Fairytales Revisited Series

Dana Kroos is a writer and artist who lives in New Mexico. She has taught ceramics and currently teaches a variety of writing classes at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. Her work has appeared in exhibitions across the United States.

John Cross: Tell me about the “Fairy Tales Revisited” series.

Dana Kroos: Fairy tales fit into the realm of teaching stories, along with myths, folklore, legends and others. These stories were designed not primarily to entertain, but to explain and instruct. They not only offer reasons for why night and day exist, life and death, mountains, rivers, and trees, but also talk about human emotions, behaviors and situations. 

These stories teach lessons. They tell us how to live and reinforce social structures. But in contemporary times we have come to questions or even disagree with some of the lessons that they teach and the harsh way in which they teach them. Fairy tales are unique because they are traditionally stories written for children. The Brothers Grimm, who are responsible for many of the fairytales that we still tell children today, first published a collection of stories in 1812, but some of the included stories were adapted from versions dating back to the 1600s. 

As someone who grew up in the seventies, I can tell you that the way our culture believes children should be treated and taught has changed significantly in just forty years (in the seventies and eighties, not only would my parents never have thought of asking me to wear a bike helmet, but our car didn’t even have seat belts installed and the local theater let in every customer—1 to 100—with total disregard for the loose rating system that was in place). 

From a modern perspective, not only do these fairy tales put their children characters in jeopardy, but they seem to put our actual children in jeopardy through exposure to the stories. Disney has softened and watered down the original tales into adaptations that parents of the twenty-first century are comfortable with, but the original Grimm stories contain tales of parents murdering and attempting to murder their children, kidnapping, and elder and child abuse. These stories end “happily,” that is to say, the protagonists survive and triumph over their enemies, but often at the cost of having to commit heinous acts themselves, or at least having undergone significant trauma.

I am interested in the way that fairy tales take (what I would consider to be) adult content, and cater it for children. Of course, the Brothers Grimm are not solely responsible for this. Mother Goose is also packed with nursery rhymes and children’s poems which sound innocent on the surface but are in fact about more serious matters. “Ring-a-Ring o’ Roses” is a common one, a nursery rhyme—still heard today—about victims of the plague. “Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater” also disturbs me—the story of a man who imprisons his wife and “there he kept her very well.” 

The “Fairy Tales Revisited” series is comprised of sculptures and collages that include imagery and pas­sages from fairy tales, in combination with historical imagery and factual information. As sculptural forms, they represent adaptations of characters or symbols from fairy tales or mythology; as collages, they depict a character or scene that takes the form of a page in a picture book. This work explores the possible adult content present in some of these stories written for children and questions the lessons that are being taught through these stories by putting them into the context of history and real life.