Teaching a Unit of Fairy Tales

Fairy tales are a good beginning for a course in children's literature because they are familiar but unsettling. Students typically feel superior to children's literature—the ultimate Micky Mouse course, the one in which you actually study Mickey Himself. They need to have their complacencies disturbed before they can begin to learn anything. Since most of them will admit to knowing at least a few fairy tales, a discussion of fairy tales shows them the fascinating oddity of what they take for granted. This is productively unsettling. And as it happens, I'm convinced that the fascinating oddity of fairy tales is a key to much that is important in all sorts of writing for children, so I personally find fairy tales a particularly sound way to start a course.

I start by asking my students to tell me the story of Little Red Riding Hood. Besides breaking their inevitable shyness, this storytelling makes the point that they all do know the story, that in fact they have always known it and cannot remember when they first heard it. But it also shows them that they all know it differently. So they see both the enormous staying power and the enormous flexibility of fairy tales. I use "Little Red Riding Hood" because it is one of the few stories told by both Perrault and the Grimm brothers—and also because I have a large personal collection of versions of the story that come into use later in the course.

I ask each student in turn to tell a sentence of the story. Everyone else is allowed to add details, or subtract them, or to suggest alternatives, whenever it seems necessary. This usually turns into a delightfully chaotic free-for-all, and many different versions of the story get told at once.

After the storytelling, I offer some history as an explanation for all the variations. I start by reading them a translation of the original Perrault version. They are shocked by its abrupt ending, which allows the wolf the pleasure of his little-girl feast without a breath of retribution. So it's easy to make the point that later versions, including their own, have different and happier endings because of changes in attitudes toward children and what we think they should hear. A glance at the Grimms' "Little Red Cap" reveals attitudes quite opposite to Perrault's: for Perrault, Little Red ought to have known better, and she receives a just punishment for being too innocent; but in the Grimm story, she is saved (by a grownup, of course) and learns that she must always listen to grownups because she is innocent. In the century between these two stories innocence became a virtue instead of a danger. Pointing out to students this complete revision in attitudes shows them how local and relatively new our own deepseated convictions about children are; I hope it makes them question those convictions, so that they begin to judge literature on its own merits, and not in terms of its presumed effect on children.

After that, a quick trip through history shows how "Little Red" became less violent (and less interesting) as the years passed.¹ First Little Red is eaten, then she is eaten but rescued, then she is not eaten at all; in recent versions she sometimes doesn't even meet the wolf in the forest. The grandmother, at first eaten and then eaten but rescued, next hides in the closet and then just runs away; in one version, she isn't even home when the wolf arrives. Finally, the wolf, who first triumphed and was then killed, just runs away and is never seen again; even worse, he is turned into a figure of fun, a bumbling incompetent who trips over chairs and looks silly in nightgowns.

All of this shows the protectiveness of our attitudes to children, and allows students to consider the overriding importance of attitudes towards children in discussions of children's literature. It also introduces them to the idea of investigating children's stories for the attitudes they inevitably contain—an important aspect of the course to...