Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, January 3, 1994 TAG: 9401050188
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SANDY HILL KNIGHT-RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The wicked wolf goes to Grandmother's house. Grandmother hides in a closet. When Little Red Riding Hood arrives, Grandmother bursts out of the closet, wearing a ghost costume she has sewn from linens in the closet. The wolf is so scared that he runs away, never to bother Grandmother or Little Red Riding Hood again.
What, you say, that's not the way you remember it?
You thought the wolf ate Grandmother and Little Red Riding Hood, and the hunter arrived, killed the wolf and cut open the stomach, rescuing Little Red Riding Hood and Grandmother in the nick of time.
No, no, no.
That was the old version. Too scary for kids, says Western Publishing Co., which is putting out toned-down versions of fairy tales as Little Golden Sound Story Books.
Western says lots of parents are worried their young kids will be frightened by fairy tales in which the characters are harmed.
Another example: In the sanitized version of ``The Three Little Pigs,'' the wolf becomes exhausted from all that huffing and puffing, falls asleep, and the pigs build a jail around him.
Stop it, Western Publishing. Just stop it.
Yes, we need to protect our children from inappropriate violence. And some kids may indeed be a little scared by fairy tales.
But there's a world of difference between the violence of a Freddy Krueger movie, spelled out in living color, sounds and all, and the deliciously scary action in a fairy tale.
Fairy tales spark the imagination. And part of the process is learning to handle our less pleasant thoughts. Fairy tales permit us to do that in a harmless way.
More than that. Fairy tales endure when other children's stories come and go, because fairy tales speak to a child at a deeper level.
Take ``Hansel and Gretel.'' It's a tale of poor parents unable to care for their children. This is an unspoken fear of many children. Yet the children survive the abandonment, kill the witch and return to their parents safely with gems to help the family.
These stories, in fact, end happily. The psychological impact would not be the same if the witch reformed and sat down for tea and cookies with the kids.
Fairy tales are about facing and overcoming fears. And they often teach morals. The three little pigs learn to be responsible, to build their house from bricks. And they defeat the force that threatens them. A dead wolf can't come back again in the way a wolf who runs away can.
The tales are set in a fantasy world: a world of pig architects, talking wolves, a gingerbread house. This makes it easier for the child to handle the threats involved. After all, it's not in the suburbs this is happening. It permits children to deal at a more distant level with their concerns about life.
The late Bruno Bettelheim, a renowned child psychologist, made a study of fairy tales.
In his book, ``The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales,'' he deals with this question of cleaning up fairy tales to protect kids. He says adults take things literally in fairy tales. But they should view them as ``symbolic renderings of crucial life experiences.'' Kids understand that intuitively, even if they can't explain it.
A child, he says, will see it as condescending to be told that Little Red Riding Hood didn't really die when the wolf swallowed her. It's like telling someone that in the biblical story of Jonah, the whale didn't really swallow Jonah. This negates the purpose of the story: that Jonah had to enter the whale's belly to be transformed, to learn a lesson he needed to return to life a better person.
Says Bettelheim, ``The child knows intuitively that Little Red Cap's (Little Red Riding Hood's) being swallowed by the wolf - much like the various deaths other fairy tale heroes experience for a time - is by no means the end of the story but a necessary part of it.''
Through hearing fairy tales, children come to understand that transformation is possible, Bettelheim says.
In a traditional fairy tale, the hero triumphs and the evil figure meets a well-deserved fate, ``thus satisfying the child's deep need for justice to prevail.''
Through the death of a wolf, children can confront the inner wolf of their violent impulses and defeat it symbolically.
In fact, these stories have less to do with a world that some would argue is becoming increasingly more violent than with the eternal development tasks of children: to confront their inner fears, to learn a moral lesson (take the time to do it right or you'll pay the penalty: no straw houses).
There is, of course, real-world violence to protect our children from. And there is sanitized violence on movies and TV to monitor. TV, which can seem so real, may be far more confusing to a child than a fairy tale.
It would be a mistake in our desire to protect our children to get rid of fantasy deaths that, in fact, may be reassuring to them.
Parents who really object to wolves who get killed can find plenty of other stories to tell their children, without the need to tamper with classics.
by CNB