Читать книгу A Companion to Children's Literature - Группа авторов - Страница 31

Folktales are not neutral territory in children’s books. Controversy surrounding folktales as fare for children is almost as old as the first tales published explicitly with young people in mind. Sarah Fielding, the author of one of the first novels written for children in English, saw value in the imaginative aspects of the tales and included them in her novel The Governess (1749), helping to make them more respectable. Mrs. Sarah Trimmer, an educator, found the imaginary beings in the Countess d’Aulnoy’s fairy tales Mother Bunch’s Tales (1773) potentially harmful to the religious beliefs of young children (Avery and Kinnell 1995, pp. 69–70).

Theories emerged on how fairy tales could be adapted and used with young children. Some educators began to see the tales as a way to pass on cultural and social mores while helping to shape national identity. Romanticists William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge saw childhood as a unique time marked by freedom. They stressed the importance of allowing children to develop their imagination and advocated for books that encouraged children to do so. They perceived imaginative elements of folktales as more important than books filled with facts (Briggs and Butts 1995, p. 137).

As the popularity and publication of folktales increased, so did the criticism and disapproval of folktales in books for children. The debate about the appropriateness of folktales for children continued throughout the nineteenth century. By the 1850s, many educators and parents favored children’s books that stressed hard work, honesty, cleanliness, virtuous behavior, and male superiority. In 1850, George Cruikshank, the illustrator of the Grimms’ Popular German Stories, adapted and rewrote a collection of fairy tales to warn against the dangers of alcohol. Charles Dickens, a friend of Cruikshank, denounced Cruikshank’s work, calling it “Frauds on the Fairies” (Briggs and Butts 1995, p. 137). Cruikshank was not the only one to adapt tales to align with particular values or moral lessons. As Briggs and Butts point out, by the Victorian era, fairy tales had already been modified: “preselected and often strategically cut and bowdlerized … warned against the failings typical of childhood – greed and selfishness, curiosity and disobedience” (p. 138).

Today, folktale genres are still criticized for their violence, magical and supernatural elements, and gendered role modeling. The images and texts of particular adaptations become the focal point of controversy. Trina Schart Hyman’s inclusion of a bottle of wine (in text and image) in her 1983 Grimm-like picturebook retelling of Little Red Riding Hood drew criticism from several religious groups. Sometimes it is not the tale or the images that are problematic. Instead, it is the teller or adaptor. Since the mid-twentieth century, the increase in the publication of tales from non-Western European cultures has raised issues of ownership and appropriation. Betsy Hearne’s (1999) essay “Swapping Tales and Stealing Stories: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Folklore in Children’s Literature” explored the cultural, political, and economic issues that arise when an author or storyteller adapts a tale from outside their own culture. Although source citation has become more common, questions of ownership and the right to tell tales outside one’s culture remain. Aesthetic choices such as style and tone, translation, and the use of metaphors, symbols, and humor make adapting and interpreting tales from different cultures challenging. Crossing cultural boundaries also requires navigating political (i.e. artistic freedom vs cultural ownership), economic (i.e. who gains financially through copyright and royalties), and social (prestige) interests. And yet, as Hearne points out, when tales, especially oral tales, are no longer told or recorded, “much great culture would be lost” (p. 513).