Once upon a time there was a land called Europe. It was full of people of diverse cultures and languages, but they shared a common trait in that they had an oral culture. Being primarily farmers, these people would pass long dark winter evenings by telling tales that were meant for adults and children alike. These tales were meant to both entertain and frighten and they had meaning. Within each tale was a lesson to be learned, sometimes multiple lessons. These tales rarely ended happily.
Then one fine day the oral culture was supplanted by a literary culture and many of the people were no longer farmers. This was okay because the tales continued to be told, and although the various people lived in different lands and spoke in different tongues, the tales were all very much alike in all the important points. And one by one the tales were written down by different authors and some of the authors changed the tales, or perhaps they simply heard different versions. No one can really say to this day.
One fine day a new, magical land was discovered and they called it America. And America never had an oral culture to speak of, but that was okay because people from all over Europe came to America and brought the tales with them either in memory or in print. And time passed and the green land of America blossomed until one day it was determined that the tales and their lessons were no longer proper and so the tales were changed and new versions of the tales were printed. And the children of America grew up happy in their ignorance and they too had children and their children had children. And like their fathers and mothers before them, they too thought the tales were a bit too much for the youth and decidedly unmarketable given the globalized community that the green land had become, and so the tales were changed again. And eventually the children grew up and never knew that their tales had been changed to make them safer for developing minds and more marketable for media conglomerates run by anthropomorphic rodents in short pants. And first Le Petit Chaperon Rouge and then Rotkappchen disappeared until all the children had left was a syrupy happy ending. And thus did childhood extend ever until death and adulthood was hidden away for ever. And they all found out one day that there was no happily ever after. Too bad they weren’t prepared for it.
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It will be met with initial skepticism, to assert without amplification, that Walt Disney opened Pandora’s box. Just as we complain now that the tales which were used to teach pragmatic lessons to children through scare tactics are being diluted with happily ever after. So to has the lessons of the Pandora myth been lost to the post modern age.
Pandora was unwittingly sent to punish mankind by Zeus. She was a perfect creature endowed with many gifts. Zeus however sent her with a dowry, as he had intended to punish mankind. A jar, the famous Pandora’s box. When the jar was opened by Pandora upon her marriage to Epimetheus, the contents; plague, sorry, poverty, vice, passion, spite, you get the idea, were released on mankind. However what is never discussed is that Pandora quickly shut the jar, trapping in hope. At a later time she revisited the box, releasing hope upon the world. However in one version of the myth, hope is depicted as the worst of the potential evils because it is equated with terrifying foreknowledge, and that by trapping in hope, Pandora saved the world from the worst damage.
To equate the myth to modern times is to propose that at some time, the box was reopened, and hope sprang out, thereby transforming fatalistic life lessons into hopeful yarns of unending happiness which rendered the un-skeptical reader more vulnerable to the other evils. At the moment I put the onus on Walt Disney, because many Disney stories are transformations of European tales that do not have happy endings, but no one really knows how these tales became so watered down.
I suppose in the post industrial world of the early 1900s , as people began to conglomerate in their asphalt fortresses, and the hard teachings of farm life were replaced, for some, by leisure, that a snobby culture of invulnerability began emerge and cloud the judgments of those who indulged it. They began to pretended that there was no longer a Big Bad Wolf because there was no forest. They unfortunately hid their faces from the truth. The big bad wolf feeds just as easily in a concrete jungle, more so even, because unprepared prey are much more prevalent.
One can only recall a brilliant scene from the movie Excalibur
King Arthur: “Merlin, have we vanquished evil, because it seems that we have.”
Merlin: “Good and Evil, there is never one without the other.”
King Arthur: “Where hides evil then, in my Kingdom?”
Merlin: (His face suddenly very solemn) “Always where you never expect it… always”
Most assuredly so, mein freund.
I think we can actually place an early blame on Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm. Sadly, by the time they were recording their collections of folk tales a change had already occurred. We assume that the change was in the oral tradition itself as Wilhelm and Jacob published there first collection of fairy tales in 1812. Yet nearly two centuries earlier the French author Charles Perrault published the first fairy tales as we know them today, taken from the folk tales of rural Europe. In Perrault's Le Petit Chaperon Rouge, Red and Grandmother are eaten by the Big Bad Wolf and the tale ends. Moral lesson obvious.
The Brother's Grimm, either working from a later oral version with a happy ending (not the year, rural life had changed dramatically, as had social life) or perhaps willingly changing the stories for mass publication, we don't know, published the better known verions Rottkapchen, wherein the brave Hunstman (or Woodsman) cuts the Wolf open and Red and Grandma are rescued. Happy ending. The moral lesson is diluted.
Modern interpretations of the Red Riding Hood tale suggest that it is a parable of awakening sexuality or drawn from a far older tale that would now be called witchcraft. Many of the older fairy tales, being rural folk tales for enjoyment by adults as much as children, are very sexually charged, full of rape and incest, murder and canibalism. But it was a harsher time, with extended families living in one or two room farm hovels. Children learned about sex at an early age and it was not looked upon as a taboo. Thus the modern sexual interpretations of the older tales do have creedence, but as the tradition was an oral one until these tales were collected and printed, we cannot ever be sure.
However, your blame of the Disney versions is well founded. The largest change between the harsh, dark originals and the modern happy sappy versions was perpetrated by the Rat. That much is obvious. For all the great things the Walt Disney did, and I believe he did many great things, his legacy has been a most terrible one. A PC world full of hippies who grew up with watered down tales of happy endings and a universe that is somehow fundamentally right, when all of our most basic instincts tell us that it is not and that life is a struggle and through that struggle we become strong and thus better able to keep our tribe, our race, our species alive and ever growing. This schism has only gotten worse as time has gone on, and now little girls don't realize that they need to stay on the path and watch out for the big bad wolf.
If I may expand upon your Excalibur notion by quoting Merlin yet again, "...for it is the doom of men that they forget."
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