The Metamorphosis of Fairy Tales during the 20th and 21st Centuries

FACULTAD DE FILOSOFÍA Y LETRAS DEPARTAMENTO DE FILOLOGÍA INGLESA Grado en Estudios Ingleses TRABAJO DE FIN DE GRADO The Metamorphosis of Fairy Tales during the 20th and 21st Centuries Abel Sánchez Fernández Tutor: Enrique Cámara Arenas 2018/2019 Abstract This study analyzes how fairy tales have changed during the second half of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st. It compares landmark collections of fairy tales (Basile, Perrault, and Brothers Grim), to several post-World War II collections, from three different approaches: its relation to children, the presence or not of moral lessons in them, and the role of women and feminism in them. Most changes observed in contemporary fairy tales can be interpreted as a reaction against 19th-century censorship. The tendency of fairy tales now is to become elaborated, artistic creations, with these literary versions coexisting with simpler, more traditional tales aimed at children. While the role of women in fairy tales has greatly expanded, and has thus enriched them, the weight of morals in them is now reduced, something that could affect their strength and didactic value. Keywords: Fairy Tales, Folktales, Morals, Children’s Literature, Feminism El presente estudio analiza cómo han cambiado los cuentos de hadas durante los siglos XX y XXI, mediante la comparación de colecciones clásicas de cuentos (Basile, Perrault, hermanos Grimm) con otras posteriores a la Segunda Guerra Mundial desde tres puntos de vista diferentes: la relación entre los cuentos de hadas y los niños, la presencia o ausencia de enseñanzas morales en ellos y el papel que otorgan a la mujer y al feminismo. La mayor parte de los cambios en el cuento de hadas contemporáneo puede interpretarse como una reacción contra la censura del siglo XIX. La tendencia actual de los cuentos de hadas es convertirse en creaciones artísticas elaboradas; estas versiones literarias conviven con cuentos más simples y tradicionales, orientados a los niños. Mientras que el rol de la mujer en los cuentos de hadas se ha ampliado, y de este modo los ha enriquecido, el peso de las enseñanzas morales en ellos se ha reducido, lo cual podría afectar a su fuerza y valor didáctico. Palabras clave: cuentos de hadas, cuentos populares, moral, literatura infantil, feminismo. Table of contents Introduction………………………………………………… ………………………...5 The study of fairy tales…………………………………………………………… …...6 The metamorphosis of fairy tales…………………..…………………………………...8 A delimitation of the concept of fairy tale for this study……………...………..8 Fairy tales and children………………………………………………………...11 Fairy tales and morals………………………………………………………….19 Fairy tales and women…………………………………………………………29 Conclusions……………………………………………………………………………33 References……………………………………………………………………………..35 5 Fairy tales are a genre that dates back to Antiquity, with stories from ancient civilizations showing remarkable resemblances (Bottigheimer, 2014; Ziolkowski, 2007) to those stories known to so many readers from many countries: Red Riding Hood, Snow White, or Sleeping Beauty. The most famous fairy tale collections have drawn many elements from orally transmitted folk tales, and these refined, literary versions have, in turn, reshaped the tales of subsequent generations. Changes in fairy tales through history have been thoroughly studied by specialists, but the most recent production of fairy tales has been only partially studied, (Bacchilega, 1997; Zipes, 2006ª), with emphasis on the adaptation of fairy tale to other channels such as cinema. In the present work, I have analyzed some of the changes undergone by fairy tales in the late 20th and early 21st century, with special attention to the changes of their content, rather than their form. Fairy tales can play a role in the upbringing of children, from teaching them valuable lessons to representing their first contact with fiction (Cashdan, 1999), and I think that the analysis of fairy tales written in the present day could give us some clues on how its writers reacted to those they read in their childhood: what they rejected, what they changed, and what they preserved. I have divided the changes I found in three main sections: a) those concerning morals and teachings found in fairy tales; b) the influence of fairy tales on children and their suitability (or lack thereof) for them; c) the treatment of women in fairy tales, both as characters and as authors. Through tracing these elements in fairy tales from previous centuries (starting with the tales of Giambattista Basile and Charles Perrault), and in those contemporary to us, fluctuations may then be described and explained. 