The Enchanted Hour

by Meghan Cox Gurdon

  Tales of My Mother Goose! More than three centuries ago, a careful hand (possibly Perrault’s son, Pierre) had dipped a pen in ink and in beautiful cursive committed the world’s first known collection of fairy tales to this folio. Now the pages were fragile, crisp, and speckled with age spots.

  There I was, sitting in a modern office building, with trucks and cars rumbling up nearby Madison Avenue, and for a fraction of a second the book before me seemed to become a portal, like a wardrobe into Narnia or a portkey at Hogwarts, that could fling me into the past. I had the fleeting idea that if I were to touch the page, I might be flashed back to a place of silks and mirrors and a laughing girl, and that if I were to squint or tip my head at the right angle, I might go deeper still, through the story and out the other side, into the hazy Indo-European folkways where the stories began. It was the impression of a moment, and it was whimsical, I know, but the tales that Perrault collected have such broad cultural resonance today that I felt giddy to be so close to the first Mother Goose.

  Charles Perrault is credited with creating the literary tradition of the fairy tale, but of course the stories he told weren’t his. They had come from deep in the trackless past and were, by word of mouth, on their way into the future when he plucked them from the air and wrote them down. He and other collectors and folklorists over the centuries and across the world—enterprising individuals such as Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm, Andrew Lang, Moltke Moe, Lafcadio Hearn, Charles Chesnutt, W. E. B. Du Bois, and many others—have preserved vast libraries derived from “the golden net-work of oral tradition” that might otherwise have been lost. Without their efforts, we would have inherited nothing like the richness of story, song, and legend available to us in the digital age.

  I was thinking about this as Christine Nelson turned the page so that we could see Perrault’s version of “Le Petit Chaperon rouge”—Little Red Riding Hood, a tale so old that scholars have traced some of its elements to classical Greece and the myth of the child-swallowing Titan, Cronos. According to Bruno Bettelheim, the story has been told in France in one form or another since at least the eleventh century; he mentions a tale from that period, recorded in Latin, that tells of a little girl wearing a red cover, or cap, who’s found in the company of wolves.

  In the Morgan Library’s edition of Perrault, the story of Little Red Riding Hood begins with another perfect little gemlike painting. In this one, a woman reclining in bed has raised herself up and seems almost to be greeting a large dog that has bounded up. The animal’s front paws are resting on the bed’s crimson coverlet. His hindquarters are hidden beneath its golden canopy. He is no dog, of course, but a wicked wolf: the artist has captured the moment of the grandmother’s destruction.

  Underneath the picture, delicate French cursive writing tells the celebrated story. Just near the end, the scribe has inked an asterisk next to the famous lines of dialogue: “What big teeth you have!” and “The better to eat you with.” Tiny handwriting in the margin instructs the reader: “On prononce ces mots d’une voix forte pour faire peur a l’enfant comme si le loup l’alloit manger” (These words should be said in a loud voice to make the child afraid that the wolf will eat him). We know from this that Perrault didn’t create this exquisite collection for private enjoyment. He expected Mademoiselle to read the stories out loud.

  * * *

  “IF YOU WANT your children to be intelligent, read them fairytales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairytales,” Albert Einstein advised. I don’t know if the great theoretical physicist really made that remark, and I cannot promise that reading fairy tales to a child will tweak his IQ, but there is no doubt that these weird dramas of risk, terror, loyalty, and reward agitate the blood and captivate the heart. To C. S. Lewis, time spent in what he called “fairyland” arouses in a child “a longing for he knows not what. It stirs and troubles him (to his lifelong enrichment) with the dim sense of something beyond his actual reach and, far from dulling or emptying the actual world, gives it a new dimension of depth. He does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods: The reading makes all real woods a little enchanted.”

