Tuesday, September 25, 2007
It Just Doesn't Make Sense!
Over my breakfast porridge, I got to thinking: What is the point of Goldilocks and the Three Bears?
Sure, I know, there are various versions but in most of them she either gets away or is befriended by the bears. Typically, even sanitized fables have a moral.
Is it "Always lock your doors"? How about "If you're good looking, you can get away with anything."
Maybe its a professional criminal, Usual Suspects-type message: "Don't fall asleep when you're on a job or the bears (cops, Keyser Soze) will get you."
Or, at the other end of the law-and-order spectrum, maybe its a CSI message: "No matter how perfect your crime, you will always leave clues" e.g. broken chairs, eaten porridge.
Speaking of the porridge, that's something else that doesn't make sense. Wouldn't they have cooked the porridge in one big pot? Why is it all different temperatures? Even if we allow for different perceptions of temperature, does it make sense that a child would have the median perception between two adults?
And that whole 'going for a walk' business is totally loony. I mean, I get how going for a walk would make hot porridge colder, but how was it supposed to make cold porridge hotter? By either logic, the 'just right' porridge would have been ruined.
Mind you, these are bears we're talking about. We can't expect that they would have a good grasp of thermodynamics.
Maybe that's the lesson: "Blondes are even dumber than bears."
No, that still doesn't sound right. I think underlying all of this is that the women in the fable get exactly what they want. Going for a walk only really suited the Momma Bear. Goldilocks, in most versions, gets off scot-free.
So I guess the ultimate moral is actually pretty instructive for those of us in a family or a relationship: "Momma always gets what she wants."
posted by Mentok @ 9:49 a.m.,
12 Comments:
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At 12:35 p.m.,
cchang said...
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Why is it all different temperatures? Even if we allow for different perceptions of temperature, does it make sense that a child would have the median perception between two adults?
What the story leaves out are the specifics of the bowls themselves. Sure they may be small, medium and large by volume, but it speaks nothing of the insulation properties of the materials that the bowls were made out of nor how deep or wide the bowls were.
It could be that momma bear ate from a very wide and shallow bowl while Pappa bear ate from a deep well insulated bowl.
As for going for a walk and waiting for the temperatures of the porridge to change, they may have referred to the relative temperature of the porridge compared to the other bowls. I dunno...just speculating!
My moral I got from it: any kiddo named Goldilocks has got to be really irritating.... -
At 1:47 p.m.,
said...
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"Momma always gets what she wants."
Damn straight!
;-) I like that message. -
At 5:39 p.m.,
Library Mama said...
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If only it were so, Rachel, if only it were so...
:-) -
At 5:49 p.m.,
Rick said...
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It's a good thing there wasn't any brown sugar or raisins around. Then it would have been Goldilock treats for all the good little bears...
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At 4:56 a.m.,
said...
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it's funny you should write this. just yesterday i felt like goldilocks herself. i was trying to find/adjust a bike at the gym to my specifications and i couldn't do it. it took about three different bikes until it felt just right. i think the moral of the story is: persevere until you get exactly what you want! ;-)
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At 10:38 a.m.,
Mentok said...
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cindy - actually the story does tell us quite a bit about the properties of the bowls. Papa's is a "great big bowl", Mama's a "little tiny bowl" and Baby's a "medium sized bowl". It's no wonder Papa's porridge went cold quickly: his bowl had poor thermal properties!
Further, you may well be on to something with your "relative temperature" observation. Perhaps they grouped the bowls together, so that the over-hot porridge would warm the cold porridge and maintain the temp of the just-right bowl. This however would require that the too-hot bowl have good thermal transmission properties e.g. a metal bowl. This would risk the too-hot bowl cooling too quickly... but, again, they're bears so they may not have considered that.
rachel - glad you liked it!
librarymama - oh, it's so more often than you admit and you know it! ;-) (btw, thanks for the porridge this morning. It was just right!)
wankelrotaryengine - I'm sure there's an obscene gag in there about eating Goldilocks, but I'm not going there.
marcy - word of advice: do not work out at a gym frequented by bears. Seriously. You've been warned. -
At 3:58 p.m.,
FiL said...
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Ah, Goldilocks. Actually, the tale as we know it is a relatively recent one, first published in 1837 by Robert Southey. Southey's version had the three bears visited by a nasty old woman, who at the end of the story, jumps out a window. "And whether she broke her neck in the fall; or ran into the wood and was lost there; or found her way out of the wood, and was taken up by the constable for a vagrant as she was, I cannot tell. But the Three Bears never saw anything more of her."
So the original moral of the story: beware of ugly old women who squat in your house and eat all your porridge.
There is also a version, possibly way older, in which the visitor is a fox --a vixen named Scrapefoot to be precise-- and porridge is replaced by milk.
Moral of that version: er, um, beware of foxy ladies who suck you dry??
It wasn't until the mid-1850s that the intruder became a little girl, and 1904 saw the first appearance of Goldilocks herself. -
At 9:49 a.m.,
Mentok said...
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Fil - Yes, its amazing what you can learn on Wikipedia ;-)
You left out the part I found most interesting: in many of the earlier "old lady" versions, the old lady is referred to as "old Silverhair", which no doubt served as the inspiration for the name Goldilocks when the transition was made to a little girl character.
Your warning about nasty old ladies who squat in your house and eat all your porridge is well taken. And you, what are your plans for Thanksgiving? ;-) -
At 11:09 a.m.,
FiL said...
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Actually, while the quote and dates were lifted from the www, I did have some a priori knowledge; Dearest Wife has a Master's in folklore, and an interest in fairytales. Not sure when Southey/Scrapefoot lodged in my mind, but it may have been even pre-internet...
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At 11:41 a.m.,
Mentok said...
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Oops, sorry for sounding snotty, man. You know me... just goofing around.
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At 4:21 a.m.,
adam said...
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Goldilocks gets banned by the more insane fringe parent/teacher associations becuase *shock horror* she doesn't get punished for abusing somebody else's property. So there you go, it's not about mums or porridge or perseverence, it's about communism.
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At 5:25 a.m.,
adam said...
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Although, now I come to think of it, 'being woken up and then chased out into the forest by a family of hungry bears' sounds pretty much like punishment to me.
