The forgotten, and Grimm, reality of bedtime tales
In a small town in Germany in the 19th century, two brothers, Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm, feared that the Germanic folklore tales that women regaled to each other to pass the time during their daily chores would be forgotten by history.
Swiping parchment and a quill they interviewed the residents of the town to record tales such as Cinderella and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.. The brothers published Nursery and Household Tales in 1812 – known today as Grimms’ Fairy Tales. The pair’s real life was no fairy tale, though. After encountering academic censorship from an evil King, exile from their home city and bankruptcy, Wilhelm died in 1859 and the younger of the two, Jacob, lived just four more heartbreak filled years.
Before they were ‘Disneyfied’, the Grimm brothers’ tales were not the typical bedtime story either; they were written as entertainment for parents, not for the ears of children. Cinderella still went to the ball and danced with her handsome Prince Charming, but in the Brothers Grimm version, the ugly step-sister’s gruesomely hack away at their toes to force their feet into the glass slipper and win the prince’s affections.
And Snow White, the first of the Disney princesses to be animated, was originally enslaved and sexually degraded by her seven housemates, made to grant their every request. To make matters worse, it was her own father that forced her into their clutches when she escaped the castle, as his obsession over his own daughter’s beauty grew sinister. A far stray from the plot Walt Disney had in mind.
The Grimm, and often forgotten, reality of these traditional stories is that they were never child-friendly fairy tales. Today, other literary works also face this reality check; it has been called ‘the great awokening’. This March, the estate of Theodor Geisel used the late author’s birthday to announce that six titles from the Dr Seuss enterprise, including And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street and If I Ran the Zoo, will no longer be printed as they contain racial stereotypes and caricatures. The Mulberry Street title, which depicted an Asian caricature carrying chopsticks and sporting a long plait, had already been cleaned up from the 1970s version where this character was the only one drawn in yellow. Dr Philip Nel, a leading expert in racism in children’s literature and author of Was the Cat in the Hat Black?, described the decision to The Guardian as “a product recall” rather than Cancel Culture’s latest victory.
Enid Blyton is also under fire from the woke army, much to the dismay of the generations raised on The Famous Five. The case for Blyton’s cancelling was made by The Little Black Doll (1937), the story of Sambo, a doll who wants the rain to wash him white and The Three Golliwogs’ (1944).
Literary genius Roald Dahl hasn’t escaped the wrath either. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory has been critiqued for the Oompa Loompas and the supposed connotations of slavery and colonialism. Curiously, in 2017, Dahl’s widow revealed on BBC Radio 4 Today that in her late husband’s first draft Charlie was a young black boy who was to be the “hero” of the novel. When Donald Sturrock, Dahl’s biographer, was questioned on the subject he said it was Dahl’s agent who convinced the author to change tack. The agent persuaded Dahl that people would ask “why?”, Sturrock said.
Dr Seuss is out, Blyton is problematic and Willy Wonka isn’t politically correct either. There is a gap in the market and contemporary authors didn’t need to be told twice. Take a journey to Waterstones now and you’ll find Queer Hereos by Arabelle Sicardi and Sarah Tanat-Jones, A is for Activist by Innosanto Nagara and numerous other titles with positive messaging on ‘woke’ subjects from recycling to feminism.
Some are concerned that new children’s literature will raise a further generation of ‘snowflakes’ and progressives. It is not, however, a question of woking or un-woking, but of understanding contemporary society. The target audience, after all, is made up of children. It seems reasonable their literature is a coherent reflection of the world around them. According to a recent study into diversity in children’s books, only 22 per cent of children’s books published in 2018 featured non-white characters. Today’s youngsters have a greater likelihood of reading about witches, gargoyles or Oompa Loompas, than characters from their own communities. The publishing industry isn’t in need of ‘woking’ up, but updating.
The target market of the genre may be for children, but it is parents who hold the purse strings. How, then, should they be stocking the bookshelves when the permitted utopia of their little one’s literature keeps changing? The novels deemed problematic need not be erased, in fact, they can be used as a door into some difficult conversations. Youngsters may be more receptive than assumed.
“Children understand more than we give them credit for,” Dr Nel told Joshua Johnson in a segment on NBC’s The Week, “you can read them contextually and you can also choose not to read them”. Leave the fairy tales to the Grimm brothers, stories of the real world need to be written and told.