«The
notion of violence in child-lore»
Author:
Begaidarova A., supervisor: Bakir D.A.
In Kazakhstan the interest to folklore problemshas
amplified in interaction with cultural wealth of various ethnoses. There are
kinds of art cultures with a print of a polyethnic environment as
representatives of various nationalities live in our sovereign republic, but in
our investigation we give special attention to Russian ethnos, its national
children's folklore.
This, or child-lore, is the generic term used to refer to children's own
folklore, as distinguished from folklore-about-children or folklore taught to
children by adults (e.g. nursery rhymes). Children as a social group clearly
have a very wide range of cultural traits and material, which mirror the adult
world, but the fact that much of their learning is done through informal
channels, and that they have genres, such as games and rhymes, which are
lacking in the adult world, makes them a particularly rewarding area of
research for the folklorist.
The first English scholar to take a real interest in children's lore was
J. O. Halliwell, whose The Nursery Rhymes of England (1842) and The
Popular Rhymes and Nursery Tales of England (1849) presented hundreds of children's
rhymes, songs, narratives, and other verbal lore to an adult audience for the
first time and provided the basis for most subsequent discussion in that area.
The Opies published a string of books which immediately became standard works,
including Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (1959). Lore and Language, in particular,
widened the horizons of child-lore researchers to include superstitions,
calendar, customs, nicknames, taunts, jokes, riddles, truce terms, and so on.
In the early and mid-20th centuries this was a form of bowdlerization,
concerned with some of the more violent elements of nursery rhymes and led to
the formation of organizations like the British 'Society for Nursery Rhyme
Reform'. Psychoanalysts such as Bruno Bettelheim strongly criticized this
revisionism, on the grounds that it weakened their usefulness to both children
and adults as ways of symbolically resolving issues and it has been argued that
revised versions may not allow them to imaginatively deal with violence and danger.
The notion of violence in
child-lore !!!our interest. We compare and
determine elements of violence in Russian and English children’s folklore. It
is rather difficult to examine the conditions of violence, its mechanisms and the most frequent
forms of its manifestation, but in the same time very interesting to identify
lexical and literary means of expressing violence and define their role in the
creation of the semantic field of violence in the child-lore of
English and Russian speaking kids.
In our work we consider the
conditions of violence, a
classification of its types and forms, the most frequent incidents of terror,
as well as the role of emotions and phobic experiences. Here we address the
issue functional-semantic field, as well as investigate the lexical and
literary tool creates a semantic field of
fear in the rhymes.
Continue to be popular in the children's environment of a horror story.
Their plots basically are traditional. Children freely improvise, leaning for
the settled images and plots, adding the experience of experiences. Till now in
folklore there are serious researches and classification widespread in the
children's environment, including so-called "cruel" verses ("a
horror story"). We present an original material on cruel verses and the
comparative analysis of English-speaking and Russian-speaking horror stories is
presented. Preliminary they can be characterized as the oral rhymed children's
verses of a conditional-realistic orientation which do not have firm
installation on reliability. Let's dare to assume that genetically cruel verses
go back to «actually äðàçíèòü», but differ under the form: horror stories are prosaic products, and
cruel verses possess the poetic form:
Ìàëåíüêèé ìàëü÷èê áîìáó
íàøåë –
«ÒÓ-104» â Ìîñêâó íå ïðèøåë.
(Ê.Íîâàòîâ, ã.Øûìêåíò,1996)
The subjects of cruel verses are very various: sociopolitical,
military-applied, about "kind" people, about the unlucky boy, about
the bad father (uncle).
Quatrains (is more rare âîñüìèñòèøèÿ) cruel verses are sated
by expressive lexicon, the syntactic designs peculiar to bookish way of
speaking. At the heart of cruel verses, as well as at the heart of occurrence
of horror stories the psychological and esthetic factor (requirement tragical),
but already taking into account age features lies. If to horror stories
children at the age from 6 till 12 years the prerogative of execution of cruel
verses was fixed to children of 12-13 years, mainly boys address.
There is a problem with this
explanation, though. The violence in children’s rhymes is often not perceived
by the children as cruelty. To the child reciting the rhyme, the violence is
funny. For example, children sing the song, “Little Chickie” with obvious
enjoyment:
Oh,
I had a little chickie and he wouldn’t lay an egg
So I poured hot water up and down his leg.
Oh, the little chickie cried and the little chickie
begged
And the little chickie laid a hard-boiled egg.
Now comes the main
question. Why do children prefer some of the elements to others? Most of the
reasons are fairly straightforward. Violence is the favored element in
children’s rhymes. But it is also the favored element in ballads, in
folk-tales, on television, and in books.
I will conclude this
article with some suggestions for further research. First, more collections
should be analyzed to determine more accurately the average percentage of
violent elements. Collections from
different cultures should also be analyzed. Other individuals’ repertoires
should also be collected and analyzed to see whether temperament affects the
frequency of these violent elements.
References
1. Bagizbaeva M.M.
«Ôîëüêëîð ñåìèðå÷åíñêèõ êàçàêîâ ×1», Àëìà-Àòà 1977.
2.
Martha Wolfenstein notes in Children’s
Humour: A Psychological Analysis (1978: 138, 143).
3.
Diana Heyer Gainer
«Folklore and Mythology Program» University of California Los Angeles, CA