There’s a wonderful essay by C.S. Lewis on fairy tales, called “On Three Ways of Writing for Children,” which is obviously better than anything I could ever write, and which I recommend anyone who’s interested in the subject read. He makes so many fantastic and eloquent points, a few of which I will expound upon here.
There are those who object to fairy tales because they’re “unrealistic,” in the sense that they’re set in a fantasy world with magical creatures, etc. But as I’ve argued in a previous Substack, the establishment of a fantasy world does not make the story any less inherently “realistic” than any set in the real world – in fact, Lewis argues it makes it even more realistic. “[A fairy tale] is accused of giving children a false impression of the world they live in. But I think no literature that children could read gives them less of a false impression. I think what profess to be realistic stories for children are far more likely to deceive them. I never expected the real world to be like the fairy tales. I think that I did expect school to be like the school stories. The fantasies did not deceive me: the school stories did.” Lewis argues that fairy stories arouse in a child “a longing for he knows not what. It stirs and troubles him (to his life-long enrichment) with the dim sense of something beyond his reach and, far from dulling or emptying the actual world, gives it a new dimension of depth. He does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods: the reading makes all real woods a little enchanted…The boy reading the school story of the type I have in mind desires success and is unhappy (once the book is over) because he can’t get it: the boy reading the fairy tale desires and is happy in the very fact of desiring. For his mind has not been concentrated on himself, as it often is in the more realistic story...the dangerous fantasy is always superficially realistic.”
This last point is especially important, I believe, because in our current culture we demand that all stories have a certain relevancy to modern day social movements, that audiences can “see themselves” in the characters, in the literal sense, and that stories should accurately reflect the world we live in today. I believe this kind of insistence and obsession in portraying reality accurately in fiction is nonsensical, particularly in an imaginary setting, and misses the point of fantasy fiction entirely. I also think demanding that characters are a minute reflection of oneself and one’s superficial characteristics is actually deeply narcissistic, and encourages audiences to think that any minority character, for example, must accurately reflect all people in that minority group. Naturally no writer can do this, because people are diverse, and no one character can accurately reflect everyone’s individual experience. Moreover, any attempt to do this results in making the character extremely boring, because nobody wants to write a flaw in a character that might be mistaken as tarring all minorities with the same flaws. But analyzing fiction through these political and identity lenses encourages this type of interpretation. Philip Roth has a wonderful quote about this: “Politics is the great generalizer and literature is the great particularizer, and not only are they in an inverse relationship with one another — they are in an antagonistic relationship.” Usually antagonistic relationships can be quite entertaining to watch, but this isn’t one of those times.
Fantasy, as Lewis points out, does not encourage the audience to look inward, but outward, to different and imaginary races and cultures which necessitate seeing outside oneself and one’s own experiences. The characters in these worlds, by definition, cannot be exactly like us, and so we by necessity must empathize with people outside of our own narrow experiences. The very mode of fantasy storytelling discourages the supreme focus on the self which seems to be the religion of our day.
The other superb point Lewis makes in an essay full of them is the fashion which we also see in contemporary times, of shielding children from scary and sad stories. As a child born in the 80s, who watched the movies of Don Bluth and older Disney, my generation was no stranger to scary villains and narratives of death – who remembers The Neverending Story? It’s an unforgettable movie, precisely because of the emotional punches it packs, which imprinted themselves on our brains. Our generation has not been more warped or disturbed than any other because of exposure to these concepts. But the coddling authorities of our age would agree with those in Lewis’s day, that we must “try to keep out of [the child’s] mind the knowledge that he is born into a world of death, violence, wounds, adventure, heroism and cowardice, good and evil…there is something ludicrous in the idea of so educating a generation which is born to the Ogpu and the atomic bomb. Since it is so likely that they will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise you are making their destiny not brighter but darker…let there be wicked kings and beheadings, battles and dungeons, giants and dragons, and let villains be soundly killed at the end of the book.”
