Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Fairy Tales & Children

Fairy Tales
I am currently in the process of reading the posted material for Thursday's class and feel the need to go ahead and comment on what I've read so far, even though I'm not quite finished yet. One of the points that Darnton brings up in Chapter 1 of The Great Cat Massacre, entitled "Peasants Tell Tales: The Meaning of Mother Goose" is the nonexistance of childhood as we know it in seventeenth and eighteenth century France. I took a children's literature course with Danielle Price over the summer of '08 and this concept of childhood was something that we studied in that class, also. There was no such thing as childhood for this period, no special literature or schooling or clothing or even a sense that children were more frail than adults and needed special care. This notion of childhood is something that has evolved over the centuries, and may have begun with Perrault's collection of fairy tales.

What is interesting to me, as it was in my previous class, is this distinction and while re-reading many of the old fairy tales, the sexuality and vulgarity of the stories fascinates me because today, many people would never think to expose their children to the original fairy tale texts. I had a personal experience with this one day while my older sister was at my house and brought her seven year old daughter along. While my sister was using my computer (she had just been released from her job and was using my pc for a job search) I felt compelled to amuse the 7 year old with reading out loud rather than just putting Nickelodeon on the television and letting her numb her mind. I don't have much children's literature in my collection, so I grabbed The Classic Fairy Tales, edited my Maria Tatar, a leftover collection from my Children's Lit. class. As I began to read some of the tales, my sister slowly turned from the computer and informed me that she really didn't appreciate me exposing her daughter to some of the content of the fairy tales. I explained that this is what people in previous centuries considered acceptable for kids. However, in this age of speciality, where everyone belongs in a category, sometimes overlapping, "the child" is a phenomenon that has specialized literature and has become a very large demographic that marketers bombard on an everyday basis. Children are targeted for sales and parents are especially aware of what their child is exposed to (or at least they try to be - with the internet, they have access to much more than their parents may be aware of).

I am not a parent, so my feelings towards coddling children are different for me than someone who is a parent, nevertheless children, in my view, should be exposed to some things. I think that we as a modern culture should be able to see children not as dumb little humans who need to be protected from all at the expense of their own knowledge, but explain why things are the way they are. They deserve that much from us- to recognize their capacity for understanding.

Oral Traditions
Now, back to the readings...
One of the most fascinating points I gathered from the readings was that although oral narratives have traveled through generations and throughout the world, much of the basic content stays the same. I think this says something for humanity - that we are all much more alike than we may think. The basic need for food comes up a lot in the oral traditions, even between the fairy tales and the slave narratives. Most of the narratives are centered around the acquisition of food. I guess I never really noticed this before...
My only complaint is that in Lawrence Levine's Black Culture and Black Consciousness, Chapter 2: "The Meaning of Slave Tales, in the section "The Slave as Trickster" he seemed to re-tell the stories and not really get into what they meant to him. I enjoyed learning some of the tales, don't get me wrong, but it seemed as though he was just telling us the stories again.
My favorite part was how he acknowledged that different races and cultures use scripture for their own purposes. I am taking a course concerned with Jewish representation right now, and the same topic has come up. The African view that Cain was so scared of God finding out that he killed his brother that he turns white was amusing, yet totally plausible in its own way. In my Jewish representation class, we have touched on other scriptures that different cultures translate to fit their own set of values, like the story of Noah's three sons being used to uphold the practice of slavery (which was also mentioned in Levine's text).