6 The study of fairy tales The study of fairy tales is a discipline that reached its maturity during the 20th century. Russian formalist Vladimir Propp’s (1928/1968) encoding of the fairy tale into 31 functions has been a reference work used by folklorists ever since. This study, however, is concerned with the study of changes in the fairy tale, and thus it needed works that studied the fairy tale from a diachronic perspective. The main works of history of fairy tales as a literary genre belong to the second half of the 20th century. J.R.R. Tolkien (1947/1998) and C.S. Lewis (1966/2008) studied the relation of children and fairy tales, as did Bruno Bettelheim (1976/2010), this time from a psychoanalytical point of view. Whereas Bettelheim recommends the reading of fairy tales to children for the sake of their psychological well-being, neither Tolkien nor Lewis consider fairy tales to be particularly suitable for children, and they rather encourage adults to read them. The opposite is defended by Cashdan (1999), who firmly advises both young and mature readers to explore fairy tales. The issues of psychological interpretation (1970), and the feminine elements in them (1972) were analyzed by Marie-Louise von Franz, who presented and developed a theory of archetypes, following the teachings of Jung. The reference works I used for this study were the two fairy tale encyclopedias by Briggs (1976) and Haase (2008), although the first one is strongly centered on Irish and British material. Nevertheless, since the object of this study was the change in fairy tales in times as recent as the 21st century, more recent studies were needed. Among the histories of fairy tales published at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, Bottigheimer’s (2014) traces the evolution of magic tales and fairy tales from the ancient Egypt to the Renaissance, as does Ziolkowski (2007), who analyzes their 7 Roman and Greek origins. Folklorist Jack Zipes has studied the history and evolution of fairy tale deeply, including its subversive potential (2006a), its influence in society (2012), and how it has evolved and adapted through different times and countries. His works have been the basis for this study. 8 The Metamorphosis of Fairy Tales A delimitation of the concept of fairy tale for this study The definition of fairy tale seems to be somewhat elusive. Jack Zipes, currently one of the foremost specialists on the subject, warns us that “there is no such thing as the fairy tale; however, there are hundreds of thousands of fairy tales. And these fairy tales have been defined in so many different ways that it boggles the mind to think that they can be categorized as a genre.” (Zipes, 2000, xv). A purely literal approach would force us to consider only those stories which feature the appearance of fairies, that is, of “supernatural ladies who directed the destiny of men and attended childbirths” (Briggs, 1976, p. 131); “ancient foremothers […], all are female, all are as powerful as the gods themselves in presiding human destiny” (Haase, 2008, p. 321). While this definition may be useful for the study of a very specific genre of stories, I consider it insufficient when it comes to the study of fairy tale in the 20th and 21st centuries, as the term fairy tale has grown more and more encompassing with time, and it covers a vast array of stories. As Haase (2008) pointed out, a problem with such term is that “not all fairy stories include fairies” (p. 322), and in such stories we may find that the supernatural takes other forms rather than the fairy, or that there is not any supernatural element at all. Another problem that arises when trying to define the fairy tale is the fact that it usually overlaps with the folktale: “The term folktale is often used interchangeably with fairy tale, märchen, and wonder tale, their histories being interrelated” (Haase, 2008, p. 363). And this can hardly be a surprise, as the term folktale encompasses an even wider array of stories than just fairy tales. A folktale is, essentially, any story that stems from 9 the volk, the people, usually without any known author and with many minor variations depending on the country (or region, or town) studied. The main element of difference that might be brought forward in fairy tales would be the presence of a supernatural element, but, as it was mentioned before, this is not necessarily the case in many of them. Another line that could be drawn between the two types of tale could be the oral nature of the folktale, which in many cases would precede a more elaborated, written version, in the form of fairytale. Zipes (2006b) describes the process: As is well known, there is a classical fairy-tale canon in the Western world that has been in existence ever since the nineteenth century, if not earlier […]. In my previous works, I argued that these tales became canonized because they were adapted from the oral tradition of folklore for aristocratic and middle-class audiences as