Some mollification for your giant
I’ve been seeing a lot of talk in the past few days about a children’s book called Brenda is a Sheep. The book won a book award.
Amy Sousa reads along and discusses the story:
Her video is entertaining as well as instructive.
The book itself is ridiculously confusing. It’s a sort of Little Red Riding Hood turned on its head, but…what? What’s her point? That wolves, however hungry and toothy and eager to eat you, will be so touched and pleased that you made them a vegetarian breakfast that they won’t eat you until lunchtime? If that’s the point, what’s the point of such a point?
Now maybe the point is meant to be something like…this is not easy…something like if there is a ferocious predator in your midst, the thing to do is be very very sweet to it, to gain a little time in which to THE END. That’s the best I can do. The story doesn’t explain why or how a [spoiler alert] breakfast of grass lasagna will make any difference in the long run. That matters because it’s the whole issue, isn’t it. We can flatter Putin over breakfast and no doubt he will flatter us back, smiling in his wolfish way, but that doesn’t change anything. Trump can be mollified in the moment by pouring oil on his throbbing ego, but Trump’s moments are, shall we say, disconnected. The mollification doesn’t last.
Plus what leaps to mind for children is, be sweet to your abusers. Don’t seek help. Wrong.
Yep.
Also, it’s for very young children, and it’s absurdly confusing for that audience. Very young children don’t know what sheep and wolves are yet, unless they live on a sheep farm, so all this “Brenda has sharp teeth but she’s still a sheep” nonsense is a muddle.
I have to say the description relieved me, because after reading the title, and given the regular topics here, I really thought this was going to be a book about how a little girl named Brenda identifies as a sheep, and therefore we should all praise her wooly coat….
It is certainly confusing.
I think part of the point of the book is that Brenda is very clearly not a sheep, and Brenda has dangerous ideas, and the sheep are quite silly for not only going along with this nonsense but for praising Brenda as the best example of them and trying to emulate her. It’s not didactic, and maybe that’s the point.
Amy and others think it is intended that way, but then the bit about the sharp teeth doesn’t make much sense. But none of it makes much sense.
Or rather – the bit about the sharp teeth does make sense, but not the kind of sense people who want to Be Supportive of Trans Folx hope to make.
And………if those real sheep had not been “nice” to Brenda…………….would those sharp teeth of Brenda’s be tearing out the throats of those real sheep? And would the takeaway be that those bad sheep deserved to be punished for not making Brenda happy?
Sort of how like real women get told husbands/boyfriends won’t abuse us if we are nice enough so, if we are being abused it is our fault. Or how men who hate and attack, kill and mutilate women only do it because women are not nice enough to them………so, again, our fault if we get attacked because we must deserve it?
The biblical Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing story comes to mind, but combined with *a negation of* the Scorpion and the Frog story. It’s not in a wolf’s nature not to be a predator, only humans can make a conscious choice to eat certain ways despite being omnivores. It’s anthropomorphic and moralizing, but most children’s stories featuring animals are. I suppose it’s clever if you’re unaware of the classics.
I don’t really see any profound connexion with ‘Little Red Riding Hood’. It is surely a reworking of Aesop’s fable, ‘The Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing’, with the twist that Brenda – so the story-teller wants to intimate – gives up her nasty plans at the end before killing and eating any of the sheep because the sheep are so nice to her. The sentimentally ‘warming’ moral: even nasty people may change if everybody is nice to them (except in the case of Drumpf, of course, but even there, if he were given a chance, perhaps…). Is it actually intended as an allegory in favour of trans-people?
I prefer Beatrix Potter any day and have loved her since childhood for her clear-eyed view of things, and her wickedly savage and unsentimental humour: ‘But don’t go into Mr McGregor’s garden. Your father had an accident there. He was put in a pie by Mrs McGregor.’ The world is not a nice, safe place.
In this connexion, Jan Morris, the writer who transitioned from ‘male’ to ‘female’ and wrote the book ‘Conundrum’ about the experience has died in his/her nineties. There is an article in the Guardian in which Morris is quoted as saying:
‘Reflecting on her own history in 2018, Morris said her transition no longer felt like the defining moment of her life, telling the Financial Times that it hadn’t changed her writing “in the slightest. It changed me far less than I thought it had.” As she approached her final years she thought of herself as “both man and woman … or a mixture of both.” Her transition may have overshadowed her books at first, she admitted, “but it’s faded now.”’
@9 Not Aesop, but the bible. Matthew 7:15 KJV
@9 Nevermind, like everything else, the bible probably hijacked it. :P
Aesop.
https://fablesofaesop.com/the-wolf-in-sheeps-clothing.html
Oops, I posted after you updated.
Anyway – oh yes! I thought there was another story but thought it was Beatrix Potter and Google said it wasn’t, so I decided I’d misremembered. Totally forgot the Aesop. But I did remember the grim realism of Peter Rabbit; so much more satisfying. “If you feed the wolf grass the wolf will decide not to eat you” … wut?
I suggest that a good antidote to the heart-warming little tale of Brenda is Potter’s ‘The Tale of Jemima Puddleduck’. I hope that Scottish father on the video gets round to reading that to his children before too long, or too late.