  The reading does something else, too. It situates children in a cultural sense, equipping them to understand references to fairy tales and other classic stories that they will find all around them. When we read Hansel and Gretel or The Fisherman and His Wife or Puss in Boots, we’re at once transporting children with our voices and grounding them in foundational texts. For this reason, the time we spend reading to them can amount to a second education, one that helps children “acquire a sense of horizons,” in the phrase of linguist John McWhorter. What we give them is not schooling qua schooling, but an introduction to art and literature by means so calm and seamless that they may not notice it’s happening.

  We can furnish their minds with eccentric oddments, beautiful images, and useful bits of general knowledge. We can introduce them to a world of peculiar and renowned characters: to Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, to Custard the Dragon, to Corduroy, Strega Nona, and the Farmer in the Dell; to the Sheriff of Nottingham and the Velveteen Rabbit; to Baba Yaga and her house on chicken legs; to the boy who cried wolf, to Apollo and Artemis, to Daedalus and Icarus; to Coraline, Despereaux, the Runaway Bunny, and the tricksters Loki and Anansi and the Cat in the Hat.

  We can give them what, in truth, is already theirs. The books and artwork of the world are, after all, the inherited property of every child. They are the natural estate of every boy or girl from the moment that he or she draws breath. Nursery rhymes, fairy tales, legends, myths, poetry, paintings, sculptures, the great body of classic literature, the bounty of new and forthcoming literature, whether for children or adults—all these things belong to the young and ignorant just as much as they do to the old and erudite. When the Dominican-born writer Junot Díaz was a boy, his elementary-school librarian in the United States showed him around the stacks and told him, he said years later, that “all the books on the shelves were mine.” It was a galvanizing moment that he never forgot. It is a message that every child needs to hear.

  Owning something and taking possession of it are two different things, of course. A child may have as much right to Beowulf as the scholar who devotes his life to the study of Old English. Yet unless the child meets the hero Beowulf and the monster Grendel, and Grendel’s gruesome mother, he cannot be said to have taken possession of the property that’s his. Let that child’s mother read Beowulf in translation at bedtime (if she dares—it’s pretty gory), and the child’s custody is complete. The characters and scenes and language of the book will become part of his interior landscape. The book’s mystical qualities will add sublimity to his experience of life.

  The more stories children hear, and the more varied and substantial those tales, the greater the confidence of their cultural ownership. They will recognize allusions that other children may miss. A girl who has heard the stories of Aesop or Jean de la Fontaine will have a clear idea of what is meant by “sour grapes” and will know why people compare the industriousness of ants and grasshoppers. A boy who’s heard a parent read The Odyssey has a more complete idea of what constitutes a “siren song” than his friend who thinks it must have something to do with an alarm going off.

  The narratives of the past have helped to frame the consciousness and language of the present, and it’s a gift to children to help them recognize as much as they can. The milk of human kindness, the prick of the spindle, the wolf in sheep’s clothing, the wine-dark sea: all are expressions of a vast cultural treasury.

  “We all come from the past, and children ought to know what it was that went into their making, to know that life is a braided cord of humanity stretching up from time long gone, and that it cannot be defined by the span of a single journey from diaper to shroud,” Russell Baker writes in his beautiful memoir, Growing Up.

  Children get a wider perspective when they’re tugged out of the here and now for a little while
each day. In an enchanted hour, we can read them stories of the real and imagined past. With picture-book biographies we can acquaint them with people we want them to know: Josephine Baker and Amelia Earhart, Julius Caesar and Marco Polo, Martin Luther King Jr. and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, George Patton and Shaka Zulu, Pocahontas, Frida Kahlo, Edward Hopper, William Shackleton, the Savage of Aveyron, and the terrible Tudors.

  With any luck, our children will come to appreciate that the people of generations past were as full of life, intelligence, wisdom, and promise as they are, and impelled by the same half-understood desires and impulses; that those departed souls were as good and bad and indifferent as people who walk the earth today. Those who came before us wrote stories and songs, built roads and bridges, invented and created and argued and fought and sacrificed for all sorts of causes. Do we not owe them a debt of gratitude? We wouldn’t be here without them.

