Fairy tales are back

Fairy Tales are Back Jill Bickham Fairy tales are back—and they’re not bedtime stories for just the little munchkins this time around. Fairy tales are literature for the big munchkins too. Hang on a second, you say. Fairy tales aren’t literature! Literature is something you read to make you think, something that questions the bigger things in life. Literature is Shakespeare and Milton and Dickens and Joyce and….

Yes, that’s all good and true. But how does that exclude fairy tales?

It doesn’t.

Fairy tales make you think more than just about any other piece of literature. Fairy tales question all of the big things in life like true love, loyalty, good, evil, family, hard work, morals—I could go on, but I’ll stop there to explain what I mean.

Do you remember how much you hated that one book that your tenth grade English teacher made you read and you fell asleep every time you read more than a page? Isn’t that supposed to be literature? Why can’t you even remember the name of that book, much less what it was about?

Can you honestly say that you haven’t thought about a fairy tale long after you read or heard it?

Far longer than after you read anything by Shakespeare or Dickens?

Why is that? I say it’s because fairy tales are uncertain. We don’t know all of the details. We don’t know why Cinderella was so sweet and kind despite her evil stepmother. Was the stepmother really evil or was she just a terrible stepmother? Why did the poor woodcutter leave his children alone in the woods to die? There’s not a chance I would have—I’d rather starve myself than let my children die. I think. A.S. Byatt commented “Absence of information starts the imagination working.” Because we don’t know, we start to think of every possible scenario.

Even when we do know how a story ends, we still take off on those unknown tangents. And when all is said and done, isn’t that what literature is supposed to do?