Fairy tales: Horror stories for children

I recently joined YMCA Camps as a volunteer staff for part of my summer, so you can imagine the time I spent dealing with kids. One of the main things that children like is singing. It’s nothing much, just catchy chants with easy actions that kids find easy to follow. We normally sing about “fishy-wishy”, “piggy oink-oink” or “Mama and Papa shark”–you get the idea.

But I noticed something about these songs. There was one song in particular. It goes like this:

Three blind jellyfish,

Sitting on a rock, woah! Sitting on a rock, woah!

Along comes a big wave,

Splash!

Two blind jellyfish…

And et cetera. If you just follow the leaders as you sing, dancing along like the kids, you wouldn’t notice a thing. You’d be enjoying yourself just as much! But now that I think about the lyrics, it seems a pretty “dark” topic to teach kids about. Blind jellyfish? That’s not very nice. And the concept of a big wave killing them off one by one? Not exactly something you’d tell kids in a story. And that’s only one of the chants. Then there are chants about going to “Beaver Heaven”, or “Shark Attack”. Obviously, they are nothing but silly chants for kids, but it got me thinking.

When I was young, my mother used to tell me bedtime stories. I enjoyed them a lot, just like any kid would enjoy Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty. It was only until I had grown up older that I was introduced to the Disney adaptations of these fairy tales. When I’d grown into a teen, my mother told me why she never told me the traditional fairy tales that everyone loved: she hated the dark themes of it.

Come to think of it, even though the fairy tale collection has been elaborately “refurbished” and decorated into beautiful, charming fantasies where characters live “happily ever after”–Grimm’s Fairy Tales underwent seven editions!–deep down there still lies a subtle dark world of rape, violence and gore (here we leave the discussion of wonderfully animated Disney films and talk about the written tales that have passed down orally through generations in Europe.

In fact, many of the “children’s tales” were originally intended for adults, and contain legends behind them, adapted to become “watered-down versions of uncomfortable historical events”. For example, Frenchman Charles Perrault’s tale of “Cinderella” was actually based on the story of a Greek woman Rhodopis, who was captured as a young girl and sold to be a slave in Egypt at around 500 BC. There, because of her unusually good looks, she was noticed by the Pharaoh and became one of his wives–but only to gratify him sexually; the original version of “Sleeping Beauty”, written by the Italian poet Basile, depicted Talia, the sleeping girl, being woken by the king raping her. And so it seems that these “tales” are only watered down because of how unbearably gruesome they actually are, even for adults.

Why, then, did story collectors like the brothers Grimm compile all these stories together and call it Children’s and Household Tales? Apparently, during the 17th century, the concept of childhood began to emerge in Europe. Children were seen as separate beings, “innocent and in need of protection and training by adults around them”. By watering down the gruesome historical events into children’s tales, children were taught strong morals relevant to the time while being protected from the actual gore of the subject. These morals that are “relevant to the time” include staying away from strangers, avoiding wandering into forests and being loyal to one’s own country. In fact, the morals of the stories are so diversified–due to limited description and characterization of the stories–that their influence stretched further than expected. It was said that Hitler praised them as folkish tales showing children with sound racial instincts seeking racially pure marriage partners.

Now here I ask: are these morals still relevant to us nowadays? As time goes by, our view of these stories have turned from being stories with great morals to fantasies with elegant princesses. Children are looking up to Cinderella because of how beautiful she becomes; they look up to Snow White because she lives with seven cute dwarves who are always at her service. None of the morals extracted from these fairy tales in order to teach children show through in Disney’s animated adaptations of them. Thus, are we devaluing the concept of childhood by not developing children’s tales of our own? Is that why all that children around the world want are princess dresses and smartphones? Don’t get me wrong–I have nothing against the Disney films. The thing is, no matter how well we decorate the watered-down versions of Cinderella and Rapunzel, the dark truth–the root of them–still subtly remains, waiting for children to realize when they grow up. And if you try to take away the historical context of them, the moral reality also slowly vanishes. What’s left are beautiful characters living in a fantasy world, and stories with no meaning at all. If so, is it worth it to elaborate them into Hollywood box-office record breakers just to please children worldwide without giving them any sense of reality. If we value our children’s growth so much, and we realize that stories do form an integral part of their learning, then shouldn’t we develop our own children’s tales, “relevant to our time”, just like what my mother did?