A Plea for Heads: Illustrating Violence in Fairy Tales

Doubtless we do well to deplore violence in any form, though the special case of violence as experienced vicariously through the form of art—the fairy tale, Elizabethan drama, the cinema—seems to complicate the issue, especially in those instances where our children are concerned. If we agree that the indiscriminate savagery of the teenage gangs in The Warriors, or the sadistic retribution of Clint Eastwood in Magnum Force, is unsuitable for children, can we also agree that Hamlet (its last scene a carnage of corpses), or the often ghastly tales of the Brothers Grimm, has redeeming social value for the young? The perennial problems of censorship (and bowdlerization) find their center precisely here, in the area occupied by the young: Rated R—Children Under Seventeen Not Admitted Unless Accompanied By An Adult.

Isaac Watts in the eighteenth century feared that fairy tales and stories of ghosts and evil spirits "'make such a frightful impression' on children's 'tender Fancies' that 'their Souls' were enervated and 'their Spirits' broken."¹ Maria Edgeworth trusted that Dr. Samuel Johnson's fame would not induce parents to offer their children the tales he recommended: tales "'of inchantments'."² She felt—and she was not alone—that children's imagintions, and their future lives, would be damaged by contact with mystery, enchantment, and the terrifying. Charles Lamb and Samuel Taylor Coleridge could grind their molars all they liked about the absence of the Old Classics in the nurseries and on the bookshop shelves, but Steadfast Sarah Trimmer and her legions persisted in applying their snipping scissors to the parts of fairy tales that they Rated R.

The three-pronged attack on the content of fairy tales—that they distort reality, that they do not depict truths, and that the violence is detrimental to the health and psyches of young children—has been partially answered, at least for many of us, by such notable figures as Bruno Bettelheim, Nicholas Tucker, Kornei Chukovskii, Catherine Storr, and others.³ The answer to all three charges is negative, though as we all know, in our less polemical moments, the answer has to be No and Yes.

It is with the illustrations of violence and retribution that accompany (or don't accompany) a fairy tale that I am concerned here, asking whether there can be a sound rationale for "re-doubling" the violence in children's literature by adding pictures to the text. I am particularly grateful to Mrs. Sarah Trimmer's scathing attack on what was depicted in Tabart's publication of Nursery Tales, Cinderella, Blue Beard, and Little Red Riding Hood (1804), for her objections began my quest for a peek at what was in the closet. Sarah found in "Blue Beard" that the second plate

represents the opening of the forbidden closet, in which appears, not what the story describes (which surely is terrific enough!), 'a floor cloted with blood, in which the bodies of several women wre lying (the wives whom Blue Beard had married and murdered,') but, the flames of Hell with Devils in frightful shapes, threatening the unhappy lady who has given way to her curiosity!⁴

The critic of children's literature will agree that the described illustration violates the text: by inserting a scene and emphasizing details that have no verbal correspondence in the tale, a confusing distraction rather than a fit complement has been added. An adult might be able to force the symbolic representation of the flames and devils to fit the story (perhaps wives who break faith with their husbands go to hell?), but it is unlikely that a child will impose such meaning on the illustration. What is added by way of illustration is as important as what is left out.⁵ After examining the illustrations in more than twenty editions of "Blue Beard" from the late nineteenth through the twentieth century, I concluded that visual curiosity about the look of the "closet" is arrested and apprehended at the door by artists, editors, and publishers. Aesthetic wholeness fragments in conscious or unconscious censorship, as illustrators present the locked door, the key inserted, the...