The Folkstories of Children

Introduction

INTRODUCTION The major purpose of this work is to make a collection ofchildren's stories available to a larger public. Such a collection, systematically taken, has not been available since Chzldren Tell Stories, by Pitcher and Prelinger (1963). The present collection extends the range from two-year-olds to ten-year-olds, whereas the earlier work ended with five-year-olds. The title of this work, The Folkstories of Chtldren, presents something of an anomaly. The stories that are dealt with in this book were made up by the children and so do not, on the surface, seem to be of a folk character-not if folklore is defined as "traditional items of knowledge that arise in recurring performances" (Abrahams 1976, p. 195). They might easily have been termed fantasy narratives and in some earlier articles we have done just that (Sutton-Smith, Botvin, and Mahony 1976). But part of the function of this book is to show that when given the opportunity, children are inveterate tale tellers, and the tales they tell have considerable similarity to traditional folktales. They are not the same as folktales, but they share major common elements with them. It follows from the fact that we have been able to make use of analytic INTRODUCTION systems first applied to folktales and myths that there must be some important parallels between these different genres. The children's stories may be less well structured than fairy tales, folktales, legends, and myths, and they may be replete with modern content, but they nevertheless have the same basic plot structures and the same general concerns with fate, fate overwhelming, and fate nullified as do those other genres. Furthermore , the repetitive nature of the stories that most of the children tell indicates that if the children were given the audience they desire, and if children came to tell each other's stories, the stories might indeed become folktales. But at present they are not folktales; they are more like tales in some embryonic stage. For this reason we have chosen to call them folkstories. In the following sections we deal, first, with our efforts at analyzing these stories, second, with our speculations on their origins, and third, with our methods of collection. We conclude with some speculation on the character of narrative as a kind of mental activity. The collection that follows is divided into the verse stories of the two- to four-year-olds and the plot stories of the five- to ten-year-olds. Whereas the second set of stories represents the accommodation of the older children to the hero norms of western civilization, the first set represents the younger children's assimilation of those hero norms into their own characteristic forms of organization. As with many developmental phenomena, playful assimilation precedes realistic accommodation even within the domain of fantasy itself. Analyses ofthe Stories VERSE STORIES OF THE TWO- TO FOUR-YEAR-OLD GROUP Children's stories usually have been analyzed in terms of their underlying symbolism of psychosexual development (Gardner 1971; Pitcher and Prelinger 1963), or in terms of their plot structure. Currently there are a number of kinds of plot analysis of children's stories available in the psychological and folkloristic literature (for example, Leondar 1977; Mandler and]ohnson 1977; Maranda and Maranda 1970; Menig-Peterson and McCabe, 1977; Propp 1958; Stein 1978). Our approach has also been primarily concerned with types of plot analysis. The stories of the youngest group, the two- to four-year-olds, however, did not seem to lend themselves very readily to this kind of analysis. Gilbert Botvin modified the analysis that Vladimir Propp made of Russian folktales in order to make it suitable for use with our children's stories (1976). His analysis yielded ninety-one elements that he felt could describe these 2 INTRODUCTION stories, and those elements are listed in table 1. He found that when the elements were in turn subcategorized into beginning (introduction, preparation, complication), middle (development), and ending (resolution and ending), then the very youngest children told stories that were mainly beginnings and endings, whereas the oldest children in the sample more proportionately distributed the ninety-one elements over the subcategories (see table 2). Table 1. Na"ative Elements in Children's Folktales (after Botvin) Initial Situation I: Preparation Elements preceding disequilibrium Threatening situation Threat Interdiction Compliance Violation Warning of impending danger Deception Deception discovered Self-defeat II: Complication Disequilibrium: lack State of insufficiency Excess Misfortune Task Test Disequilibrium: villainy Prepare for (physical) attack (Physical...