From The Witch Must Die by Sheldon Cashdan and, of course, Freud
I checked out something like five books for some independent research into folklore, fairy tales, myths and legends and nursery rhymes over the holiday. (The bad thing is that because they were library books, I was afraid to take them to MS and accidentally leave them. The good thing is that for Christmas I received 8 of the 10 books that I’ll need for this semester. Way beside the point, but I’m happy!)
Anyway, one of them is The Witch Must Die. I’m only in the first chapter, but so much has been covered it is almost overwhelming until you realize that most of it are examples of the point. On the way to MS it would have made a better discussion topic if I could have remembered all the Freudian theories. Now, I have the book in front of me and will summarize. Keep in mind Freud’s emphasis on sexuality.
1.“The struggle between Snow White and her stepmother, for example, supposedly derives from Snow White’s oedipal longing for her father.” (11)2.The older woman embarks on her murderous quest because she believes that the seven-year-old [Snow White] poses a sexual threat. (11)
3.The dwarfs represent stunted penises that cannot pose a sexual threat to the child.
4.In the original Cinderella, the stepsisters cut off parts of their feet in order to fit into the shoe. The prince’s distress comes not in noticing the flow of blood, but of “castration anxiety.” (11)
5. There's more, but I must have read it somewhere else. Little Red Riding Hood stands out in my head, but I'd like to get the wording right, so that will have to wait.
Freud is not the only one with such a twisted mind. An early version of Little Red Riding Hood “has the heroine do a striptease for the wolf before jumping into bed with him.” (6)
In another early version, this time of Sleeping Beauty, “the prince ravages the princess in her sleep and then departs, leave her pregnant.
And in the Princess Who Couldn’t Laugh, the heroine is doomed to a life of spinsterhood because she inadvertently views the private parts of a witch.” (6)
The first pages of this book makes me ask a million questions (I’m going to have to recheck the thing because up until today, the kids have been home and I’m trying to do all the major cleaning before school starts!)
1.If Freud was so sexually focused, how the hell did he gain prominence in such a prudish time? (Of course, if you’ve seen The History of Sex on the History Channel, you know that there are two sides to every slice of history. We are simply not taught the wild side in school. Though I’m tempted to say that on some things, high schoolers should definitely be educated. And maybe I should actually read Freud instead of everything that’s been said about him – but how boring would that be?)2.If fairy tales were so very adult when collected into anthologies, who in their right mind read the first one to their child in the nursery?
3.Should we allow the politically correct censoring of fairy tales and view it as a natural evolution that has happened in the past and secretly preserve the originals to introduce only in college classes (when people are presumably mature enough to handle the grotesque as well as the sexual)?
4.Should we preserve the originals at all except in a museum?
Watch the movie The Brother’s Grimm. At first, I thought that the premise was off the wall and rebelled against it in my mind – like I rebel against the slaughter of dragons in any movie in which they appear (yeah, for Eragon), like a pregnant me rooted for the babies in Godzilla. But it seems that the premise to The Brother’s Grimm is a common thought among scholars even of their time. (So is there really anything new?)
Basically, the more I read the more questions that I have.