7. In the dock

In the post-war period, fairy tales were denounced as a blunt tool of patriarchy, the bourgeoisie, cosmetic surgeons, the fashion industry, and psychoanalysts bent on curbing girls’ energies and desires. ‘In the dock: don’t bet on the prince’ considers tbe feminist response to the fairy tale from the 1970s onwards. After critical close readings of fairy tales, the strategies feminists devised ranged from furious satire, irony, and parody and, at the other end of the literary spectrum, romancing on their own terms, in inventive and witty re-visionings. The most incandescent work to rise from the feminist explosion—The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter—opens up ten fairy tales to reveal their latent, erotic content.

6. On the couch

‘On the couch: house training the Id’ explains how the intertwining of psychoanalysis and fairy tale is tight, and the stories are still trusted to offer a key to understanding the human psyche—regardless of history or social circumstances. It considers Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment, one of the most influential studies of fairy tales ever written, and the work of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. The stories have universal meaning, but most decodings remain subjective. The belief that the stories have the power to lead by example and shape character, especially gender, to engineer social citizens, and inculcate values and ideology has been widely held and is still accepted.

8. Double vision

The tradition of fairy tale has lent itself, in the name and interest of rationality, to some of the most acute intellectual creations. Writers have wrapped themselves in fairytale themes and motifs in order to communicate political and philosophical thinking, sometimes in conditions of censorship, sometimes in the interests of amusing their audience and so persuading them more effectively. ‘Double vision: the dream of reason’ explains how magical realist fiction, whether believing or doubting, dips into the streams of fairy story for its material and authors such as Swift, Voltaire, and Kafka have also found inspiration for their fantastic fiction in fairytale conventions.

5. Childish things

Fairy tale hovered as a form of literature between children and adults, but in the Victorian era, the fairy way of writing became a mode of communicating moral values, political dreams, and even scientific knowledge to children. Printing technology made books with pictures one of the most exciting and successful ventures of the nineteenth century, and fairy tales began to be produced deliberately to appeal to an audience of young readers. ‘Childish things: pictures and conversations’ explains that, on the whole, the role of artists who helped create fairy tales has been neglected. It describes the re-writing of fairy tales for this younger audience. Modern fairy tales display a darkening tone.

4. Potato soup

Princes and queens, palaces and castles dominate the foreground of a fairy tale, but through the gold and glitter, the depth of the scene is filled with vivid and familiar circumstances, as the fantastic faculties engage with the world of experience. ‘Potato soup: true stories/real life’ explains that the genre’s themes are real-life themes and the passions real-life passions. The situations in fairy tales also capture deep terrors of occurrences common and, mercifully, uncommon. Despite the historical origins behind stories such as Bluebeard and Snow White, fairy tales, in general, dramatize ordinary circumstances. They are messages of hope arising from desperate yet ordinary situations.

2. With a touch of her wand

‘Magic tale’ has been suggested as a term that captures the idea of the form better than ‘fairy tale’ or even ‘wonder tale’; it points to the pivotal role that enchantment plays, both in the action of the stories and the character of its agents. Enchantment, however, has its own changing history, its own tides and currents, from medieval faerie to Romantic possession and hauntedness, from sceptical magic entertainment to the contemporary technological uncanny. ‘With a touch of her wand: magic and metamorphosis’ discusses how classic fairy tales, deploying wonders and inspiring astonishment, depend on magic as causation. It considers the magic of nature, metamorphosis, and words.

9. On stage & screen

Because fairy tales can be meddled with, mixed up, and turned around in ways that an authored text resists, they have emerged as the favoured reservoir of contemporary mass entertainment, and their yields are in a perpetual state of metamorphosis. ‘On stage and screen: states of illusion’ discusses how composers of opera and ballet and writers of plays and film have mined classic tales and national folklore for material. The general consensus now agrees with Dickens, Tolkien, Bettelheim, and Windling, who declared that sweetening the tales was tantamount to vandalism. But at the same time, the darkness of contemporary retellings threatens to grow so deep it throws a shadow over the happy ending itself.

Epilogue

A few dissenting voices still consider fairy tales childish and foolish, but on the whole, they have been widely accepted as a most valuable and profound creation of human history and culture. They have come to be treated as scriptures from an authentic inaugural time of imaginative activity, a narrative blueprint when it was all set down, right and true. The Epilogue explains that for these reasons, fairy tales are gradually turning into myths: stories held in common about the deepest dilemmas, no longer aiming at being optimistic or consoling, but rather bearers of wisdom, deep, thought-provoking, and illuminating.

3. Voices on the page

‘Voices on the page: tales, tellers, and translators’ describes how the modern fairy tale came about. The late seventeenth and early eighteenth century marks the start; Charles Perrault and Antoine Galland were the key exponents who, in the history of readership and reception, established as literature ‘the Fairy way of writing’. Collectors and writers like Perrault and, later, the Grimm Brothers, formed a corpus, or canon, of fairy tales, and their printed versions established standard elements. Arguments still carry on between the diffusionists, who believe stories travel, and the universalists, who propose a collective unconscious. It is now accepted wisdom that there are only seven stories and all the rest are variations on them.

1. The worlds of faery

‘The worlds of faery: far away and down below’ explains that the ‘Other Worlds’ which fairy tales explore open a way for writers and storytellers to speak in ‘Other’ terms, especially when the native inhabitants of the imaginary places do not belong to an established living faith and do not command belief or repudiation. Fairies do not need to appear to stamp a story a fairy tale, but magic needs to be implied and present to conjure the presence of another world. Fairylands are zones of enchantment, but both dangers and pleasures are found. The powerful underlying motives for the construction of fairy tales include a need to move beyond the limits of reality.