B-Rant

- submitted by a.vernon on 08/30/2010

  

Classic Children Stories. Scary, Violent, Abusive. Other Than That, So Fun

By Amy Vernon

As the mother of a 5-year-old and an almost 3-year-old, I read a lot of children's stories. Every night at bedtime, and often during the day. Some are new books or nonfiction accounts of all kinds of animals.

Others are the so-called classics. One book, 5-Minute Fairy Tales, has Puss in Boots, Cinderella, Snow White, George and the Dragon, Princess and the Pea and a slew of other tales and fables. Then we have the full - i.e., non-Disney-fied version of Pinocchio that we recently finished reading one chapter a night at bedtime. Have you ever read the original? Pinocchio is by turns hanged, set upon by assassins, and otherwise mistreated, besides learning that kicking your classmates gains their respect.

Pinocchio starts off with two best friends - old men, in fact - beating the crap out of each other because each thinks the other said something mean. From there, we have Pinocchio running away from Gepetto, who ends up getting arrested for mistreating Pinocchio, who shows no remorse and goes home, where there's no food. He ends up burning his feet off, and when Gepetto arrives home in the morning, he not only gives Pinocchio the only food he has, but also carves new feet for Pinocchio before selling his winter coat to buy the ungrateful marionette a schoolbook. Which Pinocchio ends up selling to buy tickets to the puppet theater.

If I were Gepetto, I would have used the rest of the puppet for kindling then and there. I mean, he was, after all, just a marionette. But that wouldn't have made for a very long book, I suppose.

And forget about Jiminy Cricket. In the book, it's just a talking cricket who tells Pinocchio to respect his elders and immediately thereafter is squashed like a - well, like a bug.

To be fair, Pinocchio spends pretty much the entire book sort of trying to get back home to his father and feeling badly for how he's treated him. But he only feels badly at moments, as he's too busy slacking off, playing and lollygagging. He almost gets killed multiple times, is put in prison, is forced to live in a doghouse to discover who's stealing a farmer's chickens. He is arrested for nearly killing a classmate (even though it wasn't directly his fault), he turns into a donkey that's thrown into the sea to be killed and turned into a drumhead.

I mean, this book is violent. Death abounds. Sure, when it was first published in 1925, it probably reflected the facts of everyday life a bit more - Gepetto is a poor woodcarver who regards one family of beggars as wealthy. And my son has already had his first experience with death, as a cousin was hit by a car and killed just down the block from us a couple years ago. It's not as if we're trying to be overprotective.

But how do you explain Pinocchio's hanging? The marionette is hanging by a noose from a tree. When your child asks what a noose is, what are you supposed to say?

Later on, shortly before Pinocchio is turned into a donkey for being a lazy boy, the man who is responsible for said transformation actually bites off the ear of a donkey (which, we learn later, used to be a boy) to get it to not reveal to Pinocchio the dreadful truth. The man bites a donkey's ear off. I freely admit, without shame, that I skipped over that part of the sentence as I read that chapter to my sons.

And, tell me, how do you explain that the solution to problems is NOT to kick your classmates? That's how Pinocchio gains his classmates' respect after they tease him. A couple of kicks and elbows in the gut from the wooden puppet, and suddenly he's the toast of the town, the BMOC.

The best way to deal with those issues is to just not read the book. I mean, dude.

I realize, however, that I get kind of hypocritical about this stuff. In reading the 5-Minute Fairy Tales book, I got annoyed when The Frog Prince was changed to be, I suppose, more PC. In the end, the frog merely has to get the princess to lose her temper, because princesses never lose their temper, in order to change back into a prince. No kiss. Hansel and Gretel, however, still ends with the children pushing the witch into the oven, stealing her jewels and finding their way back home.

So, kissyface = bad; violent ends = good. Kind of like MPAA movie ratings.

So what am I supposed to read to my kids? The phone book?

______________________

Amy Vernon is a contributing writer at Burbia and a regular blogger.

Amy grew up on Long Island and has lived in the Chicago, Miami, Phoenix and New York metropolitan areas at various points in her life. In other words, she's spent her entire life in the suburbs, except that summer she interned for The Courier-Journal in Kentucky, though the Louisville neighborhood she lived in seemed pretty dang suburban.

She has a bachelor of science in journalism (that's a B.S. in journalism, get it?) from Northwestern University and worked for newspapers as a reporter, editor and blogger for nearly 20 years before she was laid off in the great newspaper culling of 2008.

Amy now works from home as a freelance consultant and writer with her husband, a writer/actor/stay-at-home father who has taken on the additional role of office manager as she settles into her new life. Her older son, Rafael, loves zebras, giraffes and elephants, while the younger, Markus, is utterly obsessed with the "Chicka Chicka Boom Boom" book and DVD.

Got all that? You can find Amy online waxing poetic about television -- particularly 24, Battlestar Galactica and Lost, not necessarily in that order -- at The TV Tyrant or follow her on Twitter @amyvernon...read more rants