“The fairy tales we know today…used to be darker, stranger, and more complex, until this century. Then they were banished to the nursery (as J.R.R. Tolkien, the author of the Lord of the Rings books once pointed out) like furniture adults have grown tired of and no longer want.” (Datlow &Windling, p.vii)
While there is some truth to the above assertion, to anyone who looks closely, fairy tales are constantly re-vamped for modern readers and moviegoers, especially the teens. Consider the success of books and films like Meg Cabot’s The Princess Diaries, Christopher Paolini’s Eragon and Eldest, or J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series and you’ll see that fanciful, moral tales of magic and miracles, kings and country maids are alive and well in the young adult world. A great deal has been debated about the value of fairy tales as an educational tool, and many scholars agree that they are one of the essential building blocks, not only of children’s literary development, but moral development as well. (Zipes, 1979) One collection that may prove a great teaching tool in the young adult classroom is A Wolf at the Door and Other Retold Fairy Tales. (Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, editors, 2001). The tales in this volume embody many classic themes and lessons of all young adult literature—with new twists – including issues of image, pedagogy of fear and warning, and the importance of embracing the whole of life’s journeys and boundaries, including the supporting characters, the rough bits, and attaining the closure that in order to mature, you must not ignore.
Fairy tales, to the modern, Disney-influenced generations, have always had a focus on appearances. Consider the amount of time in Cinderella that is devoted to deciding on costume choices – her whole relationship with the mice and birds of the house seems based on what to wear. (Tartar, p.138) “Cinder Elephant,” by Jane Yolen, in contrast, openly makes fun of these fairy tale birds who, arguably with the best of intentions, dress the portly Elly heroine of this tale in a gown of feathers and shoes of twigs and leaves, until she resembles a fat hen rather than a princess. It is the evil stepsisters who are the thin waifs, “with hearts so thin you could read a magazine through them.” (p.18) Elly wins the prince not through her looks, but by being approachable, and able to talk about baseball and bird watching with the prince. Yolen states a good moral for adolescent girls in the age of super-model-induced eating disorders and unrealistic terms of physical beauty: ”if you love a waist, you waste a love.”
The title story, “Wolf at the Door,” also deals with this issue of images. Here, a young girl in a fantasy ice age finds a hungry wolf, and finds he can speak. He tries very hard to act human, and the girl begins to fear that he may be a man under an enchantment, a fear her father shares and worries that she will be obliged to kiss and later marry him. Author Tanith Lee writes in her notes, “I was always very intrigued by the changes... the frog who is really a prince, the cat who is a princess… maybe we are all something also, something other than what the world sees when it looks at us. How many people, for example, look at a child and see “only” a child?” (p.62) The wolf turns out to be a lion, not a man, and the daughter is relieved, and as Maria Tartar notes in her Off With Their Heads: Fairy Tales and the Culture of Childhood, “The casual way in which fairy-tale parents sacrifice their daughters to beasts is nothing short of alarming.” (p.140) But the story brings out a very teachable point: our lives are all in transition, and we are not what meets the eye.
Nowhere is the issue of image more profound than in Kathe Koja’s bittersweet “Becoming Charise.” In this retelling of the story of the ugly duckling, nothing magic saves the girl who does not fit in at school. She knows she is different. She feels like she wants to become something else. When she is offered a place at a prestigious school for gifted students, you think as the reader that this is the moment when she turns into the swan. But she is unable to go – her family cannot afford it. It is through the reassurance of her teacher and mentor that she realizes that she must strive to become what she was all along – her true self, already a swan, already smart and beautiful, just in an environment that does not appreciate her. The author writes in her notes,
“I chose to retell this story because I have been the ugly duckling more than once: I know how it hurts, and I know that you have to be who you are, no matter what. I hope this story helps another duckling, somewhere else.” (p.135)
In addition to issues of image, fairy tales are also filled with pedagogy of fear. “Disobedience,” writes Tartar, “is generally a function of curiosity and stubbornness in the behavioral calculus of most folktale collections, and both vices are repeatedly singled out for punishment in cautionary tales.” (p.25) Neil Gaiman’s “Instructions” is just what it sounds like: warnings and advice for anyone entering a fairy tale, including things like don’t trust the youngest princess, be nice to and feed old beggar women, and do not forget your manners. (pp.30-33) “The Months of Manhattan” has a similar theme, with a heroine who finds an enchanted painting, is polite to it, and is granted good luck. Her stepsister figures out the source of this luck and decides to go get some for herself. But when she finds the painting of Rockefeller Center, she is rude, and is cursed with the worst luck ever. Rudeness and lack of respect