Cabinet Des Fees: an opinion

I've read nearly all the stories on Cabinet Des Fees, and found it an interesting experience. Nearly all of them are fairy tales (with a few myths thrown in), and I find that I disagree with the authors on one key point. I believe in fairy tales. I don't think them literally true, but I think they communicate deep truths (I've written about this at some length in this blog*). I try to take each version on its own merits, because I don't think there is a definitive version of nearly all fairy tales (the exception being those recently created by a particular author, such as George MacDonald's Little Daylight), and I like Andrew Lang's colored fairy tale books, the Grimm Brothers, Jack Zipes translations from the French of some of the oldest versions of Beauty and the Beast, Robin McKinley's retellings of Beauty and the Beast, and the Disney cartoons of Snow White and Cinderella, to name a few. But one characteristic that these share is the traditional fairy tale tropes of virtue being rewarded, beauty and good being inextricably linked, justice always being exacted, and so on. These modern fairy tales almost universally are cynical. We find that Cinderella was an evil genius, or that the stepmother in Snow White was misunderstood and wrongfully condemned. I think it is good to question assumptions, but these are not the fairy tales that I love, because the essence is not there. Cinderella is not Cinderella if she is not good. Snow White is an unfulfilling tale, and loses rather than gains over the familiar tale if justice does not triumph in the end. If the witch in Hansel and Gretel was not evil but merely misunderstood, then the story is no longer a fairy tale. I found these stories unsatisfying. I think there are deeper truths that the familiar stories tell, instead of these poor, cynical, broken hearted stories (incidentally, I think Shrek has many of these same problems), and these seemingly more realistic stories miss much that the Disney stories capture.

There are, of course, dangers inherent in desiring to be Snow White or Cinderella, and it seems I have often heard women saying that you shouldn't expect a knight in white armor or a charming prince. In answer to that, I merely wonder if we have misunderstood the fairy tales, and forgotten that it is only a virtuous princess who may rightfully win a happy ending (and it rarely comes easily). Fairy tales don't say that life is always easy, but they do say that it is ultimately good, and that there is justice.

It is too easy to swing between extremes, to say that fairy tales are only stories for children and that there is nothing of substance in them, or to say that all fairy tales are the oldest, darkest versions in which Red Riding Hood is eaten and Sleeping Beauty wakes up pregnant. The truth is that fairy tales are good for children, because they are true, and as Lewis shows much better in Voyage of the Dawn Treader, stories about dragons (such as fairy tales) are the right sort of stories. I don't throw away a story merely because I liked it as a child. Some of them I find really aren't that good, but the more I read good stories, like Narnia, the more truths I find within them. But I've never outgrown fairy tales, or seen through them. I've added more, and more grown up fairy tales to my bookshelf. I will take my fairy tales light (although with substance), or dark (although with hope, like Hamlet or King Lear), but I won't take them cynical.


*for more of my thoughts of fairy tales, see the seventh fairy, formula in fairy tales, on the subject of being rescued, the Fey, love and beauty, why read fairy tales?, the beautiful princess, and happily ever after