My daughter’s reading fairy tales. Just bought a big book of ’em not too long ago, and she’s doggedly plowing through the massive tome princess by princess, wolf by wolf, moral by moral. Some nights when we’re out walking, she’ll tell me about the latest fairy tale she’s read, going into great detail about the talking fish she’s encountered, or the down-on-his-luck tailor.
Oh, did I mention she’s 17?
Truth is, I don’t know if we ever outgrow fairy tales. It explains why they’ve endured as long as they have: In an age in which we’re surrounded by iPads and Xboxes and unremitting pokes on our Facebook accounts, most of us still know and remember these stories of old: Snow White. Little Red Riding Hood. The Frog Prince. Sure, some of them have grown hazy with time or become a little Disneyfied in our brains, but they’re still there. We revisit them enough to ensure they’ll stick. And we often turn to them when times get tough.
Perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us that fairy tales are experiencing a serious resurgence. ABC’s fable-soaked Once Upon a Time is an honest-to-goodness hit. NBC’s Grimm has been renewed for next year already. And in 2012, the multiplex will be awash with films searching for their own happily ever after ending: Jack the Giant Killer, starring Bill Nighy and Ewan McGregor; Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters, featuring Gemma Arterton and Jeremy Renner as the siblings all grown up; and (count ’em) two new Snow White films—Snow White and the Huntsman (starring Charlize Theron as the evil queen) and The Brothers Grimm: Snow White (which features Julia Roberts in the pivotal queen role).
Now, some fairy tales aren’t appropriate for every boy and girl—or man and woman, for that matter. Lots of them feature witchcraft and occultism. Many of them, unmoored from Disney and Saturday morning cartoons, are quite dark. It still freaks me out that Hansel and Gretel—a story originally about children abandoned by their parents and taken in by a cannibalistic woman (with an admittedly odd taste in real estate)—would be considered suitable for children.
And yet, these stories still touch us—not in spite of the darkness, but in some ways because of it.
Let’s face it: We live in a time where we’re pressed upon by our own dark, forbidding forests, and danger lurks behind every tree. They might not be evil witches or big bad wolves; we fret instead over the situation in Greece or shake our heads at our embittered politics or tremble in our shoes over our own sets of sins. We struggle with work and school and peer pressure and dizzying temptations.
And yet we know there is hope. There is the potential for joy, for better times ahead. We know this, first and foremost, because of our faith … but fairy tales in their own way can help remind us of that ultimate hope we have.
“Fairy tales do not give a child his first idea of bogey,” G.K. Chesterton once wrote. “What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.”
It’s hard to say how these fairy tales will manifest themselves on our screens in the coming months. Most likely, we’ll probably have to hammer on most of ’em for something. Already, we know that neither Once Upon a Time or Grimm make for content-free, fun-for-the-whole-family viewing.
But the impulse behind this work is, I think, strangely and perhaps subconsciously positive. The power of the fairy tale is this: The reminder that, in the midst of our fears, we can find the courage we need to face them. We learn all over again that we can kill the dragon.
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