A horse-drawn carriage, an enchanting stranger, a happily ever after: the stuff of fairytales. You don’t need to think twice when asked to recollect what comes after the words ‘once upon a time’. They are the stories we watched unfold on theater screens and then grew up to enact in our very own school productions. They were our guidebook as we learned to read for ourselves and our lens through which we attempted to make sense of the world around us.
What happened when someone around us didn’t fit into the trope of what we were taught a character would be like? More often than not, we chalked it up to an exception. A neglectful parent? It couldn’t be – only step-mothers could harm us, not our own biological parents. An overprotective partner? We were probably just overthinking it; everyone knows the prince is meant to save us, we should be grateful we’ve found our fairytale romance.
As our parents tucked us tightly into bed, lulling us to sleep while blanketing us under a sense of ever-lasting safety with the words ‘once upon a time’, perhaps what we should have been focusing on were the words that followed immediately after: ‘In a land far, far away’. Those words should have been warning enough to clarify that the sweet promises of these fairytales were, in fact, empty and were a far stretch from the reality of our actual world.
However, this wasn’t always the case. Before the modern-day practice of feeding sugar-coated stories to children along with their daily dose of sugary treats and other forms of instant gratification, fairytales were once tales of caution that emulated the cold, harsh realities of our world. The early renditions of Cinderella featured her as a slave girl forced to marry the king of Egypt and her stepsisters’ fate included their eyes being pecked out by crows. A younger version of Little Red Riding Hood was notoriously known for stripping her clothes, getting into bed with the wolf, and then dying.
It was the German Grimm brothers of the 1800s who fought to preserve the darker narratives of the past, commonly referred to as grim tales. They published a collection of stories and ancient folklores in a book titled Children’s and Household Tales. Despite its charming name, the controversy arising from the rape, murder, and violence in the book led to a hesitation in the minds of the masses. In the meanwhile, the rosier narratives painted by authors such as Charles Perrault replaced violence with romance as a way to appeal to the sheltered tastes of the larger public. Perrault’s versions of Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty are the ones we know today that have been picked up by Disney and other producers to immortalize on the big screen as being the sole truth.
So, what does the drastic evolution of fairytales in the last few centuries say about us as a society and is there anything we can do about it? Have we been raised to seek happiness in a world that can only ever exist in books? Are our elders inevitably setting us up for future dissatisfaction by fostering impossible expectations of romance and all-round merriness from childhood? And in the process of it all, have we also unknowingly grown up to become the same adults who pass on these stories and blindly encourage censorship of all things deemed ‘bad’ – no matter how real or important they are for us to accept as a part of life?
The truth is: in the face of this paradigm shift, the moral behind each of these fairytales seems to have withstood the test of time. The belief of good over evil still prevails at the end of each book, no matter how much the contents in between the pages change. What happened to these fairytales over the past centuries is not so different from the evolution of any other form of art. Art is fluid. It has the power of transcending time, space, and even skip through generations while maintaining its core essence.
We might not ever know the exact turn of events that took place in these fairytales centuries ago, and we certainly will not be able to pass it on to our children as our ancestors had once recited to theirs. However, what we can do is understand and hold the untarnished morals behind these stories in our hand, ever so gently, as we pass it on to the ones after us and hope that the faint marks of our own unique fingerprints have not tampered with the morals too much. After all, these morals that have raised us came from a land far, far away – and if the past is any indication, they will perpetually have a far, far way to go.
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