Dear Babyboomers
After reading one of the rather 'grim' fairy tales by the Grimm Brothers, 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs' to the little people in my life, I wonder at the violent nature of some of these stories. However most children love them! I can't count the number of times I have been asked to repeatedly read Cinderella to one child (male). It was a long and rather tedious version and of course any verbal editing was instantly picked up.
This story was first collected by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, and was translated into English in the 1820s. Its present status as one of the best loved of the stories collected by the Grimm brothers seems to derive from the fact that in 1937, Walt Disney turned it into an animated film. In the film the seven dwarfs have been given names, and personalities to match those names: Happy, Sleepy, Doc, Bashful, Sneezy, Grumpy, and Dopey. The film remains hugely popular even today.
The first volumes were much criticized because, although they were called "Children's Tales", they were not regarded as suitable for children, both for the scholarly information included and the subject matter. Hence the many changes through the editions – such as turning the wicked mother of the first edition in Snow White and Hansel and Gretel to a stepmother, were probably made with an eye to such suitability. They removed sexual references, such as Rapunzel's innocently asking why her dress was getting tight around her belly, and thus naively revealing her pregnancy and the prince's visits to her step mother, but, in many respects, violence, particularly when punishing villains, was increased.[
Yes, there was an inevitable Prince Charming, but he was relatively unimportant since all he did was look at Snow White as she lay under glass, thought she was beautiful and kissed her - which brought her out of her coma but the main characters in this story are far more sinister........ 'Wicked Stepmothers and MIRRORS!! And much much more - perhaps the forerunner to Anorexia, Narcissism, Obsession with Appearance, Shallow Hal etc
"Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the fairest of them all?. " is not a good question to ask in the first place. Fraught with difficulty, before you even get an answer, even if you are a relatively self-accepting babyboomer and not a wicked stepmother.
And of course, many of us have been stepmothers - more likely as a result of a blended (some say scrambled) families. As far as stepmothers are concerned, one theory is that folktales use the figure of the stepmother in order to say things about rivalries and mother/daughter relationships and relationships between older and younger women which are unacceptable when said about actual mothers, (who are often killed off early in the story so they can be left on a pedestal.)
The simple social reality of the time, however could be that because so many women died in childbirth, stepmothers were a common fact of life, who might have been keen to safeguard their birthchildren's access to limited resources, such as available Princes, as in Cinderella.
Bruno Bettelheim, a child psychologist, famous for his research on autism, recommends in his book, 'The Uses of Enchantment', that "children be immersed in the world of fantasy and fairy tales throughout their childhood since reading fairy tales contributes toward their healthy and confident attitudes about the challenges and terrors of this life."
