Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

Wild Thing
Book information
*
*
[08/20/99]

There goes my baby
Once, I thought my daughter would win the Nobel Prize. Now that she's started college, I just hope she keeps her phone, her power, her housing -- and remembers to wake up for class.
By Stephen J. Lyons
[08/19/99]

First crush
When you're a girl, a grown man's attention can make a woman out of you.
By Maurine Shores
[08/18/99]

Hot Flash
take my tv
The American Academy of Pediatrics says children under 2 should not watch TV. Why would any parent disagree?
By Jacques Leslie
[08/17/99]

Hot Flash
TV can be a good parent
The American Academy of Pediatrics says television watching is harmful to babies and toddlers. This mama says: I don't think so.
By Ariel Gore
[08/16/99]

Complete archives for Mothers Who Think

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Indeed, Barbie and fairy tales induce parallel anxieties in gender-conscious parents. But while Barbie, despite having taken a critical beating, still dominates the toddler/preteen doll market, an alternative fairy-tale culture has sprung up in recent decades for families who don't like their princesses tricked out, locked up or comatose.

This new genre, in which classic stories are revamped or fairy tale-like narratives are given progressive twists, is not to be confused with its adult counterpart, penned by authors such as Anne Sexton, Angela Carter and Margaret Atwood. These are kids' titles, yet they address adult concerns about fairy tales: that they pit women against each other in struggles for husbands and status; that they're filled with dead mothers and negligent fathers; that they equate virtue with youth and beauty and promote a feminine ideal of purity and compliance.

This last complaint is what drives many current reformers, who do their magic by transforming passive heroines into doers or subverting traditional scenarios in order to skewer the values the original stories reinforce.

Also Today Information on the books mentioned in this story

One of the most successful contemporary revisions is Frances Minters' lighthearted "Sleepless Beauty" (Viking, 1996). Written in verse and exquisitely illustrated by G. Brian Karas, it stars a resourceful Beauty who both saves herself and gets her prince.

This Beauty grows up in a swank Manhattan apartment. After she pricks her finger on the needle attached to an "old time vinyl record" player brought by a witch who crashes her 14th birthday party, she falls asleep. But in this tale, Beauty calls the shots:

Next morning bright and early
As always I awoke.
I saw my parents sleeping
I thought it was a joke.

"Wake up, wake up!" I shouted!
"You've slept enough, I'd say."
"What year is it?" asked Mother.
"Same year as yesterday."

"We didn't sleep a hundred years?
The witch did us no harm?"
"She couldn't," I said proudly,
"'Cause I set the alarm."

Beauty writes a thank-you note to the comely rocker whose music helped her "fool the wicked stranger." They meet, and the rest is fairy-tale history.

What makes "Sleepless Beauty" so effective is that Minters doesn't compromise her story in the name of upgrading its sexual politics: The witch is creepy, the threat is real and Beauty triumphs romantically in the end. Minters' tale, of course, reworks just one popular rendering of "Sleeping Beauty" -- a saga with many incarnations. One of its earliest recorded versions is Italian Giambattista Basile's "Sun, Moon and Talia," (published in 1636), in which Talia, pricked by a poisonous thorn, falls asleep and gets raped by an opportunistic king. The story later morphed into Charles Perrault's "The Sleeping Beauty in the Woods," and later still into the Grimm Brothers' "Little Briar-Rose."

Purists may question the ethics of meddling with such time-tested stories, but a bigger concern might be on which "original" to base a rewrite -- since even classic fairy tales sometimes recycle shared scenarios. As Maria Tatar explains in "Grimm's Grimmest" (Chronicle, 1997), the Grimm Brothers modified their own stories: Originally collected as tabloid-style diversions for adults, the tales were later modified to boost sales, and then again to appeal to children. In the originals, for example, Snow White's stepmother danced to death in hot iron shoes, Cinderella's stepsisters got their eyes pecked out by doves and Rapunzel got pregnant in her tower.

Next page | Where are the studies proving that traditional fairy tales damage girls' self-esteem?