The Value of Fairy Tales Part 1
I am a member of an international writers’ organization – The Society for Children’s Book Writers & Illustrators (SCBWI) - and in August I attended our annual summer conference. One of the keynote speakers, author/illustrator Felicita Sala, talked about the changes she has observed in children’s literature over the past 20-30 years that she has been a working professional.
She talked about the artists who influenced her, explaining that she was the kid who loved the stories that were gross, disgusting, mean, or weird. Authors and works like Edward Lear’s “The Jumblies and Other Nonsense Verses,” Roald Dahl’s “The Big Friendly Giant” and “Rhymes and Nonsense Poems,” Edward Gorey’s “The Gashlycrumb Tinies,” and William Cole’s “Beastly Boys and Ghastly Girls.” These artists weren’t afraid to explore subjects that make people squirm: ugliness, boogers, meanness, bullies, disobedience, bad parents, hatred, dishonesty, baddies, unkindness, farting – you name it.
I have to agree with her. Some of these themes are hilarious in their own way, and I don’t think I find them so because I have the objectivity of an adult. They make me squirm and blush a bit, but I think I find them hilarious because they’re just so darned real. I recall visiting a classroom of pre-schoolers whose teacher had just read, “Walter The Farting Dog” by William Kotzwinkle and Glenn Murray that was published over twenty years ago. These kids were rolling on the floor - their amusement uncontainable. Interestingly enough, or maybe not, the boys were all over it whereas the girls were giggling demurely.
Sala says, “I don’t believe we can work with storytelling if we’ve lost [the] faculty of wonder. [These subjects are] fun for children to read and [have] kind of disappeared from contemporary picture books. I think that these authors had faith in their readers - in what they were able to understand and could handle – fear, horror, and disgust or ridicule remained in this world of fiction and wonder, and they understood that the real world was something different - they could tell the difference. I feel that now we don’t put that faith in children anymore.”
She could be right that parents today coddle children more than previous generations and aren’t interested in reading the kind of books to their children that endorse bad manners or impart fear and anxiety.
Ms. Sala’s speech segued into the subject of fairy tales, which again, to today’s audiences and sensibilities can be regarded as rather astonishing in their depictions of violence and cruelty, grossness and bad behavior. She observed how publishers in the US have been pulling away from that type of literature for kids for a while now, deeming it too scary and blatant. I think what she is talking about is an overprotectiveness that has crept into our world in the 21st century. And rightly so. It makes me wonder if this doesn’t have something to do with the world that children are living in today, whose reality is every bit as scary as those creepy forests and crone-like witches youngsters have been reading about for centuries.
Isn’t today’s classmate with a gun the big bad wolf in disguise? Kids today know all too well how scary real life is with the potential terror of school shootings a constant in their daily lives. Fairy tales as we know them may not have a place in today’s society anymore. And for children living in war zones, how could fictional baddies begin to compare with the reality of their lived experiences?
Read The Value of Fairy Tales Part 2