print culture developed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and basically reshaped and retold during this time […]. (p. 1) Nevertheless, not even this allows us to establish a clear difference: Folktales may begin their existence as spoken stories, but at some point they are registered, and written down. The question then would be: Should they be considered fairy tales from the moment they appear in print, or is it possible to still consider them as folktales, only in written form? There is no clear answer to this. Furthermore, were it not for this written registration, the number of tales (of both kinds) would be quite reduced, most likely circumscribed to our own and, perhaps, neighbouring communities,1 and thus it might be argued that while folktales may not depend on the written word for their sheer 1 Jan Harold Brunvand (1981) argues that the most widespread example of folktale in the present day could be the “urban legend”, as it has no clear author and it is transmitted orally (or,from the 1990s on, via the Internet). 16 literature […] cannot accommodate this proliferation of uses and meanings (p. 3). The question now would be: Are there any fairy tales in the 20th and 21st century akin to those more literarily crafted tales, such as those “subversive” tales described by Zipes (2006a), or those of Perrault or Basile, more suitable for mature readers? The answer seems to be affirmative. During the latter half of the 20th century, and continuing in the present, “a myriad of fairy tales are being marvelously reinterpreted or retold or newly invented […] gritty, transformative, subversive, weird, and powerful (Guran, 2016, p. 12). Especially in the English-speaking market, anthologies of fairy tales (retold, revisited, newly crafted, adapted, or parodied) have appeared with a steady (albeit moderate) pace, and in many cases aimed at an adult, or young-adult readership, or at Guran offers in his book a brief list of compilers of fairy tales, among which stand out the Ellen Datlow, Terri Windling, Kelly Link, and herself (p. 11). A fundamental difference should be noticed here between the fairy tale compilations of past times and those of the present. No longer are the names of compilers alone in the books they produce: now, every tale has its author, who usually has a brief biographical sketch featuring in the book. This means that, unlike what happened in the past, fairy tales are not adscribed to a handful of authors, who concentrated the majority of the canon in five or six names. Even in a single anthology, the number of fairy tale writers has grown exponentially. The tone and style of all these new fairy tales vary, but the literary elaboration is present throughout the vast majority of them. Tanith Lee’s Beauty begins in the following fashion: 17 His hundred and fifty-first birthday dawned aboard the sleek ship from Cerulean, high-above the white-capped ocean that was the Earth. By nightfall he would be at home, in his beautiful robot-run house. Beyond the tall windows a landscape of the Western hemisphere would fall away, pure with snow, to a frozen glycerin river (in Guran, 2016, p. 493). In a sharp contrast, Three Dwarves and 2000 Maniacs, by Don Webb, resorts to a different style: I’ve heard it said that many people study psychiatry on the “physician, heal thyself” plan. Well, it was certainly true for me. I was neurotic in high school, psychotic in college, and saw my first padded cell during a Jung seminar in graduate school (in Datlow & Windling, 1998, p. 180). These two examples showcase a twofold tendency in the writing of fairy tales in the recent decades. If the first echoes the more classic style of Perrault, the second one represents a more ground-breaking attempt at a contemporary fairy tale, from the more colloquial style to the mention of mental disorders (something quite absent from canonical fairy tales, and certainly not described there in clinical terms). All the tales in these two anthologies, from the selection of themes to the different styles, eschew the Victorian adaptations and style. In an interesting move, these new fairytales seem to move in two different directions. Some of them return to the ancient style and content (more classic style, more mature content), while others explore new ways of approaching the fairy tale both in form and content, and others 18 combine both tendencies freely. Regression and evolution live together among the new tales. In the present day, all this new fairy tales coexist with the traditional, 19th- century inspired, more traditional ones, in a process that started with the many social changes in the post-World War II years, and whose catalyst would be, if I have to choose one, the publication of Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber in 1979, (which I will mention later), because