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.

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.

At any rate, this is an interesting read, from Books and Writers.

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.

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.

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 . . .