Guest Column

She's been getting into trouble for reading fairy tales since she was in 9th grade. Still is, too, 35 years later. Why? Truth is, a lot of readers today just don't ''get it'' when they read them.

The author is a native Iowan who returned to the state in 2000 after several years out of state, during which she wrote essays and book reviews for respected magazines and newspapers all over the country. —Chuck Offenburger

By Kathleen Kisner
August 23, 2004
DES MOINES, IOWA

Kathleen Kisner

The eighth-grader we called “Rapunzel” didn’t like us.

“You’re just a couple of small-town hippies,” she said.

My friend Laura and I stared and sighed. It was exactly the kind of comment we expected from Rapunzel, a cheerleader with so little knowledge of literature that she didn’t even know who Rapunzel was. Her waist-length hair frizzled around her face, which was flushed and distorted with anger.

Why did she hate us so much? All we had done was wear slacks under our dresses in an attempt to change the dress code at Southeast Junior High in my hometown of Iowa City. We were tired of freezing our butts off in miniskirts, pea coats, and nylons on our long walk to school. We would have liked to think Rapunzel was our feminist sister in arms, but she was more like a dim-witted princess, the kind who was parodied in the “Fractured Fairy Tales” cartoons of the 1960s.

“I like the idea of being a small-town hippie,” I said.

“Me, too,” said Laura. “Thanks for the compliment.”

Rapunzel stalked away, glowering. Our cleverness had infuriated not only the principal, but also the jocks and cheerleaders. Why, we couldn’t fathom. We hadn’t broken any rule by wearing slacks under our skirts, and if our ploy forced administrators to re-examine the dress code, the entire student body stood to gain. But the next day, after the principal announced that girls would henceforth be allowed to wear slacks, kids started sneering at us. When the jocks began calling Laura “Horseface” and me “Egghead,” we retreated to the restroom to cry.

Maybe that’s why we started reading fairy tales. We escaped into a world where heroes were honored, not shunned as outcasts.

Ninth grade was the year we immersed ourselves in Andrew Lang’s 19th-century collections of fairy tales: “The Blue Fairy Book,” “The Red Fairy Book,” “The Violet Fairy Book” and so on. The year was 1969, I wore bell-bottoms with silly bobbles sewn to the hem, and Laura wore fringed suede boots over her patched jeans, so we resembled the princes more than the princesses. We made forays into the children’s department of the Iowa Book and Supply store there in Iowa City to purchase Dover paperback editions of Lang’s fairy tales, as intrigued by the detailed Victorian illustrations as we were by the tales themselves.

Our teachers were not impressed with our choice of reading. When our science teacher caught us reading fairy tales in class, he told us we were too old for that – and made us put our books away in our knapsacks.

“Is this a drug culture thing?” he asked.

“We’re not on anything. We just like beautiful stories,” Laura said.

“And they’re not just for kids,” I added. “In the seventeenth century, French aristocrats told fairy tales at literary salons.”

He wasn’t interested. “Get back to the Periodic Table,” he said.

It’s too bad our teachers couldn’t fit fairy tales into the curriculum.

Raised on fairy tales of the Disneyized “they-lived-happily-ever-after” variety, we were delighted by the unpredictable, sometimes tragic, endings of literary fairy tales. I chortled when I learned that “Little Red Riding Hood,” a silly child who had always annoyed me, got eaten by the wolf in Charles Perrault’s original 1697 version of the tale. Perrault’s moral (in Jack Zipes’s translation of Perrault’s tale, which I read years later) is:

One sees here that young children,
Especially pretty girls,
Who’re bred as pure as pearls
Should question words addressed by men.
Or they may serve one day as feast
For a wolf or other beast...

I was similarly entertained by Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy’s buoyant humor in “The Yellow Dwarf.” The story begins: “Once upon a time there was a queen who had only one daughter, but that one was worth a thousand. Since the queen was a widow, nothing in the world was as dear to her as the young princess, and she was so afraid of losing her affection that she never corrected any of her faults.”

Uh-oh. The princess as spoiled brat? Now there was a prototype we hadn’t encountered in “Sleeping Beauty.” In “The Yellow Dwarf,” the princess breaks her promise to a hideous dwarf who saves her life, and the reader realizes that no matter how high-ranking the hero or heroine, he or she must adhere to a code of social behavior or suffer the consequences.

