Which brings me back to fairy tales. After World War II, Allied commanders banned publication of the Grimm brothers’ stories in Germany, believing that their bloodlust had contributed to the Nazi atrocities. For the same reason, they fell out of favor among American parents. Take the brothers’ “Snow White”: at the end the wicked queen is invited to her stepdaughter’s wedding, where—surprise!—she is forced into a pair of red-hot iron shoes and made to dance until she dies. Like I need my five-year-old to have that image in her head?
The thing is, though, if you believe the psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, we avoid the Grimms’ grimness at our peril. His classic book The Uses of Enchantment argues that the brothers’ gore is not only central to the tales’ appeal, it’s crucial to kids’ emotional development. (An earlier intellectual rock star, John Locke, disagreed; he deemed the fairy tales too gruesome for little ears, but then again, he also thought the offspring of the poor should be put to work at age three.) According to Bettelheim, fairy tales and only fairy tales—as opposed to myths or legends—tap into children’s unconscious preoccupations with such knotty issues as sibling rivalry or the fear of an omnivorous mother. In their tiny minds, a fearsome giant may be transformed into the school bully, a menacing wolf into a neighbor’s pit bull. Fairy tales demonstrate that hardship may be inevitable, but those who stand fast emerge victorious. What’s more, he wrote, the solutions to life’s struggles that fairy tales suggest are subtle, impressionistic, and therefore more useful than either the spoon-fed pap that passes for kiddie “literature” these days or the overly concrete images of television (and now the Internet). He goes so far as to say that without exposure to fairy tales a child will be emotionally stunted, unable to create a meaningful life.
I guess Knuffle Bunny Too won’t do.
Nor, apparently, will the stacks of revisionist, modern-day princess books I had checked out of the library. Anyway, most of them seem to equate “pro-girl” with “anti-boy,” which does not strike me as an improvement. Take The Paper Bag Princess, a staple of kindergarten classrooms everywhere. The heroine outwits a dragon that has kidnapped her prince, but not before the beast’s fiery breath frizzles her hair and destroys her dress, forcing her to don a paper bag. The ungrateful prince then rejects her, telling her to come back when she is “dressed like a real princess.” She summarily dumps him and skips off into the sunset happily ever after, alone.
To me, that is Thelma & Louise all over again. Step out of line, and you end up solo or, worse, sailing crazily over a cliff to your doom. I may want my girl to do and be whatever she dreams of as an adult, but I also hope she will find her Prince (or Princess) Charming and make me a grandma. I do not want her to be a fish without a bicycle; I want her to be a fish with another fish. Preferably, a fish who loves and respects her and also does the dishes, his share of the laundry, and half the child care. Yet the typical “feminist alternative” to the marry-the-prince ending either portrays men as simpletons or implies that the roles traditionally ascribed to women are worthless. Thus you get Princess Smartypants, in which our heroine, uninterested in marriage, bestows a chaste smooch on the prince who has won her hand in a contest sponsored by her father, the king; the prince promptly turns into a frog, and she is freed to live contentedly with her pets. To me, that’s not progress; it’s payback.
Unquestionably, the Grimms routinely bumped off mothers, equated beauty with virtue, and pitted women against one another in a battle over husbands. Understandably, parents’ first impulse is to keep the stories’ grisliness far, far away from their children. But what if Bettelheim was right? What if their horrors do help our kids to explore their fears safely, to answer the Big Questions of existence? Should we deny them that wealth in favor of a $50 “official” Cinderella gown? Maybe I had been hasty in dismissing fairy tales as a bastion of passive heroines and Prince Charming hype. Uncle Walt may have most successfully reinterpreted the tales for our era, but why should he get the final say? Maybe I needed to revisit the traditional stories myself.
What do you know: I began with a (toy) gun to my head and found that when I stared down the barrel, I was once again looking smack into the eyes of Cinderella.
