Shock Value

Source: The New Yorker

The Stubborn Child
From Grimm’s Fairy Tales

Once upon a time there was a stubborn child who never did what his mother told him to do. The dear Lord, therefore, did not look kindly upon him, and let him become sick. No doctor could cure him and in a short time he lay on his deathbed. After he was lowered into his grave and covered over with earth, one of his little arms suddenly emerged and reached up into the air. They pushed it back down and covered the earth with fresh earth, but that did not help. The little arm kept popping out. So the child’s mother had to go to the grave herself and smack the little arm with a switch. After she had done that, the arm withdrew, and then, for the first time, the child had peace beneath the earth.

How’s that for awful? Try reading that to a kid before she goes to sleep. Even I got the chills. I had to read it a second time to trust what I thought I had just read.

Then again, at least according to this article, that could be the whole point of fairy tales:

The value of fairy tales is that they teach us not to adjust, because the oppressive society in which we live is something we should refuse to adjust to.

My own memory of fairy tales is that they were mostly creepy and that I never could shake the feeling, somewhat reassuringly, that something in them didn’t really make sense. Always had problems with their impossibilities, improbabilities.

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