Taming the Wild Things for Children - Essay Example

Taming the Wild Things for Children The of being a child is a universal experience. We were all there once upon a time. I distinctly remember that as a child, I could not fall asleep unless my father read to me my favorite fairy tales. He would read them to me, no matter how tired he was, sometimes nodding his head off to sleep in boredom, since I would make him read the same stories over and over again. Childhood is truly a wonderful, magical time when fairytales are most cherished as bedroom companions to lull little ones to the land of dreams. Despite parental fears of traumatic results in their children, picture books depicting monsters and other scary creatures seem enjoyable to young children. Such storybooks seem frightening since they contain alarming images, disquieting texts and threatening concepts. Take as an example the book entitled Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak. In this book a little boy is challenged by sharp-toothed monsters with equally sharp claws combined with ear-splitting roars threaten to gobble him up. This book no doubt portrays the alarming. What are the effects of such a book on young children? Occasionally, these children may be frightened beyond tolerance. They may not only be enjoyable, they may even cause distress. The author himself, Sendak, tells of a child who screamed in fright each time Where the Wild Things Are was read to him. The fear factor is not relegated to the children alone. Sometimes it is the adult who is afraid. Such a book as Sendak’s may instill fear in adults too, persuading them to withhold the bbok from a child who would absorb its contents wide-eyed and unshaken. “Some critics have noted that the unfamiliar ferocity of such monsters initially took some grown-ups aback. The monsters of Wild Things are scary monsters and that scariness probably frightened a few adults unaccustomed to such literary apparitions and unsure of their benignity.” (Stevenson, 1996, p. 3) Very often, adults are afraid in behalf of their children – adults may find the images, text or concept not frightening but they feel the need to protect children from their lack of fear. In their naivete, the children may not understand the danger of the images contained in the book. Their very innocence makes them trusting, ignorant and vulnerable to corruption. They may be convinced through the attractive medium of the picture book that an evil is acceptable or even pleasurable. Stevenson believes that “fear is the first and most obvious literary reaction to guard against, fear is a fearsome thing and therefore a bad thing, a bad thing and therefore a fearsome thing.” She goes on to say that “the mere idea of fear – the idea of possible fear –can suffice to justify keeping a book away from a young audience.” (Stevenson, 1996, p.3) The age-old assumption remains that strong emotions evoked by literature can damage the sensitive. Will sensitive readers remain permanently afraid of books, of monsters, etc.? The fear seems to be that children will grow up shadow-eyed and haunted, doomed always to sleep with the lights on, incapable of ever being productive citizens, in short, harmed. Scary picture books do not indiscriminately try to scare young readers. The creators of such books also take into consideration the control of fear. Such books do control themselves and control their effects on children. The use of visuals puts boundaries to the playing field of dangerous excitement in a way acceptable to them. And when parents feel a story to be too terrifying for children, when they are told the story is accompanied by pictures, they always change their minds. Folk artist Moses refrains from adding new elements to or trying to set his own stamp on the text, adhering faithfully to the Grimm Brothers’ story. He reinvents Hansel and Gretel in lush wordless spreads and spot art. “His unique contribution instead comes through in immeasurable subtle visual inventions in his oil paintings. Alternating spot illustrations that dot pages of text with wordless full-bleed spreads, he paints forest landscapes thick with spruces and winding streams, a night lit with a moon as warm and orange as a pumpkin and a witch’s house whose architectural details and cozy fittings make its candy decorations seem almost superfluous.” (Moses, 2005). Another way of eradicating fear of scary folk tales is by encouraging children to write and draw. “Writers, no matter how young also write to craft literature, to make words sing, to capture something lovely, to think through an idea, to make literature. Often the easiest way to help children write literature is to first encourage them to draw.” (Calkins, 1997, p. 65). When children are learning to draw and write, somehow the monsters and other scary creatures in storybooks become less menacing and parents are wise to respond to drawing and writing of very young children by shuddering at One-Eyes’ frightful appearance as drawn and described by them. One of the best techniques for helping children deal with their problems and emotions, e.g. fear is bibliotherapy. Bibliotherapy is the use of literature to address children’s problems. “This technique is used successfully with all types of children in all type of situations. There are stories dealing with all kinds of issues and problems – facing bullies, getting along with friends, living with disabilities, coping with divorce, death, abuse, war, hunger, homelessness, etc.” (Shalaway, 1998, p. 208). Mary Rizza of the University of Connecticut advises that “teachers using bibliotherapy should keep these ideas in mind: First, it is not enough to simply have the children read the story. They need to talk about what they have read.” This is important, even in storybooks where the fear factor is prevalent. The teacher must remember that bibliotherapy is a conversation starter, not an ender. It should be used to open up communication. Connections need to be facilitated and open expression, encouraged. In this way, the teacher can do much to eradicate fear in the child who reads scary literature. Even unedited versions of Hansel and Gretel may: 1. promote the exchange of information between adult and child. 