THE REALITY OF FAIRY TALES
Fables and folklore provide an otherworldly escape route in troubled times. No wonder their popularity is booming,
“Stories create the energy that makes this world go,” Melissa Albert writes in her fairy tale-inspired debut The Hazel Wood. “They keep our stars in place.”
The much buzzed-about YA novel, out last week, follows a high school student, Alice, whose grandmother is the author of a disturbing collection of folk tales that launch the teen on a magic-filled quest.
It’s a mesmerizing outing, tailormade for young audiences and tapping into the recent resurgence of interest in fairy tales.
But The Hazel Wood also explores a big idea — that narrative has the power to shape both individual lives and humanity as a whole — and, as such, is part of a fascinating conversation in literary circles on the role myth can play in healing societal wounds such as sexism and racism. Can our age-old tales offer hope in troubled times?
And what, exactly, gives them timeless appeal?
“Of course, I discovered fairy tales as a young reader,” says Albert, reached on the phone in Chicago on a book tour. “When you read them as a kid, they seem like these really full, rich stories. But they are actually very bare bones, almost skeletal.
“(Because) they are not fully determined, you can read them and you can retell them, and you can modernize them, and you can give them new settings. They just have this wonderful pliability.”
Add to that: fairy tales offer escapism, which can be comforting in times of uncertainty.
“All the threats that Alice faces are supernatural in origin,” the Brooklyn author says. “She doesn’t fear the racist. She doesn’t fear the s---ty boss getting out of hand. Her fears are otherworldly. And I think that’s kind of relaxing — to read about, and be scared of, terrors that aren’t real.”
Fairy tales, of course, have long held a sacred place in our collective psyche, returned to again and again.
In recent months, as societal tensions have soared, we’ve seen a tidal wave of folklore-inspired titles, including Girls Made of Snow and Glass by Melissa Bashardoust, Leigh Bardugo’s The Language of Thorns: Mid- night Tales and Dangerous Magic, and even Stephen Fry’s celebration of age-old legends, Mythos: A Retelling of the Myths of Ancient Greece.
There’s more to come, too, with fable-inspired books as diverse as
Floating City by Kerri Sakamoto, a magic realism-tinged literary fiction, and The Prince and the Dressmaker, a graphic novel by Jen Wang set in Paris at the dawn of the modern age.
The timing couldn’t be better for a book on the meaning of fairy tales, and it’s set to arrive in March, courtesy of the iconic American poet Robert Bly. More Than True: The Wisdom of Fairy Tales is the ideal companion reader for this explosion of contemporary fairy tales.
“During certain times the old Kings in the fairy stories, the Princess-daughters, the dangerous and illtempered dragons and so on, fall into an unconscious reservoir, hibernate, and resonate there for centuries,” Bly, now in his 90s, tells the Star in an email.
“When these stories are most needed, they unfold into conscious minds again. This unfolding might happen when mass regressions are most severe . . . (when) our resident dragons scorch the earth we live on.”
In short: “The stories give us ways of understanding the craziness of our lives.” Consider, if you will, The Frog
Prince, recounted in More Than True. In a kingdom on the edge of a forest, the king’s daughter plays with a golden ball, eventually losing it down a well. She weeps, and an ugly frog appears and offers to retrieve the ball for her — for a price.
“Let me be your companion and playfellow,” he says. The princess agrees and, though repulsed, allows him into the palace to sit on her chair, drink from her cup and eat from her plate. Come nighttime, she places him on her bed. “Aren’t you going to bring me to your pillow?” the frog demands. Fed up, the princess throws the frog against the wall and he transforms into a prince.
What are we to make of this strange story?
Bly’s suggestion is this: We all have ugly parts of ourselves, parts we feel ashamed of and repress. But healing, wholeness, can only take place when we acknowledge this brokenness. Then, and only then, can we take this ugly frog-part of our nature in hand.
This story goes a long way to explain why, in 2018 — a time of political polarization, racism, mass uncovering of sexual violence — people are turning to fairy tales in droves.
“It takes an adult to confront the magnitude of harm that’s rampant in our current North American political life,” Bly says in his email.
“Fairy stories show stages in the development of an adult human psyche. Such stages are necessary if we are to begin coping with harms so vast.”
Fairy tales illustrate these stages in lighthearted ways, Bly adds, allowing the lessons to sink in slowly, and eventually land, helping us “find strengths that we didn’t know were ours.”
This need to discover buried strengths may be why feminist reimaginings are also proving so potent, including Hilary McKay’s
Fairy Tales and The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror by Mallory Ortberg, out in March. Such orations are tailor-made for the #MeToo era, as women come forward en masse, demanding a voice, becoming the heroines of their own stories. This necessarily involves an outpouring of pent-up sorrow and anger; the resulting crisis is terrifically painful, and the chasm between men and women will require much to heal. To this end, Bly’s book contains another instructive tale, The White Bear
King Valemon. In this story, a princess weds a bear. Curious, she defies warnings and holds a candle up to her beloved husband in bed at night, discovering a secret that banishes him from their home and triggers a separation that takes much courage to overcome. “The story asks what the soul is willing to pay for the increase in vision,” Bly says. “We are asking that question now. With the number of revelations and accusations of harassment and worse, a new consciousness of gender relations has to appear. The push for light will force it to happen. It will demand that men see the pain they have been causing. They must make the choice to do that. Everything is at stake. “Women must choose too,” he adds, “whether they want to employ shame and rage only, in hopes of speeding up the change that’s already underway, or whether they want a dialogue with men like the ones taking shape on the fronts of racism and the freedoms available from democracy.”