Consolation, comeuppance, and escape

FAIRY TALES BLEND mythological pasts and present realities. And like their miniature sisters and brothers (fables and folk tales, myths and legends, ballads and proverbs, even saints’ lives and miracle narratives) their magical micro-universes of honed and coded wisdoms seem ceaselessly combinatorial and connective.

The tales offer several kinds of escape, deliverance from cruelty and injustice, from mind-numbing seriousness, from what had seemed to be fate. And yet they are as soon to console and compensate as they are to deliver comeuppance.

For every malicious stepmother there is a forgotten soul.

Fairy tales are importantly untrue, and thus so very “real.”

These stories bid their listeners and readers enter one enchanting mind-voyage —one dark forest— after another.

“The living literature that everyone knew,”* fairy tales have long played with humanity’s innermost fears, the stuff of childhood and family, of dislocation and dread of abandonment.

They trade in desire, toying with how humans yearn for a different, a better existence, for how things ought to be. For a space free from an immoral reality.**

Little wonder they get de-fanged and re-fanged again. They permutate and persist, “the favoured seed bank,” as Marina Warner has put it, “of contemporary mass entertainment.”*

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*Fairy Tale: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [2014] 2018), 55 and 125. See also Jack Zipes, Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales, Children, and the Culture Industry (New York and London: Routledge, 1997) and Maria Tatar, Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood (New York; W. W. Norton & Co., 2009).

**André Jolles, Simple Forms: Legend, Saga, Myth, Riddle, Saying, Case, Memorabile, Fairytale, Joke, translated from German by Peter J. Schwartz (London and New York: Verso, [1930] 2017), chapter 8.

painting (charcoal and watercolour: 16 February 2022) by Kenneth Mills