A world without fairy tales

Rashmi Kalia

Children make sense of the world with the stories they hear and often cast themselves in the roles they hear about. That’s one reason boys grow up wanting to be handsome princes and girls wanting to be Cinderellas

One night, as I narrated a fairy tale to my wide-eyed seven-year-old son, I realised I had unwittingly ventured into a territory that would be difficult to cross. After every few sentences, I would be stormed with questions as to why did this character do that? What did he mean when he said this, and the most difficult questions to answer were: What do you think of that? Does it seem fair? Needless to say, it took us several brainstorming sessions for the next few nights to complete the tale that I had begun.

A couple of months back, when I had first read the news that a number of schools in the US were planning to ‘ban’ fairy tales, I had wondered if we had gone mad? The glass slippers, the fairy godmothers, evil stepmothers, charming princes and the happily-ever-after endings — were they not an essential and integral part of our childhood, the stories that exert an imaginative force in us because those were the stories we listened to and absorbed uncritically.

Children make sense of the world with the stories they hear and often cast themselves in the roles they hear about. That’s one reason men grow up wanting to be handsome princes who save the damsels in distress and most girls grow up wanting to be Cinderellas.

However, in the world that we live now, is the rendition of fairy tales simply an act of storytelling? How do we narrate the stories where men lock women in towers for being defiant and women are loved best when they look pretty and stay silent, without being questioned? How do we answer the questions of our little girls when they ask us, for instance, “What happens if the girl had the sword and the prince had to wait for her to rescue him?” However, it’s not that our girls want to wield swords or want to lock men up in towers. It simply means that our children have learnt to ‘interrogate’ the fairy tales. In short, fairy tales have ceased to remain sacred. 

Stories are powerful as well as dangerous. They have far-reaching consequences. Perhaps, the impact of a story was understood well by Plato, who wanted to ban storytelling. When we listen to a story, we imagine ourselves in different kind of roles. And if these roles are limited, the scope of our imagination stays limited. This act of imagining ourselves into various roles was what Aristotle referred to as mimesis. And therefore, it is our job as parents, and as educators, to help our children critique the stories and not impose them on our children as we received them, unquestioningly.

However, this is not to say that fairy tales have lost their essence. There are simple life lessons embedded in our fairy tales that will sustain through any change that we witness in our society and in our ideology, through the ages. For instance, Little Red Riding Hood teaches us that appearances can be deceptive and Pinocchio teaches us not to tell lies. There are countless lessons about love, friendship and about life in these fairy tales, lessons that every generation should imbibe. Most importantly, all fairy tales have a happy ending. And sometimes, we all need a happy ending, even if it is not our own.