2007-10-31 - 4:42 p.m.

Do you find there are some things that bother you from your childhood? Not the average things like "oh, God, my parents had sex", but odd things. I guess you could say the odd things were pretty average too; when you boil anything down you can get a simple psychological explanation for it. Whether or not that explanation is actually true is a whole other kettle of fish.

Anyway, I can think of a couple of things off the top of my head that really did me in as a kid. An inproportionate number of these have to do with traumatic animal death. ("Oh, please, not the book about the dead dog again. Please don't tell us about the story of the brained dog," comes the chorus.) One of those that doesn't, however, is from a fairytale, and feel free to pick it apart with as many Freudian complexes as you like. (For your convenience I have included some interpretation myself.)

So. When I was a kid, the version of Thumbelina that I was exposed to (dirty! Forcibly naked in front of a teeny tiny girlie? No wonder she's so..!) followed a somewhat disturbing story, whereby Thumbelina's woes begin when she is kidnapped in the middle of the night by a frog who wants to force her into marriage with the frog's son. Thumbelina has judo-skills, I guess, because she uses a reed to pole-vault/reed-vault her way to the bank. Some boring things happen for a while until she encounters an injured sparrow, and the only one nearby who can help is a kindly, if smelly, mole. The mole helps her and she helps the bird, and for some reason this means she really has an obligation to marry the mole, and even though neither is forcing the other into this, for some reason neither of them can actually pull out of it. WHY, I DO NOT KNOW. She's about to marry old/blind/smelly-but-sort-of-nice mole when the bird volunteers to fly her out of there (even though she's not being held against her will, so what the hell) despite the fact that this would injure him. 'What the heck,' says she, 'It's not like I wasted a winter tending to your health only to see my efforts wasted in an instant!' and they fly the coop. Er, fly the burrow-beneath-tree-root. Whatevs.

Now that I'm starting to relay this version I realise that Thumbelina is actually almost forced into marriage twice in one story, which, really, overkill much? (The forced marriage bits aren't the bits that disturbed me. They did not disturb me at all. Read into that what you will.)

So, after Thumbelina escapes, the bird (who she truly loved, by the way) goes on his merry way, and she goes on a journey of self-discovery. That, or she immediately meets a fairy prince - tiny, like her, except with wings! And a crown! And a prostate! Out of desperation she falls in love with him - I mean, you must understand that she is the only human being of her stature in the world, excluding Tom Thumb, and really, who'd want to have his kids? They go off and get married. Then the book ends, because that's the last page, with them wearing crowns and sucking dew drops from the surrounding bits of grass, or something.

Here's the bit that gets me: Thumbelina's elderly and normal-sized mother is never mentioned after she is kidnapped. I do understand this, somewhat - although she was, no doubt, hailing the police and asking the local gents to put up posters ('Lost: Tiny Girl. What? She's tiny! Very easily misplaced!') and wringing her arthritic hands all the while, the story is rather limited - a third-person narrator confined to first-person perspective with little attention given to the political background of the conflict therein cannot describe every last detail of/around the Thumbelina story. But, dude - her mum. Her mother isn't mentioned at the end of the book. And basically, to your very stupid five-year-old who doesn't care about the forced marriages (and thus obviously has very little reasoning ability), that means that Thumbelina never asked her husband, "King Gossamer, could we not hail the chalcone butterflies and their chestnut chariot to visit my dear mother? She lives a few hours away, it is true, but it would be very ungrateful to me to ignore the many more hours she spent tending to my wellbeing in previous years and, no doubt, those she has spent since in constant agony over her daughter's wellfare." Thumbelina never sent a teeny-tiny letter saying "I have not been sold as a minute slave! Fear not! Also I'm alive! Also sorry for not inviting you to your only child's wedding!"

Ungrateful brat!

(All jokes aside, seriously - it messed me up!)