I was reading Laura Tuley's thought-provoking piece about helping her son deal with post-Katrina trauma this afternoon (http://www.mamazine.com/Pages/column90_aid8.html). I was particularly struck towards the end of the piece by her discussion of death and mother-killing in the Disney film, Finding Nemo.
Tuley talks about how stressful her son found the early scenes of the movie, when Nemo's mother and the eggs are gobbled up. Disney movies do tend - as Tuley says - to kill off mothers, which is not particularly pleasant for those of us who are mother-viewers. But of course Disney is only being true to the genre here; fairy tales have been killing off mothers for centuries, going all the back to the Grimms and Hans Christian Anderson in the early decades of the 19th century, and even before.
This is odd, really, because fairy tales are traditionally told by women. Mothers and grandmothers narrate stories to their children - stories to entertain, stories at bedtime, stories to make the world make sense - and their daughters, in turn, pass these tales onto their own children. Each generation modifies the story a little bit, according to the anxieties and interests of the day; each mother changes the story a little bit too, to make it relevant to her children, to their fears, to their lives.
If this is true, why are the fairy tales we know today so violent towards women? Why do they so consistently value behaviour and traits that women are likely to find enervating and constricting? Think of Cinderella's beauty, think of Snow White's passivity - and think of the terrible endings that await both Cinderella's step-sisters and Snow White's Wicked Queen (in the Grimm version of Cinderella, the step-sisters have their eyes pecked out by birds, and go blind; in Snow White, the Wicked Queen is forced to dance to death in a pair of red hot shoes).
One possible answer is that the versions we know today are those captured by the Grimm brothers and Hans Christian Anderson - by early nineteenth-century men, in other words, who were plausibly animated by the beliefs and ideologies of their day. One wonders what real-world mothers were telling their children back in 1825!
But let's not just blame the authors; we must assume that they were capturing stories that existed at the time, even if they modified them to some degree. Some literary critics (Marina Warner in particular) have suggested that these stories, with their obsessive mother-killing, represent the anxieties that women long had about being replaced. According to this theory, women have for centuries recognized that their place is inherently unsafe and unstable; that as long as women are valued for looks and child-bearing, the position of the 'surplus' woman is dangerously uncertain. To put it crudely, mothers are inevitably replaced by wives.
In this account fairy tales represent and articulate a deep fear about being replaced, and perhaps a strategic decision on the part of the teller to align herself with the winner of the battle - the wife over the mother. In this reading, fairy tales are not just about the child's psychological needs, they are about the story-telling-mother's needs too - her fears, her anxieties, her attempts to cope with a threatening world.
Of course today we hope that things have changed (!), that we are no longer valued for looks and child-bearing alone. If this is true, it is time for the Disney screenwriters to reflect a new view of the world - to modify the stories just as they have always been modified, to reflect new realities, new cultural awarenesses. Fairy stories aren't cast in stone, they are pliable, ever-changing narratives; there's no reason they can't be rewritten and reshaped to center the strong, present, and loving mothers we see everywhere around us today.