As someone who loves villains, while the final statement always pains me, it pains me more to no longer have horrible villains in children’s stories, just poor, misunderstood victims of society. There’s nothing like a good villain, but having a good villain means having a good death for them, because otherwise the story is unsatisfactory. And every writer should put the good of the story over their own personal biases.
This brings me to the meat of what I want to write about, which is the aversion our current age seems to have for fairy tales. Back in 2004, you had Shrek subverting the classic fairy tale tropes, which it did very well. And it did this very well because it was obvious the people making the movie loved fairy tales – they had to, to bring in all the references and in-jokes which would only be appreciated by the knowledgeable fan (The “Do you know the Muffin Man?” interrogation scene is a favorite!) That’s why Shrek works, and why all parodies work, because the writers and the audience are sharing in the joke with their shared knowledge and enthusiasm of the subject matter. Deconstruction and subversion, when done with love and respect, are highly entertaining, and is one of the joys of parody.
Shrek, of course, was released nearly 20 years ago now, which certainly makes me feel old. And in the 20 years that have passed, our age has become more cynical, and I think more bitter. We now have a tendency to want to deconstruct and subvert the old in an effort to tear it down and denigrate it – this was exemplified in movies like The Last Jedi, whose antagonist encourages us to “Let the past die. Kill it if you have to. It’s the only way to become who you were meant to be.” This is actually a fine attitude for a villain to have, but unfortunately it was also the attitude the entire movie had – destroy legacy characters and established canon in favor of new, diverse characters who are better than those legacy characters anyway, or so the movie would like us to think. Of course there’s nothing wrong with introducing new, diverse characters, but these are frequently written as tearing down and humiliating older, established characters in order to build themselves up, which is bad writing.
This has become a tired trope of all major franchises – Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Marvel, etc. The legacy characters that everyone loved back in the day have to be made weak and useless and pathetic, to be showed up by a new, younger, better version who is flawless, and therefore boring. And of course all these franchises are owned by the multi-decade master of fairy tales, the Walt Disney Corporation.
As a lifelong Disney fan, it pains me to say it, but current Disney is broken. There is still some good original content being released, of course, but the studio seems to be primarily banking on its franchises, and its big-budget, live-action remakes of its classic movies as a source of income. This is a bad idea, since these remakes have had diminishing returns for a while now, and honestly I’ve never seen the point of them. The animated films are usually perfect, so there’s no artistic reason to remake them – it’s purely a financial incentive, a way to make easy money by playing on fan nostalgia. And in some cases, like The Lion King remake, it’s just swapping one kind of animation, hand-drawn, for another, CGI, which is objectively inferior. Realistic-looking CGI animals singing and talking is horrific, not cute, as The Little Mermaid only proved once again.
These remakes seem to exist for only two reasons – the financial one, as stated, and also as a means to correct the parts of the animated classics that are unfashionable in the current political climate. This is explicitly stated by the film’s stars, in both The Little Mermaid remake and the upcoming Snow White, that the princesses are no longer motivated by true love, but rather on gratifying their own desires to be the strongest and most empowered women they can be. As a strong, empowered woman myself, I’m incredibly tired of the “strong, female character” trope, which completely ignores that we’ve had strong, female characters ever since storytelling began, just not the stupidly dull, flawless versions we have today. A girlboss princess is not a radical idea – it’s the same idea that’s been latched onto for almost a decade now, and it wasn’t that interesting to begin with.
I’ve never understood, and perhaps some feminist can enlighten me, why the model for female characters seems to be turning them into masculine characters. Feminists, in my experience, tend to rail about the evils of the patriarchy, this shadowy cabal of men that has been oppressing women since time immemorial, and which puts male achievements ahead of female ones. But the solution provided to defeat the patriarchy seems to be to have women conform to the patriarchy, and act in traditionally masculine ways in order to no longer be oppressed. So isn’t that just the patriarchy winning? In trying to defeat it, you become it, which doesn’t seem like a victory for feminism.
