picture books, story apps, movies, short stories
I’m sure any visitor to this blog has at least one version of Snow White on their childhood bookshelf. Which version did you have? When you think of Snow White, perhaps you think fondly of the Disney film, or perhaps, like me, you grew up with ‘Read It Yourself’ versions, as well as coming across it again in fairytale anthologies.
Continue reading “Snow White as Illustrated by Burkert and Hyman”
“Mothers are either held up as paragons of selflessness, or they’re discounted and parodied. We often don’t see them in all their complexity.”
— Novelist Edan Lepucki contemplates motherhood.
The only time you truly become an adult is when you finally forgive your parents for being just as flawed as everyone else.
— Douglas KennedyIt is partly a children’s book convention that you write from the kids’ point of view, so you cannot be entirely fair to the parents as well. If you are going to write about children of twelve and thirteen who have totally understanding and marvellous parents, there’ll be nothing to write about.
— Gillian Rubenstein
The subject of mothers is apparently very sensitive for Peter [Pan]: “Not only had he no mother, but he had not the slightest desire to have one. He thought them very over-rated persons”. This is rather a puzzling statement, since Peter’s desire is to have Wendy as his mother. But the desire is extremely ambivalent, and the Lost Boys can only speak of mothers in Peter’s absence, “the subject being forbidden by him as silly”. “Now, if Peter had ever quite had a mother, he no longer missed her. He could do very well without one. He had thought them out, and remembered only their bad points.” We know that Peter ran away the day he was born, because he heard his parents talk about what he was to be when he became a man, which was not his intention: “I don’t want ever to be a man…I want always to be a little boy and have fun”.
—From Mythic to Linear: Time in children’s literature by Maria Nikolajeva
Frances Spufford writes that characters in fairytales are symbols.
A character in a story exists in particular before it exists in general. A wicked stepmother is a woman before she is a symbol of what a child might fear in motherhood. The story of Snow White therefore says things about gender, and the encounters of daughter, stepmother, father and lover, before it can become a picture of a psychological process.
—The Child That Books Built
The following notes draw heavily from the Kid You Not Podcast, Episode 11
The mother in children’s literature is generally ambivalent and ambiguous.
I do like to read shopping lists which have been left at the bottom of my shopping trolley. Who knew The Wicked Step-mother liked lasagne?
The Twisted History Of Snow White from Reading Today Online