The Randy Red Ridinghood
Once upon a time, fairy tales were a very different beast than they are now. Before the Brothers Grimm got their hands on them, before Disney decided to further tame them down, fairy tales had a folk beginning.
What a folk beginning means is that the stories, themselves, were told, over and over
again, by campfires, around hearths, in backrooms… what this amounts to is a way for adults to entertain adults.
And then the Grimm's got their hands on it. And Folklorists started editing what people were telling them. And the world was moving in the direction of stories for children (with a moral purpose) which allowed many other stories to be repurposed to become a moral tale for young children and Little Red Ridinghood goes from being a bawdy tale about a randy girl to a semi-moral tale about a young girl who is told to go straight to grandma's house and doesn't only to be eaten by a wolf and then saved (cut out of the wolfs stomach) by a benevolent woodsman.
I guess it gets to be very interesting, to me, that we look at fairy tales as ways of teaching children how to behave, and to offer the hope of dreams to those that need to have something to dream about. It is not a coincidence that Disney creates an entire line associated with their princess stories. These give little girls the idea that they can be princesses; but, think about it, if the stories originated in backrooms, around campfires, and as entertainment for adults, why are we recreating these stories for little children?
Does it matter?
There is not a lot of effort that has to go into finding examples of the stories that are
repurposed back into the adult environ. Magnates of adult entertainment discover that taking a child's tale and applying the same storytelling techniques, they can have a very real story with real impact in a very immoral way.
However, it is the immorality of the storytelling that is at imperative here. If a fairy tale takes its origins from something that is meant to entertain and arouse; and yet, outside of the original folk tellings of these tales, you get a relativistic moral story that is meant for digestion by children.
The dichotomy of moral and immoral actually proves to be very interesting. Especially
when you consider that some authors, today, share rather adult themes in stories and
books designed for rather young audiences. One, Neil Gaiman, has stated that he believes that you get out of a story what you bring into the story. If, as a young reader, you do not bring adult sensibilities to something that is determined adult in content, will not take away adult themes, but rather will take away a feeling of introduction to a realm they know nothing (more) about than when they started.
In other words, you only take away what you bring to a subject. I tend to agree with this. Especially as you consider the notion that love stories and stories dealing with sexual relations and feelings take on much greater meaning when considered against a marriage relationship (which also denotes a sexual relationship). Because of my religious and personal beliefs, the sexual relationship was not possible (for me) before marriage.
The point though, is that fairy tales were the humor and the bawd that are used, today, in humor, jokes, that touch upon the sexually explicit. Think about Red Ridinghood and her use (originally) of her sexuality to trick the wolf into letting her go. A more passive, and demure Ridinghood makes for a more appropriate moral story than one who is aware of and uses the adult themes the original stories were known for.
Story is important. The plot, point to point elements, of a story is equally important. You can take the same points, a girl is given advice, she leaves with the apparent intent of following that advice, then is tempted to go against the advice (in modern renditions of Ridinghood, go straight to grandma's house), after which tragedy strikes, and that same individual must use her intelligence and ingenuity to escape from the clutches of the trap that temptation drew her into – and, barring intelligence and ingenuity, the intervention of providence and a benevolent hand.
Sure, what I just wrote shouldn't strike anyone as anything more than an outline to a
story. But, in the right hands, that story could be moral or immoral. It is my theory that a moral person will write, inherently, a more story; and an immoral person will write, inherently, an immoral story. Regardless, though, a wide berth of stories can be told from this same basic plot structure that, ultimately, can produce a story appropriate for children with a moral outcome and meaning or an immoral outcome and a tantalizing meaning.
John Hattaway | smokingpen | Alicia Grey | Clockwork Princess | Cassandra West
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