Three simple responses to “The Better to Entertain You With, My Dear,” published in The New York Times on March 21, 2012. While the author seems to have genuine affection for fairy tales he has encountered in film and elsewhere, he also makes broad statements roundly dismissing their relevance to the 21st century readers and viewers. 

Point/Counterpoint #1.  This article makes the astonishing claim that “the social realities on which the original [sic] fairy tales depend are almost incomprehensibly alien to 21st-century sensibilities.” In stark contrast to this incomprehensible statement, the NYT article called “Living Like a Billionaire, If Only for a Day” appears a mere few days later! We will leave aside in this response any discussion of the films the article purports to review: it’s the cliche fairy-tale bashing that concerns us. And the social realities of poverty, hardly alien to us today. 

Point/Counterpoint #2. The NYT piece claims that in the new Hollywood versions, “Snow White is a much more can-do kind of princess than the passive heroine of yore.” Such as yore’s Albanian Snow White (hard to find in translation to English) who possibly murders her mother and sometimes two sisters as well, and is occasionally depicted living companionably with 40 dragons? So passive! Yore, like today, does not have one Snow White, but a diverse spectrum of heroes shaped by a diverse spectrum of authors and artists.  Here is a more thoughtful article about another 21st century  “Snow White,” a ballet with costumes by Jean Paul Gaultier. 

Point/Counterpoint #3: The NYT article states that “The world from which fairy tales and folk tales emerged has largely vanished, and although it pleases us to think of these stark, simple, fantastic narratives as timeless, they aren’t. ” This is puzzling because fairy tales, as far as we know, “emerged” from planet earth, which has not vanished . .  . yet. The old tales do reflect a world far more astonished and grateful for biodiversity, we think. Yet that is not what Rafferty means; he means their stark themes are outdated.  As long as child abandonment, extreme poverty, racism, genocide, famine, and all manner of senseless violence remain in this world, we will have fairy tales. Many (not all) offer radical solutions to very real problems.  Others offer different consolations through their poetics.

If the current movies reviewed in this article lack aesthetic and narrative force for the reviewer, why blame fairy tales? At the least, it’s an illogical rhetorical gesture. We think Rafferty is a fairy-tale friend. And we would love to see reviewers cease using cliches about fairy tales. It is easy to do. There are many wonderful and accessible books on their history, including Maria Tatar’s The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales, Jack Zipes’ newest, The Irresistible Fairy Tale, and it is fun to brush up on the old fairy tales too, with many astonishing variants easily found on Heidi Anne Heiner’s fairy-tale site, in Tatar’s Grimm Reader and Zora Neale Hurston’s Every Tongue Got To Confess (not to mention hundreds of other collections — which Fairy Tale Review would be thrilled to receive as gifts, hint hint).

In all seriousness, we are puzzled by the tone of condescension to readers (and to the reporter himself) when this article asserts that, while “it pleases us” to think fairy tales are “timeless,” fairy tales are utterly irrelevant now. We regret that the esteemed NYT takes such a classist and pedagogical tone in an article that fuels disparagement of fairy tales, a minoritarian art form of spectacular complexity and diverse expression.

“We are the folk,” as folklorist Alan Dundes once said. 

Here at Fairy Tale Review we are not pleased by the timelessness of human brutality still rampant today, though we are pleased by the fraught, complex, poetic mode of expression called fairy tales, still living today. As long as violence, poverty, abuses of power, and greed live in this world, fairy tales likely won’t vanish. It is no coincidence that Anne Frank wrote tales up in that Secret Annex.  We understand, of course, that Rafferty’s misunderstanding—however unintended—is not his alone, and we are not trying to make an example of him personally; many cultural entities of influence have encouraged this exact view that fairy tales as a class represent an inferior form, and content, of expression. 

Upon closer inspection of fairy tales from 2,000 years ago to today, or merely a few engaging books about their strange history, would the author of this article really agree that we live in a world where “fairy tales” are so outdated? It would not take much work to dismiss that fallacy, really. One need only compare a version of the Appalachian tale “Babes in the Woods” with the “stark, simple, fantastic” story below, circa 21st century. What makes this story relevant now? The children’s survival: a radical act. “The folktale is real,” said Italo Calvino. Here, at Fairy Tale Review, we agree.