Are fairy tales next in the queue to be banned for young children? The “influencers” – individuals and organisations wielding cultural influence throughout our globalised world – are working on it.
The film star Keira Knightley says she will ban her young daughter from watching movies about Cinderella, because poor old Cinders is too passive a role model for modern feminists. She slaves away in the kitchen, and is only finally rescued by marrying a prince. Rubbish, says Ms Knightley: Cinderella should rescue herself – not wait around dopily for some royal fellow.
Meanwhile, Amnesty International has frowned on Sleeping Beauty as a possible template for sexual overtures without consent. The Prince kisses Sleeping Beauty while she is asleep – without first seeking her permission. Amnesty has put a rather creepy little cartoon clip of Sleeping Beauty on YouTube, in which the Prince not only kisses the young woman, but probes her body intimately.
The Little Mermaid is also in the frame for not meeting modern positive feminist values: it shows a man having power over women, teaches girls to be respectful of men and advances female self-sacrifice.
I daresay the whole canon of Hans Christian Andersen, Charles Perrault and the Grimm Brothers can be revisited and revised – or indeed banned under contemporary protocols. And different generations have seen different aspects of these age-old tales (Cinderella goes back to the China of Confucius). Yet it’s surely lacking in imagination to miss the metaphorical meaning within such fables.
Cinderella is very much about the problems of step-families – and how, with virtue, luck and a little help, “the last shall be first”. Sleeping Beauty teaches that a parent cannot protect a child from all risk of evil, but love and courage can be redemptive. The Little Mermaid has been interpreted as a story about fear of emotional or conjugal engagement.
Scholars including Carl Jung, Bruno Bettelheim and Marina Warner have interpreted fairy tales for their deeper meaning, which children can discern. So it’s regrettable to see them invoked so superficially.
Jung thought that Little Red Riding Hood was a meaningful lesson for young girls on the cusp of puberty. The message was that there are indeed bad men out there who will try to devour you (the wolf), but there are good men, too, who will be a help and a support (the woodcutter). (But is this discrimination against wolves?)
Yet there are parallels in the real world with some of these stories. Didn’t Meghan Markle marry a prince, find an entirely new life, and is now the cynosure of all female eyes?
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A fifth of people over the age of 70 eat all their main meals alone, according to a Royal Voluntary Service survey. Eating alone is supposed to be bad for us, having a “detrimental impact” on health. So the RVS is launching its campaign, Cooking for a Crowd, which aims to stimulate lunch clubs and more communal eating.
Yet I wonder how many older people quite enjoy eating on their own, at least some of the time? It certainly doesn’t bother me, allowing me to pick away at the simple snacks I often prefer to four-square meals – beans on toast, Welsh rarebit, the joy of a simple tomato omelette. And to eat at odd times, too – four in the afternoon is my preferred time for lunch-dinner.
Eating with others requires social input: making polite conversation (often about health matters); sharing the choice of food with communal appeal; and seeing to the needs of others at table.
At convent school we were taught that “If your neighbour has to ask for the salt, you’ve already failed her – you should have offered it to her first.”
“Breaking bread” together is very much embedded in religious ritual, and not coincidentally, with the Communion of the Last Supper. So we should do it. But supping alone is not always to be disparaged.
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An Irish friend was asked by a young person, “Why do charities have weird names like ‘The Samaritans’?” Ireland is voting to delete the never-used offence of “blasphemy” from its 1937 Constitution this week. More striking, I’d suggest, is the appearance of an entire generation which doesn’t now recognise references from the New Testament.
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