Putting my degree to good use...

What's that you say? You want me to forgo my usual blog post about the bizarre antics I got up to this week, and instead treat you to an excessively long commentary on literary fairy tale tropes? And here I thought you had no interest in what I do. Well, if you insist...

In reading The Pleasures of Children's Literature (Nodelman and Reimer) for one of my classes, I came across some interesting ideas on fairytales. Nodelman and Reimer observe that there are 9 fairytales that most university students polled know by heart:

Cinderella
Snow White
Beauty and the Beast
The Three Little Pigs
Goldilocks and the Three Bears
Hansel and Gretel
Jack and the Beanstalk
Little Red Riding Hood
and Sleeping Beauty

Of these tales, Disney has commandeered and re-written most of them (either as feature-length films, or as small episodes starring Mickey Mouse). Disney is so pervasive in our culture, that generally, the versions of fairytales that we know are, in fact, the Disney versions, and not the original folktales, most of which originated in the 1700's. Now, many of these fairytales (especially the ones involving princesses) have often been criticized for their inaccurate portrayal of romance and relationships*.

From the tender age of 3 or so, children are taught that every girl is a beautiful princess and every man is a handsome prince who must dash into a lady's life at some point in time and sweep her off her feet. Thus, children, girls especially, are easily instilled with highly unrealistic expectations for their romantic lives, and are encouraged to pander to the gender and class stereotyping that they will live out for the rest of their lives. And so on.

In this scenario, we must assume that children are incapable of telling fantasy from reality. Well, let's give them a bit more credit than that. On the one hand, one might not believe something is true just because a storybook portrays it as such. But what if you read 2 dozen storybooks that all seem to preach the same thing? These poor misinformed children grow up to be delusional romantic hopefuls, fighting to preserve gender lines, waiting either to be swept off their feet by a handsome, oddly silent young prince much taken by the lady's looks, or to find beautiful, sweet young ladies who will swoon for the first person who cuts through a thorn bush for them. Also, that there isn't much more to life than this interaction.

I once worked with a woman who had been so badly victimized by this delusion that she had to spend most of my lunch hour explaining to me that fairy tales don't come true and there are no stars to wish on, etcetera. Being witness to (though not the direct victim of) some very nasty relationships, and having heard about many more, I had, in fact, deduced that fairy tales aren't really true:
that there isn't necessarily someone for everyone,
that men are human too and will not spend the rest of their lives throwing roses at you,
that some men do happen to be horrific assholes,
that even the most loveable of men are not necessarily knights in shining armour,
that the people who love you most are also the ones who can hurt you the most,
that anyone--absolutely anyone--is capable of cheating on their beloved, given the right circumstances,
that the man who will sweep you off your feet solely based on the redness of your lips is the type of man who may also paste 2-foot blow-ups of your face to his ceiling and follow after you picking up your used tissues in the hopes of cloning you, or, in the very least, the type of man who will dump you when he figures out that those red lips rub off at the end of the day because they come out of a tube of compressed animal fat and dye
and, most importantly, that there is life before, during, after, and outside of the pursuit for prince charming.**

The long and short of my comment here is that those damned fairytales are the culprits behind the pained disillusionment of our nation. Or are they?

First of all, as Nodelman and Reimer point out, the values that most people associate with fairytales--and even the idea of a fairytale ending--were manufactured by Disney and reflect the values of upper-middle-class American culture of the 1930's and 40's. They were also marketed towards children. In actuality, the original folktales were meant to be enjoyed by everyone, and were often rather gruesome. One of the original versions of Sleeping Beauty has our good old prince charming raping the sleeping lady, who is impregnated and gives birth to twins. It is only when one of the twins climbs over the bedclothes and sucks the spindle splinter out of the princess's finger that Sleeping Beauty wakes up, to find herself an abandoned single mother of twins. It is unlikely that anyone reading this story would be tricked into thinking that all men are well-behaved knights in shining armour.

Similarly, most 'child-friendly' versions of Cinderella skip the part where the ugly stepsisters cut off their toes and heels to try to fit the slipper. Now, there are a lot of things going on here and I'm going to do the bad thing and oversimplify it all: we could easily take this imagery as a commentary on the painful (and fruitless) lengths that women go to in order to get a man. It might also be a commentary on early plastic surgery. Who knows.

Oh, and another thing: you know those evil step mothers who marry rich and screw up sweet young princess's lives? In the original tales, those weren't step mothers. They were birth-mothers. When the Grimm brothers started transcribing folktales, they were thoroughly disturbed at the idea of a real mother enslaving her daughter, or throwing her daughter out of the house to go find a house made of gingerbread, or sending an old woodcutter to cut her daughter's heart out to prove that she was dead. So the original stories addressed the fact that not all families are big, happy families. Some families are royally screwed up. Some mothers just don't have those motherly instincts. Etcetera.

So next time you want to blame your misguided notion of a cliche fairytale ending for your latest romantic let-down, don't blame the folkstories. Go for the more current cliche, and blame Disney. Always blame Disney.


*of course, the problems with the Disney Princess tales reach much deeper than the difficulties North Americans have with dating expectations, but I'll keep this light and fairly sweet for now.

**I have, on several occasions, tried to explain to people that I don't assume I'm going to get married. Until the moment when you actually are, in fact, married, there's always a chance that you never will be. You may never find someone worth dating. If you find someone worth dating, you might not find him/her worth marrying. If you do find him/her worth marrying, he/she might not feel the same way about you. And even if you do feel the same way, there's the off chance one of you will get hit by a bus on the way to the altar. In which case, I will buy myself a nice big house and fill it with cats and very brightly painted furniture, and open a charming little bookstore cafe called Patchwork--or maybe The Silver Spoon-- which will be open at the strangest of times and sell the most interesting of pastries and caffeinated beverages, and I will lead a fascinatingly eccentric life, and finance it with the books I will have been getting published during the whole frustrating dating/courtship/engagement/roadkill romance (of course, one might hope that I would do all this even with a husband in tow). Even after explaining all this, most people I talk to about it come away from the conversation with the assumption that I don't want to get married. Or, conversely, that my self-esteem is so low that I think no one wants me. Now, is that what I said? Is it?