The close association of fairy tales with childhood has made it easier Essay

The close association of fairy tales with childhood has made it easier for their broader cultural meanings to be disguised or denied. Discuss with reference to relevant textual examples - Essay Example Broader cultural meanings are a magnified field of thought process in children. Fairy Tales make a significant contribution to it as children are very closely connected to the stories they hear from their adults. Hence the impact of these stories becomes a major cause of concern as to whether they have deviated these children or totally denied them facts from their own cultures or the broad aspects of cultures of the world. Snow White and the seven Dwarfs, Rapunzel, Cinderella, Frog King, Hansel and Gretel and Sleeping Beauty have certainly conjured up pictures with specific cultures in the minds of children but that is not to say that these same children have been refrained from facts of other cultural issues. The stories collected by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in the early 1800s serve up life as generations of central Europeans knew it—capricious and often cruel. The two brothers, patriots determined to preserve Germanic folktales, were only accidental entertainers. Once they saw how the tales bewitched young readers, the Grimm’s, and editors aplenty after them, started "fixing" things. Tales gradually got softer, sweeter, and primly moral. Yet all the polishing never rubbed away the solid heart of the stories, now read and loved in more than 160 languages. (National Geographic). It is agreeable that vast popularity of these fairy tales played with childhood psychology to make them believe and think of prototype images of people. Stories like Cinderella, Snow-white, Hansel and Gretel support the negative figure of the bad mother portrayed by Grimm’s in their stories. Children learnt from these stories but they were not the only media by which cognition was imbibed by children. So it cannot be true that these stories have marred their opportunity of learning about the world and its culture. A counter research dedicated to the study of children’s literature remarked â€Å"In many ways childrens literature and fairy tale stories are on odd