Adults in Stories for Children

[Zhena]

I'm starting a new thread so this topic isn't buried in the "Yesterday's Activities" thread.

To give context, hear are some qoutes. Extreme apologies for mixing the order -- there was a point where two separate conversations broke out, and it makes more sense to follow them separately ...

ChachaMama:
1:15-4:15--Grade like maniac. Do 3 FemSem research essays.
-Plasticization of American women: plastic surgery, waxing, etc.
-Representation of mother/maternal figures in Disney.
-Women in Japanese anime.

fascination:
ccm...would love it if you would say a bit about mother figures in disney...are there any who aren't evil, dead, invisible, or a teapot?

j_alexandra:
/hijack/ chiming in here, forgive me ccm, this is your field, not mine, but... iirc, the absent female parent is a given in a lot of the fairy tales on which the Disney films are based; gives the plucky heroine something to overcome on her way to maturity -- Disney ran with it to the extreme, imho

if you think for a while, can you come up with a fairy tale in which the mother figure is not absent or evil? the teapot is an exception, ime, and created for the film, not present in the original (...deleted...)

Mary Poppins does not count; not a fairy tale, and she replaces the mother completely; that's what nannies do

fascination:
mother willow I suppose...but still a tree replacing a dead mother...will continue to ponder this

samina:
there's sleeping beauty's mum, who's living, tho doesn't figure much in the story... can't think of any others. but it's been awhile since i read through our brothers grimm tome.

fascination:
also simba's mom...shrug, the mother cat in aristocats...gah...thinking....

samina:
the abdigation of feminine influence in favor of the patriarchal has been pretty well represented by our fairy tales, i'd say, heh.

Peaches:
My take on the absent mother figure has always been a bit different from yours j_alex, although I think that's certainly a facet. IMO, it is because the mother figure is absent that the girls are able to do what they do. IMO, if there had ever been a mother figure present, she would have been raising the girl to be a lady...who wouldn't ever do the kinds of things that said plucky herioines do. They'd be taught to stay home and be helpful in the kitchen and helpless for themselves...because that's how ladies behave kind of thing.

I think it's only because of the lack of feminine influence, and the resultant lack of oversight in that department (benign neglect on the part of the fathers), which allows the girls to grow up into strong and independent characters.

fascination:
and, if there had been a good mom, she' have seen that crap coming a mile down the road and protected and advised her kids...:smile:

Peaches:
I dunno. I think that fairy tales rely so heavily on stereotypes except for the two central characters, I don't think the mother would have seen things coming. Or, if she had, she would have taken the helpless female approach. It's only ever the herioine, who has not had that confining influence in her life and was allowed to roam free like a boy, who has the stones to actually do something to change her own situation.

fascination:
agree...that was my point...that if they showed a mom like I mentioned, they'd have no story, cuz she would have averted it :smile:

Peaches:
Ah...I read "averted" with a different slant. My bias, in fact. Gotcha. Yup.

samina:
instead they go off and adopt rampant delusions of needing to be rescued by men...

Peaches:
Well, yeah. At some point, no matter how strong the female character is, she always ends up needing to to be rescued. Pisses me off.

fascination:
did mulan have to be rescued....?...love that one

 

[Zhena]

continuing:

ChaChaMama:
***
A few thoughts:
#1--It is interesting to me that the over-parenting protective figure in Disney is increasingly the DAD.

Marlin in "Finding Nemo" is such an overprotective Jewish mom, except he's a clownfish and a dad.

King Triton in "The Little Mermaid"--though powerful with that Triton thing--also does a good worried parent who wants to shelter his child thing.

And of course the kids rebel against that.

***
#2--There ARE some living moms in Disney movies.
"Mulan" has a living mom. As Peaches predicted, however, she is a figure who largely reinforces conventional expectations. She gets her ready for the matchmaker. Mulan also has a feisty grandma, whom I love, and whom I would credit with defying stereotypes about grandmothers when she checks out Mulan's love interest and says they can sign her up for the next war.

Interestingly, and unlike most other Disney princess movies, "Mulan" does not particularly reinforce the idea that marriage to Prince Charming is the right route for girls. "Mulan" has a love interest, but she doesn't marry him within the body of the main movie. (There is, I believe, a fairly awful sequel in which they do marry, though.)

"The Princess and the Frog" has a living mom. (I'm somewhat guessing that I am the only one of us who has seen this movie, because I can't really imagine any of you guys going on a date to see a Disney movie. But Child and I had a Mommy-Daughter date.) In this one, Dad dies, not Mom...and as a young adult, daughter works her butt off to achieve what was once her dad's dream: to have a restaurant and name it after her: "Tianna's Place." The Mom is supportive, but also thinks Tianna is too obsessive and needs to balance work with fun, meeting men, maybe eventually giving her some grandkids.

Oh, and outside of the princess canon...
In "Peter Pan," the kids having a living mom, and an inept dad.

