THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 3, 1994 TAG: 9407010326
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN
LENGTH: Medium: 85 lines
IT'S TYPICAL OF OUR intimidated times that even such a minor matter as fairy tales can cause a major flap.
They're too violent, say some. Too sexist, say others. Too frightening, too expressive of conflict, too disrespectful of authority.
In sum, politically incorrect.
Hans Andersen has never been less Christian; the Brothers have never had it so Grimm. It figures. Don't forget this is the year that editors of the Los Angeles Times (I know they're in California, but still) issued a 19-page booklet titled ``Guidelines on Ethnic, Racial, Sexual and Other Identification.''
Drafted by committee, of course, the booklet listed, among words to avoid, the following: ``WASP'' (``may be pejorative''), ``co-ed'' (``considered derogatory to female college students'') and ``birth defect'' (``use congenital disability'').
So it isn't far from there for the humor-impaired to regard ``Snow White'' as an example of colorist thinking.
A solution of sorts resides in Politically Correct Bedtime Stories: Modern Tales for Our Life and Times by James Finn Garner (Macmillan, 79 pp., $8.95).
Garner identifies himself on the dust jacket as a ``descendant of dead white European males.'' He is also a Chicago writer and performer. This collection constitutes his first processed tree carcass.
Garner's version of ``Little Red Riding Hood'' begins:
There once was a young person named Red Riding Hood who lived with her mother on the edge of a large wood. One day her mother asked her to take a basket of fresh fruit and mineral water to her grandmother's house - not because this was womyn's work, mind you, but because the deed was generous and helped engender a feeling of community. Furthermore, her grandmother was NOT sick, but rather was in full physical and mental health and was fully capable of taking care of herself as a mature adult.
During the McCarthy era, we routinely harassed and vilified people for what they didn't do, such as not testifying against their friends, not paying lip service to a bogus ``loyalty oath'' and not loudly supporting the lunatic House Un-American Affairs Committee. Today we've improved matters enormously. Now we routinely harass and vilify people for what they do, such as expressing an opinion in English.
Red Riding Hood walked on along the main path. But, because his status outside society had freed him from slavish adherence to linear, Western-style thought, the wolf knew a quicker route to Grandma's house. He burst into the house and ate Grandma, an entirely valid course of action for a carnivore such as himself.
Then, unhampered by rigid, traditionalist notions of what was masculine and feminine, he put on Grandma's nightclothes and crawled into bed.
There is, of course, one and only one 100 percent sure way to remain absolutely, inarguably politically correct, and that is to say:
Nothing.
After all, if you can't say something nice. . .
But back to Grandma's. Just as the log-fuel technician burst in and raised his ax to protect Red Riding Hood, Red bawled him out for assuming that womyn and wolves couldn't solve their own problems without a man's help. Our story concludes:
When she heard Red Riding Hood's impassioned speech, Grandma jumped out of the wolf's mouth, seized the woodchopper-person's ax, and cut his head off. After this ordeal, Red Riding Hood, Grandma and the wolf felt a certain commonality of purpose. They decided to set up an alternative household based on mutual respect and cooperation, and they lived together in the woods happily ever after.
Or, if not ever after, at least longer than anybody had any right to expect.
Maybe this effort of Garner's will open the way to adjusting the rest of our literature so it reads less offensively.
Undoubtedly somebody will carry the revisionist ball and provide us with new editions of old classics, like Of Mice and Persons and Vertically Challenged Womyn.
Such books, you may be sure, will be politically correct.
But will they be art? MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia Wesleyan
College.
ILLUSTRATION: Jacket design by WENDY BASS
Jacket illustration by CARTER GOODRICH
by CNB