Once Upon a Time

What is fairy tale? Where do the stories come from?What do they mean? What do they try and communicate to us about morality, sexuality and society?

The range of fairy tales stretches across great distances and time, their history is entangled with folklore and myth, and their inspiration draws on ideas about nature and the supernatural, imagination and fantasy, psychoanalysis and feminism.

"It is interesting how impossible it is to remember a time when my head was not full of these unreal people, things and events. The tales are older, simpler and deeper than individual imagination. It is odd when you come to think of it that human beings in all sorts of societies, ancient and modern, have needed these untrue stories.These flat stories appear to be there because stories are all pervasive and perpetual characteristic like language, like play.

There is no psychology in a fairy tale. The characters have little interior life;their motives are clear and obvious. If people are good, they are good and if bad, they are bad.The tremors and mysteries of human awareness, the whispers of memory , the promptings of half understood regret or doubt or desire that are so much part of the subject matter of the modern novel are entirely absent." A.S.Byatt

Fairytale narratives are dream-like; they are disjointed, brilliantly coloured, the overlook rational cause and effect, they stage outlandish scences of sex and violence, they make abrupt transitions without rhyme of reason.They also contain significant repetitions and recurrent symbols.

Behind the shiny gorgeous surfaces of fairy tales you can glimpse an entire history of childhood and family: the oppression of land owners and rulers, foundlings, drowned or abandoned children, the ragamuffin orphan surviving by his wits , the likeable lad who has his eye on a girl who is from a better class than himself or the dependence of old people.Unlike myths, which are about gods and super heroes, fairy tale protagonists are recognizably ordinary, working class people toiling at ordinary occupations over a long period in history before industrialization and mass literacy.

When the eldest son inherits everything the younger brother would set out on his adventures penniless, to return fabulously endowed .The genre's themes are real life themes and the passions real life passions:getting by and getting what you want, knowing the odds are stacked and that all might be lost.Luck is powerful but resourcefulness is praiseworthy. Unspeakable, unbelievable acts are also taking place.Terrible family violence:a father cuts off his daughter's hands because the Devil wants to carry her off; another daughter disguises herself in a coat of animal hides after her father wants to marry her.Small children are damaged:Hansel and Gretel are abandoned by their parents to die in the woods and so on.These acts contradict all ideas of natural feeling.But these  situations however horrible are echoed even now in the news.Starvation and infanticide are recurrent dangers and their victims devise ways of opposing them, avenging themselves on their perpetrators and of turning the status quo upside down.These plots convey messages of resistance-a hope of escape.

source- "Once Upon a Time" by Marina Warner