Dwarfs and Giants in the Literature – Edge of Growth and Maturation

By Yael Darr

This is a summary of the EDGE meeting in December 2021. In the first part of the meeting, Dr. Sabine Hannema interviewed the parents of a transgender child. According to the parents’ request, this part of the talk was not recorded.

In the second part, Professor Yael Darr talked about dwarfs and giants in the literature.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ym5BwuL0zwI

Firstly, we need to think about dwarfs from a historical-cultural perspective. Prof Darr maps the 19th century as the time when stories about dwarfs rose. That was the time of the industrial revolution. Child labor was common during the early years of the Industrial Revolution. Trying to eliminate child labor, there was a debate about what is childhood? and what is adolescence? And what is the exact barrier between them? During the Victorian era in England the concept of childhood changed, lows were written about the age of consent for example. In 1875 the age of consent was 13 and it was changed to 16 years in 1885. This had an impact on the regulation of schools, working places, and very importantly the age of marriage and sex.

Dwarfs are little people but are not children. They do not have the traits that 19th-century romanticism gave children. Dwarfs are not necessarily cute they’re not necessarily nice. In a nutshell, I will discuss three classics that have small people as protagonists. The first one is Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Once it was published it became a canon It was first put on paper by the Brothers Grimm in 1812 although, of course, it was a folktale theme before.. Of note, the Brothers Grim collection was not written for children, rather they collected stories to write a history of old German poetry and to preserve history. Most of us are familiar with the Disney version of the story but the Brother Grimm’s version is dealing with the question of coming of age, and the dwarfs are not so important integral. In this version the dwarfs are men without sex, with no age, they are half old and half children, they do not have any romantic demands from snow white, they do not die, they are eternal/ essential children but they are not cute. In the Disney version, they have an important role, questioning the right way of a girl to become a woman. In 1937 snow white and the 7 dwarfs became the first full-length animated movie. In this version, the dwarfs are cute and childish, and snow-white is like a mother to them.

The second story is the Adventures of Alice in Wonderland. The story by Lewis Carroll, published in 1865, is a story about a child, who fluctuates with her height, and the attitude of all the surrounding creatures to these changes. Thus it is an example of how things change when you are a child or an adult, and what exactly makes the change; what is the threshold to maturity? Initially, Alice is cute and lovable and in the end, during her adventures, we change our feelings toward her. We do not know what to do with these phenomena of a growing child who becomes big or feels big and then being small. This is exactly what happens during adolescence. This is the way children and parents feel at the beginning of adolescence. Thus the fluctuation with height is not only with the protagonist but also with the readers. Lewis Carroll was the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. The story was written to Alice Liddell, the daughter of his friend. The book is so complex that no child can read it, so it is again a game of “heights”.

The third book is Peter Pan by James Matthew Berry, published in 1911, but is considered part of the 19th century. Peter Pan is a child who refused to grow and in this respect is very different. While things happen to Alice and she could do nothing about it, Peter Pan simply refuses to grow and raises the question on eternal childhood but also at the same time on death. James Barrie was six years old when his elder brother died in an accident at age 14 years. His mother never recovered and was deeply depressed. It is suggested that J. M. Barrie may have based the character of Peter Pan on his older brother, as his mother and brother thought of him as forever a boy. Of note, Peter Pan is not a lovable child, he is resentful and obnoxious. Its character is very different from the way we see it in the 21st century as a metaphor of eternal youth. This is another example of a text for children that in fact, its first version was a play that was on stage in 1904 several years before the book was published. It is different from a Bildungsroman, which is about a young person who grows and eventually integrate into society. This is a story about an orphans who does not have a real place in society and lives out in Neverland somewhere. In that respect, it is a very disturbing story.

In summary, we had dwarfs as little men but without masculinity and no age, we have a girl who is not a girl because she changes all the time, and a boy who refused to grow and is partly dead, he is not part of time and space. These examples were both threatening but also very interesting to the 19th-century’s readers because they made them think and rethink about modern childhood and maybe modern adolescence, and because through them, one can reassure the new concepts of the modern child that was so important in the 19th century. We can think, why is it that in the 20th century, we needed to make all these three examples much more likable and all these small people resemble children and resemble and evoke the feelings we feel towards children. We took away the ambivalent feelings that the little people evoked in the 19th-century stories.

Orit Hamiel

Some points were highlighted during the conversation

While in tales of the 15- 16th century society, most people were very short, and, most people didn’t live that long, the problem that we are facing as doctors in the 21st century did not exist in the past. This may explain why we have so many kinds of dwarfs or short people throughout the centuries. Currently, we are much more open to thinking about short stature as a handicap, and trying to correct it.
Physically the timing of puberty was much later in the 19th century than it is today, (average age even up to 17-18 plus the standard deviation the variation was much larger than it is today, many people, did not mature till the early 20s), however, there were so many orphan children, with no family and no parents to take care of them, that emotionally and socially they became grown up in a very early age. The fact that the rules of childhood and adolescence were defined at that time, may explain, why so many stories were written at that period because these ideas were just crystallizing and were not so clear-cut as they are today.
The 20th-century reinvention by Disney may portray the seven dwarfs as adults, they all have beards they’re clearly childish so they are like a combination. It is possible that in the 20th century we clearly portray them as grown-up vs children, whereas before maybe there it was less distinguished. Today, we know exactly what a child is but before it was much more amorphous.
Our dichotomy between being a child and being an adult may also have changed, perhaps we are more open-minded enabling children to be grownups a little bit and definitely for grownups to be infantile sometimes. In our times this clear-cut notion of ages is changing.
In many children’s books, they use a giant and dwarf to educate children to be kind to the small ones, and then. For example, the story about The Lion and the Mouse by Aesop shows that even the little ones can help the big ones, so the giants need to be kind to the small ones, and vice versa. Indeed children are small people as we say and they are the most important things in our life, but in fact, we control their lives from morning to night. Thus, the good stories about dwarfs or little animals enable them, to feel big and for at least five minutes or 10 minutes of the story, they feel empathy towards someone smaller than them. This is the role of all the pets that we find so many times in children’s stories
Interestingly whereas transgender people are now accepted in society, small people still get an injection to grow bigger, whether you like it or not, it is terrible they have to be treated and we do not need to ask the consent of the child before.
Environment and gender. It was emphasized that height is a cultural thing. A height that will be acceptable in Israel may be a problem in the Netherlands. Not only short stature is being perceived as a handicap, but people also ask to limit their height. So, it is not the actual height rather being like the others. There is also a matter of gender; for boys, it’s much more important to be taller than for girls, and vice versa, for girls it’s harder to be very tall.
It was noted that in young adulthood these problems are generally over, studies show that short adults are happy people.
Also it was noted that there is an impact of the formative years, ie. If one was always the shortest or just stopped growing early and thus has a notion of himself as a normal person despite being short.

Prof. Yael Darr is chair of the Master’s Program in the Research of Child and Youth Culture at Tel-Aviv University. Her research focuses on children’s culture in general and children’s literature in particular during the Jewish nation-building period in pre-state Palestine and the first decades of Israeli statehood. https://english.tau.ac.il/profile/yaelda

Dr Sabine Hannema is paediatric endocrinologist at the Centre for Atypical Sex and Gender Development at Amsterdam UMC since 2020. She is a board member of the Center of Expertise on Gender Dysphoria. Previously she was the endocrine lead of the gender clinic at Leiden University Medical Centre and worked in the DSD team at Erasmus University Medical Centre, Rotterdam. Her main areas of interest are DSD and transgender care.