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Happily Ever After
Old Tales, New Reality
With a growing brigade of young nieces and nephews in charge of my life, I have been re acquainted with fairytales. There are kings, queens, handsome princes and beautiful princesses. There are witches, elves, fairies and animals that can talk. Stories in which, without exception, someone gets poisoned or murdered or dies horribly. If no one is poisoned or murdered, then there is the huge chasm between the haves and the have-nots. The ugly princess is invariably the wicked princess (Snow White’s beautiful stepmother being the only noteworthy exception). The Little Mermaid throws herself into the sea instead of stabbing the cad Prince.
To keep from bursting a blood vessel on account of the political incorrectness that is rife in this children’s literature, it is vital to know where it is coming from.
During the nineteenth century, both fairy tales and childhood came to represent an elevated imaginary state. Earlier religious myths were transformed into a new myth of Original Innocence (in contrast to the myth of Original Sin). The child became the image of innocence in an Edenic state, as opposed to the fallen adult.
Fairy tales seem to address common human themes; they offer solutions, potential paths to be taken, and happy endings to be won. They have often been described as being “universal”. But in them we frequently find ideologies (about both gender and social class) that are far from liberating.
Modern scholars of fairy tales note that there is no ‘original’ version of a fairy tale. Elizabeth Wanning Harries (author of ‘Twice Upon a Tale: Women Writers and the History of the Fairy Tale’) has noted, “Though (fairy tales) may have roots in oral narratives, all the stories that we now call fairy tales have been written and rewritten, printed and reprinted over centuries.’
Each variant of a tale was unique to its circumstances, its geographic locale, its chronological period, its cultural norms, and the idiosyncrasies of its teller. Which means that each era tapered its fairy tales to suit the need of the hour, though a common thread continued to run through!
Maybe the real problem is not the outdated tales, but our own desire to chloform the tradition of storytelling and freeze its voice in some dated past. Maybe what we need to do is continue to tell the stories - as we need to hear them in our time.
As for the beautiful princesses and their ugly step-sisters, I just make it a point to add a footnote for my niece about how the ‘beautiful’ stands for personal qualities rather than a beauty queen face. A little unnecessary, really, considering that her favourite fairy tale of all is ‘Shrek’. Which, as anyone knows, is about an ogre who is the good guy, who wins the hand of the princess, who turns into an ogre in the end. And they live happily ever after. |
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©
mindfields 2007
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