Monthly Archives: September 2014

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“Little Red Riding Hood” Perrault vs Grimm

In the test case of “Little red Riding Hood”, the author, Zohar Shavit, makes the claim that the concept of childhood as we know it today did not exist until the seventeenth century. Part of this reason was because prior to the seventeenth century there was no educational system in place for children, and no children’s literature was available. Also, the Middle Ages was a tough period where children’s mortality rates were very high. If a child did survive, they were not able to stay a child for long. Back then, children married and went to work very young, making it almost impossible to have a childhood. To demonstrate this, Shavit recalls the classic story of “Little Red Riding Hood”. “Little Red Riding Hood” is a story written for adults and children. Though the original author, Perrault, meant for the story to be told to children, the underlying message of “Little Red Riding Hood” is rather gruesome, and a message that only adults could understand. “Little Red Riding Hood”, in essence, is about a village girl who is taken advantage by a man. The story is underlined with an erotic meaning, as the author goes into detail about the girls beauty and innocence.

Shavit then does to analyze the Brothers Grimm version of “Little Red Riding Hood” that was published 100 years after the original version by Perrault. Shavit claims that the differences are because in 100 years a new emphasis on educating the child was put into place. The Brothers Grimm changed the tone of the story, changing it from satire to amusement; their ending was happy rather than sad/tragic. The Grimm version also was meant to be appropriate for children to read, which was not the case earlier in Parrault’s version. The Grimm version of “Little Red Riding Hood”, to my understanding, is similar to the “Disney” version of Perrault’s original story. As times change, the way we view children change. This is evident in the two evolutions of the same story.

 

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Abbott, “The Truant” and “The Truant Boy’s End”

There short stories were very fun to read because i never knew something like this existed! I read a little background about the author and he had studied in a Theological Seminary which explains why his stories always teach about correct behavior for children. In my opinion this was a good idea to instill certain values in the children from the start. Children have a mind like sponges up until the age of 5, we learn in psychology, so why not try to mold their minds so they can be the best of their potential? These two short stories on the other hand definitely took this subject of scaring the child into doing good, a bit too far. I am sure any child reading this short story will be scared and will try to abide by all of the rules. It is just not practical that a child could go so astray just from one day of skipping school. However, the purpose of the book was surely completed and in my opinion we need more books like this now that teach the children all about manners, ethics, emotions and how to handle tough situations in life. This book was also most likely to standardize teachings of morals at home because if every child is reading the same book then they all learn the same thing unlike what happens in society today. Today, children learn different things about morals and manners at home from their parents and when they meet at a place like school, those teachings clash. This is a reason why uniformity in personal values and beliefs have been erased and you get a very diverse settings among children in schools. In essence they have to deal with three different cultures; one taught at home, one taught at school by teachers and one taught by their peers. Thus in order to minimize confusion, there should be the same books for all children of a particular age group. They should all be learning to respect one another and be honest and truthful at all times. These things instilled in them early on may bring a huge different to their future.

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Little Annie’s Ramble – Ignorance of the Child

Little Annie’s Ramble by Nathaniel Hawthorne was literally a ramble about his love for this child named Annie. He seemed to think lowly of everything but Annie. In his eyes, Annie, this “child”, was just a pure thing in which he missed in his life. I feel that that is so because at the very end, he said, “As the pure breath of children revives the life of aged men, so is our moral nature revived by their free and simple thoughts…” This basically means that Annie was the thing that could revive his life and allow him to feel more at peace and free; to experience his boyhood again. Throughout the story, he kept going on and on about how pure and beautiful Annie was. She was beautiful because he thought she didn’t know anything negative about the world and that she wasn’t tainted by the evil and the bad. He wished her to disregard him if he started moralizing. This is because he believed she didn’t know right from wrong. Around the middle of the story as well, he said she would rather pay attention to the dolls rather than to the queen, king or knight. In his point of view, she was a child that knew nothing and couldn’t understand anything but her desires for the pretty things and toys such as dolls. He liked her better that way because him, as an adult, knew too much and all the dark things he knew as well caused him to feel that life was not that great and that he would be better off like Annie, who didn’t know much. It is as the saying goes, “Ignorance is bliss.” In this case, Annie is the ignorant one in the narrator’s point of view and the narrator is the one that wishes to be ignorant, to have the bliss that he feels the child has. He misses that ignorance and that bliss.

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The Dark Truth of The Little Red Riding Hood

I once thought the Little Red Riding Hood was a story meant to teach the lesson of not talking to strangers, but after reading different variance of the story it made me realize it has a much deeper meaning. The new lesson I found in some of the variance was to belittle women, showing how vulnerable they were, but in others they show how strong women can be. The similarity of all these was men was described as being a wolf (and bear) or just a savage animal that gives in to their animalistic instincts, this meant men gives in to their needs such as hunger or sexual desires. If one would read these to a child, they would most likely get the idea talking to strangers and disobeying your parents can lead to dangerous conclusions, but to some adults we see the hidden meaning of each characters such as little red can be a heroine that modern girls would not be tricked easily or how a huntsman can come to the rescue after little red learned her lesson. I think different version of these story were created to target different readers of different age; they can censor inappropriate contents for the younger audiences and let older audiences read the raw versions, but since all the story branch from a common source there should be a universal meaning or lesson to be learned and in the Little Red Riding Hood I think the universal lesson was not to trust strangers who are unfamiliar to you.