Calling the Grimms’ fairy tales the “originals” is as absurd as conferring that designation on Disney’s. The brothers culled their stories from a rich, distinctly adult oral storytelling tradition, then edited, embellished, and heavily sanitized them. Did you seriously think the prince merely kissed the comatose Sleeping Beauty? That Rapunzel and her beau whiled away their time in that phallic tower holding hands? Before the Grimms gussied them up for the nursery, both girls were in a family way—each pregnant with twins!—well before the Happily Ever After kicked in. Fairy tales have been called the porn of their day: bawdy, raucous, full of premarital shenanigans and double entendre. They were also rife with incest or the threat of it. The Grimms took that out, too. The brothers’ delicacy, however, did not extend to violence: on the contrary, they ratcheted up the bloody bits, believing they would scare children out of bad behavior.
As for Cinderella (whom the Grimms called “Aschenputtel,” a name which, understandably, did not catch on)? There are at least five hundred versions of that story told around the world. The Chinese Yeh-Shen, whose story was recorded in A.D. 850, gets her mojo from the carcass of a dead fish. The Japanese Hachikazuki spends years with a flowerpot wedged on her head. The Russian Cinderella is saved by a magic cow; in Brazil she is born with an enchanted snake curled around her neck. There are Cinderellas in African tribes and Native American ones. Her slippers are made of glass, fur, or gold, and sometimes there is no footwear at all. But the basic plotline never wavers: a beautiful, kind girl is brought low by a parent’s untimely death, then humiliated by her new guardian; she is transformed through some act of bippity-boppity-boo so that her exterior sparkles as brightly as her heart; she loses an item of clothing while fleeing a love-besotted nobleman who relentlessly tracks her down; there is the big reveal of her true identity—bummer for the evil relatives!—and she lives happily ever after with the man of her dreams. Apparently we, like our preschoolers, are suckers for that arc. Even today, Cinderella stories are guaranteed box-office hits: Pretty Woman, Ever After, Maid in Manhattan, Ella Enchanted, Princess Diaries (I and II)—even Enchanted, which gently spoofed the genre. Something so enduring, so universal must have—well—something, right? Perhaps I had judged this particular princess too harshly.
There is no pumpkin in the Grimms’ “Aschenputtel,” no footmen, not even a fairy godmother. Disney cribbed those from “Cendrillon,” a seventeenth-century French version by Charles Perrault. Instead, Jacob and Wilhelm’s heroine plants a hazel branch on her dead mother’s grave, waters it with her tears, and watches it grow into an enchanted tree. Whenever she wishes for something—such as, oh, a gown for the ball—a dove perched among the leaves tosses it down to her. I liked that: her mother’s love was so powerful that it transcended death. Admittedly, the story still sucks for stepmoms. If it is any comfort, psychologists say that splitting the mother into two characters—one good and one evil—serves a developmental purpose: it helps kids work through their inevitable resentment against Mom without directly copping to it. To which my stepmother friends respond: “Whatever.”
That aside, making the mother the source of the magic interested me. One of the things I had found most disturbing about the Disney Princesses was that somehow the wand had been transferred to the girl. The heroines of the stories had never before been magic—not even in the studio’s own movies. It was not enough that the writers had whacked all the mothers and made their surrogates loathsome; now they had given the boot to the fairy godmother as well—the sole remaining symbol of adult female guidance and protection. It was almost sinister, the implication that women had no place in girls’ development. And it certainly reflected the current marketing mentality—cut out the middleman (or, in this case, woman), and sell directly to the child. I often wonder what the long-term resu
lts of that change will be: rather than raising a generation of Cinderellas, we may actually be cultivating a legion of stepsisters—spoiled, self-centered materialists, superficially charming but without the depth or means for authentic transformation.
I say: let’s bring back that tree!
But the biggest surprise of “Aschenputtel” is that it’s not about landing the prince. It is about the girl herself: her strength, her perseverance, her cleverness. It is a story, really, about her evolution from child to woman. It is Cinderella herself who plants the magic tree and requests the finery for the ball (which is celebrated over the course of three days). She walks to the party each night rather than traveling by enchanted coach. She leaves not because she has some arbitrarily imposed curfew but because she has danced enough. Then she escapes both the pursuing prince and her own father by hiding in a dovecote or nimbly scaling a tree. When the prince finally comes a-calling, shoe in hand, Cinderella greets him dressed in her sooty rags. He may be looking for the beauty with the dainty foot, but, as Joan Gould, the author of Spinning Straw into Gold, notes, she demands that he witness the woman she has been, dirt and all, not just the one she will become. So while he provides the occasion for her transformation, he is not the one responsible for it—she can only do that herself.
