[UA] Darkening Children's Tales

[Timothy Ferguson]

----- Original Message -----
From: Brian V (Vajra) King <kingbv at saclink.csus.edu>
To: <ua at lists.uchicago.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, February 13, 2001 3:59 AM
Subject: [UA] Darkening Children's Tales


> I see it completely differently.  I see children's stories as
> artificially sterilized: they take out most of the death, poverty, moral
> confusion, bad things happening to good people, good people having dark
> sides, world-is-a-frightening-alien-place stuff which is part of a
> realistic story.

Actually most modern children's stories go the other way.  Each of the
national book councils has recently complained that for some reason
publishing houses are churning out teen angst filled with manipulative,
ineffective pschyoterapists.  Thank God for Harry Potter...  Can you be a
character in a modern children's novel and have well-adjusted, present
parents who you like?  No, you can't.  If you go through the children's
bestsellers for the last three years, everyone's parents are mad, dead,
divorcing or piously conservative.  The one exception I can think of, oddly
enough, is R.L. Stein..  Even the really fluffy stuff, like Sweet Valley
High and Babysitters Club, have kids dealing with how their fathers have
dumped their mums and gone off with younger women.

> This sterilization makes the story appropriate for
> children in modern western culture.  As we grow up though, we realize that
> the good things in life can not exist except in contrast to the bad
> things.  The happy beatific stories of old can no longer exist in the
> lives of our minds because they lack a dimension that we ourselves have
> grown in to.

The traditional old stories aren't all that nice either...if you mean Grimm
and Perrault.

> Of course, each person has a different worldview.  In order to make Oz
> more realistic, you might add war and disease.

Yes...like they did in "Wicked".  I think Baum is a bad example...


_______________________________________________
UA mailing list
UA at lists.uchicago.edu
http://lists.uchicago.edu/mailman/listinfo/ua