The Message and Meaning in Fairytales

Why fairytales continue to thrive and survive

The Little Tailor is a fairytale about a man who convinces the people around him that a minor event (his slaying of seven flies) is actually a major accomplishment. He does this by stitching himself a belt that says, “seven at one blow,” and when people assume he’s referring to men, he doesn’t dissuade them. In fact, he encourages their perception without actually confirming or denying, and their belief in what he says makes his words a reality. He leverages that constructed reality to “achieve” several tasks and ultimately wins a position as the son-in-law of the king.

Now, ask yourself, who does that Tailor remind you of?

Depending on your political persuasion, he may remind you of Donald Trump, who leveraged a series of failed businesses and bankruptcies into a TV show about how to be successful in business, and then ascended into the White House on the beliefs of an audience who thought he was a successful businessman. Or the Tailor may remind you of Colin Kaepernick, who built a campaign for social justice on the perception that he’d lost his job as quarterback because he took a knee (though he’d lost his position months earlier) and then had his perception cemented into reality with Nike’s campaign slogan, “Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything.”

No matter who you think personifies the tailor, the tailor lives on years after his tale was first recorded. That’s the beauty and the power of fairytales—they remain relevant because they continue to offer insight into our world, and the events and people around us, hundreds and sometimes thousands of years after they were first told.

Take The Girl Who Pretended to be a Boy. It’s the story of a princess who with the help of a magic horse, sets out on a series of adventures. Disguised as a boy she even rescues a princess who falls in love with her. Along the way she is cursed by a hermit who declares that if she be a woman, may she be turned into a man: “and when the princess felt she was really the man she pretended to be, she was delighted, and if the hermit had only been within reach she would have thanked him from her heart.” The fairytale concludes with the marriage of the princess-pretending-to-be-a-boy to the other princess—an early transgender fairytale.

Or re-read Bluebeard, the story of a man who offered women their hearts desire and then restrained their freedom with the threat of losing it all if they disobeyed him. Those who crossed him lost everything. Harvey Weinstein anybody?

Einstein once said that if you want your child to be brilliant, read him fairytales and if you want him to be even more brilliant, read him even more fairytales. I think Einstein was referring not just to the world of possibility in the stories, but also to the realities they portray. He was a scientist and scientists start with acknowledgement of a reality. They use the reality as a launchpad for challenging, envisioning and creating a new reality. In the same way, the destitute daughters and third sons in fairytales acknowledge the reality of their worlds—disinheritance, loss of a mother, incredible poverty—and then set out to change it. Fairytales are grounded in unpleasant realities but it’s the acknowledgement and subsequent challenge that gives rise to the quest to change their world.

Because fairytales are frank about the harsh realities of the world and of the savagery that occurs daily within it, they’ve been the frequent victims of book banning—and not just in elementary schools in California today, but in post-WW2 Germany as well. The Allied Command banned Grimm’s Tales for a while after the war because they felt the savagery in them had contributed to the behavior of the Nazis. While they may have been misguided and unaware of the history of the Grimm tales (which had roots in Perrault’s tales in 17th century France, and the Italian publications of Straparola in the 16th century and Boccaccio in the 14th century), the Allied Command understood enough to know the tales had meaning and impact.

Post-World War Two, the Military has continued to take stories seriously. The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) spent several million dollars studying story and narratives through its Narrative Networks Program. On the website they explain, “DARPA launched the Narrative Networks program to understand how narratives influence human cognition and behavior and apply those findings in international security contexts.” In other words, they wanted to know how stories impact people. One of their key takeaways was that story is a framework for understanding events—it provides context and creates meaning about things we may not be able to comprehend or cope with on our own. Like Donkey Skin, a fairytale about incest. Or Cuchulainn, a tale about a man who pursued his passions (war and fighting) until they killed him.

I used to find fairytales sexist and irrelevant until I began reading the original versions. Now I find their narratives everywhere. Their dark corners illuminate what’s worst about human behaviors and reflect what’s possible when we’re at our best. When we sanitize them, we lose their relevance to our lives and the possibility that, with a little magical or spiritual help, we can change the world.