After the visitors left, one of the teachers read the story again at the request of the kids. When she got to the point in the story where the woodsman cuts open the wolf’s stomach to get Red and her grandmother out, she made a comment to the other teacher about how she liked that this version had him using a scissors instead of an ax, but, instead of saying ax, she made an arm motion that clearly meant ax. It was like even the word was too violent for 3 year olds to hear. Also, when she read the line about putting rocks in the wolf’s stomach the little boy sitting in my lap turned around, looked at me wide-eyed, and asked why they would do that. This showed me that the teachers do a good job of keeping the kids away from violence.
Even though we have talked about the violence present in some fairy tales, I had never really encountered anyone in my life who felt that it was a serious issue, at least not that I can remember. It was interesting to see that the teachers were a little bit concerned about even having the book in the classroom because of the violence. It seemed to me that they were only thinking about the violence the kids may absorb rather than explaining the moral of the story to the kids. Their focus on only one aspect of the fairy tale, and a negative aspect, was a different perspective for me.
I personally don't think the teachers were giving the kids enough credit. They are old enough to understand that stories are not reality, and I don't think any of them will be tempted to take a scissors to another kid just because of the story. I think that even though there is some violence, the kids could look past it if they were told that while whet the woodsman did was not very nice, he was just trying to protect people from being eaten, and they could learn a lesson from the story.
This is a really interesting point you’re making here. I do agree with what you’d said above, that sometimes people focus on only one aspect of fairy tales that they get carried away and miss what there is more to it. When I started working on the critical review, I did a lot of googling in both English and Korean at first for inspirations because reading different stuff written by different people provide really interesting point of views and helps me out to brain storm better. Since I decided to explore how different cultural context affect the tales being told and if there is cross-cultural connections in terms of themes or motifs being told, I did some research on various versions of Cinderella tales as well as the swan maiden tales told in many different cultures. I don’t know if any of you are familiar with the latter, but to make the long story short, it generally refers to folktales with 1. A fairy or nymph like female protagonist with feathery clothes, 2. And a male character, usually a woodsman, who hides the clothes to marry the female character. In Korean version of the tale called “Sun∙nyuwa namukun” which roughly translates into something like “the nymph and the woodsman,” the woodsman learns the trick of hiding the clothes as a return of favor, after saving a deer’s life. Here the woodsman lies to distract hunters’ attention, and I realized that a number of parents and teachers were overly concerned with that lying and stealing part of the tale. Not only did they were bashing the story to be immoral and thus not appropriate for children, but some of them went beyond and even suggested that those stories should not be told unless we eliminate those unsuitable elements to make the story a better moral example. The feathery clothes tale is by far one of the most widely told fairy tales in my native culture, and it never occurred to me that the story is morally wrong or anything like that, so I was literally shocked that so many people found the story so problematic. Okay, I’ve been taught that telling lies is bad, but to me, the lie the woodsman told the hunters was a white lie with altruistic purpose, and the woodsman eventually gets punished for stealing and lying about the feathery clothes. As someone who grew up with this specific version of the tale, I felt like those are necessary elements of the story that makes it distinct from other tales and that Sun∙nyuwa namukun won’t be Sun∙nyuwa namukun in a censored, goody goody, nobody tells a lie version. The tales does have components in line with the traditional moral lesson of punishing the wrong and rewarding the good, so I feel like sometimes people gets too absorbed in one aspect that they miss out on other things that they can get out of.
ReplyDeleteI have had a lot of experience with parents and teachers sheltering children from violence and other "negative" aspects of life. It is encouraged to cut unhappy things out of stories for children in order to give them a positive outlook on life. My parents provided me with the "real" versions of stories as soon as I was old enough to read them. We had the Grimm Brothers, Shakespeare, ballets, Aesop's fables, and countless other stories. When we read “Romeo and Juliet” in eighth grade, I informed all 12 girls in my class that the word “maidenhead” meant because I was asked. I got in a lot of trouble for that one, because the class then realized that the play contained a man threatening to rape a bunch of young women. That was not appropriate discussion, and my excuses of “But it is in the play!” fell on deaf ears.
ReplyDeleteIn this age of helicopter parenting, sheltering children from the violent reality present in fairy tales and folk tales can give an unrealistic outlook instead. The Grimm Brothers' version of Little Red Ridinghood isn't pretty, but it does teach children about how the world works and how they should fit into that mechanism (the appropriateness of the second part is debatable). “When you don’t listen to mom and dad, bad things can happen” is a lesson children can understand. Yes, being eaten by a wolf who is then cut open with an axe is rather scary and gory. Real life isn’t pretty. Fairy tales and folk tales introduce violence to children in a format that can provide teaching and reassurance to children. Also, you have to give kids some credit- most of them won’t fully understand the violence until they are older, but they can get the general idea.