Off with Their Heads! Fairy Tales and the Culture of Childhood by Maria Tatar

Here a revealing episode in the gender politics of cultural production unfolds as male artists and writers, working in a society consumed by fear of outside threats, envision women as enemies that can be contained and mastered through transcendent artistic expression. Tatar focuses attention on the politically turbulent Weimar Republic, often viewed as the birthplace of a transgressive avant-garde modernism, where representations of female sexual mutilation abound. In examining images of sexual murder ( Lustmord), she produces a riveting study of how art and murder have intersected in the sexual politics of culture from Weimar Germany to the present.

Tatar, however, challenges us to consider what is taking place - both artistically and socially - in the construction and circulation of scenes depicting sexual murder. This image is so prevalent in painting, literature, film, and, most recently, in mass media, that we rarely question what is at stake in its representation. Since the cultural stories we read to children in their formative years have a powerful influence on their lives, Tatar emphasizes the importance of interrogating and reinterpreting these bedtime tales.In a book that confronts our society’s obsession with sexual violence, Maria Tatar seeks the meaning behind one of the most disturbing images of twentieth-century Western culture: the violated female corpse. After examining how fairy tales were converted into children's literature, the author investigates the acculturation of heroines in such stories as Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast, and concludes with meditations on violence, cannibalism and conflicts between parents and children. In this book she explores how adults mistreat children, focusing on adults not only as hostile characters in fairy tales themselves but also as real people who use frightening stories to discipline young listeners. When Hansel and Gretel try to eat the witch's gingerbread house in the woods, are they indulging their uncontrolled cravings and destructive desires, or are they simply responding normally to the hunger pangs they feel after being abandoned by their parents? Challenging Bruno Bettelheim and other critics who read fairy tales as enactments of children's untamed urges, Maria Tatar argues that it is time to stop casting the children as villains.

Off with Their Heads! Fairy Tales and the Culture of Childhood by Maria Tatar