The Ongoing Relevance of Fairy Tales
by Joshua Fagan
Where fairy tales originally came from is contentious. The debate extends back at least to the nineteenth century and covers disciplines from comparative mythology to anthropology. A psychologist like C.G. Jung views these stories as emerging from the waters of the unconscious, illuminating all the “wants, fears, and longings that have accumulated down there,” reversing the “stagnation and desiccation of soul.” A social historian like Robert Darnton, conversely, views the dramatic stakes of these stories as emerging from a morose historical environment where desperate people “hired themselves out,” and “did odd jobs, and took to the road, picking up work wherever they could find it.” More important than the origins of tales, though, is the fact that they are still here and still relevant.
This relevance manifests in some ways that are vastly different than in ancient days. Children in a small German village five hundred years ago did not experience the luscious colors and elegantly lilting tunes of classic Disney movies. The internet and social media did not exist then, and the spread of stories occurred at a slower rate. A German child could listen to a certain set of stories from the honeyed voice of a grandmother and never realize that children across the world in China listened to their grandmothers too and received different stories. Perhaps more intriguingly, that child would not realize that the likes of Cinderella have a close equivalent in other cultures. In Germany, there is the story of “Aschenputtel,” while China has the very similar story of “Ye Xian.”
Still, there are certain ways in which the diffusion of stories has not changed that significantly. Children still hear these stories from their older relatives, or perhaps the relatives of friends. Every one of these versions is a little different, but the basic elements of the story remain similar. Even subversions or parodies of the original tales depend for their relevance on the recognizability of the original stories. A relevant question to ask is why. Does this retelling simply occur out of a lack of creativity? Do generations refer to tradition because they do not have the imagination to think of new stories? Not particularly.
These stories are retold because they continue to register emotionally. Their essence does not decay or fade in relevance even though the agrarian, perilous settings in which many fairy tales occur differ substantially from the relatively safe and secure worlds of contemporary childhood. Arguably, these stories have more relevance now, because they represent a vanished world. Fantasy stories in the Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones mold still proliferate, many of them set in the medieval past, but they are fundamentally modern stories told in modern ways. Fairy tales preserve the sensibility of a distant age that genuinely experienced the world as bizarre and enchanted, filled with unknowable natural environments that emphasize the limitations of human knowledge.
Characters in these tales do not think like modern adventurers. The encounter with fantastical creatures does not cause an epistemological crisis. They simply accept the world as fantastical and bizarre at its center. In fact, they spend less total time thinking and ruminating about their choices and experiences. Cinderella does not spend time reconsidering whether her fairy godmother is real or expressing anxiety over what will occur after she visits the ball. She simply follows the opportunities afforded to her. Directness and immediacy dominate these stories. The stakes are high, failure associated with poverty and starvation, and success associated with astounding wealth. In Hansel and Gretel, for instance, starving and abandoned children outsmart a witch who attempts to eat them, then kill her and take her immense wealth. These stories offer opportunities for action and wit and individual courage. Perhaps Darnton is right, and these stories appealed to premodern audiences primarily because they directly related to difficult, real experiences of lost children and broken families. Such an explanation does not, however, provide clarity regarding why these stories continue to appeal to children and even to adults.
A degree of nostalgia certainly animates the appreciation for fairy tales; reconnecting with them is a way of reconnecting with how people felt back then. Giants did not roam the earth then, but people genuinely believed that they did. Ghosts may not have visited the dead, but belief in the supernatural was much more widespread and visceral. There was the potential for unmediated action, for wandering through an unknown and unexpected world, that does not exist today, when lives are much more regimented and orderly. Even trips to distant countries, so much more convenient now, usually entail a GPS and a travel guide. As Thomas Carlyle wrote, the efficiency-obsessed modern world is one where nothing “is now done directly, or by hand; all is by rule and calculated contrivance.”
