What Is and What Could Be: The Magic of the Fairy Tale

The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter. Penguin Books, 1993, 126 pp., $13 (paper).

The Doll's Alphabet by Camilla Grudova. Coffee House Press, 2017, 158 pp., $15.95 (paper).

There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya. Penguin Books, 2009, 206 pp., $15 (paper).

Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi. Riverhead Books, 2014, 316 pp., $16 (paper).

Why are we still telling fairy tales? In their traditional tellings, they are short, occasionally didactic stories that feature some sort of magical element. Sometimes this magic is a talking animal, like the cat who calls Little Red Riding Hood a slut in the French version when she fails to acknowledge that the wolf in her grandmother's bed is an impostor and dear old Grannie has been consumed. Other times, the magic hides in the narrative, tied to young poor folk realizing their own innate strength, such as the Boy Who Learned to Shiver discovering that his inability to fear is not a deficit, as he believed, but a power by which he can overcome all adversaries and win the heart of the princess. These tales are sometimes relegated erroneously to the realm of children's fantasy: even in the dark and violent versions, there is a happy ending of sorts. What was wronged is made right; the poor become rich; and true love will be consecrated in a marriage. The tales are told to children—often with the violence made cartoonish, or as literal cartoons in the case of Disney—to make sense of injustice. They become little white lies from adults to their babies: no matter how strange things seem or how terrible the world can be to you, what is true and kind will win out.

Yet, as children grow, they learn that the world is complicated and justice can seem far-fetched, a fantasy in itself. Reality does not right what was wronged, and the irrational becomes the real. The easy ending of a fairy tale, where the wicked are punished and the righteous are given their reward, can be read as childish, hopeful, and out of touch with the lived reality of so many of our lives. I have always been a bit uneasy with the fairy tale. They are often didactic, filled with admonishments against exploring the dark woods or the suspicious moral that the rich beast in a lonely castle needs only love to show the true man underneath. Too often, the stories rely on magic (or in Andersen's case, a full acceptance of the Christian divine) for the happy ending to occur. This begs passivity and complacency from the characters in the tales and from the reader digesting them as well: wait, wait just a little longer, and something wonderful will occur. In reality, though, how long does a girl with a wicked stepmother need to wait until she grows old cleaning the hearth, watching as her skin wrinkles a little more each time she dips a cloth into the bleach? In a realist tale, she would march out of the house and into her own destiny. In a fairy tale, a magical godmother will show up and turn a pumpkin into a carriage.

So, again, how does the fairy tale belong in a world where magic has to be viewed skeptically, since not very many have the benefit of waiting around for a fairy godmother to weave magic shoes? Yet the fairy tale persists. It does so because, like many of its characters, it transforms and adapts to the society that tells it. That is perhaps the greatest magic trick up its literary sleeve and its most redeeming quality. A...