Barbie in Wonderland

Swan Lake 2003

I have usually just shaken my head at the saccharine-sweet romance that accompanies the lifestyle marketed in the shape of Barbie dolls. In 2003, however, my slight contempt was replaced by indignation when the toy company Mattel introduced "Swan Lake" as a new theme in the Barbie universe: a dream of romance and love in the enchanted wood, where true love conquered the evil sorcerer, according to the commercials.

The original German story of the swan lake did indeed include both romance, love, and enchantment, but it is a tragedy. During his hunt for swans a prince meets the beautiful Odette, and they fall in love. She explains that a sorcerer has cast a spell on her, turning her into a swan and only allowing her human shape by the lake at midnight. The spell can only be broken if a man promises her eternal love. At the wedding when the prince expects Odette as his bride, the sorcerer plays a trick that causes the prince to promise his love to someone else. Odette's curse cannot be broken, and the prince has lost his love. When Odette forgives the prince his mistake, and the story seems about to end happily, the sorcerer drowns the lovers in the lake.

Tchaikovsky cast the story in music, and turned the Swan Lake ballet into one of History's most spectacular musical works. If Mattel's distortion of the original tale alone should cause some wonder, it is a mockery against this classical masterpiece to reduce it to Barbiefied pop culture.

Fairy Tale Exorcism

Mattel is not the only trend-setter. Disney has also discovered that romance sells better than tragedy, so in Disney's version of The Little Mermaid, the mermaid does not die and become the foam on the surface of the sea; she is married to the prince. And in Pocahontas, Disney prefers falsification of History to a tale of American extortion and brutality against the Amerinds.

The children's fairy tale books are also polished. Early versions of Grimm's Fairy Tales abound with bloody gruesomeness against children and other creatures that you won't find in today's renditions.

It is clear that popularization of fairy tales has taken a distinct direction. Fairy tales must no longer be too sad or too scary. Bloody scenes are converted to pastel-colored Teletubby worlds, and grand conflicts are converted to momentary disagreements.

In general, children must no longer be confronted with the dark side the fairy tales of fear, scare, and evil.

Embracing Fear

In earlier times it was a very real and familiar fear that the children could find in the fairy tales. The risk of being abandoned by one's parents was only too imaginable, and hunger and misery was often a daily challenge. Witches, trolls, and magic were something you believed in, and Hansel and Gretel weren't the only children that were left to die in the woods as a result of food shortage.

Fairy tales were thus not just exciting stories. They were scary because they confronted children with those things they had the most reason to fear. Fairy tales were gruesome tales, but they made children face their fears, enabling the children to process these fears.

At the same time, fairy tales confronted the children with a number of conflicts such as desparate love, the relation to an evil stepmother or stepfather, or the situation of being abandoned by one's parents. These conflicts might not have been solvable, but the fairy tales helped children use words or images for conflicts that the children felt but did not quite understand.

Protection from Evil

Responsible parents know that it is only elements of real danger that children should be protected against, such as falls from considerable heights. One should not protect the children from bumping against sharp table corners when they play around the tables. The only result of shielding the children against such accidents are clumsy children that bump into anything that has a shape.

The same is true for children's feelings. Just like a parent should not protect a child against any sharp corner in the house because that will produce a clumsy child, a child will develop a bad response to emotion by the parents that protect the children against its own emotions and feelings. If a child does not learn to cope with the obstacles in its daily life--be they physical or emotional--the child will be poorly prepared for life.

But that is exactly what one does by shielding the child against fear by softening the fairy tales. The fairy tales loose their original scary aspects, and the conflicts are lost. In doing that, the fairy tales loose the very effect that made them so appealing. They no longer provide children with a healthy and safe confrontation with fear and conflict.

If any conclusion is to be drawn from the recent tendency to add artificial sweeteners to the old fairy tales and folklore, it is that children are to be protected against pointy and sharp feelings that may hurt.

The parents' eagerness to protect their precious offspring by any bruise on its self-confidence and any scratch in the sense of justice can only lead to children that have no idea what to do when one day these feelings become pressing. I expect that the new generation will be unable to cope with emotional challenges. They will become even more dependent on religious pipe dreams and more or less dubious therapists and psychologists than currently characterizes the country that produces the Barbie dream.

More Fear, Less Costume

The alternative to padded wrapping of children's emotions will not lead to the brutalization that some film and movie critics warn against. I think the reason movie violence is in fact often a compensation against the movie's protection of the audience against the real fear, leading to a requirement for much more powerful effects before the movie leaves a reaction. If in the original fairy tale one was afraid of being abducted by a monster, the brutalized fairy tale would be a version where the fear of abduction was overlooked while the monster had been very fearfully described.

This is why the movie Alien is much scarier than its successor, Alien 2, where monsters are everywhere. The first movie captures the very thing one fears the most: the fact that there is a cunning and very dangerous monster that is hunting you, not how it looks. If a movie can capture the actual fear, its need for brutal helpers diminishes. Ironically, it is the very protection against the fearful element that turns the tale brutal.

In raising our children, we have never attempted to prevent them from being bruised, neither physically nor mentally. I think they learn that a scratch or a hurt feeling may be uncomfortable but temporary. It will not cause them to panic or to become incapable of coping.

I prefer that my children do not watch the Disneyfied interpretations of old tailes where conflicts have been filtered and brutality removed. We try to encourage self-confidence and a feeling of safety in our children, but we have also purchased a Brothers Grimm book of fairy tales from the time when blood and dismemberment was allowed in the fairy tales—and our children love the stories.