Sunday, October 14, 2001		Lead Article

MY three-year-old daughter is already an avid story-listener and refuses to go to sleep unless I tell her some self-invented story which has to feature a horse and a "baby-birdy". Anticipating that the desire for new bedtime stories will only grow with time, I went to the nearby bookstore and purchased a huge load of fairytale books to refresh my childhood memories and prepare beforehand for my child’s future needs.

However, as I read one tale after the other, I got convinced that these were definitely not the stories that I wanted my daughter to grow up with. Story after story stressed masculine, individualist and capitalist attitudes in the male heroes and traditionally demure, passive, chaste virtues in the female characters.

Most stories enforced the view that external appearance was everything. It was not for a woman to plan her own destiny. Only a handsome prince could take charge of a girl’s life and free her from troubles. A female could frequently be treated as a commodity to be acquired or given as a reward to a brave hero.

Marriage to the most eligible bachelor is shown to be the sole aim of the female protagonists. Adventure, bravery, determination, steadfastness, decision-making and action are almost always the traits associated only with the male hero.

Thumblina, the story of a beautiful thumb-sized girl, is pathetic indeed. Throughout the story she is at the mercy of beetles, rats, moles and swallows till she finally meets the fairy prince. The story of Hop-O-My-Thumb, another thumb-sized protagonist, is however very different because the hero happens to be a boy. He fights giants, performs brave deeds with little regard to his size, quite contrary to the helplessness and misfortunes of Thumblina.

Snow White is a passive, unresisting subject to all her stepmother’s ploys. She gains the sympathy of the dwarfs only by performing their household chores. Her deliverance comes when she is lying in a near-death state in a glass coffin after consuming a poisoned apple. A prince happens to pass by, sees her and falls in love with her or rather in love with her lifeless body. He orders the coffin to be carried to his castle. In the process, the apple is dislodged from Snow White’s throat and she comes alive again. The prince, then, marries her and they live happily ever after.

The theme of the famous ‘The Sleeping Beauty’ is no different. Hard work, struggle and conflict have no role to play in her life. She just has to be very beautiful, be born to a king and then fall into an innocent slumber and wait for the prince to come, kiss her and marry her. She then lives happily ever after.

The most ridiculous, almost bizarre, ideals of feminity and female sensibility are upheld in stories like The Real Princess. The story begins with a very handsome prince looking for his perfect princess. His quest ends when a beautiful girl comes to him claiming to be the real princess. To test her claims, a dried pea is placed under her bed comprising of 20 high mattresses. The pea turns the princess’s body blue and black, the mattresses not withstanding. The end of the story, the prince decides that only a real princess can have skin so soft so as to be troubled by a tiny pea. He goes ahead to marry her and dried peas are banned in the entire kingdom.

Even in the all-time children’s favorite, Cinderella, the message that only a man can bring about a women’s deliverance is made loud and clear. No amount of hard work or good nature can change Cinderella’s cruel fate. Only her beauty, which charms the prince at the ball, serves to free her from the bonds of slavery. Had she not been beautiful, had she not met the prince, her goodness and kindness would have been futile.

Thus, beauty is emphasised as the essence of being a woman, as a tool to acquire a worthwhile mate who would take care of all her troubles. Where beauty is projected as a virtue, its opposite — ugliness — is stressed as being undesirable and wicked. The message that the children unfortunately receive is that if you are not beautiful, you are not really a complete individual and that beauty, a purely accidental and transitory fact of life, does set some people on a much higher plane in life.

Hence, all that is mean and wicked in the fairytales is also ugly. Thus, Cinderella has really ugly-looking stepsisters and stepmother. The old witches in Rapunzel and Hansel and Gretel are repulsive and ugly and deserve cruel and violent deaths. The Ugly Duckling has to bear parental and peer rejection for the same reason.

For the male hero, female beauty is almost always presented as a commodity to be acquired, and award that he receives for all the services and valour. Hence, in the story of the Steadfast Tin Soldiers, the one-legged tin soldier finally gets to keep the beautiful paper Ballet Dancer as a kind of compensation for his trials and tribulations.

Also, not all the heroes of these tales truly deserve the good fortune that falls their way. Jack of the story Jack and the Beanstalk gets rich despite being lazy, a thief, and ultimately a murderer, who kills the giant he steals from to acquire all that rightfully belonged to the giant. The owner of the Puss-in-Boots gets rich and marries the beautiful princess in much the same manner — by lying, cheating and by his cat depriving the giant of his fortunes and ultimately killing him.

At the end of most tales all that is truly shown to happen has been aptly summed by writer Jack Zipes in his book Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion: The Classical Genre for Children and the Process of Civilisation. "Along the way, the male hero learns to be active, competitive, handsome, industrious, cunning acquisitive. His goal is money, power and a woman... The female hero learns to be passive, obedient, self-sacrificing, hard-working, patient, and straight-laced. Her goal is wealth, jewels, and a man to protect her property rights".

However, are these not the very ideals that we seek to do away with especially in our daughters so as to provide them with an even platform in life? Don’t we wish to teach our children that inner beauty is more important than the external beauty and that we can build our own destinies through hard work, determination and perseverance? Don’t we still believe that honesty is a virtue, stealing a sin and so on? Why continue bombarding them with contradictory signals and confuse them with what we expect them to know? Let us instead pick and choose, even if that means rewriting all our fairy tales. Let us provide both our sons as well as our daughters with positive role models that will help them grow into responsible, enlightened citizens with positive attitudes and realistic values.