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Images of the Elderly in 19th Century Children's Literature» The Legacy of Author and Artist* Current studies reveal that children associate old age with physical and intellectual decline as well as with such negative attributes as sick, dirty, ugly and sad. Researchers concerned with the origins of such attitudes have charged that children's literature is a primary source of negative and stereotypic attitudes toward the elderly.1 Thus "ageism" has been added to the list of social injustices that we are asked to heed. The charge that children's books are responsible for transmitting such negative attitudes suggests the need for an inquiry into the nature of images of the elderly found in these books. The 19th Century seems a fitting and instructive period in which to begin. It is a period that has contributed works written especially for children as well as those works simply taken on by them; a period in which, as Sheila Egoff has noted, children's literature in the best moral and humanistic tradition was born.2 What sort of portraits of the elderly has this literary estate given us? Are they indeed negative, even frightening, stereotypic or ambiguous? For example, what about the fearsome old hags, witches and fiendish dwarfs of the fairy tale? As we know, there were numerous editions of these tales commonly available in the 19th Century. Often it is the imaginative conception of the illustrator of these tales that determines the effect of the image projected. Gustav Doré's illustrations of old women in Perrault's tales (Les Contes des Perrault. Paris, I867) seem to be drawn from life, rendering in great detail every wrinkle, sag and mole. These portraits are decidedly unflattering in their realism. The illustration of the good old woman spinning in the castle attic in "The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood" shows a plump old woman with white curls appearing beneath her ruffled cap and her face deeply furrowed and dotted with moles, who is smiling bemusedly at the eager questions of the inquisitive princess. The godmother in "Cinderella" appears as a very plump old woman, rauch wrinkled, white capped and bespectacled, with a comfortable yet wry pleasantness about her — a far cry from Disney's beauteous version. As for the grandmother in "Little Red Riding Hood," it is with compassion that one views her. Dore has portrayed a vulnerable and terrified old woman in her night cap with a few thin white curls showing, a deeply wrinkled face with a bulbous nose, a sagging chin and mouth, a mole upon her cheek. A pair of spectacles and a snuff box have fallen upon the covers. In a more fanciful vein are H. J. Ford's classic illustrations of the wicked old witch in "The Donkey Cabbage" or the Fairy Lagree "so old that she had only one eye and one tooth left, and even these poor remains she had to keep all night in strengthening liquid" in "Fairer-Than-A-Fairy" (Lang, The Yellow Fairy Book). ?Illustrations referred to in this paper were accompanied by slides during the presentation at the conference. H. K. Browne's ("Phiz") rendering of the witch in "Hansel and Gretel" (Grimm's Goblins . I86l) portrays an elderly figure, somewhat comical with her prominent nose and protruding lower lip, a pointed chin, and moles upon her cheeks, yet unmistakably threatening with her leering eyes. Still more threatening is Arthur Rackham's illustration of this witch with her body all gnarled and bent, her stringy white hair, a nearly toothless grin and scheming eyes that peer out over spectacles resting on a sharp pointed nose (Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, 19OO) . Filled as they are with such frightening old creatures, fairy tales might indeed seem a source of negative attitudes toward the elderly. However, before condemning these wondrous and enduring tales to a regime of bowdlerizing in the name of psychological wisdom or sociological necessity, it is important to consider how the child perceives the fairy tale. The Opies in their study The Classic Fairy Tales (Oxford, 1974) remind us that one of the chief characteristics of the fairy tale is that it is unbelievable; its enchantment and other...

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