***
#3--The student whose paper I just read wrote on four films:
"The Little Mermaid," "Mulan," "Pocahontas," and "The Princess and the Frog." I don't want to say too much about her specific arguments, as they are her intellectual property, but she had a very interesting take on Ursula in "The Little Mermaid" that I would not have thought of, and on the role of Pocahontas' mom (her spirit represented by the wind) and grandma (Grandma Willow).

***
#4--If we are allowed to step outside the Princess canon...

I'm going to have to insist that "Mary Poppins" is a very interesting example in the Disney version because the mom is a flaming suffragette. :smile: Unfortunately, in Disney's view, this makes her the kind of mom who definitely needs a nanny to actually take care of the children, who are little rebels.

By the way, "Mary Poppins" has some of the BEST choreography of any movie musical ever and is in many top 10 lists, so if you haven't seen it since you were in elementary school, check it out!

You know what other one is interesting? "Bedknobs and Broomsticks." Eglantine is about the least conventionally maternal woman protagonist in Disney, and she just about plotzes when city kids are dumped on her during WWII. Yeah, okay, the last few minutes things get kind of conventional, but the bulk of the film is pretty fun. It also had good songs.

 

[Zhena]

Then I went back to the beginning with:

Ah, but the question is bigger than that.

This discussion inspired (?!?) me to climb into my loft, move a bunch of boxes, and find the box containing my old papers. (Be very impressed that I went straight to the right box!) Long before I became an engineer, before I even really knew what an engineer was, back when girls went to college to become nurses or teachers, I was an English major.

I've been interested in children's literature since ... well, since I was a child. In 1972 I wrote a paper in which I discussed my impression that it's almost a requirement for parents to be dead/absent/distant for children to have proper adventures. I chose six stories to illustrate this, three with female and three with male protagonists. (If I were writing the paper now, I'd look for stories with parents who are fully present to analyze the difference, if any.)

Here's a mental exercise. List the first ten children's books/stories that pop into your mind. Once you've made the list, think about the status of the parents. Are they both alive? If alive, are they physically in the same location as the child(ren)? If physically present, are they engaged with the child(ren)?

My impression may be skewed by the type of stories that appealed to me as a reader, so I'd be interested in seeing lists from other people.

 

[Zhena]

ChaChaMama:
My favorite book as a child was Little Women, and the parents are alive and reasonably involved in that one. However, in general, I think a lot of children's literature upholds your premise.

To make sure I'm not skewing results:

Here is my 7-year-old's list of favorite book series, as of February when we started a new family journal.

Parents Dead
1) Harry Potter series--Parents dead.
2) Oliver Twist (Great Illustrated Classics)--Parents dead.
3) Boxcar Children series--Parents dead. Granddad involved.
4) Any Star Wars series--Parents dead. Well, okay, technically, Dad is alive but is Darth Vader, and Luke doesn't know that for a good long while.

Parents Alive but Offstage Most of the Time
5) Percy Jackson series--Both parents alive, but Dad is Poseidon and not an involved parent on a day-to-day basis. Mom is very loving and involved, but has to send him to Camp Half-Blood for his own protection. So parents are effectively out of the way most of the time.
6) Magic Treehouse series--Parents alive, but all the adventures involve the kids traveling in a magic treehouse that can travel through time and space. The parents only feature in the beginning or end where they might, for example, call the children to dinner.
7) Warriors series--Okay, I'm going to be honest and say I've never read these at all. I know they are about cats. I just asked Child, and she said there are like 50 cats, but that the main character, Fireheart, has parents who are alive, but are not wild cats--they are "kittypets"--and thus not with him having adventures. :kitty:

Mixed
Vet Volunteers series--One girl, Maggie, has mom dead, dad in army, and gets taken care of by grandma. Other protagonists have parents.

Living parents
9) Junie B. Jones series--Parents involved. She gets in trouble with them a lot.
10) Calvin and Hobbes (complete series)--Parents involved, but do not seem to understand that the tiger is real.

 

[Ray Sison]

Charlie Brown / Peanuts

Zhena, in the Charlie Brown Peanuts stories, notice how the adult figures like the parents and teachers are off-camera in the Charlie Brown universe--and how when they talk it sounds like "wah-wah-wah" (completely incomprehensible and funny).

If I recall correctly, Charles Schultz changed this in at least one latter-day Charlie Brown feature: I think it was to bridge a bit of that gap between child and parent or teacher...

 

[pygmalion]

Lowthar's Blade Trilogy (awesome books for elementary aged kids, IMO) Boy leaves his traditional mom at home, doing girly things, and goes on a quest to save his Dad and civilization from the ultimate evil.

 

[pygmalion]

Older children's book series (ones I grew up on)

Beverly Cleary books -- Ellen Tebbitts, Ramona the Pest, etc. All the books I read had active, visible, involved parents (and two-parent families) but much more run-of-the mill adventures (starting a lemonade stand and learning a moral lesson versus saving the world.)


Parents are party poopers it seems.

 

[pygmalion]

There's another figure I remember from books, back when I was a wee bairn. Impoverished usually widowed Mom struggling to raise kids. (The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew -- loved that book. Mom and Dad bought it from Reader's Digest for us.)