the elements that began appearing in the literary fairy tales during the decades to come were already present in her work. Evidently, most of these new fairy tales are too recent to guess if they will resist the passage of time and become classics in their own right. Although fairy tales are counted by the thousands, the number of them that endure the years is rather low. Zipes (2006b) explains: Fairy tales have evolved as humans have evolved. I am tempted to say there has been a “survival of the fittest” that we sometimes designate as a classical canon. In the course of the past five centuries, approximately fifty t seventy-five tales have rise to the fore in the Western world and have been repeatedly told in diverse forms, rarely in the same way, always adapting […]. But they stick (p. 130). These tales that Zipes describes are the ones that carry on through the centuries, have survived until our time, and they will surely survive us. Children in the present day know them just as Victorian children knew them. As Cashdan (1999) points out, they 19 are an “unparalleled source of adventure […], but […] are more than suspense-filled adventures that excite the imagination, more than mere entertainment […] Whereas the initial attraction of a fairy tale may lie in its ability to enchant and entertain, its lasting value lies in its power to help children deal with the internal conflicts they face in the course of growing up.” ( p. 21). With regards to that, not much has changed for children and their relation to fairy tales. It is in the fairy tales not meant for them that greater transformations are to be found: children of today will grow up to know different “strains” of fairy tale than those their Victorian counterparts knew, in whose themes they will recognize some of the old tales from their childhood.. I would propose the following simile to illustrate this. Fairy tales may be compared to a choir: Some of the accompanying, deep voices repeat their motifs using a reduced range of notes, while others above them move in ampler and faster intervals, even to the point of discordancy. The latter need the former to sound whole, and the song is only complete when all of them occur in balance. Fairy tales and morals It seems natural to tie some kind of moral to fairy tales, like we do with fables. We tend to think of fairy tale morals as simple teachings that may well help us in our life, usually by dissuading us from a bad behaviour or warning us against some kind of danger, hence the name, sometimes used, of “cautionary tale”: the story of someone who did not heed the warning and had to suffer the consequences, told to children so 20 they do not make the same mistake. Fairy tale, because of their structure and length, would seem to neatly fit this mold: easy to listen, easy to remember, with only a handful of characters and straightforward action. In the old, landmark collections of fairy tales, the moral is not only clear but explicitly expressed. Perrault (2000) added a verse section titled “the moral of this story” to his fairy tales, in which he explained what could be learned from them. For his story The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood, he adds “ Lovers lose nothing if they wait / And tie the knot of marriage late […] / young girls, though, long for married bliss / so ardently that, for my part / I cannot find it in my heart / to preach a doctrine such as this” (pp. 96-97). His moral to the story of Little Red Riding Hood is one of the best known: “Young children, as this tale will show / And mainly pretty girls with charm [...] / It’s no surprise that some are caught / By wolves who take them out to eat / I call them wolves, but you will find / That some are not the savage kind / No howling, ravening, or raging / their manners seem, instead engaging […] / These are the most dangerous wolves of all” (p. 103). While the moral of Sleeping Beauty has more of a fatalistic tone (young girls will not ever heed such advice, so the author does not have the heart to say it firmly), the tale of Red Riding Hood offers a much more complete instance. Although it plays with the metaphor of the wolf, the object of the warning is clear: men who seduce younger women, perhaps those who, in the times of Perrault were called “rakes”. It is a perfectly explained warning for young girls not to stray off their paths (not only in the literal sense). Any ambiguity that could linger after reading the tale is carefully solved by the author himself, out of, concern for those young girls who might hear it. 21 Some of Perrault’s morals oscillate between the naïve and the cynical. In the first category, a good example is the one from The fairies “If you have gold and jewels galore / You’ll make a great effect, of course, but gentle words are worth much more / And move us with much