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In her cultural history of ugliness, Gretchen Henderson describes how, in fairy tales, ugliness is often ‘counterpointed with beauty, to delineate good from evil’. Thankfully, the children we teach are growing up in a post-Shrek world – in which the equation between good and bad and beautiful and ugly isn’t as clear-cut as once it might have been. However, we still have a long way to go in challenging the prevalence of this idea in children’s culture.
So many of our fairytales still adhere to only one vision of beauty: drawings of Cinderella I observed, in picturebooks and in children’s artwork, when I was teaching in nursery and Reception, were still overwhelmingly thin, white and blonde.
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