Houses of Horror: Domestic Dangers and Man-made Monsters

Abstract

The scary side of fairy tales is often obscured, yet far from being conceived as cosy bedtime reading for children, they originally aimed to entertain listeners of all ages, and a number of gory and gruesome features remain. Monsters may take various forms, but are perhaps most frightening when presumed care-givers are shown to deviate from their role. Child abuse, cannibalism, murder and incest are but some of the crimes that feature in these tales: terrors conspicuously located in the family home — making them veritable houses of horror for imperilled protagonists. The frequent appearance of familial foes has prompted folklorists and psychoanalysts to offer various explanations. Why make mothers and fathers into threatening figures, and turn a place usually associated with security into a dangerous realm protagonists must escape? Do such narratives exaggerate common childhood fears as a means of voicing repressed anxieties, perhaps hoping to incite a level of maturity via characters who are forced to leave their homes and fend for themselves? Or do they voice other (often unspoken) ideas via their manifestly unhappy families? As Angela Carter notes in her introduction to The Virago Book of Fairy Tales: Fairy-tale families are, in the main, dysfunctional units in which parents and step-parents are neglectful to the point of murder and sibling rivalry to the point of murder is the norm.