The Guardian: Wicked Parents

In the UK, the Guardian is offering a series of seven fairy tale brochures in their physical papers with corresponding articles online. So, thank you, we don't have to be in the UK to enjoy the content!


The first day's offering is Wicked Parents feature and offers an article, Wicked parents in fairytales by Booker Prize winner Hilary Mantel and three fairy tales to read, including The Juniper Tree, Hansel and Gretel and Snow White.

It's a fine short article on the topic and focuses on The Juniper Tree and Hansel and Gretel. Still it is timely for me since I just submitted my next Faerie Magazine article about Snow White, the other well-known horrible parenting tale. (More about that in upcoming weeks, of course.)


Here's one paragraph, but there's plenty more food for thought in the article, so click through to read it all:

When we read fairytales now, the tools of psychoanalysis jump to hand, like the animated dish and spoon in the nursery rhyme. But we mustn't forget the historical reality behind the stories. Step-parenting, with its grudges and feuds over right and inheritance, was a fact of life through the ages, and now, because of frequent divorce, has become a fact of life again. Modern families may not be quarrelling over inheritance, but they are still at loggerheads over who gets what share in the parent or child. We don't dismember the child for the cauldron, like the boy in the Juniper Tree, but we shred him by apportioning his time and love: weekdays with mum, weekend with dad. And in step-families, sexual tension is the great unspeakable. In the Brothers Grimm tale, Snow White is a child of seven. Her story makes more sense, of an unpalatable kind, in the versions where she is on the cusp of womanhood, a blossoming rival to her stepmother.

And I love the illustrations for all three tales provided by Laura Barrett. I love silhouette illustrations. They allow for so much detail but still leave plenty of scope for the imagination.

Great fairytales brings you the finest stories of morality, justice, triumph and enchantment from around the world, collected in seven themes: Wicked parents, Rags to riches, Love, Quests and riddles, Wisdom and folly, Justice and punishment and Beastly tales.

The stories are all nominated by a panel of critics, writers and experts on children's literature: Anthony Browne, AS Byatt, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Robert Irwin, Alison Lurie, Adam Phillips, Philip Pullman, Salman Rushdie and Marina Warner.

Each collection is beautifully illustrated and includes an afterword from a range of leading writers exploring each theme.

Edit: The Fairy Tale Cupboard wrote about this series yesterday, too. Great minds again...