I am not, and never have been, a feminist, because my lived experience is that the movement actually seeks to disempower women by telling them the lie that they’re inescapable victims of an unjust and oppressive society. It also sells them a lie of empowerment – it encourages women to focus on self-actualization and career advancement over romance and family. The traditional, stay-at-home mother is looked down upon, while the girlboss CEO is held up as the mirror all women should aspire to. This is the new fairy tale we tell young girls – forget about Prince Charming, one day you could be president!
Of course there’s nothing inherently wrong in wanting to be president, but personally I’ve always thought that, man or woman, you’d have to be completely psychotic to want a job like that (and looking at our current and recent candidates, my opinion on that point has only been strengthened!) Any kind of high-powered, stressful career is something you really have to devote your whole life to, and often people in those positions have to sacrifice their family life for their glamorous career. You can’t have it all, despite the lies of the feminist movement, and there are always trade-offs in life. If you want a high-powered career, that’s fine, but one of the trade-offs will necessarily be your relationships with family and friends.
Personally, I think it’s much healthier to prioritize family and friends over a job, and I think there are few who would actually disagree with that. Humans are social creatures, and human relationships are of primary importance to most of us. Which is why I can’t understand this drive to tell young women not to dream of true love and romance. What other better ambition is there in life? I’m a single, mid-thirties woman with a cat, and the stereotype is that I should be shouting proudly about being childfree by choice, and talking about how great it is not to be burdened by a family. But the truth is, I’m not childfree by choice – I would love to have kids, and a husband, and I still hold out hope for that one day. There’s nothing pathetic in that – it’s perfectly natural to want someone in your life to love. I’d be more concerned for people who didn’t want that, people who are borderline sociopathic who don’t want any kind of intimate relationship. Those seem like the kind of people you want to watch out for, and they also seem to be the people writing and making movies.
One of the dumbest things I’ve seen on the internet (and it’s a long list!) was a commentator who said she wouldn’t let her daughter see Tangled, because it included, and I swear this is the exact quote, “non-consensual hair cutting.” I’m wondering in what universe her daughter would be in a position where she might be threatened by non-consensual hair cutting (maybe in the V for Vendetta universe, where your head is forcibly shaved and you’re thrown into a concentration camp, but then I think you’ve got bigger problems than non-consensual hair-cutting!) I also wonder whether, in Rapunzel’s situation, where her hair was cut to save her from eternal slavery, there might be cases where non-consensual hair cutting is actually pretty excusable. But nevertheless, this kind of literal-mindedness in terms of fairy tales, which I’ve railed about in previous posts, seems to be everywhere. The Little Mermaid remake changed the lyrics to the song “Kiss the Girl” to make it explicit that you shouldn’t just kiss a girl without getting her permission first, instructing the prince to “use your words” as if he’s a tantrum-throwing toddler. The Snow White ride was recently redone in Disneyland, and there was an article complaining about the kiss at the end, because kissing a sleeping princess to break a spell over her is basically sexual assault, apparently. No sane person has ever been on a ride at Disneyland and had a serious philosophical thought about it, never mind extrapolating out how a true love’s kiss to break a spell is literal rape. Never mind again, that this kind of non-consensual behavior might be ok rather than being kept in a death sleep forever, because apparently it’s not. Consent is consent, and even living death is preferable than that being violated, I guess.
This is all so very stupid. No child in the history of the world has ever watched Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, or The Little Mermaid and taken them literally. This is not how a child’s mind or imagination works. It’s how adults with no imagination and no childhood think their minds work, but these are broken, miserable people who don’t understand anything about fantasy and fairy tales, and they should not be allowed to control the cultural conversation. They should be laughed at and mocked loudly for trying to project their hangups about modern dating culture onto timeless stories. As Lewis attests, these stories, beloved for generations, help children see the world outside themselves. To try and diminish them by making them conform to our small, transient, realistic world is to do a great disservice, both to the stories and to the children. There is nothing wrong with dreaming of true love, or Prince Charming. It is healthy to dream outside yourself. And as Cinderella says, “no matter how your heart is grieving, if you keep on believing, the dream that you wish will come true.” Let’s hope there’s some truth in that.