian Science Monitor compares a list of top ten children’s bedtime stories to a list of the top ten fairy tales which are not read as often.
And I’m wondering about the causes and effects of setting aside Snow White in favor of The Very Hungry Caterpillar.
VERY interesting!
You can find moms of a sort in the toy aisle at the store. Barbie is there in all her incarnations and “family” sets are there with moms and kids, but few, very few daddies make the family sets.
It’s funny you talked about this. I was just discussing this same subject with my friend the other day. Where is the mother in Max and Ruby?
It’s funny, though – as a 6th grade Language Arts teacher in the public schools, I was once at a teacher’s training about middle-schoolers preferences for reading material. I remember learning that one of the top requirements for literature that’s “attractive” to middle-schoolers is a story that has minimal parental involvement. It’s definitely a trend.