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<\/a>Photo by Lucius B. Truesdell\/Public Domain<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>
Most people know that Grimm\u2019s Fairy Tales are not the watered-down stuff Walt Disney gave us. They\u2019re much darker, far grimmer.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Two questions arise in my mind at the thought: first, what purpose did the real stories serve? (they were passed down for generations, and I\u2019ve heard tell their roots go down so deep they\u2019re positively prehistoric), and second, why were they\u00a0bowdlerized<\/a>? We can\u2019t blame it all on poor Walt.<\/p>\n The Bowdlerizing Impulse of the 19th Century<\/strong><\/p>\n The reformist impulse of the 19th century did a lot of damage. It\u2019s a huge subject, but I\u2019m focused at the moment on the way the stewards of literature made the tastes of little girls a needle\u2019s eye for everything to pass through.<\/p>\n The household, a political and economic institution once upon a time, was being stripped of its functions by the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the Welfare State. But advocates for it were reinterpreting it and turning it into the safe haven we know today, a place of sentiment and softness, a cult of hearth and home. And stories of children being cut up and thrown into pots just wouldn\u2019t do.<\/p>\n (Not only did folk tales suffer from the knife, so did the Bible. There\u2019s no telling how many boys were lost to the church because of Sunday School flannel-graphs. Mark Twain was. More about that in a minute.)<\/p>\n But when things that serve a forgotten purpose are lost, they have a way of returning in new forms.<\/p>\n The Sublime<\/strong><\/p>\n I remember a Time Life book we had when I was a kid. There was this amazing fold-out illustration of, Rudolph Zallinger\u2019s, The Age of Reptiles.<\/a><\/p>\n I was drawn to it, almost against my will, and once open I would meditate upon the awesome awesomeness of Tyrannosaurus Rex\u2013the king of dinosaurs: that capacious mouth lined with teeth, those thunderous thighs, those tiny arms, so strangely endearing and useless.<\/p>\n