  Young people are inclined to think, in a vague way, that events began when they did. When I was a child, I was told that President Kennedy was shot in 1963. It seemed to me that the tragedy coincided, more or less, with the end of the Civil War. When you’re young, the decades blur together. Only years later did I come to understand that JFK died six months before I was born, and that I entered a world still shocked by his departure.

  So it goes. Youth is inattentive. It thinks itself something fresh, full of energy, spirit, and insight. It feels that no one has ever cared so much, felt with such intensity, or realized truth with such exquisite clarity. It prepares for a future that is unique in its grandeur and meaning. Youth may have no idea that it is wreathed in ghosts, informed by ghosts, held up on the shoulders of ghosts. When we read aloud from the literature of the past—and all literature is the literature of the past—and when we share artistic traditions, we are not merely giving children stories and pictures to enjoy. We’re also inviting a measure of humility, gently correcting youth’s eternal temptation to arrogance.

  * * *

  “TRADITION IS TO the community what memory is to the individual,” said the Irish poet and Celtic mystic John O’Donohue. “And if you lose your memory, you wake up in the morning, you don’t know where you are, who you are, what ground you’re standing on. And if you lose your tradition, it’s the same thing.”

  But what tradition? Well, it depends. Cultural literacy is a complicated concept, and what goes into it will depend on where and when a person lives. Today a modern American child’s informal education still begins with nursery rhymes and songs. Many of the best-known ditties and verses date back centuries, and have disputed and murky origins in the commerce and politics of the British Isles. Their durability at this point may seem a little mysterious—who is Solomon Grundy to us, that we should care for him?—and yet they matter, because, as cultural signifiers, they’re embedded all over the place.

  To take an example dear to the heart, Goodnight Moon assumes a not-insignificant measure of background knowledge. You will remember that the paintings in the great green room show first “three little bears sitting on chairs,” which refers to Goldilocks and the Three Bears, and, second, “a cow jumping over the moon,” which alludes to the nursery rhyme “Hey, Diddle, Diddle.”

  The recognition of these foundational songs can go both ways. A child who encounters Goodnight Moon without knowing a nursery rhyme might come later to a Mother Goose collection and think, Say, haven’t I seen a cow jumping over the moon somewhere else? But if he only sees Goodnight Moon, and never hears “Hey, Diddle, Diddle,” the cow jumping over the moon will be an untethered idea with no deeper resonance. The child who has met the cow in the song, and then sees a reference to it in Goodnight Moon, on the other hand, will identify even more firmly with the little rabbit in the great green room: Hey, he knows the same stories and rhymes that I do!

  In this way, cultural allusions intertwine and self-reinforce, and as with new vocabulary words, the more of them children know, the more they’ll catch as they fly by.

  It helps that children love the bump and tumble of rhyming words. They may not mind one way or another about the characters of Humpty Dumpty or Little Miss Muffet or Old Mother Hubbard, but most little ones find the lolloping rhythms of nursery songs irresistible. (I have the faintest memories of my mother chanting “Ride a cock-horse to Banbury Cross” to me. Holding my hands, she’d jog me on her knees, as her own mother had done with her. At the crucial line, “And she shall have music where-ever she goes!” she’d pretend to drop me, and I’d shriek. This all came back to me with a rush when I saw her do the same with my daughter Molly, as she, Molly, will probably someday do with her own children.)

  Fun to chant, and culturally grounding to learn, nursery rhymes also happen to be a terrific entry point to language. Neurobiologist Maryanne Wolf and others believe that exposure to these traditional poems can help to sharpen a small child’s awareness of the smallest sounds in words, known as phenomes. “Tucked inside ‘Hickory, dickory dock a mouse ran up the clock’ and other rhymes,” Wolf writes in Proust and the Squid, “can be found a host of potential aids to sound awareness—alliteration, assonance, rhyme, repetition. Alliterative and rhyming sounds teach the young ear that words can sound similar because they share a first or last sound.”

