Happily Ever After?

 

Do you recognize the person in this picture?

Nobody seems to get fairy tales.

A text from which I am currently teaching uses Cinderella as a hook. “Almost everyone knows how the story of Cinderella ends, but do people actually think about how she spent her days before she met the prince?”

Suprisingly, at least to me, few students seem to find the answer obvious. Even though without it, without Cinderella’s initial state of neglect and abuse, there is no story. Even though it is made her and the story’s defining characteristic: “Ella-in-the-cinders.” Everyone seems to think of her only as the happily-ever-after princess, in a princess gown.

But my text itself seems not to get it. It goes on to comment, “If someone had asked Cinderella what chores she did not particularly like, she probably would have answered, ‘Why none, of course. Housework is my duty.’” As though she was perfectly content with sleeping in the cinders while her sisters went to the ball. 

Why this weird blindness to what is, primarily, a tale of child abuse?

So, indeed, are most fairy tales. Snow White’s mother wants to kill her and eat her. Beauty’s father allows her to do all the work, while her two sisters abuse her relentlessly. Then he expects her to give up her life for his. Hansel and Gretel’s parents abandon them twice to be eaten by wolves. Rapunzel’s parents trade her for a mess of potage, then her stepmother locks her in an exitless tower.

Yet nobody seems to notice. Over time, most fairy tales have been sanitized, supposedly to remove anything that would upset small children. The violence is taken out, and any sexual innuendo. Witches or trolls may be too scary. Yet the abuse tends to remain, as though no one notices it—although, to be fair, it is so central to the stories that they would probably be meaningless without it.

It is not just child abuse which seems to be invisible in storyland. Jesus’s parables, too, are invariably misinterpreted. For example, nobody seems to notice the critical point of “The Good Samaritan”—although it is also apparent in its common title. It is not just the obvious point that it is good to do good; it is that the one person who did good was a Samaritan. After thieves had done evil, and a priest and a Levite ignored it.

The parable of the Prodigal Son I have seen similarly misinterpreted, even though the point is again in the standard title. Some apparently think that it is all about condemning the one son for wanting to leave the family farm.

In the Parable of the Talents, nobody seems to notice that the servant who is praised for good stewardship has made the money by lending at interest—prohibited by the Mosaic Law.

Although not a parable, the story of the woman taken in adultery is a similar case. Everybody seems to insist that Jesus overlooks the sin of the woman caught in adultery. He does not; he calls her out for it, and tells her to go and sin no more. The point is that he is not prepared to stone her to death, to give up on her.

My friend Xerxes, quoting some Protestant theologian, recently asserted that Jesus’s parables on the Kingdom of Heaven were really about the value of friendship. Heaven was being a friend to all. None of this nonsense about sheep and goats.

It occurs to me that there is a common thread here. It is a general denial of evil. We refuse to see evils committed in front of us; we pretend they do not exist.

To do so, to wash our hands and ask, with Pilate, “what is truth?” is itself the ultimate evil. Anyone might do an evil act. But to categorically deny the existence of evil is to crucify Christ in the flesh.