Introduction to the Exhibit

Analyzing death in social margins in children’s literature is very important to understanding how children come to terms with death and how they recognize they way it affects others. Our group decided to focus on how death and violence is portrayed between different classes, races, genders, and levels of abilities in children’s fairy tales. It’s easy to gloss over the differences in the way death is portrayed in different social groups and this project delves into small details and makes connections between the deaths of children on the margins of society.

Our group decided to work with Andersen’s Fairy Tales, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Der Struwwelpeter and Adventures of a Pincushion to analyze death in societal margins. We chose these works because they each have short stories and illustrations and it’s easy to discern many implications from both. Andersen’s Fairy Tales, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and Der Struwwelpeter were published around the same time, the late 19th and early 20th century, and Adventures of a Pincushion supplements the short stories by adding an opposite approach to analyzing disability in a conduct of life work. The works can be very violent and death is a prevalent theme, as we’ve discussed in class. By looking at these tales from a different perspective or social lens the reader is able to come to new conclusions about the method of death in these fairy tales and how that differs from margin to margin.

Hailey was interested in how death is portrayed in different social classes and the implications this has for children reading these fairy tales. The children reading the versions of Andersen’s Fairy Tales and Grimm’s Fairy Tales that are available at the Baldwin would be among the upper class because of the size and amount of color used in the illustrations in these editions. These books would have been very expensive and would be shared among an entire family. Also upper class children were more likely to have an education making them the main demographic for readership. In “The Little Match Girl” by Hans Christian Andersen it’s very easy to discern the child is in the lowest social class, but by looking at different editions and illustrations the reader is able to see if her death is used as an escape or a way for the author to gain sympathy for the child. It’s also insightful to compare the deaths of upper class and lower class characters in these fairy tales to see if more or less violence is used towards lower class characters and to even examine the temporality of death used. Death serves a different purpose amongst the classes. In the lower class death is used as an escape from poverty and in the upper class it’s more romanticized, temporary, and grieved for.

Kirby was interested about race in fairy tales and how this is related to violence and death. In “The Little Inky Boys” from Der Struwwelpeter the blackamoor character is instantly othered and ridiculed. The giant in “The Valiant Little Tailor” from Grimm's Fairy Tales is black and viewed as an antagonist. It’s interesting to see the way races are portrayed and more often than not the villainous character is depicted as a race other than white. In contrast to the creator trying to gain sympathy for “The Little Match Girl”, in stories with deaths of the other race the author is attempting to distance the reader from their death or demonize a character based on their race.

Similarly Erin delves into how gender relates to death and the way female characters suffer more violence or more horrific deaths than their male counterparts. Erin incorporates charts and graphs in order to reach several conclusions. She analyzes the ages of the characters’ deaths and the causes of deaths and then relates this to gender. Women are killed throughout the stories during old age while no men are. This killing off of mothers and step mothers creates a villainizing effect for women in the stories and it wasn’t uncommon for a stepmother to also be a witch. The need to kill the evil witch/stepmother character allowed more violence to be committed against female characters. Erin examines the way characters were killed by breaking deaths down into categories: torture, burned, unknown, murdered, exposure, self-sacrifice, devoured by animal, temporary death, condemnation, drowning, and illness. Categorizing deaths and using short fairy tales makes this study easier as more deaths and characters are able to be closely examined.

Lastly Sara decided to analyze the way disability is portrayed in Der Struwwelpeter and Adventures of a Pincushion. Sara was drawn to analyzing disability because of the lack of representation of children with disabilities in literature, however from these works we see the representation isn’t positive. Adventures of a Pincushion is a conduct of life fiction book for girls which allows differing insight to disability from both time period and subject. In these stories disability is used a punishment. Out of the 37 vignettes in Der Struwwelpeter 10 involve disability-related punishments or characters. None of the characters started out with a disability, but procure one by the end of these stories for being naughty or not adhering to a societal standard.

Our main goal in analyzing death across the margins of society in children’s literature was to see where death and violence differed across margins and how they could also be related. Lower class children, blacks, females, and those with disabilities are marginalized through either lack of representation or a lack of positive representation in which the character has agency and power over their death or treatment. Both black and female characters are villainized and subject to more violence than their white or male counterparts. Disability is used as a punishment and is often a humorous addition to the short stories in Death and bereavement are different among the upper and lower classes and temporary death is used a mechanism in the upper class. Temporary death is also used as a method for death to female characters. The way death is portrayed in these children’s texts could shape the way the child reader saw death, and by analyzing death in the margins our group was able to better understand society during the late 19th and early 20th centuries as well as gain insight to the representation of children on the margins of society within literature.