2. enable the child to make the connection to her or his life. 3. validate the child’s feelings and responses to the crisis or issue at hand. We have heretofore discussed ways and means of handling the fear factor present in reading many fairy tales featuring ogres, giants and the like, perhaps we could do more by following the example of the brothers Grimm when they made a final edition in 1857 of their first one which came out in 1812. As we read these two editions of the story as originally written by the Grimms, we compare and contrast them and come up with defining elements that make the tales variants of the same story. For one thing, the second edition is longer than the first. At the very onset of the story, we find a shift from we to you, showing the primary concern of the father for this children when he says “I will make afire so you won’t freeze.” Then also Hansel’s admonition to his sister, “God will not forsake us.” Somehow this takes out the sting from the children’s realization that they were being abandoned. The youthful reader who may identify with the characters will not then feel too much apprehension. Perhaps one of the reasons for the length of the second version was that the writiers wanted to reassure their youthful readers that the father, like most fathers, was overjoyed to see his children safe once more. Still another reason is the injection of animals into the story, such as the little snow-white bird that led the children to the candy-house and the white duckling that took them across the lake, not to mention the little mouse at the end of the tale. The writers also take the trouble in the more recent version of going to great lengths in describing what the children did with the precious stones they found in the witch’s house to enhance the happy ending. “The most substantive alteration in the text of Hansel and Gretel is the transformation of the children’s mother into a stepmother. Whereas the children’s mother/stepmother grows harsher in later editions, their father grows more introspective and milder, perhaps too mild, for he is unwilling to stand up to his domineering wife.” (Ashliman, 2002) Wilhelm Grimm added numerous small embellishments to the story making the tale more dramatic, more literary and more sentimental in later editions. The most outstanding is the addition of the episode of the children’s escape from the sinister woods across a large body of water, one at a time, on the back of a duck. In the Translator’s Note, the phrase “die Frau” occurs frequently in the final edition of Hansel and Gretel by the brothers Grimm. This phrase can be translated as “his wife”, “the wife” , “his woman” or “the woman”. The translator believes that the generic “the woman” best fits the story’s child’s eye perspective and tone. The tale as we know it from Brothers Grimm was meant to be a pleasant fable for middle class consumers of the 19th century, the original however was probably an admonishment of the hardships of medieval life. Because of episodes of famine, war, plagues and other reasons, abandoning children in the woods was common. “In the first editions of the Grimm’s collection, there was no stepmother; the mother persuaded the father to abandon their own children. The change appears to be a deliberate toning down of the unpleasantness for children (Wikipedia Foundation, Inc.) The True Story of Hansel and Gretel is the scariest of fairy tales, told with gripping realism as a Holocaust novel set in Poland near the end of World War II. It “brings the genocide history up close through the horrifying daily experience of 11 year old Jewish Gretel and her younger brother (in the original story by Grimm Brothers, Gretel is younger than her brother). They save each other from the worst with the help of a few brave villagers.” (Murphy, 2007) The stepmother and the witch are not villains but quiet heroes who sacrifice themselves to save the children. The witch lands up in an oven – a concentration camp. The Nazis indulge in wholesale slaughter, and the children barely survive, hiding and on the run. In the final pages, redemption is not a fairy tale ending but a “heartening message of hope.” References Ashliman, D.I. (2002) Hansel and Gretel by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm: A Comparison of the versions of 1812 and 1857. Retrieved on June 23, 2007 from: http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm015a.html Calkins, L. (1997) Raising Lifelong Learners, A Parents’ Guide. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books Moses, W., (2005) Hansel and Gretel. Publishers Weekly; Vol. 252 Issue 50, p62-62, 1/4p Murphy, L. (2003) The True Story of Hansel and Gretel: A Novel of War and Survival. Penguin Books Shalaway, L. (1998) Learning to Teach. New York: Scholastic Professional Books Stevenson, D.,(1996) “Frightening the Children?: Kids, Grown-ups, and Scary Picture Books”, Horn Book Magazine, Vol. 72 Issue 3 Wikipedia Foundation, Inc. (n.d.) Hansel and Gretel. Retrieved on June 23, 2007 from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hansel_and_Gretel Read More