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My Niece’s Ramble…My Learning Through Experimentation

My reading of Little Annie’s Ramble, managed to reinforce the epiphany I had while I was reading The Case against Peter Pan, two weeks ago; although not without a little extra experimentation on my part. While reading Little Annie’s Ramble on my iPad I happened to be doing it right next to my eleven year old niece (while she was also doing something on her iPad). After finishing and reflecting on how much this story happened to resonate with this idea that not all children’s literature is for children, which I had gotten from my reading the first couple sentences of The Case against Peter Pan, I decided to try something. I asked my niece if she would like to see what type of stuff College kids have to read and she said yes. I then showed her the entire text of Little Annie’s Ramble and she was (understandably) a bit taken aback with it. I then told her to try and read the first paragraph with me and, through a bit of egging on, she said she’d try. She struggled, but with my help she finished it. I then asked her what she thought about it and she said she didn’t understand any of it. I then read to her parts of the text out loud (mainly the parts describing the candy shop and toy store). I made sure to enunciate certain words like sugar, sweetly, cakes and doll and (after I finished each exert) when I asked her what I was describing she answered (although clearly uncertain in her facial expressions) “candy” and “toys”, respectively.

Although all I was really doing was killing time before Sons of Anarchy started, my experiment on my niece gave me a bit more understanding in the context of children. I knew for a fact that this text was not meant for children and I proved that by making her read the text to me out loud and asking her if she understood it (which she did not). At the same time though, when I read it to her (while making sure I enunciated certain words I knew she’d know) she managed to get a general idea of what I was talking about. Through this nonchalant experiment I’ve come to an interesting understanding in my abovementioned epiphany: even if specific stories about children are not meant for children there is still always something there for children, even if they themselves don’t know it is there.

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The Last 15 Minutes of Class

 

In the last fifteen minutes of class, I explained a little more about how Peter Pan is exemplary of what all children’s literature seems to do.  I drew a diagram. I doubt that it will be helpful for those of you who weren’t privy to that last 15 minutes, but I am posting it all the same. Perhaps it will generate dialogue.

 

 

Peter Pan Diagram

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CLOSE READING -Handout

Hey everyone,

The following is a link to a handout I have on close reading assignments.  The handout was generated for an African American literature course, so the examples are around Richard Wright’s Black Boy, but the general methods should be applicable to your paper.

Note: there are other ways to do a close reading than the two I have presented here, but these are two very common and tried and true ways of going about a close reading.   You should definitely look at the handout, and certainly if you feel uncertain about a close reading, you should try following one of the methods on this handout.

Handout:  Close-Reading-Strategy-Clean

 

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Peter Pan : An Adult’s Fantasy

The first thing that struck me while reading Jacqueline Rose’s, The Case of Peter Pan, was the fact that it was about Peter Pan. The story of the boy who never wants to become an adult. He wants to stay a little boy forever. He NEVER wants to grow up. I felt this was the perfect entrance piece of writing to read for this course because it gave a good insight to some of the history of Peter Pan but it also challenged ideas and raised questions that probably wouldn’t have come up otherwise. But what I really wanted to focus on is what really stood out to me. I was thinking about it through the entire text was when Rose said,

“Peter Pan offers us the child — forever.”

While reading this, I went back to Beverly Clark’s, “Kiddie Lit” where she mentions that there is some part in us that “values childhood. But we also dismiss it.” People love taking trips down memory lane to the times before responsibility and work and paying bills. I know I do. So there is a little Peter Pan in all of us I guess. Some part of us that wants to stay young. However this is not acceptable “adult behavior”. Eventually we all “grow up” and become a rational, responsible adult. Peter Pan never does. He is an adult’s fantasy.

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The Truant Boy: A Moral Behind Every Children’s Story

In The Truant by Abbott, it tells a story about a boy named Henry who skipped school when he found a boat as he traveled there. Not only did he discover the boat, but he decided that he should sit in it a little while before he continued his journey on to school. However, after paddling deeper into the stream he struggled to get back ashore and by the time he did reach dry land he was too tired to even go to school. The next day when he arrived for school, he had to make up a lie to avoid getting detention and he got away without any repercussions.  So, once he realized that he could get away with skipping school, he began to do it more often; but each time he lied to his teacher, he would develop a guilty conscience.

In my opinion, I feel that this story follows the guideline of most children’s literature. Almost every piece of literature where children are audience, there is some type of lesson that the author tries to project through their writing. The moral of this short story tells young readers that it is never good to lie under any circumstances. In the story, not only did Henry lie but he also developed a guilty conscience because he knew that skipping school was wrong, but he also knew that telling a story to avoid getting in trouble was even worse. I’m not completely sure if Abbott intended to also show that one bad thing can lead to a world of other negative things, however that’s what I got out of the reading and I think that is also a good hidden message for children to know. A lot of literature written for children prepares them for certain essential aspects of the real world such as never to lie, cheat or steal.