AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
![]() ![]() ![]() So he crouched down by the side of the house and waited. Now it chanced that a Wolf was passing close under the window as this was said. "If you make that noise again I will throw you to the Wolf." "Be quiet now," said an old Nurse to a child sitting on her lap. Could this tale even have something to do with - dare we say it - penis envy?Īnother possible interpretation - the suppressed desire of the harried mother to be free of her maternal responsibilities - surfaces in variations in which both children are harmed: ![]() Maybe the daughter is identified as the older of the two children to emphasize that she really knows her mother's threat isn't a literal one, but she acts on it anyway out of sibling rivalry. Perhaps this legend addresses male fears of (literal) emasculation in a world dominated by women. This version serves as a warning to parents: Watch what you say around your children, because they don't possess an adult's ability to comprehend the subtleties of oral communication - they understand (and act) on a much more literalīut is that all that's really going on here, a simple warning to parents to watch their language? That both examples presented above involve a mother (but no husband) and a daughter who maims or kills her younger brother brings some interesting psychological interpretations to mind. (A classic example is the innocent defendant on trial for murder in a "Perry Mason" courtroom drama, who tries desperately to explain under relentless cross-examination that even though he once shouted "I'm going to kill you!" at the victim in the course of a heated argument, he didn't really mean it literally.)Ī straightforward reading of this legend presents an extreme example of this phenomenon, involving a child who is too young to understand that a threat made by her exasperated mother wasn't meant literally and acts on it, with tragic results. Sometimes such exclamations come back to haunt us, especially when they're repeated out of context. Something we never meant to be taken literally, words we later came to rue. Origins: We've all said in a fit of anger When she returned, the porthole was open, the baby was gone, and her daughter slept blissfully. In desperation, she shouted: "If you don't shut up, I'll put you out of the porthole." This seemed to quiet the child, and she went for her meal. She was trying to settle them in their bunks for the night so that she could go off for dinner, but the baby refused to stop crying. He almost bled to death.Īt the beginning of the war, a young mother sailed for Ireland with her two young children, a girl of five and a baby of two. So one day, when the children's mother was away, the boy wet again, and the girl took up a pair of shears and cut it off. Unfortunately, she was overheard by the boy's older sister. Despite scoldings, he resisted toilet training until his exasperated mother warned: "If you don't learn, I'm going to cut if off." The most horrible tale I remember concerned "the little boy who wet." Depending on the version, he was two or three years old. ![]()
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |