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‘Once Upon a Time’ in Popular Culture: A Reading of Fairy Tales
Harsha A.U.S
2nd Semester MA English
The Zamorin’s Guruvayoorappan College, Kozhikode
Abstract
Fairy tales are everywhere around us- in our grandmothers’ tales, books, comics, films,
television, music, fashion and even in advertisements. From time immemorial, these magical
stories have captured the imagination of generations of children and adults alike, permeating
their minds, setting standards and influencing the way they behave and perceive things around
them. Knowingly or unknowingly, themes and images from fairy tales are manifest in our
popular means of expression, often forming more or less unchallenged stereotypes and
archetypes. In the recent years especially, we have seen a series of new adaptations and retellings
of some of the most admired fairy tales such as Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel, Snow White and the
Seven Dwarfs, and Cinderella in popular literature, cinema as well as television. This paper
attempts to look at the different ways in which these age-old stories have influenced popular
cultures across the globe. Thrust will be given on the role of the fairy tales and their adaptations
in forming gender and racial stereotypes. Some popular works from cinema and literature will be
examined to check for fairytale-inspired themes and adherence to the common stereotypes. The
paper will also try to look for any attempts made in these modern-day retellings to overcome the
stereotypes and examine how far they have succeeded.
Keywords: Fairy tales, popular culture, adaptations, stereotypes, archetypes
“Once upon a time …”
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A simple phrase as this is capable of filling our imagination with vivid images of
fairylands, princes, princesses, witches, and magical woods where danger lurks in the shadows,
but where good invariably triumphs over evil, the good princess always gets her prince and they
live ‘happily ever after’. Regardless of where in the world, it might be safe to say that there is
hardly anyone who hasn’t heard or read a fairy tale at some point in life. Right from the rather
grim versions by Grimm Brothers or Charles Perrault to the glossy Disney adaptations, these
enchanting stories have enthralled generations of children and adults. They have permeated our
minds and influenced our behaviours, perceptions and even dreams.
When we hear the term ‘fairy tale’, we associate it with the delightful stories we were
told as children, to amuse and to teach. However, fairy tales are far from being simple bedtime
stories. They transcend geographical borders, cultures and time; every culture in the world has its
own fairy tales, which are deeply imbibed in the cultural identity as well as the individual and
collective consciousness of its people. Therefore, it must come as no surprise that themes, motifs
and archetypes derived from fairy tales are manifest in our popular means of expression
including literature, cinema, television, music, comics, fashion and advertisements. This paper
attempts to show how the fairy tale motifs have transcended geographical borders and achieved
universal status in its different avatars. Finally, its stereotypical gendered and racial perspectives
are analysed as also its recent transgressions of the stereotypes in western culture.
Fairy tales have their roots in the oral storytelling cultures of ancient and medieval ages.
The origins of the literary western fairy tale can be traced to a collection by Giovanni Straparola,
printed in the mid-sixteenth century, followed by Basile’s The Tale of Tales, Marie-Catherine
d’Aulnoy’s Tales of the Fairies and the more famous Stories, or Tales from Times Past by
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Charles Perrault in the seventeenth century. Antoine Galland’s French translation of The Tales of
Thousand and One Nights appeared in early 1700s. In nineteenth century appeared Grimm
Brothers’ Children’s Stories and Household Tales as well as Hans Christian Anderson’s
collections. Alexander Afanasyev’s book of Russian Fairy Tales (1855-1863) included tales like
The Frog Princess and Father Frost. The stories in this collection became the basis for Vladimir
Propp in his studies analyzing the basic plot elements of folk tales, in the twentieth century.
Throughout history, fairy tales have been subject to numerous revisions and
interpretations. Earliest versions of these tales were more gory and dark in content, intended for
adults rather than children. Subsequent versions cut down the violent and dark content so that
they could be read to children. It was perhaps in the Victorian era that these tales took a more
moralizing tone, and began to be used to instil in children moral values and behavioural codes of
the age. They are often the first stories children hear, which leave a lasting impact on them, and
are, even now, used to teach them the ways of the world and to differentiate between good and
bad.
In the modern and post-modern ages, the advent of electronic media has ensured that
fairy tales travel across borders and integrate into cultures across the globe. In recent years, we
have seen a series of new adaptations of some of the most admired fairy tales like Sleeping
Beauty, Rapunzel, Snow White and Cinderella in popular culture. Disney adaptations have
played the greatest part in familiarizing the present generation with fairy tales. In addition,
elements typical to traditional fairy tales are glimpsed in popular romance and fantasy fiction and
film, including the immensely popular Harry Potter, Narnia and Twilight novels and films. Fairy
tales in television have been dominated by serialised animated versions aimed at children, but
recent American TV serials like Grimm (NBC channel) and Once Upon A Time (ABC channel)
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take inspiration from fairy tales. Popular authors like Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter, Neil
Gaiman and Gail Carson Levine have reworked traditional tales. Fairy-tale themes and motifs
abound music industry, with major rock and pop bands or artists including Tori Amos, Faith Hill,
Katy Perry and Taylor Swift using elements from fairy tales in their songs. Fairy-tale motifs can
be traced in popular cultures of the East as well, including Bollywood films as well as
Japanese/Korean mangas and animes.
The Damsel, the Prince and the Wicked Stepmother
The theme of a persecuted young lady being saved and swept off her feet to a happy life
by a prince has recurred in many fairy tales. The archetypal fairy-tale heroine is a fair, demure
and submissive young girl who is cursed or mistreated by the villain, typically a stepmother or a
wicked witch, and who needs a man to rescue her. Be it poor Cinderella who is tormented by her
cruel stepmother, Snow White who bites the poisoned apple or Princess Aurora who is cursed to
sleep for years by a scorned fairy, there is almost always, a prince just around the corner, waiting
to be enchanted by her beauty and free her of her trials. She is submissive and sacrificial, does all
the household work she is ordered to without complaint, and takes care of the little mice in her
attic or the seven dwarfs, in almost a motherly fashion. She can attain happiness in life only if
she gets her prince, even if she has to lose her voice in the pursuit. In short, she is the
embodiment of the ‘angel in the house’- the ideal, homely female member of a patriarchal
society. The Prince has not much of a personality, except that he is ‘charming’; he is more a
reward for the heroine’s virtues, than an individual character. These tales also equate happiness
with material success; it takes a Prince, and not an ordinary young man, to rescue the heroine.
The chances of the heroine saving herself seem sadly slimmer.
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In contrast to the demure heroines are the archetypal fairy-tale villains- the cruel
stepmother or the wicked witch. The step-mother, who abuses Cinderella, is jealous of Snow
White’s beauty and tries to kill her, or the wicked-witch who wants to devour Hansel and Gretelthe fairy tale’s powerful female-figures are largely found only in these nasty villains. The
depiction of stepmothers as wicked in these tales has arguably contributed to the general fear of
stepmothers in the real world. To accompany the stepmother are ugly, cruel stepsisters who
torment the beautiful, good heroine. Except for Snow White’s stepmother, these villain figures
are almost always visualised as ugly or unpleasant looking. Association of beauty to goodness
and ugliness to evil is an element commonly found in fairy tales.
Starting from the 1937 Disney adaptation of Snow White to the latest 2015 adaptation of
Cinderella, faithful film adaptations of fairy tales have served to reinforce the stereotypes of
femininity, goodness and evil in the minds of young children and adolescents who watch and
unconsciously imbibe them with starry-eyed fascination. In addition, the ‘damsel in distress’
trope has been used in a vast majority of contemporary literature and popular culture. An
unprivileged woman raising herself in social standing by marriage to a wealthy man, the main
premise of Cinderella has repeated in a great number of love stories. Elements and motifs from
Cinderella pervade a vast body of subsequent literature and popular culture including the films
Pretty Woman (1990), The Princess Diaries, A Cinderella Story (2004), and television show
Ugly Betty (2006). The heroine of Stephanie Meyers’s best-selling vampire-romance series
Twilight has often been criticised as an embodiment of the hapless fairy-tale heroine who always
depends on the hero. (Hawes 163-167)
The fairy-tale motifs discussed above can be easily traced in Indian popular culture
including cinema and television also. A majority of Bollywood romances follow a fairy-tale
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pattern, with abundant use of ‘love at first sight’ and ‘damsel-in-distress’ tropes. Most Indian
commercial movies include song-sequences which sometimes use fantasy and fairy-tale-like
settings and elements. In most soap operas, the heroine is a typical fairy-tale princess-like figure;
demure, virginal and submissive while the female villains can be seen as the reflections of the
archetypal ‘wicked witch’ in fairy tales.
Who’s the Fairest of them all? The Problem of Colour and Race
Everyone is familiar with Snow White, the beautiful princess who was “as fair as snow,
as rosy as the red blood, and with hair and eyes as black as ebony.” (Mabie 11) Although there
are fairy tales in every culture, European fairy tales including Snow White, Cinderella and
Sleeping Beauty enjoy the widest reach across the world. These tales have been narrated, and
immortalised onscreen many times by major film companies including Disney. In most popular
adaptations, the heroine is envisioned as an embodiment of the western beauty ideal, the fair,
slim and blue-eyed beauty. Children of colour, who are exposed to fairy tales through these films
are bound to absorb these beauty ideals, and may believe them as the acceptable standards of
beauty.
In many fairy-tale visualisations, symbols can be found associating white with good and
black with evil. Wicked characters are often dark-skinned like the evil Sea-Witch Ursula in The
Little Mermaid (1989), or like the wicked queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)
who “lives in a black castle that has black rats, a dangerous black forest containing black bats,
and black owls”, (Hurley 225) or rides a black horse like the villain Jaffar in Aladdin (1992),
who is also dressed in black. Although most characters in Aladdin have a tanned or brown
complexion, Aladdin and princess Jasmine’s skin are paler, while Jaffar is visibly darker. The
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infamous introduction song of the film initially contained the lines, “Oh, I come from a
land/From a faraway place/Where the caravan camels roam./Where they cut off your ear/If they
don't like your face/It's barbaric, but hey, it's home.” The lyrics were altered following great
criticisms that these lines depicted Arab culture “as perpetuating the tired stereotype of the Arab
world as a place of deserts and camels, of arbitrary cruelty and barbarism.” (Wingfield) In 1995,
Disney created a fairy-tale-like heroine out of Pocahontas, the historic Native-American tribal
princess, in their animated film of the same name. However, this film also met with criticisms of
historical inaccuracy and stereotypical depictions of Native-Americans: “Perhaps the most
obvious aspect of racism in Pocahontas is in its language, in terms such as "savages,"
"heathens," "pagans," "devils," "primitive" and "civilized." These terms connote something wild,
primitive, and inferior. They imply a value judgement of white superiority.” (Pewewardy 20-25)
The Post-modern Subversive Fairy Tales
Fairy tales maybe our windows to a mystical past where everything was possible, but
they have hardly lost their relevance in contemporary literature and popular culture. They are
alive in the magical realism traditions of our eminent authors, in popular romance and fantasy
fictions and in the numerous new adaptations and retellings churned out on film and television.
The post-modern retellings are often focussed on debunking stereotypes and archetypes
perpetuated by traditional fairy tales.