Not bad for a pair of medieval chauvinists. Except for this: as usual, the stepsisters try on the tiny golden slipper before Cinderella does; in order to jam their big fat clodhoppers into it, one slices off her heel and the other her toe. Some fancy academic might see that as a metaphor, a warning to girls against contorting themselves to fit unattainable standards of beauty, but, truly, it is just gross. And the Grimms seem to relish it, describing how the sisters grit their teeth, how the blood “spurts” from the shoe, staining their white stockings. Even Cinderella, seemingly so gracious, proves distressingly vengeful in the end. She invites the stepsisters to join her wedding party, but as they enter the church, one on either side of her, doves (again, perhaps, representing her mother) perched on the bride’s shoulders peck out their eyes. That’s right: Peck. Out. Their. Eyes. Imagine those wedding photos.
Still, I thought, remembering Bettelheim, I would not want to permanently scar my kid by denying her the blinding of the stepsisters. Maybe I could work up to it, start with something easier, like, I don’t know, “Rumpelstiltskin.” My memory of that story was a little vague, something about a gnome spinning a roomful of straw into gold and flying away on a spoon. How bad could that be?
A few days after the gun incident, I decided to give it a try. I hauled out my annotated Grimms, a 462-page tome with a navy-and-gold filigree cover. Daisy was, well, enchanted. We flipped through, examining its nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century illustrations (Bettelheim, who believed that pictures corrupt the power of the text, would have disapproved). Then I started reading.
“Once upon a time . . .” I began.
At the sound of those ageless words, Daisy snuggled close. I kept going: “there lived a miller who was very poor, but had a beautiful daughter.” Okay, I thought, as the story moved forward, maybe the girl is treated like chattel by her dad and is supposed to be delighted to marry the greedy king who initially imprisoned and threatened to kill her if she did not make him rich, but at least there’s no gushing blood. And the girl is resourceful, tricking the gnome and saving her baby. She even has a vaudevillian’s sense of dramatic timing, stringing her tormentor along, pretending she does not know who he is until . . .
“Could your name possibly be, Rumpelstiltskin?”
Daisy’s eyes shone as I continued. “The little man screamed and in his rage he stamped his right foot so hard that it went into the ground right up to his waist. Then in his fury he seized his left foot with both hands . . .”
My eye skipped ahead but it was too late: “ . . . and tore himself asunder,” I finished lamely.
Yikes! What happened to the spoon?
“He did what, Mommy?” Daisy asked, confused.
“Well,” I said, “he was so mad, he ripped himself in half.”
“Oh,” she said, nodding.
Then: “Read another!” she commanded.
What to do? I considered ditching the Grimms for Hans Christian Andersen, maybe trying the original “The Little Mermaid.” I have already grumbled about Disney’s Ariel, who gives up her voice to get a guy. What kind of message is that? I ask you. I suddenly recalled, though, that Ariel got off easy compared with her precursor. In the Andersen version, the sea witch does not painlessly extract the mermaid’s voice. Oh, no. She grabs a big old knife and hacks out the poor creature’s tongue. Once the girl has her land legs, every step feels like “walking on knife blades so sharp the blood must flow,” yet she dances for the prince on command, never hinting at the agony it causes her. As in the Disney film, the prince seems to return her love but then heaves her over for someone else, a princess he wrongly believes has saved his life. In this version, however, he never discovers the truth; he marries the other woman, explaining to the mermaid that he knows she would want him to be happy. Then the lout asks her to hold up the train of his bride’s gown during the shipboard ceremony—and she does it, knowing all along that his marriage to another means her demise. Late that night, the mermaid’s sisters appear; they have shorn their hair and traded it to the sea witch for a magic dagger. All the little mermaid has to do is stab the prince in his heartless heart; his blood on her legs will fuse them back into a fish tail and she will survive. But she can’t do it. Instead, she flings herself overboard and disintegrates into sea foam. The only nod to happily-ever-after is that she eventually becomes a “daughter of the air” who, after three hundred years of good deeds, might earn an immortal soul. There may be valuable lessons in all of this—don’t change for a guy; don’t let him treat you like dirt; you deserve to be loved for what is special, magical, unique about you. But jeez, what a buzz kill.
