faerie

   Something needs to be cleared up. I read quite a few blogs, and a couple of them have recently mentioned fairy tales, and I am somewhat confused as to what exactly people think fairy tales are. Fairy tales are not stories in which an incompetent damsel in distress gets rescued by a prince and suddenly has an amazing life. Sure, there are a couple that go along those lines, but more often than not fairy tales are stories about people coming through extreme peril using mainly straight-up ruthlessness and/or cleverness and/or kindness.

   To illustrate my point, here is a short list of some of the very clearly not "cute/clean little stories for children and impressionable teenage girls" features in some of the better-known fairy tales:

• When trying on the glass slipper, Cinderella's step-sisters cut off parts of their feet in order to fit into the shoe.
• The Little Mermaid commits suicide.
• At her wedding, Snow White forces her step mother to dance in red-hot iron shoes until she dies.
• Rapunzel gives birth to illegitimate twins in the desert by herself.
• Rapunzel's prince is pushed out of the tower by the witch, blinded and maimed on a thorn bush, and wanders homeless and lost for two years.
• In some versions of the story, Sleeping Beauty is impregnated and gives birth, all while still asleep.
• After being twice abandoned by their father, Hansel and Gretel are taken captive by a witch who plans to eat Hansel and teaches Gretel sorcery until Gretel pushes her into an oven and burns her alive.

   Let's sum this up: self-mutilation, suicide, cruel and unusual punishment, promiscuity, maiming, rape, abandonment, cannibalism, witchcraft, murder, and I could go on. I haven't even mentioned Bluebeard (who kills wife after wife and hangs their bodies in a locked room) or Baba Yaga (who lives in a house built on chicken legs and eats children) or Donkeyskin (who runs away from her father to avoid being forced into an incestuous relationship) or the Goose Girl (in which the villain is put in a barrel full of nails and dragged behind horses) or The Little Match Girl (who freezes to death alone in an alley).

   Let me disabuse you of the notion that fairy tales are cute stories in which a helpless, pretty princess is rescued by a handsome, morally upright prince and they go on to live happily ever after. Fairy tales are a lot of things, but they are not cute. Do they often involve love stories? Yes. Do they also involve a whooooole lot of murder and mayhem? Also yes. Interestingly enough, instances of the woman, the man, or people working together doing the rescuing are pretty even across the board. Don't try to feed me some idiocy that fairy tales are some sort of evidence that women just want to be rescued by men and then they'll be happy and fulfilled. If you say that, you clearly have not read very many fairy tales. Women rescue men, men rescue women, groups of people work together to achieve a goal, people rescue themselves, and sometimes no one is rescued and everyone comes to a grisly end.

   These stories are valuable not because they are supposedly full of happy, shiny people, but because they illustrate the human condition and tell tales of triumph over evil in the face of our own flaws and seemingly insurmountable odds. Cinderella relies on steadfastness and honesty. The Little Mermaid chooses self-sacrifice over self-seeking. Rapunzel finds and heals her prince, introduces him to his children, and they go on to rule a kingdom together. Characters in fairy tales, the good guys as well as the bad guys, do terrible things to each other and make mistakes and misjudge situations, but they stick to their guns and they learn fast and they pull through. I don't know about you, but I would way rather hear a story about someone who has flaws and learns and grows and comes out victorious than about a vapid shell of a human being relying solely on another to rescue them and provide "happily ever after".