What is it about fairy tales that we love so much?
Is it the magical creatures we meet? The witch? The ogre? The enchanted princes? The swans and frogs and donkeys that are not what they seem? The triumphing of good over evil?
Or is it the journey? The hardships? The agonies and humiliation that the protagonist must suffer in order for goodness to prevail? Is it the clever helpers and the enchanted tools?
Or do we love the happy endings? Where the princess and her prince ride off into the sunset or the children are returned to their loving parents or the evil witch is vanquished and everyone can go back to living a normal life? Is that what make us love them so very much?….or is it something more, something…deeper?
What draws you into a fairy tale? What keeps you there? And, what, after all that, makes you remember it long after you’ve set it aside?
Fairy tales have been around since before man had a name to call them by. Some began life as parables, setting the example for children on what they should aspire to as functioning and contributing adult members of society. Some began as myths, meant to explain away some phenomenon or mysterious and beautiful person or place or thing. Many, though, began as legends, with their own small (in some cases, microscopically tiny) grain of truth.These evolved over time and telling until there were so many versions that one could never tell which was the original or where the truth lay hidden amongst all the lawful lies.
Thus it becomes redundant to point out that Disney was not the first to hook the beauty up with the beast or give the mermaid legs. But they did, in fact, fabricate many of the happy endings. The mermaid is given legs but every step is sheer agony and her prince chooses another over her. She ends up a wandering spirit, doomed to forever work for an angel’s wings that she will never receive. Rapunzel was actually knocked up by the prince, with twins no less, gets her hair hacked off as punishment and evicted by the witch. And children are always getting used and abused, especially by stepmothers.
The original fairy tales were quite gruesome with children being decapitated or horribly deformed or abandoned. Or women being trapped by ogres and witches and young men being transformed into swans or frogs or other things equally as undignified. Men were never changed into, oh, I don’t know, war horses, or dragons or some such. It always had to be a rather embarrassing animal. The women seem to be mostly airheads, or passive-aggressive, and if they do possess a brain, they must lose it in the end in order to get the happily-ever-package deal.
Enchantment or Brain washing? But still, we love them. We’re drawn back to them, again and again. We tell them to our children, we rewrite them, we make them into films and books and plays and paintings. The question is, in essence, why?
Why do we love fairy tales so much?
