Story and Memory

Let’s talk today about fairy tales and their softening over time. 

Now, I mean this, not in the sense that in the Grimm brothers and Perrault people are getting raped and having their limbs chopped off, and in Disney they’re not, but on a more personal level. Maybe a better way to put it is, let’s talk about story and memory.

Human memory is flawed. We frequently remember things as better, or worse, or simply different from how they really were. For fairy tales, I default to remembering them as better. I think it’s because, despite all the research I’ve done and everything I’ve learned about fairy tales over the last 15 years or so, some subconscious part of me still thinks fairy tale=good, sweet, happy.

So the other day I was reading King Thrushbeard. And, like, I’ve always known that King Thrushbeard was, let’s say...questionable. But I’ve also always been a sucker for anything involving secret identities - superheroes, Beasts, The Princess Bride, the Scarlet Pimpernel.

I’m not going to get into the details of King Thrushbeard here, because I just did that over here, which was my whole reason for reading it in the first place. Anyway, I knew it had some not great aspects, but on my reread, this little section here absolutely blew me away with how bad it was.

Kindly. He said it *kindly*. Like, F you, dude.

I’ve experienced this kind of in-memory softening of a fairy tale before, the first time I reread Perrault’s version of Riquet of the Tuft after many years. And again, you can read what I’ve said about this story here. But basically, I remembered it as this beautiful story about beauty being in the eye of the beholder, because I had very clearly remembered this line:

But what I hadn’t remembered was this line:

Where, for some context, the princess is saying “I agreed to marry you, an ugly man, when I was a total idiot. Surely, now that I am no longer a total idiot, you cannot expect me to keep such a promise.” ie, marrying an ugly man is something only a total idiot would do. She only agrees to marry him when he tells her that she has the power to make him hot. Which I feel just really undercuts the meaning of the line I remembered above; in context it seems as worthless as the morals Perrault likes to include at the ends of his stories, which often have nothing to do with the stories themselves. (Either that or they’re outright stupid - often both).

So. All this to say, I don’t think I’ll be reading my kids (if I ever have kids) a lot of fairy tales. I think I’ll be telling them, as I remember them, because I trust my own memory to produce a nicer story that Perrault or the Grimms can. Which, I suppose, is why oral tradition is so important. A fundamental part of folk tales is making them your own.