All the Cinderellas

For our last little peek behind the pages of the fairy tales in our current exhibit, Once Upon a Time, we’d like to celebrate one of the best-known of them: Cinderella! The beauty with the special slipper has a very, very long lineage. Stories about her, or women very much like her, have been traced back hundreds of years, to China, Greece, and Egypt.

The Greek-Egyptian version of Cinderella is most likely the earliest, although it lacks many of the elements that are more familiar to us from the European-derived stories of the 1700s. In this tale, the heroine is named Rhodopis, and she was one of many servants of a Greek businessman and politician named Xanthes. He had taken a party to Egypt for business, and Rhodopis, bathing in a spring, had one of her slippers snatched up by an eagle, who then dropped it in the lap of the King of Egypt. The king took this as a sign from the heavens and searched everywhere for the slipper’s owner. Rhodopis, also known as Rhodope and as Doricha, was most likely a real woman, a courtesan (or “hetaera”) who lived about 2600 years ago, but the story about the shoe was probably a tall tale, and we can thank her contemporary, Aesop, for that.

More than a thousand years later, the popular tale had made its way to China. Tuan Ch’êng-shih wrote of a heroine named Yeh-Shen, and her story is closer to the version that we know. Yeh-Shen longs for happiness and marriage since her stepmother is so cruel, and she has some supernatural help from a magical fish who grants her wishes. Yeh-Shen attends a ball wearing a beautiful dress and slippers made of gold, and leaves one behind, in the hands of a charming king, when her allotted time expires.

Yeh-Shen and Rhodopis stories continued to be told, with different names, as the centuries passed, with dozens more iterations than we have room to discuss here. In 1697, Charles Perrault’s version, “Cendrillon,” was published, and it’s pretty much the final form that we know it today. Earlier European versions had replaced the magical benefactor with a kind godmother, but Perrault made her a fairy godmother for the first time. She transforms a pumpkin into a carriage, makes the slippers from glass, turns mice into horses, and so on. Basically all the elements of Cinderella that we all recognize are present in Perrault’s version, which has as strong a claim as any to being the most popular of all fairy tales.

Perrault’s was not the final version, of course, because as we’ve discussed, fairy tales are always changing and evolving. In recent years, Hollywood movies like Snow White and the Huntsman and Maleficent have given classic fairy tales a darker edge, but the Cinderella story was taking on heavier overtones quite early on. In 1812, the Brothers Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, published their seminal collection of European tales, and the Cinderella version that they included, entitled “Aschenputtel,” is much darker than Perrault’s and all the variants that followed it.

What interests me about Cinderella, though, is that the bleak overtones that some writers and folklorists have added to the story don’t actually seem to stick. As we noted in the first of these features, about Jack and the Beanstalk, many fairy tales actually thrive with a little color and backstory and discussion of motivations, even if it’s sometimes darker. Cinderella, however, shrugs off anybody’s attempts to darken it. Perhaps because the core of the story is so bright and happy, and its tale of wish-fulfillment is so encouraging and promising, that darkness just doesn’t belong to it. Cinderella is arguably the most popular fairy tale in the world, and the happiest.

Further reading: Lit Reactor | readyed.com.au | popsugar.com

More Fairy Tales: Andersen and de Beaumont

Most of the fairy tales which Americans grew up reading are of European vintage, and a healthy majority of them were compiled by the Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen, who popularized such classics as “The Little Mermaid,” “The Snow Queen,” “The Ugly Duckling,” “The Princess and the Pea,” “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” and “The Steadfast Tin Soldier,” among many others. Our current feature exhibit, Once Upon a Time: Exploring the World of Fairy Tales could very easily have been an Andersen-only exhibit, but since the intent is to explore the whole world of fairy tales, from many sources, only one of Andersen’s made the cut, and that’s the wonderful and charming “Thumbelina.”

Thumbelina is an inch-high little girl who popped into this world from barleycorn, and who fends off marriage proposals from various members of the animal kingdom. In Andersen’s story, she is nearly wed to both a toad and then to a mole, but finally finds true love with one of her kind, another fairy who emerges from a flower. Her story is related to a human storyteller by way of a bluebird who had also fallen in love with her, and confides to the man about his broken heart.

Hans Christian Andersen wrote travelogues, novels, and memoirs, but it’s the fairy tales that he’s best known for today. Seven or eight of Andersen’s are probably iconic enough that they’ll be on anybody’s list of classics, but he either adapted or created more than two dozen!

About a hundred years earlier, in France, Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont penned the best-known version of “Beauty and the Beast,” a folk tale that had been passed around for several decades. De Beaumont’s novel was first published in 1756, and either excised or simplified much of the Beast’s backstory. Interestingly, as later adaptations, films, and cartoons have been produced, based on the story, many writers have sought to bulk up the story behind the Beast’s hideous appearance. There is actually no need for them to go to all that trouble because Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve, decades before de Beaumont, had already given the Beast a family and a lengthy origin that includes political scheming and fairy queens, material that de Beaumont later dropped from her novel.

