about Zipes 81-96...

About Zipes 81-98…
Here I take it that Zipes makes a point that America needed fairytales to have happy endings because of what had been happening, WWI, and the Great Depression so people “were looking for some signs of hope (85).” Particularly the 1930’s. After Disney came out with the 1937 version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and made it into a musical, librarians and writers of child literature defended the original books. In the meantime, Wanda Gag, had rewritten the Grimm Fairy Tales into an American theme with sensitivity and compassion without any horror to them. Then she was asked to write Snow White to please the reading public. I take it, the real point of Zipes was all about kids whether reading, movies or stories will all get their own translation or thinking about them from their family life and culture that they are being raised in. Zipes says that no one can say what child literature should be written like. For myself, it would seem that all the older versions are of a macabre style, with gruesome disgusting “horrors” within. Then the fairytales of Grimm (I must have read Gag’s) were not so bad and gave moral behaviors to follow. But in the present time children are in a completely different world, that of the internet, T.V. violence, and real life horrors as well as war going on. Children were still hungry, parents had a hard time finding work, but everyone pretty muched helped out others if they could and no one locked their doors. I like Gag’s way of thinking and giving children mild sensitive material. Children have to grow up and face a sometimes cruel and unjust real life soon enough. I agree with her statement “You do not chop off a section of you imaginative substance and make a book for children for–if you are honest-you have, in fact, no idea where childhood ends and maturity begins. It is all endless and all one” I take it as keeping the childlike imagination of good things to come, magical thinking. I think that’s great!