greater force” (Perrault, 2000, p. 129). For the second category, the perfect instance is that of Cinderella: “You have a great advantage, I admit / If you receive from heaven at your birth / Good breeding, courage, sense, a ready wit / And other things of comparable worth / But that is not enough, unless you know […] / A Godfather or Godmother” […] (p. 141). The contrast between the two is clear enough. If the first one offers advice that, while not useless, seems too idealistic for the real world, the second takes a turn for the cynical. While the mention of the Godmother is a direct reference to the magic-wielding woman of the tale, the true meaning of it can hardly be concealed: someone with enough influence and power to open the right doors for you. In his Tale of Tales, Giambattista Basile offers advice as well, but he prefers to do it in an extremely condensed way. At the end of each tale, a single sentence sums up a moral: “Those who resist win” (Basile, 2016, p. 425), “those who sow thorns should not go barefoot” (p. 454), “those who oppose the stars are crazy” (p.114), “a ship steered by a good skipper is only rarely dashed on the docks” (p. 99). These examples are less specific, more of general advice, and not so closely tied to the tales they close. The Tale of Tales abounds in this kind of sentences, dotted throughout the tales to better illustrate the adventures and misfortunes of the characters. The intention is always to warn the reader about what is advisable and what is not. In the introductory tale, Basile (2016) begins (bold added by me): 22 A seasoned proverb of ancient coinage says that those who look for what they should not find what they would not, and it’s clear that when the monkey tried putting on boots, it got its foot stuck, just like what happened to a ragged slave girl, who although she had never worn shoes on her feet wanted to wear a crown on her head. But since the millstone grinds out the chaff and sooner or later everything is paid for, she who deceitfully took from other what was theirs ended up caught in a circle of heels, and however steep her climb up was, the tumble down was even greater (Basile, p. 64). In a short paragraph, we find that half of the content is made of different proverbs and sayings. Aside from it being a manner in which to present the morals of the story, it also reminds us of the intertwined nature of the folktale and the fairy tale, as proverbs and sayings are one of the trademarks of popular, orally-transmitted stories, to the point that a fair percentage of those sayings need footnotes to be fully comprehended, as they are taken form the Italian language (and, specifically, the Neapolitan variant) of the 17th century: the expression “caught in a circle of heels” is a reference to a game played by Italian children in those times. The works of Basile and Perrault present morals that do not stem from religion, but rather may be considered as a product of that wisdom that comes from the common experience shared by one or another community, lessons that may seem self-evident, but that it is advisable to recall from time to time. They would be the last major collections to include them, however. The explicit morals in fairy tales faded away in favour of less obvious ways of presenting them. Donald Haase (2008) explains the process: 23 Morals are often evident in fairy tales […]. In the case of Charles Perrault’s seventeenth-century French tales, each story’s moral […] is set in verse and pronounced explicitly […]. In Germany, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children’s and household tales, 1812-1815) is a collection replete with didactic tales, and although Grimms’ stories may not have explicit morals like Perrault’s tales, the moral messages are no less obvious. Similarly, the tales of Hans Christian Andersen […] abound in moral lessons to be inferred by the reader (p. 637). . Rather than preach, Brothers Grimm are didactic, preferring to present moral lessons in a (slightly) subtler manner. Not all of them have straightforward morals, though. Some of them are just-so stories, in the manner of Rudyard Kipling’s: stories that tell how things came to be, like The Nightingale and the Blindworm. It is a brief story that explains how both animals were one-eyed until the worm lent his eye to the nightingale out of selflessness, and never recovered it, as the bird grew fond of it (Grimm & Grimm, 2014 p. 25). Such a tale has more of an artistic (or fanciful) explanation than it has of teaching a moral. Other story, The Wolf and the Seven Kids tells the story of a wolf that tries to eat seven kids and is eventually outsmarted by them, which leads to his demise (p. 23). Again, here we have a funny and enjoyable story, but without much moral content. Nevertheless, these are a minority. Brothers Grimm’s stories often