Grandmother, What Big Teeth You Have

Many years ago, I wrote a piece for this magazine called “Grim Tales.” At the time, I was a young mother rediscovering the world of children’s literature, deciding what to read to my daughter and what to avoid. I argued then for the importance of reading the original (or, at least, pre-twentieth-century) fairy tales, rather than, say, the Disney book editions, or other sanitized and simplified contemporary retellings.

To be sure, the traditional tales have always been adapted to different times, countries, and cultures. Until the Brothers Grimm wrote them down, they were largely passed on orally, as “housewives’ tales.” Hans Christian Andersen, Oscar Wilde, and others were profoundly influenced by the Grimm brothers and subsequently wrote their own fairy tales, testament to a body of work that W. H. Auden claimed “rank[s] next to the Bible in importance.” Einstein is reported to have said, “If you want intelligent children, read them fairy tales. If you want more intelligent children, read them more fairy tales.”

However, when my daughter was young, there was a strong prejudice against any of the tales, with the exception of the Disney movies. The stories were considered both too “scary” and too politically incorrect. Indeed, at private school open houses in Manhattan, parents were assured that their school would eschew traditional fairy tales and, instead, instruct children to write their own with appropriately empowered females and detoxified men. Should young Janie be fortunate enough to gain admittance to these hallowed halls, she would be busy rewriting and improving those backward, patriarchal texts. God forbid the princess should fall in love with a prince. She had a corporation to conquer. 

Back then, my chief concern about the cancellation of the tales was the loss of mystery, complexity, and beauty. So much of what was featured in children’s classrooms and bookstores was thinly disguised propaganda or crude, silly stories with flat and ugly prose. As I wrote then, “When they read, or when they listen, what we give them should be worthy of their eager, wondering minds and souls.” It did not occur to me that there might be other, even more sinister consequences to the abandonment of the fairy tale canon.

Now, blessed with a three-year-old granddaughter, I am once again revisiting the old tales. We read and then re-enact “Little Red Riding Hood,” “The Wolf and the Seven Kids,” “Hansel and Gretel,” “Snow White,” “Sleeping Beauty,” “Cinderella,” “Rumpelstiltskin,” “Rapunzel,” and many other stories over and over again. My granddaughter always insists on playing the innocent victim; I am always the heavy. And nothing thrills her more than the terror of a bad fairy’s curse, a pricked finger, or a poisoned apple. It is precisely the “scary” bits that excite her the most. She loves to face the fear and then move on with the story.

Intuitively, she knows that there is no joy without terror. You must travel through the forest to reach Grandmother’s house; you may have to sleep for a hundred years before finding love; you will need to think quickly to outsmart the witch or the wolf; you will need to persevere in the face of despair. 

In fairy tales, evil is a palpable presence but always defeated. The innocent are saved and the wicked meet a violent end. Justice is preserved; order is restored. Parents are united with children, maidens meet loving princes, and all live happily ever after. True, we may not all live happily ever after, but we will surely all confront evil at some point in our lives, and fairy tales prepare us for that very real world: a world of terror and disorder, of inexplicable cruelty and violent death. At the heart of every tale is a wicked wolf, an evil witch, a jealous stepmother, a greedy father. Lust, envy, jealousy, greed—these sins abound in fairy tales, as they do in real life.

Rich and deeply layered narratives, the tales are also superb teachers of justice and morality, of right and wrong, helping us to find the right path out of the woods. Deprived of these foundational texts, our children are left adrift and unmoored in an all too real world of evil. And I cannot help but wonder if the abandonment of the fairy-tale canon has contributed to the well-documented depression, despair, and fragility so ubiquitous in today’s young people.

Perhaps, had this generation faced a wolf or witch early on, they might be better equipped to handle adversity. More crucially, had they confronted the reality of evil and cheered its appropriate destruction, perhaps they would now be able to correctly identify the innocent from the guilty. They might condemn Hamas rather than Israel; or demand the blood of three innocent children be avenged rather than cheering on the mother who strangled them with exercise bands. Perhaps, they would have recognized the horror of abortion until birth or the insanity of a society without police or prisons. Instead, innocents are slaughtered and the guilty left unpunished. The moral order is inverted and chaos rules.

We do not need to “understand” the wolf; he needs to be cut open and destroyed. The witch may have had an unhappy childhood, but justice requires that she be baked in the oven. Snow White’s stepmother may be suffering from PTSD, but her fate is richly deserved: “Iron slippers had already been heated up over a fire of coals. They were brought in with tongs and set right in front of her. She had to put on the red hot iron shoes and dance in them until she dropped down dead.”

Right and wrong, good and evil, hope and fortitude; beauty, mystery, joy, laughter, and terror; all these are to be found in the fairy tales. They do not need to be sanitized or updated. Perfect exactly as they are, we abandon them at our peril.

Will bringing back the classic fairy tales be enough to restore sanity and moral clarity to a topsy-turvy world? Probably not. But, like the Odyssey, these tales are irrevocably part of the human story, giving our lives meaning and coherence. Each one is a breadcrumb leading us safely through the forest. Take them away, and we may never get out.