  The writer, illustrator, and read-aloud evangelist Mem Fox agrees. “Children get a real kick out of the bounce and wackiness of poetry,” she remarks in Reading Magic. “Once children have masses of rhythmic gems in their heads, they’ll have a huge store of information to bring to the task of learning to read, a nice fat bank of language: words, phrases, structures and grammar.”

  So yes, we start with nursery rhymes and read them again and again—maybe setting them to improvised tunes, maybe reading versions in Spanish or French or another language, for fun. Then come traditional folk and fairy tales.

  Fairy tales are so resonant and strange, so fantastically generative, that all the stories and all the versions of the stories and all the subsequent reimaginings of the stories and all the scholarship into and exegesis of the stories could fill the Black Forest itself—or perhaps the Sahara, for in truth they arise in every corner of the world. To take one example, variants of Beauty and the Beast, with the courtship and pairing of a beautiful human and a charismatic animal or monster, can be found in Zulu and Native American cultures, in Bolivia, Burma, Iran, India, Russia, Japan, Ghana, and elsewhere.

  Why do these stories stay with us, and why, like nursery rhymes, do they continue to matter? This mystery is part of the attraction of these ubiquitous and ancient works of art. They appall us with horror and entrance us with loveliness. They jar and surprise. The neutrality of their characters (“the third brother” or “the queen” or “Jack”) allows anyone to occupy the roles in imagination.

  Fairy tales also encode a measure of philosophical and practical wisdom, as Vigen Guroian observed. It is certainly easy to see the moral precepts in Little Red Riding Hood. Perrault all but spells them out with the ominous sexual overtones in his version of the tale. Having devoured the grandmother and taken her place in bed, the wolf tells Little Red, when she arrives, to undress and join him. She does—to her ruin. In case we missed the metaphor, Perrault makes it explicit in the second half of the moral of the story (the first was at the beginning of this chapter):

  And this warning take, I beg:

  Not every wolf runs on four legs.

  The smooth tongue of a smooth-skinned creature

  May mask a rough and wolfish nature.

  These quiet types, for all their charm,

  Can be the cause of the worse harm.

  Viewed in this cautionary light, Little Red Riding Hood seems to come to us a from a long line of parents stretching back in time, all calling, one generation after another, “Watch out! Beware the sweet-talking stranger!”

  Bruno Bettelheim, in The Uses of Enchantment, argues that fairy tales offer children access to the quiet wisdom of the ages: “These tales are the purveyors of deep insights that have sustained ma
nkind through the long vicissitudes of its existence, a heritage that is not revealed in any other form as simply and directly, or as accessibly, to children.”

  The vicarious journeys that children take into cottages and castles and through dark woods, their encounters with heroes, gnomes, giants, cannibals, talking animals, wish-granting fairies, witches and wolves and huntsmen with terrible, shining knives—all this comes to them, Bettelheim says, as “wondrous because the child feels understood and appreciated deep down in his feelings, hopes, and anxieties, without these all having to be dragged up and investigated in the harsh light of a rationality that is still beyond him. Fairy tales enrich the child’s life and give it an enchanted quality just because he does not quite know how the stories have worked their wonder on him.”

  Much the same happens with myths and legends. Orpheus and Ariadne and the Minotaur are more distinct as individuals than the featureless, elastic characters of fairy tales. Yet their struggles and quandaries reveal universal aspects of life and human nature that children will recognize, in that dim, half-hidden way. Reading aloud stories of the Greeks, Celts, Persians, Romans, or Vikings helps to lay an intellectual foundation that is made up of sense and feeling, reason and knowledge. Children experience the stories as emotional events, even as they’re picking up and stowing away important cultural references.

  Once begun, a child keeps acquiring. In this way, the language, stories, and pictures of a person’s early years build an imaginative scaffold. With exposure to a wide variety of images and narrative, the scaffolding gets stronger and more substantial. In time, it becomes a kind of interior reference library fully furnished with peculiar and interesting things.