have a moral, and it is fairly easy to grasp, usually by checking who lived happily ever after and who did not. Andersen’s tales differ to some extent. Haase is right in describing his work as abounding in moral lessons (The emperor’s new clothes is a good instance), but there 24 are two elements that are mostly absent from those by Brothers Grimm. Firstly, there is religious influence in Andersen, in contrast with the canonical collections of fairy tales, which show little. Secondly, there is in some of his tales a tone of that ideology of social reform movement of which Charles Dickens is perhaps the foremost literary example. I have chosen The Little Match Girl to illustrate this. This story tells the tale of a little girl who sells matches in the freezing cold of Danish city winter in New Year’s Eve, and of her yearning for a warm place and some food. The girl, whose name is not revealed, freezes to death, and in her last moments he sees a vision of her beloved grandmother (Andersen, 2014, pp. 268-273). The story is certainly heart-wrenching. There is no intervention from any worldly or otherworldly agent, no final twist. Andersen softens the passing away of the girl by the means of her grandmother: “Grandma […] gathered the little girl in her arms, and together they flew […] to where it is no longer cold, and there is neither hunger nor fear. They were now with God! (p. 272). The mention of Grandma and God cannot really hide what happens: The little girl freezes to death in an alley. While the reunion with her grandmother is meant to dulcify, if only minimally, her demise, this tale is a severe reminder of the conditions of many children from the lower classes, hence its Dickensian echoes (A Christmas Carol had been published only four years earlier), and its tone of social reform, so characteristic from 19th century and protestant countries. Andersen wants here to move the reader; he is not teaching us anything for our own well-being, but for the well-being of others. This moral does not present what should be, but what should not. In another of his stories, The Steadfast Tin Soldier, the reader is again faced with a story that is rather ruthless. A crippled tin soldier (lacking one leg) falls in love with a 25 toy ballerina, but he is incapable of even speaking to her, and, by accident, they both burn down in the hearth of the house (Andersen, 2014, pp. 279-286). In this story we find a sort of fatalism, a sense of fate crushing the tin soldier mercilessly. As the trollin-a-box warns him at the beginning, the soldier is supposed to keep his eyes to himself, and forget about the toy ballerina. After being swallowed by a fish and recovered (p. 283), he finally gets to be back at the side of her beloved, but only to die right away, in a rather anticlimactic ending, to which the moral we may gather seems rather obscure. Stories form both Andersen and Borthers Grimm were considerable popular in Victorian England, but they were usually deprived of any subversive or disturbing or unsettling potential they might have, as Zipes (2006a) remarks that the literary fairy tales of Perrault, the Grimms, and Andersen sometimes contained a mild critic of social problems, only to avoid a systematic, bold, attack on such issues. Fairy tales were frequently adapted during the Victorian era to suit the ideals of the ruling class of the time. Thus, fairy tales, especially those aimed at children, were infused of a moral which, rather than universal (as any moral ought to be), was functional to England and its stability. Rodríguez Almodóvar (1982) explains that any radical idea of change was absent from those fairy tales: “At any rate, class struggle, or any attempt to tackle social issues do not appear at all. The only way out of poverty is marriage […] the psychoanalytic approach may explain a sublimation of class struggle in the form of a royal marriage […], while the sociological approach explains the fatality of it, for such outcome never happens in real life” (p. 71, my translation). The reaction against such kind of morality can explain the shift in the moral content of fairy tales that would begin in the second half of the Victorian period. In 32 Modern fairy tale writing (feminist or not) owes much to Angela Carter. The Tales of The Bloody Chamber attained a richness that can be traced in ulterior works of modern fairy tale, from the taste for deviancy to the use of Gothic or Romantic traits, and, of course, to the construction of female characters. It was her new approaches to the characters of Red Riding Hood, the Beauty and the Beast that paved the way for many retellings of both stories in the decades to follow, and to the present day. It is not that classic fairy tales were scarce in female characters: they were not. The two axes through which feminist vindications entered the