Well, I eat grass, but my dog only eats it when he’s ill. :D
There is a lot of variation on the classics, finding something novel is rare. “There is nothing new under the sun”, which is (probably hijacked also) Ecclesiastes 1:9 KJV
I’m not a fan of the bible, but it’s (as my father used to say) “a good story.” Not sure I agree with that either. :P
There’s also the tale told by an old Herdwick ewe in Potter’s ‘The Fairy Caravan’. It is about two silly lambs who fall into the beck and get washed away, manage to get on to a bit of strand below a steep, unclimbable bank, and a fox in disguise comes along with a crook and tries to wheedle them into being saved by it. Fortunately (as I recall), the real shepherd comes along in time.
Re-reading Jemima now. “Jemima Puddle-duck was a simpleton: not even the mention of sage and onions made her suspicious.”
And two of her saviours, the hound-puppies, gobble up all her eggs! No need for a savoury omelette for them!
I had to watch the whole video to see how it ends. Good to know that Brenda decides not to hurt anyone after they put her on a pedestal and completely centre her in everything. Now we know.
I’ve got to say though, the boys looked entirely unconvinced.
Wikipedia says the wolf in sheep’s clothing originated in the Bible and later was incorrectly ascribed to Aesop:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_in_sheep's_clothing
Most stories that have an Aesop feel eventually get credited to him.
As for the book, I kind of like it. Every book doesn’t necessarily have a lesson, and some children’s books have a bit of dark humor in them (which I think may be to entertain the adult reading it). I thought the sheep thinking Brenda was super awesome while Brenda was plotting to eat them the whole time was pretty funny. Brenda falling asleep while literally counting sheep was also amusing. The dumb sheep creating a big grass-based feast while Brenda slept, still oblivious to the true purpose of the feast, and still thinking Brenda was awesome, was a fine ending. Brenda decides not to eat them after all, at least that day. Does she later? Who knows. Probably.
Maybe the lesson, if any, is don’t be a dumb sheep. These sheep only avoided getting eaten by accident, after all.
Or maybe it’s actually against letting trans people into women’s spaces. If the parallels to trans people are not coincidental, then I think that would have to be the message. The “happy” ending is clearly framed as a fluke. So maybe the book is wickedly subversive (maybe it’ll come out that JK Rowling secretly wrote it).
Or maybe it’s just a funny story about dumb sheep.
In the end, I agree with Skeletor about the story, and it doesn’t surprise me to learn from Wikipedia that various stories were concocted by Christian theologians in an Aesopian style on the basis of the reference to ‘wolves in sheep’s clothing’ in the Bible – for there is no actual such story in the Bible, only the reference. I find the story of Brenda rather amusing and harmless, and think that that woman going through it on video is making a rather ridiculous meal of things. The father in reading it made it perfectly clear to his children that Brenda was in fact a rather nasty piece of work until her final enlightenment, even though it means all her remaining meals in life are going to be herbivorous (if she sticks to the diet, she’s not going to last very long, so perhaps the sheep have something up their woolly sleeves). He understood what the writer intended, and read it rather well.
A further story I recommend in connexion with Brenda, is ‘The Story-Teller’ by Saki, in which a young man, stuck in a railway compartment with three fed-up children and their hapless aunt, tells the children about a little girl who wins all sorts of medals for being ‘horribly good’ and is allowed into the Prince’s park, where children are not permitted, as a reward for her goodness. There she encounters a wolf. She flees, and hides herself in some bushes, where she is betrayed by the tinkling of all her medals for goodness and ‘devoured to the last morsel’. All that was left of her ‘were her shoes, bits of clothing, and the three medals for goodness,’
There is also ‘Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Homes’, which I much enjoyed in childhood, in one of which an exasperated father throws his three unruly children into a river, ‘Saying as he drowned the third,/ Children should be seen not heard.’
Stories were more robust in those days. And I suppose I was a thoroughly nasty child.
And the Gashlycrumb Tinies of course.
You may be right, it may be just a jokey story. I liked those as a kid (and still) but I also found some stuff unsettling or just plain scary. But now that I think about it the reason I liked the Mary Poppins books so much was her hilarious lack of sentimentality about and toward the children.
Ah, Edward Gorey & his gory endings!
I should add that the three children in the railway carriage in Saki’s story all thought, much to their aunt’s annoyance, that the tale told to them was the ‘most beautiful’ they had ever heard.
And just to brighten things up a little more, here’s a brief verse from ‘Ruthless Rhymes’ which had a picture of two sobbing aunts to go with it and whichI have never forgotten since reading it at the age of, I suppose, 7:
Willie in one his bright new sashes
Fell in the fire and was burnt to ashes.
Now the room grows cold and chilly,
We haven’t the heart to poke poor Willie.
There was also Struwwelpeter, which I also remember with great fondness, particularly the story of Matilda and the matches, and, the story of Little Suck-a-Thumb and his encounter with the Great Long-legged Scissors Man, which probably gave me a castration complex at an early age, but I shan’t get into that.