“Beauty and the Beast” has a pretty good claim to be the most popular and well-known of all fairy tales, maybe sharing equal first billing with “Cinderella.” It’s been directly adapted for films almost a dozen times, with Disney’s 1991 animated feature arguably the definitive version, and has inspired heaven-knows-how-many storybooks for young readers, each of which has its own version of what the Beast looks like, and its own storyline. Singing teapots and candelabras are a fairly recent addition to the story!

In our Once Upon a Time exhibit, your children can crawl through a mole’s tunnel and have an elegant dinner at the Beast’s castle, but don’t forget to take the stories home with you after you have played! How will you create your own version of these stories for your children to remember and, many years from now, share with their own?

The Many Tales of Anansi

Children always surprise me when they play, and when they’re in our Once Upon a Time exhibit, they are always finding new things to do that I didn’t see coming. This past Saturday, my son, who is four, spent the better part of ten minutes hiding behind the big pretend “melon,” hollering “Hey, I’m a melon! Don’t you want to eat me?!” at anybody who passed. Other kids would grab the melon and make a thundering “Gobble, gobble!” or such before my son would jump out to say “I’m really a spider! I tricked you!” and the eater would run away in playful shrieks. Repeat, frequently. Not at all bad for a kid who first heard this story about thirty seconds before he ducked behind/inside that melon.

Anansi, the spider hiding inside that melon, features in dozens of folk tales. He’s typically traced back to western Africa, in the region that is now the nation of Ghana, and made his way to the Caribbean and the colonies that would later become the United States in the 1600s, during the days of the slave trade. Anansi lived in oral telling for hundreds of years before his exploits were printed. He is most often literally a spider, but in some variants from Jamaica, he’s a human with four arms and four legs.

The Anansi story that is spotlighted in the Once Upon a Time exhibit is one of his most popular outings and emphasizes how clever Anansi is to think his way out of a bad situation. Writer Eric Kimmel and artist Janet Stevens have recreated many of Anansi’s adventures in storybooks that are published by Scholastic. In this story, Anansi lets his greed get the better of him, and eats so much of a melon, tunneling his way into it as he munches, that he grows too fat to escape it! The only way out is to have someone shatter the melon, so, pretending to be a talking fruit, he starts mocking all the other animals of the jungle, hoping that one of them will take the mysterious melon to the hot-tempered Monkey King.

Learning about Anansi, I was most interested to learn that, between the Caribbean and many of the communities of the southeastern US, he transformed from a spider into a rabbit. Arguably the most famous of the “Uncle Remus” tales of Br’er Rabbit involve the bunny losing his temper with an inanimate statue, striking it, and getting stuck. Remarkably similar stories are also told about Anansi getting his head, arms, and legs stuck in tar traps.

There’s no consensus among folklorists about precisely why the spider of the 1600s was replaced by a rabbit in the 1800s, but both characters, and many other derivatives, are classic examples of a trickster. The character is sometimes portrayed as good, with a mischievous side, and sometimes amoral, and sometimes downright rotten and needing to learn a lesson, but in all the trickster’s forms, he is smart and clever and can think his way out of any situation, even the ones that resulted from his own poor choices.

First Lady of Atlanta Helps Kick Off Mayor’s Summer Reading Club

It’s summer, and one of the great things about summer in Atlanta is the Mayor’s Summer Reading Club. We’re happy to once again be a partner, and a host for their kickoff event. The fun starts at 10am this Saturday morning, and we’ll have readings and crafts all day long! Plus, a special reading by First Lady of Atlanta Sarah-Elizabeth L. Reed and other special guests.

At the Museum, our staff works hard to promote literacy, because the studies show that many children don’t read and exercise their mental muscles during the summer months as much as they do when school’s in session, meaning that they will start the next grade a few weeks or months behind, and often struggle to catch up. We hope that all parents will participate in combating summer reading loss, and keep kids engaged in books.

So, where does the Mayor’s Summer Reading Club come in? Well, from their site, “The program designates a city- wide book choice for infants, for children ages 2-4, and for children ages 5-8 to share with families at no cost to them. Throughout the summer, libraries, museums, farmers’ markets, and other institutions in Atlanta will hold “book club reads” to model research based methods of reading books with children and will host enrichment events based upon the stories. The books will come to life as children enjoy arts and crafts activities, drama exercises, and other hands on activities designed to make the language in the stories meaningful to children.”

“The Mayor’s Summer Reading Club has helped thousands of Atlanta’s children and family members improve their literacy skills and ignite their passion for reading,” said Mayor Kasim Reed. “Now in its third year, the program, supported by my administration, valuable partners and Atlanta-based organizations, is increasing its reach, and inspiring more young ones to fall in love with reading. Research shows that children who read during the summer months perform better on achievement testing and are better prepared for the school year. It is my hope that the program continues to grow, and further support one of my top priorities—investing in our city’s children.”