These thrilling, action-packed stories in which characters, both male and female, find love, use their wits to defeat evil fairies and witches, or, in some cases, are vanquished by vanity or another character flaw, amused me mightily.

Suffering from the cruel teasing of our peers, Laura and I retreated to our private literary salon, trading fairy tale books in the woods at Hickory Hill Park. And when we discovered that the first published fairy tales had been intended for adults, we felt smug. We had suspected all along that these charming stories were not just for kids.

Thirty-five years later, at the age of 49, I still love fairy tales.

A few years ago I started collecting fairy tale books, some intended for adults, like “Beauties, Beasts and Enchantment: Classic French Fairy Tales,” translated by Jack Zipes, and others for children, like “Classic Fairy Tales to Read Aloud,” selected by Naomi Lewis. Whenever one of my nephews or nieces requires a gift, my husband and I rifle through the stack of fairy tale picture books I’ve acquired from used bookstores. Our 2-year-old nephew Henry recently received a copy of “Little Red Riding Hood” (the one in which Little Red Riding Hood escapes the wolf, as Henry is too young for Perrault’s version).

Fairy tales originally were passed down orally by talented storytellers, according to Zipes in his essay “Breaking the Disney Spell.” But with the invention of the printing press in the 15th century, French aristocrats began adapting the themes to stress a code of behavior and civility, and by the end of the 17th century, writers like Perrault and D’Aulnoy were telling fairy tales in salons and writing them for publication.

In the 19th century, Hans Christian Andersen wrote original fairy tales, while the Brothers Grimm collected oral fairy tales. Andersen, known for sweet stories like “The Ugly Duckling” and “The Little Mermaid,” wrote for an adult audience, though his work quickly caught on with children. The Grimms, who idealistically hoped to preserve the spirit of the peasant folk, have an unsavory reputation for grisly stories among some modern-day parents.

Modern children read fairy tales less than did previous generations, according to some experts.

A children’s librarian told me that fairy tales are passing out of our culture because many parents consider them too sexist or violent to read to their children. Well, yes, many fairy tales are sexist and violent – but less so in most cases than TV, computer games and movies. For every passive princess who is valued only for beauty, there is a plucky female adventurer like Gerda in Andersen’s “The Snow Queen,” who makes a perilous journey to save her friend Kay from the snow queen. And though Gretel in Grimms’ “Hansel and Gretel” kills the witch by pushing her into the oven, she saves her own life and liberates her brother Hansel from a cage by doing so.

Fairy tales would seem a natural fit for kids and adults who love the popular “Harry Potter” books.

If you don’t want your kids to read fairy tales, however, try them yourself.

I was pleasantly surprised by the beauty of the language when I re-read one of Andrew Lang’s collections, which are still available in Dover editions. I also love Angela Carter’s lush and stunning collection of adult fairy tales, “The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories,” which includes re-tellings of “Bluebeard,” “Puss in Boots” and “Beauty in the Beast.”

Before I end this essay, let me mention Robin McKinley, a children’s writer known for her novel-length re-tellings of the fairy tales “Beauty and the Beast” and “Sleeping Beauty.” Her gorgeous adult novel “Deerskin,” a re-telling of Perrault’s “Donkeyskin,” is one of the most charming fantasy novels I’ve ever read.

You have to admire writing that can entertain perceptive readers in both childhood and adulthood – and stimulate the imagination.

A native of Iowa City, Kathleen Kisner, 49, became addicted to writing in childhood. After earning a master's in classics (ancient Greek and Latin) at Indiana University in 1980, she taught Latin for five years at college prep schools in Washington, D.C., and Cleveland, Ohio. She escaped from her duties as a Latin teacher to become a full-time freelance writer after she began to publish book reviews and features in The Cleveland Plain Dealer, Dissent, Woman's World and many other publications. In 2000 she moved with her husband and cats to Des Moines, where she has rediscovered the pleasures of bicycling, sunlight (Cleveland is cursed with “lake-effect” cloudy weather), reviewing books for little magazines and the convenience of life in a smaller city. She also publishes a free quarterly book review ’zine, “A Few Green Leaves.” For a free copy of that publication, or to correspond with her about this essay or other matters, you can reach her by e-mail at KathleenKisner@aol.com

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