Once Upon a …. Nightmare

I said my blog this week would be fun, so I decided to tap into a fascinating subject that always blows my mind, as well as the mind of a lot of my friends – fairy tales. Now that we’re older, I feel like fairy tales are naturally seen as snippets from the imagination, lighthearted stories of our youth. The genie gives Aladdin three wishes, Cinderella runs away from the ball, Sleeping Beauty is awakened by true love’s kiss- the list of happily ever afters goes on and on and on.

So what if I were to tell you that behind every happily ever after is a more creepy reality? When I was a sophomore in college, I took a class entitled “The Dark Truth Behind the Grimms Tales”. It quickly became the most interesting course I took throughout my college career. Without further ado, here are five tales that may just shock you, when you realize that behind every tale is a much more surprising truth. I have a feeling that this post may bibbiti bobbiti blow your mind.

Behind the ‘Snow White’ Coffin:

You might think Snow White started and ended with a poison apple and seven dwarves, but these things are Disney-fied symbols that became synonymous with the tale long after the Grimms got their hands on it. You may notice that Snow White is one of the only tales where the prince is barely present in the plot of the movie, until the very end when he is necessary for true love’s kiss or whatever. At least, that is what most people thought until scholar Bruno Bettelheim, a psychoanalytic critic mentored by the one and only Sigmund Freud, stepped up to the plate. In his range of essays on the fragility of identity, he argued that Snow White and the Seven Dwarves is actually a tale about patriarchal dependance. Before you click off, the idea was that Snow White and the Wicked Queen are just different versions of a woman who has based her own identity off of what men in society think. While we are led to think that the queen is evil because she is willing to do anything to get rid of the beautiful, kind princess- they are actually both pit against each other by one man in particular, who is actually not the prince at the end of the tale.

Rather, the queen’s callous acts are done in a plot to win the affections of her husband, the late king, who resurrects himself in the story as the magic mirror. By emphasizing that Snow is now the “fairest of them all”, the fate of both characters in the story is set in motion: the princess as the hero, and the queen as (in Taylor Swift’s very wise words) the anti-hero. When the queen is murdered at the end of the story (literally forced to burn by iron-clad shoes at the wedding) and the princess is chosen to lead, Bettelheim argues this is meant to represent that the queen and her stepdaughter are just two sides of the same looking glass (that is what the coffin Snow White is trapped in represents)- an illustration of what happens when one is and isn’t favored by what Bettelheim argues is an extremely cruel, patriarchy-ruled society. And to prove that not much has changed since the Grimms published “Little Snow White” in 1812, remember this tale the next time you turn on The Bachelor.

Little Red Ends Up Dead:

Hey, remember the woodcutter who saves Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother after the big bad wolf swallows them whole? You might think Disney’s version is already a little messed up, but wait until you find out that THE WOODCUTTER DOESN’T EXIST in the original versions of the tale. And the big bad wolf- he is actually a sexual predator drawn up by writer Charles Perrault, a French storyteller who first told the story “Little Red Cap” in his saloons in the 17th century as a warning to aristocratic wives to stay on the straight and narrow and be cautious of similar men.

Need any more proof that the tale is a warning? In Perrault’s version, the story ends in the following way, with this moral that is added in once Red is eaten (and stays eaten):

“Children, especially attractive, well bred young ladies, should never talk to strangers, for if they should do so, they may well provide dinner for a wolf. I say "wolf," but there are various kinds of wolves. There are also those who are charming, quiet, polite, unassuming, complacent, and sweet, who pursue young women at home and in the streets. And unfortunately, it is these gentle wolves who are the most dangerous ones of all.” (Little Red Riding Hood, ending).

Blue Beard- 8 Wives and Counting:

Perrault should probably be checked out for a traumatic upbringing, because his version of Blue Beard is no less terrifying. In it, a rich but ugly man marries a woman and gives her a ring of keys, telling her he is to leave on a trip and that she can try out every lock except for one, which she is off limits to (hey, this kinda sounds like Beauty and the Beast). Because of course she does, the woman is too curious to stay away from the locked door, which when she opens, is host to the dead bodies of Blue Beard’s past wives who lie murdered on the ground. After a failed attempt to hide her disobedience from him, he finds out what she has done and prepares to kill her. At the last moment, however, her brothers find her and are able to kill Blue Beard and save her life.

What is most peculiar about this tale, aside from the fact that is little known today (probably because Disney found it a little icky to recreate this one for whatever reason) is the moral at the end:

Curiosity, in spite of its appeal, often leads to deep regret. To the displeasure of many a maiden, its enjoyment is short lived. Once satisfied, it ceases to exist, and always costs dearly.

