For the child—and the adult who knows there is still a child in all of us—fairy tales reveal truths about ourselves and the world.

As psychologist Bruno Bettelheim stated in his extraordinary study, The Uses of Enchantment (1976), "the fantastical, sometimes cruel, but always deeply significant narrative strands of the classic fairy tales can aid in the greatest human task, that of finding meaning for one's life."

Children who are familiar with fairy tales understand that these stories speak to them in the language of symbols—not the reality of everyday life.

Children know that the fairy stories are not "real," yet the real events in their lives become important through the symbolic meaning that is attached to them.

They know that the events described in these stories happened "once upon a time," in a "world far from here."

The old castles, the magical fairies, and the enchanted forests existed in a unique fairy-tale time—a time described in the opening lines of the Brothers Grimm's "The Frog King" as a time that was long, long ago, "when wishing still helped."

Yet these stories are still important.

In fact, they are probably more important than ever as we try to find meaning in our increasingly chaotic lives, and as increasing numbers of children are no longer raised within a community in which Church provides a source of meaning.

Fairy tales speak directly to the child at a time when the child's major challenge is to bring some order to the inner chaos of his or her mind.

These stories help children understand themselves better—a necessary condition for achieving some congruence between their perceptions and the external world. Continue reading

Source

• Anne Hendershott in The Catholic World Report

Anne Hendershott is professor of sociology and Director of the Veritas Center for Ethics in Public Life at Franciscan University of Steubenville.

In her book Princess Recovery: A How-to Guide to Raising Strong, Empowered Girls Who Can Create Their Own Happily Ever Afters, Hartstein writes that the traditional princess narrative "may be teaching your daughter everything from ‘only appearances matter' to ‘don't expect to rely on yourself—you'll need a prince to rescue you.' "

Expose her to too much Cinderella, Aladdin, or Sleeping Beauty, in other words, and your daughter may become a kind of princess herself, obsessed with beauty and uninterested in her own autonomy.

The classic Disney princess is, in Hartstein's view, not only gratuitously airy, helpless, and (save for Belle in the Beauty and the Beast) vacuous, but a threat to the healthy development of the millions of girls who worship at her pink, saccharine altar.

Her theory isn't original; it appears more or less in nearly every parenting book with a feminist bent, from Peggy Orenstein's 2012 Cinderella Ate my Daughter to last year's What Should We Tell Our Daughters? by British journalist Melissa Benn.

Despite its ubiquity, anti-princess dogma is grossly out of step with the times.

The truth is that fairy tales, though once ardent protectors and proliferators of gendered convention, are now, surprisingly, quite the opposite.

This decade's most popular fairy-tale features with heroines at their centre—Shrek, Brave and Frozen, to name a few—are actually blatant departures from the prince-rescues-princess norm.

In Brave (2012), Scottish princess and seasoned archer Merida sets off on a quest to avoid betrothal—and changes her stuffy medieval society in the process.

In the insanely popular Academy Award-winner Frozen (2013), not one but two heroines defy convention in their icy kingdom, and in this month's Maleficent, Disney's reimagination of Sleeping Beauty, Angelina Jolie plays the story's infamous sorceress as a complex, intensely likeable character, whose evildoing is warranted and, eventually, rectified. Continue reading

Source

• Emma Teitel in MacLean's

Emma Teitel is an award winning journalist who writes about women's issues and popular culture.