Fairy tales have been around as long as most any narrative style, and longer than many. The written fairy tale dates from the 13th Century B.C., and it is likely that the spoken form is even older. Yet despite this long history, people often fail to realize that fairy tales are one of the most important forms of narrative that we have, and should be celebrated by adults and children alike.
However, such praise requires justification. What even qualifies as a fairy tale? What separates it from general folklore, myths, legends, fantasies, and fables? And how, in a world where realism as fantasy far outweighs the truly imagined fantasy, do we effectively continue this age-old tradition?
The first two questions may prove the most difficult to answer. There is no standard definition of a fairy tale, and experts– equally undefined– don’t always agree on the components. Some insist that fairy tales must include a kind of magic, which seems like proper guidance until one considers that a great many of the famous fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, while exploring some supernatural themes, have nothing at all to do with magic.
Another commonly thought of component shirked by the Brothers, and a significant number of other fairy tale authors, is anthropomorphism. Apart from some of the heavy-hitters, like The Chronicles of Narnia or The Wind in the Willows, anthropomorphism is the exception rather than the norm.
It is more common for the stories to include mythological creatures– the naiads and dryads and dwarfs and goblins and so forth. Yet, fairy tales cannot be said to be simply myths because myths are, or at one time were, something believed to be true. Fairy tales never endeavor to suggest an actual historical event, which may be the reason that so many of them take place merely “once upon a time.”
There is also the question of a moral, which many people would offer as a device signaling that a story is a fairy tale. This is where the fairy tale may become mixed up with a fable. But fables are usually shorter, and are more anecdotal. They don’t imply morals as much as they dictate them, and usually not more than one or two at the end. Fairy tales, on the other hand, are often infused with morals or a particular moral throughout; the moral drives the story instead of being the point of it (although some do end with a moral lesson). Thus we have traditional tales like Rapunzel, Cinderella and Alice in Wonderland, which people generally accept as offering a moral message without necessarily identifying what that message is, and more complex fairy tales like The Wizard of Oz, in which Dorothy’s fantasy leads her to a better understanding of her reality, or MacDonald’s Phantastes, in which each advancement of Anodos through Fairy Land presents him with a new moral struggle and simultaneous revelation about himself. Both of these latter examples end with a fable-esque lesson; Dorothy learns that somewhere over the rainbow is not necessarily better than being at home, and Anodos learns “good is always coming…What we call evil is the only and best shape, which, for the person and his condition at the time, could be assumed by the best good.” So while these all have to do with morals, it is the way those morals are included in the story and presented by the author which leads the classification of “fairy tale”; in other words, a fairy tale may also be a fable, but a fable by itself cannot be a fairy tale.
It is somewhat surprising that one of the few things we can say about all fairy tales is that they do not need to have anything at all to do with fairies. Indeed, many of them do not (see Hansel and Gretel, The Light Princess, etc.). Interestingly enough, you’d also be unlikely to find many people who pick up a fairy tale actually expecting to read something about fairies, suggesting that even audiences have become somewhat desensitized to the literal name of the genre, further confusing the answer to the question presently at hand.
Perhaps the thing that makes a fairy tale different from its cousins is the fairy tale voice; that strange and varied tone that hints at a childish audience despite the fact that the story most likely wouldn’t be understood by anyone so young as that. It is a voice unique to each fairy tale author, walking the line between the innocence and brokenness of the world, addressing us as though we are children but with every intention of speaking to us as though we are adults. It is the thing that draws the child out of us while continuing to develop the adult within us.
Interestingly, it is this voice that creates the greatest obstacle to writing the modern day fairy tale. How it has come about in our culture that fairy tales are merely children’s stories is beyond me, but somewhere along the way, we’ve lost the tolerance not just for stories we find to be juvenile or fantastical in content, but also for any voice that threatens condescension. We baselessly insist upon intellectualism in the narrative voice, upon being spoken to only as adults, which is to say that we don’t much care for simplicity, innocence, dare I say even magic, to underlie the narratives we use to explore and understand the complex and confusing nature of humanity. As far as literature goes, we like a well-balanced meal and even the occasional fast food, but we seem to have tragically lost our taste for dessert.
The consequence has been an attempt to reconstruct the fairy tale narrative as though it were purely for our adult minds instead of appealing to our child minds at the same time. A glaring example of this — though not altogether a bad novel — is The Magicians by Lev Grossman. This novel-length “fairy tale” has been hailed as essential for those who are fans of Narnia or Harry Potter, but upon reading just the first three pages, it is clear that this story will be nothing like its predecessors. The narrative voice is the same you will find in most literary fiction, the subject matter has more to do with angsty college students and their exploits than it does with their adventures in whatever other worlds they visit. There is profanity, sex, drug use, and most any other thing you might expect to find in another literary piece about the lives of college students. The few exceptional moments where the story tiptoes on the border of fairy tale, such as the appearance of The Beast or the cave battle in Fillory, are overshadowed and cheapened by the attention given to predictable, sadly commonplace things like the reckless sexual behavior of the main characters and their inability to function as emotionally intelligent members of their world. It is in these moments that the magic is lost.
But Grossman’s work is not a failure as literature, just as a “fairy tale for adults.” That’s large in part because, as I’ve said before, the narrative style of the traditional fairy tale is already for adults. Changing the narrative in order to appeal only to adults ignores the fact that fairy tales are not merely a vehicle for escaping our mundane lives for a little while. Instead, they serve to remind us of the importance innocence plays when believing in something beyond ourselves; that to truly believe in something at all, one must receive it with the heart of a child, and for any heart to embrace childishness, it must also remember innocence. The adult-child balance in the narrative of fairy tales is part of what opens our minds to be transfixed completely by a world to which we do not belong. It is the difference between telling a magical story and merely a story about magic.
An exceptional example of a modern fairy tale in which this essential balance is maintained is The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne Valente. The Wonderland-esque adventure of young September through Fairyland (different from MacDonald’s “Fairy Land”) is a non-stop tumble through a most bizarre, enchanting world in which September is not only faced with myriad trials of good and evil, but also with realizations about her own courage, insecurities, strengths and weaknesses. Where September differs from the characters in The Magicians is that she learns these things externally — we do not experience any of her complex emotional struggles through a narrative saturated with omniscient or introverted analysis of character motives or personalities. September learns these things, instead, the way most things are learned; not through deep, intimate introspection, but by the choices that she is forced to make every day, the choices that don’t allow time for introspective analysis. Topped off by an americanized Victorian voice, Fairyland is a rare, successful return to the narrative style of the fairy tale, giving some much-needed weight to the old maxim that if something isn’t broken, that ought to be a good enough reason to not go trying to fix it.
Despite some recent attempts to modernize the narrative style of fairy tales, I don’t think there’s much danger in the long run. Between the deep historical roots of the genre, the relatively undefined component structure of such stories, and the fact that these stories allow us to explore our humanness in ways which literary fiction simply does not, fans of the fairy tale can rest assured that this genre of literature is unlikely to disappear, or going through any successful changes. There will always be naysayers, always those who think of fairy tales as childish or silly, those who want to bring the fairy tale to the adults instead of bringing the adults to the fairy tales, and those who will refuse to take the genre seriously as an important part of our literary past, present and future. But in the end, I’d like to think that those of us who are happy to embrace adulthood without relinquishing the reigns of childish hopes and dreams, those of us who stubbornly cling to the whimsical, fanciful playgrounds of our imaginations, and those of us who are willing to approach the complexities of our humanness with what childish innocence we have left, will eventually, against all odds of reality, find our way to that place called happily ever after.
Catherynne Valente Lev Grossman The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making The Magicians