“Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.” C.S. Lewis
Recently, I released a video on Red Riding Hood, in which I talked about the Brothers Grimm story Little Red Cap and the 2011 movie, Red Riding Hood, by Catherine Hardwicke. We dug into the theme and the tropes used and examined why that story is a Gothic one. If you’d like to watch it, you can find it here.
For this post I thought we’d do something similar, but different, and take a look at some of the Gothic tendencies that we see in fairy tales.
Because who doesn’t love fairy tales?
Disclaimer
You’re going to want to set aside all of your Disney references, if you have them, because Disney often strips the stories of their original meaning and white-washes them with a vacuous, Americanized ending. If you’re looking for an example of this, compare the original Hans Christian Andersen version of The Little Mermaid with the Disney version. In the Disney one, Ariel makes a deal with the sea witch, gets to land, eventually wins over the prince (with a few close calls of course) and then lives happily ever after. Lesson: make a deal with a witch and get what you want.
In the original, Ariel makes a deal with the sea witch in return for time on land. And it’s not just to win the prince. What Ariel wants most is an eternal soul (unlike the temporal soul of a mermaid). However, Ariel doesn’t win over the prince and he marries another woman. The witch then offers her sisters another deal – if Ariel kills the prince, she can return to her family in the sea. Otherwise she has to die and become the foam on the surface of the waves. Ariel debates and then decides to sacrifice herself rather than hurting the man she loves. She falls into the sea and dies…But, because of her selflessness, she is turned into a spirit who will one day ascend to heaven. Lesson: self-sacrifice is a model of true love and selflessness is truly rewarded.
I think you can see how the original, with its beautiful and heart-rending ending, is a million times more thought-provoking and is an emotionally evocative picture of love.
All that to say, I’ll be discussing some of the older versions of these fairy tales, so put aside your Disney versions for the duration of this post, or you might be confused.
Examples of Gothic Fairy Tales
It might surprise you to consider some fairy tales as Gothic. And if you google it, most writers do nothing more than ascribe the title “gothic” to the darker elements in some of the Brothers Grimm tales. But there are some Gothic fairy tales, and they do much to speak to those weighty truths that lie beneath the surface.
For instance, in the video on Red Riding Hood, we examined the theme that wolves – people who want to take advantage of others – are everywhere; that they prey on old and young alike; that they often look like those around us – neighbors, friends, family; and that they often use well-meaning or sincere-sounding words to trap us.
How about Bluebeard? In the original French tale by Charles Perrault, a young woman is ensnared by an odd-looking man with a blue beard. At first, she and her sister refuse to entertain his advances, partly because he’s so unattractive, but mostly because he had been married several times and his wives had disappeared without a trace. Bluebeard finally wins over the younger sister by inviting the entire family out to his country estate where he entertains them with fine feasts, hunting excursions and extravagant balls. But after she marries him, she soon discovers what happened to his former wives: Bluebeard chained them to the wall in one of the rooms of his castle and slit their throats. In the end, she is narrowly rescued by her brothers and then ultimately finds a “worthy” man to marry. The obvious lesson here is that character is more important than wealth and to be blinded by money is to make oneself a potential victim.
So why is this Gothic? The story points to the ways in which superficial things – in this case money – can so easily blind us to the truth of who someone is. This is a spiritual theme. It’s something almost everyone can agree is true, and yet why is it the case? The sister knew his wives were missing. The red flags were there. And yet she still couldn’t see past his opulent lifestyle. That’s something we can’t reason our way around. It’s an irrational theme.
You might argue that Hansel and Gretel is also Gothic. It’s a tale about a time of famine and is said to originate in the medieval time period, particularly during the European Famine of 1314 – 1322. The father and stepmother of two children choose to abandon them in the forest in order to have more food for themselves. That’s not the end of the children though. Hansel and Gretel stumble upon a witch’s cottage that is elaborately decorated in candy and other desserts. There they are ensnared by the woman who intends to keep them and feed them well so that they’ll be fatter before she cooks them and eats them. Of course, they outsmart her, kill her instead and escape. Once they make their way home, they find that their stepmother – the source of the plan to abandon the children – has died and their father is overjoyed to see them.
If you read into the story carefully (in any number of versions), it’s easy to come away with the understanding that the witch in the woods is a proxy for the stepmother. And that the children had to kill her in self-defense. She is the proverbial witch.
Why might this be Gothic? Leaving aside the superficial – the tropes of abandonment, cannibalism and the like – the theme deals with the stepmother’s inability to put the care of the children above her own preservation. I don’t think it’s an accident that the original storytellers cast her as the stepmother. Not that stepmothers are always like this, but it’s harder for readers to comprehend a biological mother doing such a thing.
I believe that the intention was to say that those who cannot love their children to the point of sacrifice are evil witches, deserving death and that a true mother would never do this. This certainly parallels the historical context of the story. And it makes the theme that much more resonant in that it pits the moral against a context in which self-sacrifice was so much more costly than at many other times in history.
The Magic Behind It All
If you look into these and many other older fairy tales, it is readily apparent that these are not necessarily meant for children. Some of the tales are morbid to the point of horror by today’s adult literary standards. Then, why the fairy tale?
If the fairy tale isn’t for children, why not couch the story in plain language and call it what it is: Dark Fiction, or even Horror?
If you’ve read some of my other writing, particularly the post What is Gothic Literature? you know that Gothic literature features those irrational themes – often spiritual or psychological – that can’t be reasoned. They’re less tangible than themes in other genres. There’s a complexity to the questions within the theme that is often mind-boggling.
And that’s where fairy tales play a magical role, because the fairy tale has a way of doing two things:
- It often introduces supernatural elements – like the witch as proxy for the stepmother in Hansel and Gretel – in order to make the lesson more tangible. This is something I talked about in my article How Gothic Writing Makes the B-Plot Tangible. We don’t just see the stepmother convincing the children’s father to abandon them. We see her reincarnated as a witch in the forest, willing to cook and eat them to save herself. And we see Bluebeard’s blue beard, not as an unnatural physical trait but as a reflection of his ugly character and the dead [and blue] bodies of his former wives.
- And second, fairy tales boil complex themes down to a child-like story that, beneath the surface, is anything but simple. When the theme is so inherently challenging to understand, the simplicity of the story can make it more digestible to readers.
So, in reality, the fairy tale, is a wonderful medium for Gothic writing. And as C.S. Lewis indicated, once we are mature enough, we will see the truth and value in fairy tales.
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