Modern Fairy Fail

Modern Fairy Fail
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday October 17, 2015

The closet under our stairs is home to a pair of battered suitcases, a retired floor mop topped with a shrivelled toupee of sponge and at least two generations of Daddy Long Leg spiders. I quite like spiders-on-stilts as a rule, but not when they come charging three abreast from the dark recesses of my scariest cupboard. Spring cleaning can be bloodthirsty work.

With my vacuum cleaner, I sucked them into the vortex of Hurricane Hoover and continued nosing deeper and deeper into the cupboard. And that’s when I struck an unfamiliar object. It was a mouldering cardboard box. I sliced open the packing tape with a knife. Inside was an antiquated collection of Brothers Grimm fairy tale books. They’d belonged to my mother as a girl and she, in turn, had entrusted them to my childhood.

I shuffled through the box, surprised and delighted to find these yellowing relics. Here were my favourite fairy tales – Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, Rumplestiltskin and Rapunzel. I teased open the fraying cloth cover of Hansel & Gretel and fell down a wormhole, hurtling back to my grandmother’s house and the bare boards of my bedroom, aged nine.

I remembered the story of Hansel & Gretel being a thrilling, if uncomfortable read: two children deserted by their new step-mother in the woods; captured by a cannibalistic witch who plans to barbecue her small prisoners. When at last, the witch gets her comeuppance, I reveled in the punitive gore of the hag being pushed alive into her own oven.

That witch deserved what she got. But I thought hard about what kind of father could be talked into discarding his children. He was a coward, I decided and I resolved never to get involved with one of those. But I was soon to acquire a step-father of my own. Not convinced of the benefits, I was already wary of being displaced in my mother’s affections. Hansel & Gretel became a touchstone for my own fears of abandonment.

Back beside the staircase, I discovered at the bottom of the box, a copy of The Juniper Tree – surely the most brutal of Grimms’ folk tales. As I turned the brittle pages for the first time in nearly forty years, the grisly illustrations loosened another panoply of childhood memories. In what cerebral crevice had they been hibernating?

Here was yet another hateful stepmother. This one beheads her stepson to allow her daughter to inherit the family fortune. The stepmother cooks the boy’s head in a stew and feeds it to his unwitting father, who remarks: ‘Delicious!’

I’d remembered few of the macabre and gory details – only a 9-year-old’s outrage that the villainous wife might get away with her crime. How relieved I’d been when she was crushed by a millstone.

Was my childish mind traumatized by such violent storytelling? Not me! I was far more terrified of the monster under my bed. Fairy tales were instructive: they cautioned me to trust my instincts. They helped me calibrate my moral compass.

Those old stories gave graphic expression to what every parent knows – that people get angry and even violent; and that these darker sides of human nature can be explored for entertainment rather than being repressed and denied.

My children have only ever seen the saccharine Disney versions of these fairytales – bowdlerized almost beyond recognition. In 21st century Hollywood, villains find themselves transformed or absolved. Good triumphs over evil and all mistakes can be rectified. Nice things happen to nice people.

Should we be sanitising fairy tales for today’s kids? In my mother’s 1940’s edition of Snow White, the evil queen must wear red-hot iron shoes at Snow White’s wedding, and dances herself to death. Cinderella’s horrible step-sisters have their eyes pecked out. Revenge was a fitting punishment. The awfulness those endings rankled in my mind, but I lapped them up, enjoying my darker fantasies.

Last night, I decided to test the delicacy of my five year old’s constitution. At bedtime, I produced my antique, unexpurgated copy of Cinderella and we settled down to read. On page 12, I remembered – nervously – what was coming. Cinderella’s stepsisters failed to fit the golden slipper. “Here’s a knife,” their mother urges. “If the slipper is still too tight for you, then cut off a piece of your foot. It will hurt a bit. But what does that matter?” So they slice off some toes.

I paused to gauge my five-year-old’s reaction, fearing I might have created a new monster for bedtime. But she turned to me and giggled.

“That was a dumb idea!” she said, whipping one foot out from under the covers. “They should’ve scrunched up their toes up like this.”

And with that practical advice, we went to the ball, met our Prince and lived happily ever after.