Brownian Motion

Written for The Princeton High School Tower Newspaper

“Why the hell should I care about fairy tales?”

Well, my dear hypothetical friend, you should care because they’re fun. When was the last time you fought a dragon while riding a flying carpet? The last time you were a mermaid seeking to find a world above the waves? The last time you crawled through a wardrobe door and talked to a goat? But they're also a reflection of our social values — what morals does a society think are so important that they’re woven into some of the very first stories we tell our children?

Let’s look at how fairy tales portray women. There’s a grand total of two archetypes here: the poor innocent girl (bonus points for pearl-white complexion and romantic dreams of some prince to marry), and the wicked crooked-nosed witch or sister or stepmother or queen.

Take “Cinderella,” where a poor innocent orphaned girl is mistreated by a wicked stepmother until a magical fairy godmother gives her the means to attend the Royal Ball and meet Mr. Prince-Of-Her-Dreams. To me, the lesson seems to be that if you wait around and suffer long enough, all of your problems will be solved, you will get to marry a handsome prince and live happily ever after, et cetera. It’s the same story with “Sleeping Beauty” ― a beautiful princess is cursed by an evil witch to sleep until awakened by a true love's kiss from a savior of a prince. I suppose the moral here is that a woman should patiently wait for a prince to rescue her from life’s troubles.

Even when our heroine plays a more active role, it is almost always to win some prince’s hand in marriage. In The Little Mermaid, Ariel is anything but passive – she rebels against her parents’ desires, saves a prince from a shipwreck, and makes a deal with an evil witch. But why does she do all these things? Because she wants to marry the prince, of course. In the original (somewhat less child-friendly) Andersen version, the Little Mermaid commits suicide after the prince marries someone else.

Of course, not every fairytale involving women goes this way. “The Chronicles of Narnia,” one of my favorite stories, is a refreshing break from this mold; Lucy Pevensie is naive and flawed, but also brave — rather than romance, she is driven by compassion and an (occasionally dangerous) curiosity. “Mulan” (pre-Disney remake) is another example; she wins the battles not because she is stronger than her comrades, but because she is clever. These are the kinds of stories that I’d want to grow up with.

The traditional fairy tales have history; they have a place in our cultural legacy; they have nostalgia — even I, someone of the demographic you’d least expect to like Western princess stories, have fond childhood memories of Cinderella’s pumpkin carriage. Fairytales can provide that spark to light a child’s imagination; they can instill that innocent optimism and magic about the world before life’s numbing arrows whittle it down. They are certainly stories worth reading and stories worth studying ― but often they are outdated. So, maybe it’s time we question the values that we teach to the next generation. Maybe it’s time we write our own fairy tales.