Nursery Crimes

I

THAT the older generation is what it is surprises no one with any knowledge of psychology who has examined the pabulum upon which its members were nourished in their most impressionable years. In fact, it redounds to our credit that we are not more abandoned than we are when we consider that at a formative age we were taught to admire such things as Jack’s murderous requital of the giant’s hospitality, little Goldilocks’ atrocious greediness, and the unscrupulous mendacity of little Hans! Who could estimate, for instance, the effect upon our infantile morality of such tales as that of Grimm’s of the soldier who, by merely striking upon his tinder box, could have his dog, with eyes as big as saucers, convey to his bedroom whatsoever young lady pleased him and who, when finally detected by a sagacious counselor, thwarted justice by forcibly subverting the machinery of civic order?

It is to be wished for the honor of our parents that the prevalence of these vicious ideas in the tales and jingles taught us could be attributed solely to ignorance and thoughtlessness, but such a conclusion can hardly be reached by anyone who has examined the evidence with care and impartiality. There can be little doubt that for generations infants have been subtly poisoned with antisocial propaganda insidiously conveyed to them through the harmless-seeming media of nursery stories and rhymes. So much so that the more intrepid explorers of the psycho-sociological stratosphere do not hesitate to ascribe most of our current ills to this early indoctrination.

And if the evil is to be counteracted it must first be exposed and public attention called to its extent and danger. Much good work has already been done in this direction. Walt Disney, for example, has shown us how subtly bourgeois morality was conveyed into every nursery through the tale of the three little pigs, and although his commendable turning of ’The Ant and the Grasshopper’ into socialistic and NRA-ish channels was a happy thought, it but served to emphasize the ruthless propaganda for rugged individualism contained in the older version.

These tales, however, are less harmful in that they do not generally reach us before the age of three or four. It is to the nursery rhymes, the very bases of our mental fabric and social attitudes, which are taught us much earlier, that we must look for the more dangerous influences. ‘Let me write a nation’s songs,’ a sage observed, ‘and I care not who writes its laws.’ And certainly the forces which dictated the baneful ballads of our bassinets were sinister!

What objectionable practices, for instance, are condoned in ‘ Higgledypiggledy, my son John’ and ‘Little Polly Flinders’! Surely the amused toleration of sleeping in one’s trousers and sitting among the cinders could not be without a deleterious effect upon the child’s later attitudes toward public sanitation and social hygiene! And in the latter there is a noticeable trace of that sadism which is all too common in these little poems. It is found again, for example, combined with hysteria, in ‘Three Blind Mice,’ where a foolish farmer’s wife, after yielding to an absurd phobia, seeks satisfaction in mutilating the former objects of her terror. This inculcation of harmful fears is also observable in ‘Little Miss Muffet.’

In so far, of course, as the attitudes and complexes engendered affect only the individual, they are the concern of the psychologist and the psychoanalyst, but there can be little doubt that in the subliminal depths of our nurseries forces are deliberately at work to condition the child’s social attitudes. And these forces are directed and controlled by those to whose advantage it is to maintain the status quo and to continue the old system of capitalistic and bourgeois oppression of the masses. The evidence lies plainly before us in the nursery rhymes.

Is it merely the exigency of rhyme, think you, that compels Higgledypiggledy, my black hen, to lay eggs but for gentlemen? Or is there not a direct implication that the proletariat is not entitled to a substantial breakfast?

And does not Simple Simon (simple indeed!) symbolically set forth the luckless unemployed? That the pieman, the capitalist, should be pictured as en route to a merrymaking at the very moment of his callous refusal is indicative of the coarse frankness with which the possessing classes avow their selfishness.

And what shall we say to the underhand manner in which the incompetence of the worker, and hence his lack of right to a share of this world’s goods, are suggested in such verses as ‘Jack and Jill,’ ‘Little BoyBlue,’ and ‘ Little Bo-Peep ’ ?

II

Perhaps it is as well to treat the subject in a purely scientific manner by quoting some of these rhymes, once in every child’s mouth, and appending a brief note in which the underlying force and the psychological effect are considered. Not that there is a great need of protecting modern children from them, — fortunately they are falling into disuse, — or any possibility of informing their educators; but merely as a means of understanding the source of many of the debased proclivities of our contemporaries and their social consequences.

The following dozen are typical and will serve as well as any: —

Here we see, held up for the delectation of the young, a representation of someone, apparently a member of the leisured classes, wandering about a house in a state of dangerous aimlessness and indolence, boldly disregarding all privacy. In the course of this peregrination he chances upon an elderly man upon whom he attempts to force his own religious practices and, not meeting with immediate and slavish acquiescence, proceeds to employ brutal violence.

Surely this is the nurture of fanaticism !

Obviously a picture of a sullen and inhibited child, who, conscious of his own greediness and execrable table manners, soothes himself with dangerous self-laudation. Students of the subject are undecided, but it is not unlikely that there is a sinister political suggestion in the approval expressed at the obtaining of the plum in a manner which openly defies convention.

That corruption in office is regarded with complacency by the majority of our citizens need no longer astonish us.

