These are the lessons she didn’t learn, that everything important comes in threes, pigs, billy goats, brothers, wishes. That often scullery maids are princesses. That sometimes apples are poisoned. That wolves and woodcutters wear each others clothes.

• Red gets sent through the forest to grandmas house
• Snow white gets sent in the forest to be killed
• Gretel [and Hansel] get left in the forest to starve or be killed
• Sleeping Beauty was trapped in a forest entwined castle
• Rapunzel gets shut up in a phallic symbol tower

in the middle of a forest

and why, sexual jelousy? slow burning anger? inheritance anxiety? misplaced over protectivness?

There you met it – the mystery of that hatred.
After your billions of years in anonymous matter
That was where you were found – and promptly hated.
You tried your utmost to reach and touch those people
with gifts of yourself -
Just like your first words as a toddler
When you rushed at every visitor to the house
Clasping their legs and crying: ‘I love you, I love you!’
Just as you had danced for your father
In the home of anger – gifts of your life
To sweeten his slow death and mix yourself in it
Where he lay propped on the couch.
To sugar the bitterness of his raging death.

You searched for yourself to go on giving it
As if after the nightfall of his going
You danced on in the dark house.
Eight years old, in your tinsel.

Searching for yourself, in the dark, as you danced,
Floundering a little, crying softly,
Like somebody searching for somebody drowning
In dark water,
Listening for them – in panic at losing
Those listening seconds from your searching -
Then dancing wilder in the silence.

The Colleges lifted their heads. It did seem
You disturbed something just perfected
That they were holding carefully, all of a piece.
Till the glue dried. And as if
Reporting some felony to the police
They let you know that you were not John Donne.
You no longer care. Did you save their names?
But then they let you know, day by day,
Their contempt for everything you attempted.
Took pains to inject their bile, as for your health,
Into your morning coffee. Even signed
Their homeopathic letters,
Envelopes full of carefully broken glass
To lodge behind your eyes so you would see

Nobody wanted your dance,
Nobody wanted your strange glitter – your floundering
Drowning life and your effort to save yourself,
Treading water, dancing the dark turmoil,
Looking for something to give -
Whatever you found
They bombarded with splinters,
Derision, mud – the mystery of that hatred.

Ted Hughes

Fairytales depict a world of arbitrary violence and frightening animism. What’s so unrealistic about that – especially from a child’s perspective? They suggest the world is full of monstrous adults: parents who abandon or imprison their children; envious, cold step-parents; stupid giants; hungry witches and ogres; lecherous fathers.

Little Red Riding Hood, in the earliest version, doesn’t disobey, she errs, in the most literal sense, wandering away from the path. But in Perrault’s tale she isn’t warned not to, and so is not punished for heedlessness. She is simply too innocent to know better, and gobbled up by the wolf, without the last-minute rescue by a huntsman to soften the blow for the children listening…Little Red Riding Hood cautions innocence from the perspective of experience, warning of external dangers. There be wolves. Duly noted.

From Justice and punishment in fairytales. By Sarah Churchwell

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