Stuff I Learned from Fairy Tales that I Really Need to Unlearn, Part II: Get To Work!
A valuable little man iIndeed. Rumpelstiltskin Spins Straw Into Gold, Illustration by Lorraine Fox, The Nursery Book, 1960
Last month I got curious about the cultural norms that I learned from favorite stories I heard as a young child. I focused first on “Finders Keepers!” and looked at the idea that when someone isn’t using a thing, it must be of no value to them so it should go to someone else who can use it. But what happens when we generalize this to people’s value coming from their utility? This is the cultural underpinning of our second fairy-tale theme: Get to Work!
Get to Work!
Take the tale of Rumpelstiltskin for example. In it, a hapless young woman is put in an impossible situation by her father, who tries to impress the king by claiming that she is able to spin straw into gold with a spinning wheel. The greedy king puts her in a room full of straw and tells her that if she doesn’t spin it into gold by the next morning she must die. Never mind that she undoubtedly has other valuable traits, for instance, knowing how to spin wool into yarn, or even that she’s described as “beautiful” – another way that maidens are useful in fairy tales. None of this matters as soon as the idea of converting the cheap and plentiful resource of straw into the rare one of gold. The young woman is only valued in that she’s useful in this more lucrative task.
"She became more and more distressed." Illustration by HJ Ford, 1889
As we know, an unnamed, strange little magical man then appears for three nights in a row to do the impossible task; each morning the king rewards the work by setting higher and higher production goals in larger and larger rooms of straw. The maiden gives away all her valuables to pay the little man, and when she has nothing more to give, he suggests she could give him another thing she can produce — her firstborn child. Remember, her life is at stake, so she agrees. This time the king is satisfied and in fact, marries her and makes her queen. A year later, she’s had a child and the little man returns to claim it. And - because he’s no longer useful to her, she sends servants out to find information to cheat on the name-guessing deal he offers. She’s learned her lesson well. People are only valuable as long as they are useful.
In the reality of our economy, workers are in fact let go so frequently it’s come to seem normal. And, after the layoff, the remaining workers typically have to pick up the slack, following the logic of, “Since you spun this room of straw into gold, now try a bigger one, or else we may let you go as well.” The relationship between employer and investors outranks any sort of social compact of mutual benefit to the workers and the employer. I recently took a business course where the professor talked about “adding value” to the company via layoffs. Having grown up in a small family business where my dad was proud to provide good jobs and took any contraction of staff as a personal failure, it took me a moment to get my head around what was being said. “Value” is narrowly defined around the immediate monetary return, rather than on the long-term community impact of the work and the workplace. So, Get to work!
After a layoff, the remaining workers typically have to pick up the slack, following the logic of, “Since you spun this room of straw into gold, now try a bigger one, or else we may let you go as well.”
Who could say no to a face like that? Illustration by Milo Winter, 1919
A subset of the usefulness lesson has to do with the arts and creativity. When I read the tale of the Ants and the Grasshopper as a child it horrified me, but I kept my feelings a secret because it was an Aesop’s Fable and I knew those were supposed to be full of wisdom. It was typically told that the industrious ants had worked all summer to store grain away in their underground colony, while the Grasshopper had been idling away his days playing on his fiddle. As cold weather approaches, he asks to live with the ants and they tell him no, and that since he’s been so lazy and useless, he can go ahead and starve, Too bad.
Disney explicitly framed artists as entitled in this song from its 1934 Grasshopper & the Ants short
Having been a choreographer as well as a PreK-12 teacher and supervisor of arts programs, I can say that the idea that the arts are an idle pursuit is a misconception. Perhaps the ants are confusing the effort of the fiddler with their own relaxing experience of allowing themselves to rest or dance joyfully while listening to the fiddler play. The arts require creative and critical thinking, physical skill and dedication on the part of the artist. Pursuit of them is anything but lazy.
