18 Jul Peter Put the Kettle On and other stereotypes!

Maxine Clarke takes up arms against the negative stereotypes and dubious role models in fairytales and children’s nursery rhymes.

As a young child, I was always highly suspicious of fairytales. Not because I knew they were fantasy but because I realised, at least on some level, that the outcomes and insinuations of many of them had negative implications for me. I was the child of a Jamaican-born father and Guyanese mother, and fairytale heroines had golden locks and skin as white as snow. I didn’t look like Snow White or Cinderella, but I didn’t consider myself an Ugly Duckling, and I certainly wasn’t about to go through a hundred-year slumber waiting for my prince or pucker up anywhere near a toad. And never in a million years would I have stood for being loaned to a beast in order to repay family debt or being forced into slavery by an evil stepmother.

I could never understand (and still don’t) why the Little Mermaid changed who she was for ‘love’. It seemed to me that in fairytale land, in order to finally live happily ever after, young women must first be preyed upon by witches and wolves, sit biding their time until a young man gets his act together enough to organise a rescue party or be forced into servitude by the mistakes, sins or failures of their parents and then trust in fate for a happy and speedy resolution.

And so, when my son Mali was 15 months old, and the time had come for me to embark on a major expedition to the bookstore to upgrade him from board books with pictures to ‘real stories’, I bypassed the fairytale section without so much as a second glance and headed straight for a giant illustrated book of nursery rhymes, congratulating myself on my purchase and looking forward to sharing it with him before bedtime.

My son has always loved books. Of course, at 18 months, he wasn’t old enough to read them himself, but even as an eight-month-old, he would sit and turn pages for hours, staring at the pictures in wonder. He even likes books without pictures – I would often catch him flicking through the Yellow Pages, shuddering in delight at the way the pages flicked through his fingers, creating a gentle breeze as they fell. That night, however, as my son sat looking on in amazement as his dad read through the nursery rhymes (complete with the melodramatic, super-animated actions only a father could master), I sat across the room, increasingly disturbed at what I was hearing.

In the way of role models for my son, there was Georgie Porgie (Pudding and Pie), who, in the adult world, beyond the age of criminal responsibility, would almost certainly have been charged with sexual assault. And not only were his advances unsolicited and traumatic (the girls cried when he kissed them), but he was also too much of a coward to accept the consequences of his actions (he ran away). Next, there was Peter (Pumpkin Eater), who was not only expected to ‘keep’ his wife, but in the end, he “put her in a pumpkin shell” in order to do so, which smacked of false detainment.

I listened, mortified, as my son was introduced to animal cruelty (the four and twenty blackbirds were baked alive in a pie, and not only were the three mice too blind to see where they were running, but they were also savagely butchered for it), and gender stereotypes (Polly is the one who puts the kettle on and little Miss Muffet is frightened of spiders). I began to wonder about the grand old Duke of York, who marched his army of 10,000 men up and down aimlessly, presumably passing time until a war broke out instead of disbanding them to go and spend time with their families or do something else constructive. Later, when I discussed the implications of these seemingly harmless rhymes with my husband, he looked at me as if I’d suddenly grown a second head.

My concern about nursery rhymes reinforcing outdated societal prejudices was reignited several months later when a family friend innocently gave my son the present of a beautiful designer bib with the words “eenie, meenie, miney, mo” embroidered around the edges over and over (the second line of the original nursery rhyme being “catch a nigger by the toe”)… I cringed inwardly as the present was fastened around his neck and admired by all.

That night, I resolved to write my son his very own illustrated book of nursery rhymes that reinforced ideals and life philosophies that were positive, gender-balanced, environmentally friendly, socially aware and ethnically diverse. An hour later, I had rewritten two nursery rhymes. First, there was:

Mei-Ling Mary, brave and daring
How does your garden grow?
Wild fruits on vines and compost piles
A-jungling, we shall go.

Next was:

Bold Brave Ms Muffet
Sat on a bucket,
Eating her corn on the cob.
Along came a spider
And sat down beside her,
She said, ‘We can share if you want’.

Pleased as punch, I patted myself on the back and went to read my new child-friendly nursery rhymes to my husband, who looked at me as if the second head I’d grown earlier had suddenly sprouted another nose, and asked me what I was going to do when Mali went to playgroup or school and realised that all of the nursery rhymes he knew were the ‘wrong ones’. I slunk away dejected but not completely deterred, muttering under my breath about home-schooling.

We kept reading to my son from his nursery rhyme book, which fast became his favourite. I tolerated the rhymes, and the more we read them to him, the more I realised how important it was to read them. Some of the nursery rhymes were harmless nonsense (such as ‘Hey Diddle Diddle’, and ‘Little Jack Horner’), but the ones that weren’t were in many cases, still reflections of life as we know it. Sexual equality, political correctness and environmental awareness are unfortunately still elusive or ridiculous concepts to many, but what is important is that we equip our children with the means of determining what is just or unjust, responsible or irresponsible, caring or hurtful. Talking my son through myths, fairytales, and nursery rhymes is just one way of contributing to the development of his moral compass.

I’m looking forward to discussing his nursery-rhyme book with him when he gets older – to pointing out Peter the Pumpkin Eater’s self-sufficiency and commitment to renewable resources (residing in a hollowed pumpkin shell) and applauding Jack and Jill’s teamwork in combining their strength to fetch water from the well when the bucket would undoubtedly have been too heavy for just one of them to carry. We may even eventually graduate to fairytales… But heaven help the parents of the child who utters the faintest ‘eenie meenie’ anywhere near me or my family.

Illustrations by Giles Evans