Why We Still Love Fairytales

by Tracey Perez

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My phone’s lock screen is a meme that announces, “I never wanted to be a princess; I always wanted to be a witch.” I wish I could attest to the complete veracity of this statement; however, I must confess to a bit of prevarication. When I was five or six, my mother pulled me out of a theater viewing of Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs when the transformation of the Evil Queen into the Wicked Witch caused me to break out into hives and run a fever. I begged to stay, but Mom was adamant.

When it comes to fairytales from childhood, many of us have recollections of sweet stories of beautiful princesses, charming princes, kind godmothers, and benevolent wildlife. Memory, however, can deceive us. Reading fairytales as adults can lead to comments such as, “Those aren’t the stories I read” or “We read kid-friendly versions” or my favorite, “Disney wasn’t like that!” Yes, Disney fairytales were like that — complete with domestic violence, kidnapping, and even the threat of cannibalism. Perhaps more insidiously, they perpetrated notions of love at first sight and happily ever after. Nevertheless, we loved them; we love them still.

Do we love fairytales because they speak to universal human desires and concerns? Because even in their multiple transformations and adaptations across place and time, we recognize and are comforted by the familiar core of the stories? Because they remind us of an unknowable past, a mythic world where magic is real? I say yes to all this and more.

Fairytales continue to delight because they surprise us with each retelling. We continue to be transformed as the narratives themselves are transformed by the tellers. And after my traumatizing experience with Snow White, I determined to overcome my fear of the witch and ended up on a lifetime journey into the ever-reinventing and reformulating world of the fairytale, where sometimes the princess and the witch are one and the same.