Still, the appreciation of fairy tales is not only nostalgia for the credulity and intensity of experience that defined a premodern age. Children, listening to fairy tales for the first time, do not enjoy them out of direct appreciation for the distant past, for that era “once upon a time,” but simply because they find the tales interesting and exciting. They want to hear a good story, no more or less. Fairy tales register as “good stories” for successive generations of children, demonstrating a remarkable consistency in what constitutes a “good story.” Action, excitement, danger, and wonder are all common. Dreariness, unredeemed despair, and inaction are not.
As Matthew Arnold wrote, the “outward man of Oedipus or of Macbeth, the houses in which they lived, the ceremonies of their courts,” are distant from modern life, but these details matter less than “their inward man; with their feelings and behavior in certain tragic situations.” The trappings of compelling stories change throughout the ages, but the essences of these stories remain. He argues that enduring stories derive from their capacity to “powerfully appeal to the great primary human affections.” Stories that occur in a mythologized past are not more distant than those that occur in contemporary America, because the external details of a story matter less than the story’s capacity to appeal to emotions and desires that endure across generations.
This paradigm is no less true for kids than it is for adults. Externally, fairy tales differ significantly from the ordinary lives of children who take piano lessons and complete math homework. Even in the days when kids tromped through the woods without the intensive supervision of helicopter parents, they were more likely to find insects or weird plants in their peregrinations than fairies or enchanted lands. Still, they relate to the wonder and mystery in fairy tales. Their imaginative minds can still connect with situations vastly unlike their own because the basic emotions still register.
Andrew Lang, Victorian folklorist and ardent defender of the fantastical, wryly notes that “not only boys and illiterate people, but even critics not wholly illiterate, can be moved by a tale of adventure.” Beneath the sophistication and subtlety of an anxious and diffuse world, Lang implies, a portion of the mind still yearns for the visceral passion and wonderment conveyed in fairy tales. Admittedly, adult audiences also appreciate stories that deal with a stifling, fragmented modern world. These are stories of constant rumination and unease, where clear right answers do not exist, the depths of others and even one’s own mind are unknown, and the human spirit is ultimately impotent when confronted with apathetic, labyrinthine structures of power. Writers like Kafka, Dostoevsky, and Virginia Woolf capture these internal stories brilliantly. Such stories deserve to exist, as they stimulate the mind and add to the understanding and illumination of the psyche. Yet the other kind of story, focused on adventure, immediate physical peril, and heroic action in confronting towering monsters and outrageous odds, still has significance, even for adults. It appeals to a part of the mind that appreciates and even yearns for more direct stakes, between starvation and eternal renown.
Writers can even combine the two kinds of stories. Fairy tales are ultimately mutable, being relatively simple blueprints that storytellers can mold. Disney has produced famous adaptations of the tales, but that is all they are: adaptations. A grandmother telling Snow White to her kids in a farmhouse in Missouri or an apartment in the Bronx is also an adaptation, and no less valid. The basic story format remains known, but the telling transforms it. An urban twenty-first century audience responds to Hansel and Gretel differently than an agrarian nineteenth century audience did. Feminist retellings of the stories have proved particularly prevalent, as demonstrated by writers like Margaret Atwood and Angela Carter.
These stories, timeless but timely, contain exhilarating depictions of striving and adventure and poignant depictions of mysterious beings from distant worlds, fairies and trolls and selkies, but they also provide sturdy narrative foundations. Any storyteller, professional writer or not, can imaginatively breathe new life into these tales, re-creating them for the current age. Whatever the origins of these tales, they continuously appeal to an interest in experiences outside the predictable routines and conventions of life, and that interest is not likely to fade.
Joshua Fagan is a writer and critic currently residing in Scotland. His creative work has previously been published in venues including Daily Science Fiction, The Fantastic Other, and Star*Line. He is the author of the Amazon bestseller The Philosophy of Avatar, an extended study of Avatar: The Last Airbender in the context of the Western philosophical tradition. As an academic, his work focuses on the intersection of literature, myth, and technology in the aftermath of Darwin, and he has published a variety of articles on writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as William Morris, H.G. Wells, and Robert Frost. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of the literary speculative-fiction publication Orion’s Belt.