Parents in the Beauty and the Beast-type tales vary as do the morals. In "Beauty and the Beast", one of the morals is clearly to take care of parents, even when they cannot take care of you. Her father is much like the Beast; he is never witty nor handsome. But he is kind and for that he is eventually rewarded. The father is a push-over. Beauty must take care of him and fix the problem he creates.
"The Pig King" has a similar parental figure in the mother of the Pig King's three wives. She is poor and has no real say in the matter. She needs the money. Even after her first two daughters are killed, the third still goes, all to protect her mother. Once again the child looks after her parent who has passed the prime of her life. There are no retirement homes. Your old, aging parents need active care and that's what this story seems to preach.
On the other side, in "The Frog King", the father is wise and still in his prime. The moral in this story is to listen to your father. The daughter does not want to take the frog in but father knows best. He insists she keeps her promise, trying to raise her right. It pays off in the end.
So in summary, take care of your parents when they get old and listen to them before they do. Any questions?
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I really didn't look at it from that perspective before, that the main lessons of the stories were to care for one's elders as they age. To me it seemed more important to teach people to be kind in general and not judge a book by its cover, but what you said actually makes a lot of sense too. After all, no reason that a bunch of morals can't co-exist with one another. Perhaps this story originated with a bunch of maltreated old parents who just wanted their bad little children to be more kind and to lend a hand.
ReplyDeleteSomewhat obviously, all of these stories are going to be written by adults, probably parents, but it is interesting they often tend to depict themselves as you described in the first two tales and less of a "Frog King" father. I see that they want to emphasize to their children, who hear these stories, the importance of taking care of their parents when they age, but must they cast themselves in such a bad light? While Beauty's dad was trying to do the nice thing by getting her the flower, he's clearly ignorant of many obvious things (like his evil daughters, that Beauty is sacrificing her life for him every day). Do parents want to portray themselves as "push-overs," as you say, or is that just how they have to act to get their kids to take care of them?
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