Fairy Tale Princesses are a Fairy Tale

 

When the average person thinks of fairy tales, they think of “Disney princesses.” And until the recent woke remakes, the basic plot was always to find true love, to link up with Prince Charming. Isn’t this what “fairy tale” is supposed to mean?

However, real fairy tales, as collected by the Grimms or Charles Perrault, rarely feature either princes or princesses.

They do usually have a king’s daughter as their protagonist, and probably feature a king’s son. But that is invariably how they are referred to, “king’s daughter” and “king’s son.” Never “princess.”

The point being made is that royal identity is a metaphor. It refers to narcissism: people who think of themselves as better than others, as kings.

In “Little Thumbkin,” all the tiny ogres sleep in crowns.

The clearest example is Hans Cristian Andersen’s “The Princess and the Pea.” The entire point of the tale is to define “real princess.” Those who were literal royalty were commonly not. Instead, an obviously poor homeless girl appears at the palace gate during a thunderstorm, water pouring out of her heels. “Down at heel.”

What made her a princess is her ability to be irritated and complain about a night spent on twenty soft mattresses.

A king’s daughter is the child of a narcissist. Suffering a narcissistic parent, who cares only for themselves, the children are anything but princesses. They struggle just to survive, like Cinderella, Snow White, Belle, or Rapunzel. The wealth or status of the parent is no help to them.

The original point of fairy tales is to give children an education in morals and life. This is what they had in preliterate times and places, when children did not read nor go to school; this, and the Sunday sermon. They are told by fairy godmothers—a godmother being a person deputed at baptism to raise a child in morals and truth, in the faith, and to protect them should the parents fail to do so.

Accordingly, many are about bad parenting, and seek to rescue the heroine from it. Usually bowdlerized delicately by making the villains step-parents.

According to Ursula Le Guin, who is wise in the ways of story, fairy tales must always be in the past tense—as they are—because present tense in narrative evokes discontinuity: nobody can know what happens next. Fairy tales are meant to restore a sense of security and the ultimate rightness of things in a child torn by the everyday madness of a dysfunctional family. They are written in “third person omniscient”: from God’s point of view.

Not the Disney versions, woke or pre-woke, which miss the point entirely. The Grimm or Perrault versions, as collected from the wild.

They are healing at any age.