Angela Carter, a post-modern British author, extracted the “latent content from the
traditional stories” and used “it as the beginnings of new stories,” as the author herself was
quoted by Helen Simpson in her introduction to Carter’s collection The Bloody Chamber and
Other Stories. The titular story is a modern-day retelling of the tale of Bluebeard included in
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Charles Perrault’s collection, in which a newly-wed girl unlocks a forbidden room in her
husband’s home to find mutilated corpses of his previous wives. While the basic premise is the
same, The Bloody Chamber is more detailed and more grotesque; Carter sets her tale in modernday France, and narrates it from the heroine’s first-person point of view, unlike the distant, thirdperson omniscient narration in the traditional tales. Perrault’s Bluebeard seems to tell us of the
dangers of female curiosity, while Carter’s version of the tale explores “the darker side of
heterosexuality”, “sadomasochism and the idea of fatal passion”. (Simpson) The tale starts with
the heroine’s wedding to a wealthy Marquis and ends with the breaking of that marriage, quite
opposed to most fairy tales that we are used to. Marriage, for her is not much of an escape from a
harsh life than an “exile”. (Carter 12) There is no ‘Prince Charming’ here, her husband is her
captor and torturer, and her lover, Jean-Yves, is a poor, blind piano-tuner. Carter smartly
deconstructs the traditional fairy tale and gives it the texture of a gothic-tale, with many gothic
images, such as a castle surrounded by the sea, and the ruby choker, a gift from her husband,
which is actually reminiscent of the French guillotine, and also extensively uses ‘vegetable’,
‘death’ and ‘sacrificial lamb’ metaphors foreshadowing the heroine’s possible fate at her
husband’s house. In the beginning of the story, she seems hardly different from the archetypal
innocent, virginal fairy-tale heroine, but undergoes a sexual awakening of sorts, and becomes
more conscious of her body, sexual desires and pleasures. She is not naive, but rather quick to
pick up hints about her possible torture and murder at the hands of her husband, and is
determined to escape, unlike traditional fairy-tale heroines who prefer to suffer in silence until a
hero comes along to rescue them. In Bluebeard, the heroine is rescued by her brothers, while in
Carter’s version, her pirate-fighting, tiger-killing, wild mother is the one who kills the husband
and rescues the heroine. Carter’s subversive efforts are more obvious in the description of the
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“eagle-feathered, indomitable mother”, who is reminiscent of Medusa, who carries a revolver
and comes riding a horse, and shoots the Marquis in the head to save her daughter. The ending is
also an attempt at subversion: the heroine, after inheriting the Marquis’s enormous wealth,
donates most of it to charity and starts a music school and sets up a house with the poor pianotuner. She attains her ‘happily-ever-after not in another marriage, but in a productive, working
life, unlike traditional fairy-tale heroines.
Frozen, Disney’s 2013 animated retelling of Anderson’s Snow Queen, is the story of two
sisters Elsa and Anna, who seek to break Elsa’s curse, that anything she touches turns into ice.
The film’s main focus is on the relationship of the two sisters rather than a love story. It debunks
the fairy tale trope of ‘love at first sight’ when Anna’s lover Hans turns out to be a villain.
Finally, the ‘act of true love’ that breaks Elsa’s curse is not a kiss from a prince, but the pure
sisterly love of Anna. Although the film has been criticised for portraying princesses as the
typical fair, doe-eyed dolls, it also has broken a handful of stereotypes that one would associate
with Disney’s fairy tales.
In 2004, Robert Coover published a novella Stepmother, a fairy-tale retelling from the
step-mother’s point of view. Maleficent (2014), a film retelling of Sleeping Beauty narrated from
the wicked fairy’s point of view, gives the viewer a more humane perspective of the classic
villain.
Fairy-tale adaptations and retellings in the recent years have also attempted to be more
racially inclusive. Disney’s Mulan (1998) narrated the tale of Fa Mulan, a Chinese legendary war
heroine. The Princess and the Frog (2009), featured the first African-American princess, Tiana,
a black-American waitress with entrepreneurial dreams of owning a restaurant, but ends up
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turning into a frog herself, after kissing a frog-prince. Although some critics had pointed out how
the first black-American princess spends most time onscreen as a frog, the film received fairly
positive reviews and was described as a “progress”. (Hare)
Conclusion
Fairy tales are the average, suffering commoner’s utopia. They tell them that despite all
odds, it only takes a stroke of luck to change their fortunes for the better; which is perhaps why
these tales have thrived for so long. For generations, young girls have been led to dream of a
Prince Charming who will free them from their mundane lives and sweep them off their feet to
‘happily ever afters’. But how happy is the ‘happily ever after’, is quite another question, as
Anne Sexton ironically expresses in her poem ‘Cinderella’:
Cinderella and the prince
lived, they say, happily ever after,
like two dolls in a museum case,
...................................................
their darling smiles pasted on for eternity.
.....................................................
That story. (100-109)
However, it is not to say that one must not read, or expose children to fairy tales. Fairy tales
cannot be escaped or forgotten. Parents and teachers should ensure that they discuss these tales
with children and inspire them to think of alternative endings and possibilities. Children can be
encouraged to rework them into the modern socio-cultural milieu. Perhaps future generations
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will be fortunate enough to experience newer versions of these tales, which do not propagate
stereotypes, are more inclusive and more relatable to the progressive values of modern societies.
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