Had the widowed mom disappeared? Or maybe ben replaced with the single mom?

 

[pygmalion]

This from dancelvr:

I'll slip in just to mention two animal mothers from Disney movies.....Bambi's mom, and Dumbo's mom...both of whom were violently torn from their children at a young age by humans......

Bambi's mom....dead.
Dumbo's mom....as good as dead.

Which brings to mind The Land Before Time and An American Tail.

In the Land Before TIme Series, IIRC, the (male) protagonist whose name I can't remember is being raised by grandparents after The Great Beyond separates him from his parents who are presumed dead.

In An American Tail, Fievel Mouskewitz encounters many adventures, only after he is separated from his loving nuclear family. Good on him that he is reunited with them, eventually.

 

[Ray Sison]

There's a lot going on here. The fantasy of a world from the point of view of child. The freedom of being separated from parents. And the fear of being separated from them.

Then there's that Lucy (representing the power of women?), always pulling away that football at the last second, before poor Charlie Brown can kick it!

 

[j_alexandra]

some random thoughts about kidlit

<puts on writer hat>

Fairy tales and kiddie lit in general were/are, to a great extent, teaching tools, teaching children how to become adults. The writer's job is to make the lessons interesting, give them a hook, create a scenario that gives the child the maximum learning curve and confidence-inducing results (which is why Harry Potter is so potent: basically nothing new, but real cool). If parents lecture the child on how to grow up, we all know (b/c we 've been taught so by our own childhood stories) that's doomed to failure, so the parent/s *must* be absent (dead, divorced, abdicated, missing) in order for the child to learn the lessons. Basically, parent dies/is absent, kid grows: you can reduce most fairy tales and children's books to that formula.

<takes off writer hat>

<puts on English teacher hat>

The stories we learn as children form our psyches and to a great extent shape and reflect our cultures. As the Jesuits say, give me a man until he is seven years old, and he is mine for life. Whether we learn bible stories, fairy tales, the Bhagavad-Gita, or Harry Potter, those tales become us. So if, at an impressionable age, you get Little Women *and* Mulan, you have a huge disconnect between the 19th century culture that spawned an unrealistic ideal of feminine behavior, and the postmodern girl, who has transcended that ideal and strives for strength.

Disney has a lot to answer for; the only more destructive fantasist in American pop culture is Hugh Hefner -- Hef's airbrushed babes are about as realistic as the Disney's sweetly mawkish Snow White.

Mulan is aberrant, as is Beauty, in the Disney canon, a nod to postmodern feminist sensibilities, and I bet that more people know Snow White than Mulan.

<takes off English teacher hat>

just some random thoughts

 

[soshedances]

<puts on writer hat>

<snip>

Mulan is aberrant, as is Beauty, in the Disney canon, a nod to postmodern feminist sensibilities, and I bet that more people know Snow White than Mulan.

This must be why I loved Belle so much, she was smart, stubborn, independent AND got the prince in the end!

Of course, the kiddie version of me preferred Belle because she had brown hair (like me) and got to dance in a pretty dress in a huge ballroom....okay, that's true now too!

 

[j_alexandra]

This must be why I loved Belle so much, she was smart, stubborn, independent AND got the prince in the end!

Of course, the kiddie version of me preferred Belle because she had brown hair (like me) and got to dance in a pretty dress in a huge ballroom....okay, that's true now too!

Belle. Of course I meant Belle. I haven't seen that flick in ages, forgot her name was Belle. Which means beauty, anyway, so I wasn't too far off. Thanks for the heads up.

 

[Zhena]

Disney has a lot to answer for; the only more destructive fantasist in American pop culture is Hugh Hefner -- Hef's airbrushed babes are about as realistic as the Disney's sweetly mawkish Snow White.

Mulan is aberrant, as is Beauty, in the Disney canon, a nod to postmodern feminist sensibilities, and I bet that more people know Snow White than Mulan.

Disney couldn't have been so successful without connecting to something real in the audience. I find the current "princess" culture for little girls baffling, but there must be SOMETHING in the Disney versions of the stories that meets a need in so many little girls. It may be as bad as drugs to an addict, or it may be healthy ... I certainly don't know.

My daughter is old enough that the princess culture was just getting going when she was in the target demographic, so I haven't really experienced the full effect as a mother. I had limited exposure to movies but constant exposure to books when I was a child, so the Disney movies that I saw when young didn't captivate me. How can you compare Disney's Cinderella to Eleanor Farjeon's Ella? But I'm no good as a guide to popular culture.

I think the audience has spoken. Snow White sells, Mulan doesn't. At least Belle is in the top ranks.

 

[dancelvr]

This from dancelvr:




Which brings to mind The Land Before Time and An American Tail.

In the Land Before TIme Series, IIRC, the (male) protagonist whose name I can't remember is being raised by grandparents after The Great Beyond separates him from his parents who are presumed dead.

In An American Tail, Fievel Mouskewitz encounters many adventures, only after he is separated from his loving nuclear family. Good on him that he is reunited with them, eventually.

Bambi, Dumbo, Fievel.......happy endings are relative.