For the third year in a row, the Rollins Center for Language and Literacy at the Atlanta Speech School have written a new adventure starring Amari, our city’s favorite young heroine, for children aged 3-5. In the previous books, Amari has visited Zoo Atlanta and biked on the Atlanta BeltLine. In her newest story, Amari’s Shining Moment, she and her neighbor, Andres, visit the children’s village of the Dogwood Festival and see a performance of “The Shoemaker and the Elves,” inspiring them to recreate the stage and perform the play for their entire neighborhood. Amari uses the skills of problem solving and determination she learned through her first two adventures to help Andres get over his stage fright.

(Say, isn’t that something? “The Shoemaker and the Elves” is one of the fairy tales that are spotlighted in our current featured exhibit, Once Upon a Time!)

The First Lady of Atlanta, Sarah-Elizabeth L. Reed, will be here to share Amari’s adventures to our guests Saturday morning. She will be here to read the book at 11 am. The other books featured for the club this year are, for infants, The Pigeon Has Feelings Too by Mo Willems, and, for readers aged 5-8, Dad, Jackie and Me by Myron Uhlberg and Colin Bootman. Find out more about the books at the Mayor’s Summer Reading Club! All of our guests on Saturday will get to take home books for free! We look forward to seeing you here at the Museum on Saturday.

Schedule of events for Saturday, June 6

• 10 AM : Craft time
• 11 AM : First Lady of Atlanta, Sarah-Elizabeth L. Reed to read Amari’s Shining Moment
• 12 PM : Imaginators bring to life Dad, Jackie and Me by Myron Uhlberg
• 1 PM : Mr. Jason’s Music Party will perform live music to get kids up, movin’ and groovin’!
• 2 PM : New York Times-best-selling children’s author, Surishtha Sehgal reads ‘A Bucket of Blessings’
• 3 PM : Cold cooking demonstration
• 4 PM : Construction Aerobics

All events are included with the price of admission and, as always, members are free.

Hey Atlantans! Let’s Read, Let’s Move!

While many Americans, especially kids, are happy to see the end of the school year, we want to watch out for the big case of summertime blahs that can infect children. Studies have consistently shown that three things have been happening to children over the last few decades: obesity is up and literacy is down, and things get worse over the summer.

United We Serve: Let’s Read. Let’s Move is a national initiative that calls on all Americans to participate in combating summer reading loss and childhood obesity through volunteering and community service during the summer months. From the organization’s web site, “Working together, Americans can foster a generation that is less prone to disease, has higher academic achievers, and is more educated about food and its effects on health. These factors can have lasting effects on a child’s overall development and future.”

There have always been summer reading lists compiled by regional libraries, but with this initiative, which started in 2012, there’s a larger umbrella to unify the various state and city agencies that have been working to keep kids active. In Atlanta, the initiative has set the groundwork for Mayor’s Summer Reading Club as well as GEEARS – the Georgia Early Education Alliance for Ready Students, both of which work to get kids excited about reading and exercise.

For the third year, the Museum is proud to be partnering with these agencies and presenting a Let’s Read Let’s Move day this coming Saturday, June 7th. We have a full day of events planned, which you can read about at our website. These include a lantern-making craft, a scavenger hunt, a cooking demo, a bicycle helmet safety demo, and story time with Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed.

Saturday’s festivities mark the kickoff for two months of events around Atlanta celebrating reading, wrapping up with “A Summer of New Adventures” at the Woodruff Arts Center on August 2. You can find more events by visiting the Mayor’s Summer Reading Club’s events calendar.

On Saturday, all of the children who attend will leave with a free book. The books that are being read and given away are Stripes of All Types by Susan Stockdale, Nothing Ever Happens on 90th Street by Roni Schotter, and Amari’s Bike Adventure, by the Rollins Center for Language and Literacy at the Atlanta Speech School. All the books are wonderful, but we are especially taken with what the Atlanta Speech School has produced. This is the second book starring Amari, and we love having a young heroine learning about life in our city. In this book. she works hard to learn how to master a bicycle so that she can ride with her family in the Atlanta Beltline’s Lantern Parade.

According to Karen Kelly, Director of Exhibits and Education, “We have seen the research that shows that active kids do better in school, and we want to always encourage that as well as encourage literacy. We’d like to engage parents in their children’s learning, and a great, simple way to do that is to work on making reading itself a more cooperative and exciting time. We’ve learned that pausing throughout the stories that you read with your children to ask questions and wonder aloud what might happen next really does enhance learning, and keeps children motivated and excited by the stories that they’re reading.”

We’re thrilled to be working with the Mayor’s Summer Reading Club! We hope that you’ll join us for this kickoff event, because we have so much planned and so many neat activities going on throughout the day, and all of it will be so exciting. Karen said it best when she told us, “This is fun, y’all!”

SOURCES:
United We Serve
Let’s Move, Active Schools