So “The Little Mermaid” was out. But Daisy was still sitting next to me, looking expectant. Okay, Bruno, I thought. It’s now or never. I took a deep breath and turned to “Cinderella.”
Daisy listened intently for a while, then rolled onto her back and began kicking her legs in the air.
“Do you want me to stop, honey?” I said hopefully.
“No,” she said firmly.
So I read it, the whole thing, without censorship, explanation, or any inflection to influence her reaction. Just as Bettelheim said I should. Then I asked what she thought.
“Eh,” she said, waggling her hand.
“You didn’t like it?”
“It was creepy,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “The eye part. Yuck.”
“Would you ever want to hear it again?”
She thought about that for a moment. “No,” she said, then jumped off the couch and skipped away, chanting “Roo coo coo! Roo coo coo! Blood is dripping from the shoe!” and laughing.
Later, I would search out lesser-known traditional fairy tales about spunky, ingenious girls. I was surprised to find how many there were—at least as many as stories that celebrated the bravery of boys or men, perhaps more. Yet none was problem-free: In “The Robber Bridegroom,” the heroine shrewdly foiled her fiancé’s plot to murder her—after she secretly watched him tear off another young woman’s clothes, hack her body into pieces, and salt it. In “Fitcher’s Bird” a feisty girl saved her sisters from an evil wizard who had kidnapped them—by reassembling their limbs, which he had severed so that their “blood ran down all over the floor.” In “Furrypelts,” a Cinderella variant, a princess fearlessly took control of her destiny, fleeing her castle upon discovering she would be forced into marriage—to her father. “The Six Swans,” in which a princess took a seven-year vow of silence to save her cursed brothers, became a favorite with Daisy even though the evil mother-in-law took advantage of the heroine’s muteness by stealing each of her three babies upon their births, smearing chicken’s blood on the princess’s unspeaking mouth, then telling her son that the girl
had eaten them (Mom-in-Law also tries to convince the castle cook to make the infants into a stew and feed them to their father). I loved Diane Wolkstein’s adaptation of “The Glass Mountain,” which amped up the princess’s role in her own fate, but Daisy rejected it (as would Dr. Bruno, I reckon). She was partial to an Algonquin Indian legend—admittedly not an official fairy tale—about a young bride who saved herself and her husband from cannibal demons, but . . . cannibals? I put the kibosh on that. No matter how macabre the stories got, though, Daisy did not flinch. None gave her the kind of nightmares that the movie version of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang had.
Score one for Bettelheim.
Compared with Stephenie Meyer, the Grimms come off like Andrea Dworkin. Meyer, a Mormon homemaker turned novelist, is the author of the most successful fairy tale in recent memory: the Twilight saga. Initially imagined in a “vivid dream,” the four-book series had, at this writing, sold more than 100 million copies worldwide, while films based on the first two had grossed more than a billion dollars. No wonder it has been compared to crack for teenage girls.
Twilight follows the ethereally named Bella Swan, who, at age sixteen, moves in with her father in the Pacific Northwest so Mom can tag behind her new hubby on the minor-league baseball circuit. On the first day of school, Bella meets the prince of her new hometown’s royalty: the hypnotically handsome, brilliant, mysterious, wealthy—did I say handsome?—Edward, who at first seems repelled by her. But no, she has merely confused uncontrollable attraction with open disgust: Edward, it turns out, is a “vegetarian” vampire (that is, he does not feed on humans) who finds the scent of Bella’s blood intoxicating. Being near him puts her in mortal danger, yet she is powerless to resist. As is he. The two fall in love, and for some 2,444 pages (or about 483 minutes of film) pursue their chaste, star-crossed romance, which is further complicated by Jacob Black, a hunky werewolf, also in love with Bella, whose pack members despise vampires.
Cinderella Ate My Daughter Page 10