A disgustingly jocular acknowledgment of the most vicious practices in child rearing, calculated to produce an entire nation of neurotics. It would take seven psychoanalysts seven years to undo the harm done by this ignorant mother!

Passing over the vulgar ostentation of the first few lines and the intimation of the atrocious cuisine which would leave the birds so underdone, we find put forth for the amusement of the young an account of avarice and gluttony in high places. In neither king nor queen is there any suggestion of social responsibility, and the phrase ‘his money’ is deliberately misleading. While the monarch gloats over extorted pelf, no doubt wrung from horny-handed peasants, and his degenerate consort pampers herself in greedy sloth, the worker, upon whose efforts their cleanliness and health depend, is foully mutilated by what was most probably an escaped victim of their bizarre appetites and barbaric cookery. And yet they manifest no concern!

Such literature is the food of young Harrimans and Romanoffs!

This famous old rhyme belongs to a group which, though apparently innocuous, is really the most dangerous of all. Verses in this group, such as ‘The Man in the Moon came down too soon’ and ‘Pease porridge hot,’ are composed of colossal masses of absurdity and are intended to destroy the last vestiges of the child’s truth sense so that he may easily be led to regard the stock exchange as a safe road to wealth and the present state of society as in every way desirable.

Closely allied are other poems which encourage the young to indulge in those irrational hopes upon which the predatory members of society subsist. Here we would place ‘If wishes were horses’ and ‘Bobbie Shaftoe.’ The latter is particularly illustrative in the confident manner in which it predicts that Shaftoe, despite the fact that common experience ascribes to seafaring men a course of conduct diametrically opposite, will fulfill his matrimonial obligations.

Here we see the crowded and unsanitary living conditions of the proletariat, their prolificity and their meagre diet, treated with a hardhearted levity. That the old woman did not know what to do about her excessive fecundity would only earn her the scorn of the inmates of any modern nursery. The suggestion of sadism, so often an accompaniment of the overstrained nerves and enfeebled constitutions of the poor, gives a macabre touch to the grim picture.

When this is the stuff of risibility for bourgeois juveniles we need not wonder at revolutions!

An interesting illustration of the state of affairs all too prevalent under the bourgeois sex morality. Here, instead of innocent and natural love play, we see the attitude engendered by the parental teaching of shame. Georgie, though from his cognomen we may assume him to be somewhat heavy and phlegmatic, is possessed of normal instincts and emotions. When, however, he proceeds to allow these their natural expression, the girls, warped by a perverse morality, pretend pain instead of pleasure. This, of course, has its effect upon Georgie, who, finding his natural feelings inhibited, becomes introverted and shuns the society of his playmates.

There is little doubt that we have here the root of much of the need for the expensive system of asylums and mental hospitals which our decadent society must support.

An unequivocal expression of that inability to realize the necessity for consumption which lies at the bottom of the collapse of the capitalistic system.

Surely it is not going too far to attach profound symbolic significance to this rhyme and to feel that it had much to do with forming the characters of our present leaders. It may be said to epitomize the whole Victorian attitude toward the shadows cast by coming events.

It is dreadful to think that this instance of the mistreatment of a worker is taught to babes as a merry song! Jenny’s wages are to be cut below the level of subsistence because of her effort to maintain a rate of production that would ensure continued employment. There is much uncertainty regarding Margery Daw, but as ‘see-saw’ carries an unmistakable suggestion of the fluctuations of dividends it is generally assumed that she was an irate stockholder whose greed initiated the oppressive measures.

Or

This attempt to suggest the sound of money in all things, even in the harmless ringing of the bells, may well account for the mercenary attitude so characteristic of the bourgeois. The inexorable demand for so trifling a sum is exceeded in baseness only by the flat refusal of the one version and the despicable evasion of the other.

That national obligations were repudiated and the gold standard abandoned by adults whose infancy had been thus conditioned should surprise no one who has made a study of psychology.

What a complete illustration of the unenlightened attitude toward women! The wooer, after tickling the young lady’s vanity by an allusion to her coiffure, attempts to induce her to become his chattel by assuring her that, denied any share in their common labor and reduced to enervating indolence, she shall waste her time and ruin her eyesight on worthless needlework while she is pampered with a dangerous diet of fruit, sugar, and fat which will serve only to obviate in time the need for the cushion.

III

A dark picture indeed! And one that would deny all hope of emancipation were it not that the indomitable spirit of man has injected a ray of truth even into the profoundest depths of tyranny. ’Old Mother Hubbard,’ for instance, infuses a salutary touch of economic realism into the nursery which has done much to counteract some of the pernicious doctrines alluded to above, while the bold application of Communism by the Knave of Hearts has, as many mothers can testify, stirred the more vigorous of the young to emulation. Even Tom the Piper’s son, though his lack of technical proficiency is to be deplored, shows a splendid disregard of vested interests, and Little Tommy Tittlemouse, who, we are told, caught fishes in other men’s ditches, deserves to be ranked among the village Hampdens for his brave struggle against feudal privilege. In these and a few others we see the beginnings of that glorious counter-propaganda which in our neo-nurseries is sweeping all before it.