Fairy tales

Fairy tales often get a bad rap these days.  Thanks to the Disney factory, people think they're all about bland "happily ever after" endings.  But that really isn't fair.  Some of them are remarkably nasty:  there's one story that ends with the Evil Stepmother being rolled down a hill in a barrel lined with spikes on the inside! (Real-life stepmothers don't like evil stepmother characters, but that's really a roman a clef version of the Evil Mother.) And who doesn't remember being scared by the story of Hansel and Gretel?

And then there's Hans Christian Andersen, who wrote a wide range of children's stories, from funny to very sad.  He wasn't afraid of tragic endings. ("The Little Match Girl" is brutally realistic.) Incredibly, the Disney version of his "The Little Mermaid" has a more conventional "fairy tale" ending than the original fairy tale.  If you ask me, the only part of that movie that really does the story justice is the melody of her voice trapped in the bottle!

Some middle-class parents think that children shouldn't be exposed to stories with too much sorrow and cruelty.  Then they wonder why their kids aren't ready for real life! J.K. Rowling has said that we keep underestimating children.  Bruno Bettelheim wrote The Uses of Enchantment, a book about the psychological importance of children's stories.

By the way, I don't like children's books where animals wear human clothes!