Poisoned by These Fairy Tales

In their song “The End of the Innocence” Bruce Hornsby and Don Henley tell us that “we’ve been poisoned by these fairly tales” because “happily ever after fails”. Most of us can relate because we’ve suffered enough pain to know that every chapter of our lives certainly does NOT end with a happy ending. So it would be easy to blame the fairly tales that tell us that happy endings are what we can expect. These days we are less offended by the idea of happily ever after than what we see as oppression, sexism, patriarchy, etc. That is the new poison and it seems that Hollywood feels the need to rewrite these stories in a way that turns these injustices upside-down. But have we actually been poisoned by these tales or are we too aliterate (not illiterate) or anemic to understand them properly? I will argue the latter. J.R.R Tolkien says that retained in these stories is the moral order of the actual universe. But most of us just read them (or watch them) from a limited and untrained perspective.

The feminists are angry with the message they perceive as implying every woman needs a man to rescue her. The marginalized feel misunderstood and oppressed. The children feel abused under the heavy hand of patriarchy. Lions and tigers and bears oh my! These are not the correct messages of these ancient and brilliant stories.

Over the last decade, I have spent a lot of time in children’s literature as well as the classics. I have found a treasure trove of stories that help shape our imaginations toward the good, the true, and the beautiful. You do have to know what you are looking for however, because there are even more books that don’t convey the right ideas about how the world has been ordered.

In the last several decades we have suffered from the Disney Effect. This is the idea that old stories have been adapted to better suit our current sensibilities. Let’s take the classic fairy tales like Cinderella and Snow White. Disney thought the Grimm’s version were, well, too grim, so they adapted them to fit what they thought parents would better appreciate. Some would say the Grimm versions were too violent and scary for young children. Most of us grew up on these adaptations and don’t even know how different they are from the original stories. I say original but the truth is the Grimm brothers didn’t write the stories themselves exactly. They collected them from all over the world and compiled them in a way that best conveyed the story (for example, nearly every culture has a Cinderella story). So I guess you can say they edited the stories they found around the world. If you have never read any of the original Grimm’s tales I would suggest you get a copy to see the difference for yourself.

Disney wasn’t the first to adapt these stories however. George Cruikshank, a British illustrator who worked with Charles Dickens, adapted many of these ancient stories in the 19th century. Dickens wrote an article entitled “Frauds on the Faires” in which he called out his friend for his “interpolations” upon these old tales. He states, “It is a matter of grave importance that the fairy stories be respected… and as much preserved in their simplicity and purity and innocent extravagance, as if they were actual fact.” Apparently Cruikshank was altering the stories to better reflect a morality he deemed superior to the original text. Dickens understood then that this was a slippery slope of what C.S. Lewis calls “chronological snobbery”. Dickens goes on to say, “Whosoever alters them (the fairy tales) to suit his own opinions, whatever they are, is guilty of an act of presumption, and has appropriated to himself what does not belong to him.”

So what’s my point in all this? Remember above when I said Disney adapted the stories to better fit what was then the current sensibilities? The first one, Snow White, was filmed in 1937, Pinnochio in 1940, Sleeping Beauty in 1959 and on and on it goes throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. Well guess what happens when culture’s sensibilities change? Our adaptations have to change in order to fit our current moral framework. This is what is happening with our current adaptions of the classics. I’ve had many people over the last couple months ask me if I’ve seen Wicked and if so what I thought. I’m honestly not sure how to respond because I know how surprised, and possibly even offended, they will be if I tell the truth…that I hated it. But most of them can’t tell me what they liked about it either, except for the music and the theatrics. One critic correctly stated that it was so “aggressively colorful, so maniacal in its insistence that it is okay to be different, that it practically mows you down.” The movie, like the Broadway play it was modeled after, lacked all the depth and brilliance of Frank Baum’s original work. This bowdlerization of sacred stories is happening more and more to the point I’m afraid many will not even remember the beauty they once conveyed about the world to the world.

What Dicken’s criticized more than a century ago still plagues our culture. In 2019 I took my then 8 year old daughter to see Maleficent 2, the movie with Angelina Jolie and Michelle Pfeiffer. I didn’t really know what I was getting into but it didn’t take me long to realize that the movie was not what I expected. I hadn’t watched the first one at the time and was pretty naive about what I should expect from this one. When we got in the car to go home I asked my daughter what she thought of the movie. She said, “It was ok, but I couldn’t really figure out who the bad guy was and which side was supposed to win.” That was enough for me. I was proud that she understood that movies were supposed to help her better understand reality. This movie only confused her. I affirmed her confusion and told her I felt the same way. We have been in a “critical theory mood” (to quote John Stonestreet) for so long we don’t even notice the new message that has hijacked us and these beautiful classic stories.

The truth is that these stories are older than any of us know. Experts such as Jacob and Whilhem Grimm saw the beauty in the universal themes that they found within them. So understanding how to read these tales is very important. They are full of metaphors and symbols that transcend a cursory reading of them. The characters often represent ideas that go way beyond individual identity. In our modern/postmodern era, the tyranny of individualism and relativism threatens to warp us into believing evil needs a backstory. We are turning the universal truths of good and evil on their heads and what we are left with is no redemption. These ideas are, to me, the biggest disappointment with the newer adaptations. For example, in Sleeping Beauty (Briar Rose in Grimm’s) the child is human but the fairies are not. They represent pure good or evil. The last fairy is evil and gives her an evil curse that is overturned by true love. This is not about human love but rather represents the bride of Christ and His pure love for her that overcomes the curse of death set into motion in the Garden. For the sake of time, I won’t go into all the details of the beauty found within these stories that point us toward the Gospel. But I would encourage you to push into these ideas more deeply. It is truly beautiful and transformational. We do these stories and ourselves such a disservice by reducing them down to little more than propaganda to promote politically correct views.