good, evil, and fairy tales

more about stories

Welcome back, readers, and welcome, new readers!

As we relax around summer campfires (in the northern hemisphere) or huddle around winter fireplaces (we in the southern hemisphere), stories are the common currency: the way we remember, look forward, and learn.

In our last post, we wrote about the stories that filled our childhoods. As a high school literature teacher, I am privileged to teach great “stories” to teenagers, and to watch how the narratives of character and decision affect their lives. Whether we’re dealing with social justice issues in Sinclair or suffering in Dostoevsky, each student brings their own lens to the stories and takes away their own lessons. (Or just sheer entertainment value: yesterday, on an excursion with our youth group to a remote ravine, we read William Saroyan’s The Journey to Hanford. “Haven’t you heard it a thousand times?” we asked. “Yes, of course,” they said, “but it’s so funny!”)

While reflecting on the role that stories play in all of our lives, we remembered an essay about the power of stories by educator Annemarie Wächter (Marianne’s grandmother). So for something different in this post, we’ll quote an excerpt from that in the hopes of inspiring you to revisit your favorite stories.

Hoping your summer (or winter) continues to be wonderful,

Norann

In Spring of 1929, Annemarie was a 19-year-old student at the Sociale Frauenschul, a school for women in central Germany that had been founded after World War 1 to provide training for the many young women who would not find a husband due to the war.

Annemarie was studying to become a kindergarten teacher, but she and her friends were also preoccupied by a search for absolute, objective truth (a search that would eventually bring her to the Bruderhof). Her diary records many conversations on this topic, and a reading journal she kept for that year lists over sixty titles by authors including Dostoevsky, Oscar Wilde, Herman Hesse, Leo Tolstoi, Martin Buber, Jack London, Thomas Mann, and Upton Sinclair, as well as dozens of books of social and educational commentary. Important passages and ideas were copied into the journal, along with brief observations. Not all the books furthered the quest for truth. “Latrine atmosphere!” she wrote disgustedly next to one title.

She brought these same interests and questions to her main academic project for that year, an essay on the theme “Do children and fairy tales belong together?”

Children and fairy tales belong together in the deepest sense because the basic element of a fairy tale is living deeds. There is nothing abstract or intellectual in them; the focus is completely on the action of the story, and there is nothing senseless or unrelated in the plot.

Unburdened by rational thought and classifying, criticizing consciousness, primitive peoples could create and develop such themes. Therefore there is a naturalness, unconcern, and freshness to fairy tale characters that seems impossible to the modern, self-conscious person.

It is no longer possible for modern man to create stories in this way; the talent of an artist is necessary nowadays. But that does not mean modern man can no longer relate to fairy tales. These stories touch on something that is hidden deep within him, beneath all the strata of rational thought and mechanical knowledge.

The search for an absolute is never finished; it stirs people’s hearts again and again and troubles the people of today just as much as it did the primitive people of long ago.  A fairy tale, therefore, is not subject to the course of time: it springs from the eternal question of the spiritual existence of mankind, which modern man must also face above and beyond all the fantastic, strange, comical, and tragic elements of life.

Now we come to the question: Is there a particular spiritual connection between children and fairy tales? This question can be answered with a simple “yes,” and this “yes” must be spiritually, inwardly founded in some way, since it would be completely contrary to the nature of a child to take a merely superficial liking to something. It only remains for us to discover how and why the strong relationship between children and fairy tales exists.

The whole being of a child is life-affirming, since the child itself is life, deeds. The child is in a constant process of making himself one with all things. He takes everything into himself: the natural world, humankind, the supernatural. This inward connection with all things means that a child can only believe in the fundamental good of it all. “The world is good,” or “Everything categorically has to be led to a good end, to a good resolution.” And that is, of course, exactly what we find again and again in every fairy tale. That’s why it says, “and they lived happily ever after.”

For the child and for the fairy tale there is always a resolution, a result. The child can’t do otherwise than believe again and again in the power that arises from becoming one with all things. It is curious that the perceptions of an adult follow an exactly converse path. The adult seeks and struggles for fulfillment in life, but when it comes down to it knows that he is better off not reaching the goal because then it would all be over. The struggle and suspense, for the sake of which he believes his life to be livable at all, would then cease. Child and fairy tale both want – and find – fulfillment. They live in happiness that knows no end or disappointment, but they truly live.

In a fairy tale something is always happening. Every moment a new element, happening, or character appears. One need not speak of individual fairy tales here: they all share this attribute. This constant flow of movement, the unstoppable progression of the plot again reflects the relationship to the child, whose life is activity and movement. It is really so: children and fairy tales are inseparable. To speak of one is to mean the other at the same time. Fairy tales can often be brutal and cruel – people and animals die – and yet, despite everything, the positive powers always win. There can be no other ending. Child and primitive man must always find such a resolution.

The only character in a fairy tale to suffer relentless punishment is the one that is the embodiment of evil.  But that does not in and of itself mean anything distressing or oppressive – the deed is served its just reward. A sense of justice is extremely clearly developed. The fairy tale knows no compromise; it remains consistent. A child also possesses a very keen and unbending feeling for justice. The more uncomplicated and unstructured the fairy tale is, the more strongly are the two extremes displayed.

To “live in happiness that knows no end or disappointment, but truly live” – that’s what we want to be reminded of when we read stories, and is of course our hoped-for goal as Christians.

Fairy tales teach us to bravely endure this:

Trina Schart Hyman’s illustration for St George and the Dragon

so we can end like this:

And they all lived happily ever after.

(The essay on fairy tales is excerpted from Anni: the letters and writings of Annemarie Wächter which is the story of her search for faith.)