Considering who the victim of this tale is and how obvious this seems today, hearing such a blurring of victim and hero from the writer of the tale itself pegs the question, “Is that the real reason we do not tell this story today?” For many fairy tale scholars, the key the woman uses and the obedience that is referred to is meant to symbolize sexual submissiveness- another example of how the remakes of today tell a narrative that could not be further from the lessons that these stories passed on long ago.

"The Goose Girl" Might Ruffle Your Feathers:

One of Bruno Bettelheim’s greatest examples of psychoanalytic theory in common fairy tales in the Grimms’ “The Goose Girl.” For a quick recap, this tale follows a princess who at the age of 13 is sent to a faraway kingdom to marry a prince with her talking horse Falada, a handkerchief her mother gives her with three drops of blood, and her evil chambermaid. Halfway through the journey, the chambermaid steals the handkerchief and assumes the princesses’ identity for whatever reason, and as such, when they arrive at the kingdom, the real princess is cast aside. However, thanks to the talking horse who reveals the truth at the end, the evil chambermaid is LITERALLY dragged through nails (UM…okay Grimms) while the prince and princess are happily married.

This cutesy, slightly concerning tale is made more complicated by the symbols Bettelheim brings to light in his dissertations on the subject. The handkerchief, meant to symbolize the girls’ sexual maturity, is stolen from her because her identity is not fully formed, and despite her age, she has not yet reached full autonomy. It isn’t until later in the story, when the girl stands up for herself against the wicked geese tender, Conrad (if you guessed he’s apparently meant to represent more sexual predators, you’d be right) that she is rescued from her predicament and reunited with her identity and the prince. Bettelheim claims that the marriage of the prince and princess and the restoration of her handkerchief means she has finally reached full autonomy. While kids reading may not relate to marrying a prince or having a talking horse to play with, they understand on a subconscious level that they will one day reach an age where things that are complicated and confusing will align, and the different components of their personalities will begin to make sense together. Since the time of Bettelheim, many scholars such as Maria Tatar and Jack Zipes have emerged from the pages to dispute and strengthen the arguments that were so pivotal and controversial about these tales we’ve printed and come to love.

The Cinderella Promise:

As the subject of my final paper in my college course, I could talk about the simple story of Cinderella all day long. We all think we know the story, right? A poor beautiful maiden is forced to become the servant of her stepmother and stepsisters when her father passes away. The next chance of happiness she has is when her fairy godmother, who just hasn’t been paying attention for 20 years, pops back into the picture to give her a pretty dress so she can manipulate a prince into marrying her thanks to his foot fetish… or something like that.

But whether you have heard the original story or not, you will know the tale from its trillion remakes over the ages: Live action Cinderella, Cinderella’s 2 and 3, A Cinderella Story, A Modern Cinderella Story, Maid in Manhattan, Another Cinderella Story, and so on and so forth. We all seem highly conditioned to what I’m calling “The Cinderella Promise” (the name of my final paper), a concept that heavily echoes the real-world uptake of “the American dream”. If the shoe fits, as a society we’d like to accept that we too can have it all, the promise of creating a better life for ourselves than what we were born into. In the story itself, the stepsisters have their eyes poked out and the stepmother chops off her children’s toes, but even if that idea doesn’t present itself in our daily lives, the comfort children feel at the Disney tale does present itself in adulthood- via, of course, the Cinderella promise.

There you have it- five stories that we all know from childhood books, ones that we remember our parents reading out loud to us as kids, but twistier than we could have ever expected. On my first day of my Grimms tales class, back in January 2020 when COVID wasn’t a thing and like 30% of people washed their hands (don’t hate the messenger, this is directly from the WHO lol), our professor showed us the trailer for the live action film of Hansel and Gretel that rumor has it I am still too scared to watch. In it, there’s this quote Gretel says: “You don’t have to hear a fairy tale – somehow you just know it.”

What does this even mean? I think what I have realized it means is that fairy tales, passed down through generations from centuries ago in Eastern Europe, are a type of glue that our kids need as escapism. Happily ever after is easier than puberty and finding a job for 40 years, isn’t it? The idea of prince and princess encapsulates this perfect reunion of someone’s past with their future, a type of reunion that is much harder to label and understand in everyday life.

And if you are still reading and still do not have goose bumps, think of it this way: the word nostalgia is Greek for the phrase “the pain of returning home”. What does this mean?

It means that fairy tales, like all nostalgic things (so like me watching the Wizards of Waverley Place movie tonight), are beautiful because they bring us back to a time we long to remember. These moments that seem just out of a reach are important because they are long gone and cannot be recreated, and that is often the reality of moving on and growing up. So next time you remember that Cinderella’s stepsisters had their eyeballs poked out, that Hansel and Gretel were abandoned purposefully by their asshole parents, or that Sleeping Beauty was raped in her sleep while giving birth to twins, remember that these tales and what they’ve turned into represent an invisible string throughout the ages.

They remind us that at least for a few minutes, anything is possible, once upon a time.