are things that are, alas, celebrated in today’s youth culture, and stories like this one might help give students some perspective. (p.16) Katherine Vaz’s “The Kingdom of Melting Glances” also deals with this lesson, as the mean sisters who pick on their siblings disfiguring birthmark are eventually turned into mosquitoes, soulless creatures the reader is encouraged to swat. (p.105) Nowhere is this cautionary pedagogy more fun and appropriately alarming than in Garth Nix’s “Hansel’s Eyes.” Here, instead of luring the two children cast into the woods with a house made of candy, two victims of parental neglect are seduced by a much more modern and potent forbidden fruit: unlimited playing of video games. During the course of the story, as Gretel tries to do the witch’s bidding and learn magic, Hansel becomes a zombie with a controller in his hands. In the end, he loses an eye, and Gretel must replace it with that of a magic cat. The sight of the cat’s eye upon their return to the evil Hagmom and weakling father gives her a heart attack, and gives the kids courage to deal with the next kid-hating spouse of their father. (p.122)
The lives of young adults are fraught with all sorts of problems, and while it is easy for adolescents to get wrapped up in their own private Jonah days, part of growing up means realizing that there is more to life than yourself, and more to the world than your problems. People at this age are constantly redefining their boundaries, with their friends, family, authority figures, and within themselves. In her book, From the Beast to the Blonde, On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers, author Marina Warner writes,
“The dimension of wonder creates a huge theater of possibility in [fairy tales]: anything can happen. This very boundlessness serves the moral purpose of the tales, which is precisely to teach where boundaries lie.” (p.xx)
Part of understanding the dynamics of these boundaries is knowing your supporting cast and their motivations as you star in your own life story. Michael Cadnum’s “Mrs. Big: Jack and the Beanstalk Retold” presents a different view of the classic ogre archetype: her husband is a peace-loving garden giant who was duped into a bad real-estate deal by a purveyor of magic beans. They went to live in the clouds in the first place because they were traumatized by accidentally stepping on humans all the time when on earth. (p.42) Gregory Maguire (of Wicked fame) wrote the tale-twisting “The Seven Stage a Comeback,” which finds the dwarves months later pining for Snow White so horribly that they actually set out to her castle and plan to give her back the poisoned apple chunk, then stick her back in the glass coffin so they won’t be lonesome for her anymore. Dopey, of all characters, is the voice of reason in the end, when he finds his tongue and talks the rest of them out of it after discovering she was now a mother. (p.146) Does this give the young reader pause, as they plan their escape from home, about the parents and siblings who are left behind? It might. More than the boundaries of interpersonal relationships, though, are the emotional ones that are drawn in the lives of adolescents, especially when they have suffered a loss. In Kelly Link’s “Swans,” a modern princess loses her ability to speak when she loses her mother. There is a fabulously funny take on the wicked stepmother motif in this tale, including the fact that she is actually a bird, and that the heroine takes a most practical approach to dealing with her when she cannot find her fairy godfather, Rumplestiltskin: she goes to the library to do research on the spells that turned her brothers to swans, stating, “if you can’t depend on your fairy godfather, at least you can depend on the card catalog.” (p.90) Sewn throughout this tale is her inability to deal with her mother’s death, represented in the unfinished quilt that they were working on when she died. She cannot bring herself to finish it until the end, when she realizes that she must in order to break the bird/stepmother’s spell. This comes to her when she finally is able to cry and to mourn. The quilt becomes a part of her journey, albeit it bittersweet, and with it, she at last has some closure, and is ready to move on, and grow up.
It has been said of young adult literature that it has soft endings – that things have a tendency to end up “happily ever after” in some way. The same could be said of fairy tales:
“The genre is characterized by ‘heroic optimism,’ as if to say, ‘one day we might be happy even if it won’t last.’”(Warner, p.xxi) And yet, it seems irresponsible in a way to me to not have this optimism in literature aimed at this tender age. Having hope and working towards one’s own happy ending should be what we are pushing as a not-so-hidden agenda in education. I would definitely teach this book to a junior high audience. There is so much that society pushes students to grow out of by seventh grade – fairy tales should not be one of those lost things. We need all the heroic optimism we can get.
Works Cited
Datlow, Ellen & Windling, Terri, Eds. A Wolf at the Door and Other Retold Fairy Tales. Aladdin Paperback: New York, NY. 2001
Tartar, Maria. Off With Their Heads: Fairy Tales and The Culture of Childhood. Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ. 1992
Warner, Marina. From the Beast to the Blonde: Fairy Tales and their Tellers. Farrar, Straus & Giroux: New York, NY. 1994
Zipes, Jack Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales. University of Texas Press: Austin, TX. 1979
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