What Fairy Tales Really Tell Us

I enjoy learning about literature in my English class because my professor tells us random facts about those stories and pieces of text that I took for granted when I was a child.

I simply accepted these stories the way that they are told, never wondering what they mean or how they are related to me or to life, culture, and society in any way.

But when our professor started talking, our perspectives change and the way we look at literature is never the same.

Our current topic is the short story so our professor asked us what our concept of a short story is and whether we have encountered any before.

Comparing poetry and short story, she gave us an analogy of where our knowledge or concept of these two literary forms, more or less, came from and she said that nursery rhymes and street rhymes are to poetry as myths, legends, and fairy tales are to the short story.

So, she went on to talking about the fairy tales that we remember from our childhood and from there, she just gave us all these ideas and literary concepts behind the real stories.

When we were talking about these fairy tales, our professor pointed out that most of the fairy tales that we know have already been Disnefied which is to say that they have been sugarcoated so that they would be especially appealing to little children.

However, the original versions of these fairy tales deserve to be given attention to and each element of the story should be analyzed to see the relevance of the story to society in general.

What I would like to share here are some of the specific details and the subtle nuances that we may not make much out of but have a deep significance to the meaning of the story and what message it tries to relay.

1. Snow White
Snow White is perhaps one of the most, if not the most, popular fairy tale character. We all know the story that Snow White is the fairest in all the land so the evil Queen, who is her stepmother, plots to kill her by taking out her heart so she commands the hunter to kill Snow White.

The hunter is beguiled by the beauty of Snow White and decides to let her escape into the forest while he shows the heart of pig instead to the Queen.

As Snow White goes deeper into the forest, she finds the house of seven dwarves who help her and allow her to stay with them.

Eventually, the Queen finds out that Snow White is still alive and planned to kill her herself so she placed poison into a luscious red apple and disguised herself as a frail, warty, old woman who offers Snow White the poisoned apple which Snow White takes a bite off causing her to die.

The dwarves mourn her death until Prince Charming comes and brings life again to Snow White and they live happily ever after. More or less, this is the story we all know about Snow White, however, there are some inaccuracies from the real story.

In the real story, Snow White is actually just an 8-year-old girl and the Queen is actually her mother, not her stepmother and they are fighting for the attention of the King.

The subject behind the actual Snow White fairy tale is the concept of youth being attached to beauty and the apple is actually a metaphor for perfection or beauty.

2. Little Red Riding Hood
Little Red Riding Hood is a simple story where a young girl was sent by her mother to her grandmother's house to give her some fruits because the grandmother is sick and the mother instructs Little Red to go through the forest but cautions her to watch out for the wolf.

The wolf eventually finds out what Little Red is up to so he decides to get ahead of her and he goes to grandma's house and eats her up.

When Little Red reaches her grandmother's house, the wolf had already disguised himself as Little Red's grandmother. Little Red notices a few curious oddities on her grandmother's features like the size of the eyes and the sharpness of the teeth.

The wolf then gobbles her up too until the huntsman, who had been carefully watching the action, arrives and kills the wolf, taking the grandmother and Little Red out of the wolf's belly.

Of course, the real subject of the story is Little Red's coming of age depicted by her red hood since red is the color that symbolizes puberty and also refraining from talking to strangers as shown when the mother instructs Little Red to watch out for the wolf.

Also, there are double meanings in certain events such as when Little Red jumps into her "grandma's" bed where in fact, it is the wolf who is lying on the bed. So, this was an eye-opener for me.

3. Cinderella
Some things that I learned about the actual Cinderella is that her name was her job description - she cleaned the cinders which caused her to be dirty and dusty.

Her slippers were not actually made of glass but of pure gold and the reason why she ran off at midnight, as my professor had explained, was because midnight was the witching hour.

The witching hour means that anything can happen to anyone at that time so it was their version of a curfew and the reason why the carriage turned back into a pumpkin and her escorts turned back to animals.

Also, when the prince was looking for the owner of the slipper, Cinderella's stepsisters' feet could not fit in so their mother instructed one to cut her big toe off with a knife and the other to cut her heel with a knife.

But Cinderella had help from her already dead mother through the birds of the hazel tree growing on Cinderella's mother's grave.

In the end, the prince and Cinderella marries and at their wedding, Cinderella's stepsisters came and stood beside her, one on the left and the other on the right, but the pigeons who helped Cinderella pecked out both their eyes because they were wicked liars. Quite a story!

Conclusion
At the end of the day, everything we see and read has a connection to real life and society. They reflect how we view the world and what we associate different abstract concepts to events that happen in real life.

Literature becomes a way for us to know more about human behavior and the values that we try to embody in our lives.