Or maybe the ants have fallen into the trap of thinking of the arts solely as entertainment. The arts function in society to do much more than distract us. In Performer as Priest and Prophet, Judith Rock and Norman Mealy enumerate these two roles. The “priestly” role is one of reminding members of a community how far they have come as a group, affirming that they can survive hardships together, and celebrating the value of the community itself. Folk music and dance forms tend to be priestly. The “prophetic” role reminds the community how far it has yet to go to reach its ideals and goals. Protest art and music are prophetic. Whether the grasshopper’s expression has been more priestly or prophetic, the ants clearly don’t see the value of these less tangible roles.
. . . If the Grasshopper had been paid a fair wage for his contributions, he might have been able to rent a winter lodging from the ants.
And, while it’s true that you can’t eat your fiddle, or your dance, or your poem, it’s also true that if the Grasshopper had been paid a fair wage for his contributions, he might have been able to rent a winter lodging from the ants. This tale reinforces the Puritan work ethic norm that things and people are only as valuable as they are useful.
Storybook Learning:
People are only as valuable as they are useful; It’s normal to dispose of those who don’t prove their usefulness.
Consequence:
I strive to prove my usefulness to others, particularly in a work setting. Keeping a job means continually proving my usefulness, and this is so normal that I calculate my own self-worth based on my productivity more than on my innate qualities, particularly my “soft” skills.
Unlearning Tip:
At the end of the day, take an inventory of artistic, emotional, or facilitative skills you’ve benefited from. Did someone set up a meeting really well so that everyone felt heard and progress was made? Did you sing out loud to your favorite song and notice a change in your physical state? Did you vent to someone you knew would understand and keep your confidence? Appreciate these things. Then, think back over any of these skills you’ve contributed, and appreciate these in addition to the things you checked off your to-do list.
Epilogue: Even in the “Classics,” Is it a Single Story?
As a child reading Goldilocks, she seemed like the heroine to me. The Bears were scary and not human, so clearly Goldie had every right to help herself. I rooted for her to get out of the house before the Bears could eat her. In researching the story, I came across a 1918 English version where Goldilocks is referred to as “not well-brought up,” whereas, “The Bears were good bears, who did nobody any harm, and never suspected that anybody would harm them.” This is why they didn’t lock their home, and Goldilocks “had no business there.” It’s a cautionary tale about respecting others’ spaces and belongings. The story ends,
Goldilocks Defenestrates. Illustration by Walter Crane, 1873
“So naughty, frightened little Goldilocks jumped out the window; and whether she broke her neck in the fall, or ran into the wood and was lost there, or found her way out of the wood and got whipped for being a bad girl and playing truant, no one can say. But the Three Bears never saw anything more of her.”
While I’m not advocating the punitive philosophy of the time, I do wonder what would have happened had a version of the story that centered the Bears’ perspective and emphasized the entitlement of her behavior continued to live in popular culture.
Similarly, I found an alternative version of the Ants and the Grasshopper by Jean de La Fontaine from the late 1600’s, emphasizing charity and compassion; by the 1800’s another French poet, Joseph Autron had added notions of the value of the arts in society. In his version, the ant agrees to share with the grasshopper (or cicada) if she will only sing a song to remind him of summer. In fact, there is a lively tradition of critiquing this story by writing alternative or parody versions.
I am heartened by this. Our generations can rewrite these and other tales to reinforce what we want our children to learn and how we want our workplaces and schools to operate. It’s clear we can update them from their feudal sensibilities. Jack and the Beanstalk had a critique within the 1987 musical, Into the Woods, casting it as more of a home invasion. I’m now picturing it as a de-colonial tale. Or a Rumpelstiltskin set in a textile mill or a sweatshop, or a Goldilocks with restorative justice for the Bear family. The point is not to settle for a single story, or for a set of stories reinforcing a single norm.
What stories do you recall, and how would you re-envision them? Or, what stories are told in your culture that reinforce different norms? Send me an email and I’ll consider them for future posts!
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