To think fairy tale promote a dangerous narrative.

[Mollymoostoo]

My DD (aged 10) has been reading the book series 'The school for good and evil' qnd this has prompted discussions about how dangerous fairy tales are in perpetuating stereotypes and outdated attitudes. For example....
Prince Charming kissed Snow White whilst she was asleep (consent issues)
Red Riding hood naively trusted a stranger in the woods and had to be rescued by a father figure.
Belle put up with the beasts behaviour even though he was aggressive, falling in love with her captor.
Beauty is seen as good, ugliness evil.

AIBU or is it time to rewite the narrative with balanced perspectives. I am not saying go to the extreme of getting rid of heros, but we need to stop putting pressure on boys to be rescuers and girls to be passive in their own stories.

I have always thought that fairy tales were a reflection of the times when they were written, much like Janes Austen’s novels.

When women were denied the same education boys got, had no control over their money and whose honour and virginity was precious. Depending upon what class you were some women were not allowed to work. Misogyny and the patriarchy were embedded into laws and culture.

There has been progress in recent years with more female lead characters in films and novels. I believe in childrens publishing it was widely held for a long time that books with a female hero would not be read by boys, whereas if the lead character was a boy, then both girls and boys would read it.

It will be nice when we finally get to a point when we can see fairy tales as old fashioned as watching characters driving a horse and cart, and feel they have no relevance today.

The traditional collected fairytales were not for children and have little to do with the sweetish sanitized versions published outside their area and era of origin.

They were not just stories. They were warnings originally. They not only warned of dangerous behaviour and what it can lead to (go to forest alone, do opposite of what parents tell you), they also provided safe space to deal with fears and scary things with your parents while they were telling them the stories.

They were certainly not like these soft versions we have of them.

Oh, I am sorry. I feel like a right twat now (I think I've been letting the stress from this shit show in government get to me, but that's another story).

It really is fascinating and if you are looking for reading on the subject, I really recommend Marina Warner's work - it's great!

Most traditional fairy tales have already been edited over time as tastes and cultures shift. If you look at the Grimm / Hans Christian Andersen versions there are plenty of weird / dark / gory elements which don't feature in modern telling of the stories. It's an ongoing process and much less of a controversial idea than many will make out.

Somewhere on my shelves is a book of feminist fairy tales called “Don’t Beton the Prince”. I bought in when I was studying A level English, so around about 1990.

But E Nesbitt got in on the act first - just read her short story, “Th Last of the Dragons.” Princess is not happy that she is going to be dragon bait as she is much better at fencing than any prince she knows. And that’s from the early years of the 20th century.

To be fair, there are a lot of assumptions about what people have access to so don't feel bad.
We are also a mixed culture family so most of my children's books were about traditional tales and cultural role models. It is only now my youngest has started to be interested in films and books that are sort of re writing these tales that I have really noticed the narrative.

Yes the Grimm tales are far from the sugary version.

Thanks for all the book suggestions. I am going to make a list and may well get some of these for Christmas.

I second Angela Carters the Bloody Chamber and also Emma Donoghue's Kissing the Hag. Excellent imaginative reworked fairy tales for today!

Keep the stories as they are and have discussions around it like you’re doing. And new stories have different narratives. Which they often do. So we have a wide range of stories for all!

Alan Garner's collection of British Fairytales is a great read - these are traditional tales, some dating back to the medieval period, and there are just as many brave heroines as heroes in them. As a PP mentioned, they are designed to both entertain and teach lessons about life and have little in common with the sanitised stories we think of when 'fairytales' are mentioned.

The original versions of fairy tales were often incredibly and much better than our versions, but there are many, many re-workings available. Like Ninja red riding hood!

Can anyone recommend some of the original versions of the tales? I am interested to see if there is still the black and white of good v's evil, ugly vs beautiful etc.

Don'y forget the "evil stepmother" who is a beautiful trophy wife. She is cruel and dismissive of her husband's child and favors her own DC. Oh wait! That's not fairy tales -- that's the collective view of mumsnet (his child, his problem).

I can’t even think of one transgender person in a fairytale.

You can buy a translation of Grimms' tales which contain many of the tales.

The Grimm brothers went round collecting fairy tales in Germany around the first half of the 19th century. They were told stories that people had told each other for a long time because many people couldn't read, write or afford books so stories were just told to each other.

The stories were often told differently for different audiences (the Grimm brothers used doctors etc to gather stories, people edited rude bits out as they didn't want to say smut to doctors), then they've been changed since with different editions and audiences. Eg the Red Riding Hood or Cinderella we know is different from the original.

The stories weren't just for kids, and they taught important lessons eg don't wander in the woods alone, don't trust your stepmother! They came from a time when Napoleonic wars were in recent memory and people had been living in horrible conditions with soldiers coming back and forth, famine and hunger etc.

But from your original point, they're not meant to be stories that set role models, they show the consequences of breaking the rules (eg what happens to Little Red Riding Hood). There are loads of good modern versions as listed here, why not talk to your DD about how attitudes have changed over time, what the role of women is, why freedom is important etc? I don't really like the attitude of 'this doesn't chime with my beliefs so let's not read it'

Angela Carter did this a couple of decades ago.

Plenty of feisty girls in older stories, my favourite being Mary Lennox in The Secret Garden.
She learns a difficult lesson about how to treat other people and not to believe everything you are told.

Your daughter will be too young for it, but Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber has fairy tales reimagined. Excellent book.

I will say though that I don't think that fairy tales are used in the same way they used to. Sure they promote (at best) outdated ideals, but even little children know they aren't real.

Some fairytales are hundreds of years old. Clearly some of the attitudes are outdated but this doesn't make them redundant or less engaging as examples of early storytelling.
Modern fairytales are already and have already "rewritten the narrative" to suit current perspectives and there are plenty of those in circulation.

Probably the better idea would be to raise children to be able to identify the differences between the two.

There's plenty of 'transspecies' and disguise though.

There's a pretty good mix available now, and the old 'maiden rescued by Prince' trope looks, as it is, old-fashioned. There are of course quite a lot of often humorous direct counterpoints to old 'classics' which children greatly enjoy E.g. Roald Dahl's take on Red Riding hood. Or in a slightly different area, the great juxtaposition in one of Anne Fine's anthologies of 'All Things Bright and Beautiful' with Eric Idle's 'All Things Dull and Ugly'

Angela Carter has some great feminist reworking of fairy tales.

I actually mostly disagree. Sure some are outdated but there's loads of modern ones. It's important to not push little girls into feeling that they have to be independent girl bosses if that's not their character. Kindness and dreamyness are also perfectly acceptable character traits.

Little red riding hood: cautionary tale, from a time folk lived close to forests. Stay on the path!
Snow White: better to be kissed than in a coma, no? Or do you think that life saving operations are also immoral because invade bodily autonomy on patients who cannot consent. Also, jealously will bite you in the arse.
Cinderella: kind and generous, kind to animals, hardworking
Little mermaid: goes against her whole family to achieve her lifelong dream of living on land.
Princess and the frog: don't make promises you have no intention of keeping.
Beauty and the beast is dodgy, I'll give you that.

It very much depends how rigidly you define 'fairytale' (and how rigidly you define 'transgender'!), but if you're interested, there are a few stories with magical elements that are hundreds of years old and feature individuals changing from male to female or female to male - the Roman de Silence and Yde and Olive are the ones I'm thinking of. They're not really 'fairytales' in the Grimm sense, because they predate the term and the assumptions that go with it, but they're quite similar otherwise.