writing of fairy tales were the presence of female fairy tale authors and the role of female characters. Concerning the first aspect, there was a situation, described by Maria Tatar (1999), that has a tinge of irony in it: “Although virtually all of the national collections of fairy tales compiled in the nineteenth century were the work of men, the tales themselves were adscribed to women narrators […], old wives’ tales” (p. x). M. L. Von Franz (1979) too recognised this problem: “Feminine figures in fairy tales might have been formed by a man, and therefore do not represent a woman’s idea of femininity but rather what Jung called the anima –that is, man’s femininity” (p. 2) Contemporary fairy tale collections have “corrected” this, and in the anthologies of Datlow and Windling (1998) and Guran (2016), more than 50% of the contributors are women. The second aspect, the role of female characters, evolved in the way that Angela Carter had already suggested, with princesses, and heroines, or just common women, becoming more active characters, and being psychologically more complex (again, the use of the first person is the norm). Even evil female characters received more attention, and served to present well-known tales in a new light; in one of the stories collected by Datlow and Windling (1998), Hansel and Gretel stand trial after shoving the old witch 33 that wanted to eat them into the oven, and have to defend themselves against the charge of murder (pp. 83-92). The weight of women, either as characters or authors, in the writing of fairy tale, is at an all-time peak at this moment. The immediate effect on fairy tales has been that of a multiplying of the points of view, with the consequent enriching of the already rich heritage of tales. Some female authors have hailed this in good spirits: “[…] for girls and women, in particular, the fairy tale’s magic has assumed the contradictory form of being both a spiritual enclave supported by old wives’ wisdom and an exquisitely glittery feminine kingdom” (Bacchilega, 1997, p. 5). Others, like Angela Carter (1990), preferred to be more cautious: “I haven’t put this collection together […] to show that we are all sisters under the skin. I don’t believe that, anyway. Sisters under the skin we may be, but that doesn’t mean we have much in common.” (p. xiv). Conclusions Changes in fairy tales during the last decades have had as much of a breakthrough as of a regression. The reaction against those adapted (or, rather, censored) versions of the classic fairy tales has been two-fold: Authors have sought the origins of tales in search of raw, primal renditions of those characters everyone knows so well; alternatively (or even simultaneously), they have tried new forms of writing fairy tales, trying new techniques and styles and thus opening new territories that were, to a large extent, unexplored. The same goes for the role of women in fairy tale: doors are open now that will enrich an already rich genre, whether new material is recovered from old times or created for the future. Such endeavours have produced finely crafted fairy tales, 34 artistic works of the first order, sometimes more akin to literary short stories than to popular tales. I would venture to say that this tendency will continue, as fairy tales are a field too attractive to simply be forgotten. Literary forms of fairy tales will continue to appear, presumably aimed at a mature readership. It would be wrong, however, to infer from this that this is the only kind of fairy tale we will know in the years to come. As I explained before, among the thousands of fairy tales known to mankind, there is a core that children know and love; a handful of tales that have withstood the passage of time and are virtually indestructible, for they inhabit thousands of minds, a shard of a collective cultural heritage. Furthermore, it is those stories that form the substrate form which the literary fairy tale stems, and both coexist in a sort of symbiotic relation, mutually affecting each other. The fairy tale as a creation for children has a capital importance, and is the necessary condition for every other tale to appear. As for the issue of morals in fairy tales, I consider the warning of George MacDonald as valid now as when he first wrote it. We may invent fairy tales, but not the Law that governs them. It seems that the tendency now is to reject morals in fairy tales, and I consider this a danger. Not for their survival, because there is no risk of fairy tales disappearing, but for their vitality. It is of course possible to craft exquisite tales without morals, but writers should be advised that this would deprive them from much of their strength and turn them into pictures in an exhibition: something fairy tales were never meant to be. 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