Fairy Tales and the Power of Transformation

Dr. Kenneth Hawley: Good morning and welcome to the 15th annual Writing Carnival.
As you know, every year we have a different theme and it goes from year to year.
It begins in our first year of the cycle with the Chronicles of Narnia, then Lord of the
Rings, then Harry Potter, then the Princess Bride, and every fifth year it's kind of a
new idea, a different topic of some kind.
And this year it's fairy tales.
We hope that you enjoy it.
We know that you know many of them and we hope that maybe you learn a little bit about
them that you hadn't thought about before.
Among the themes that we'll discuss the next couple of days are two important ideas.
One is that these stories are really pretty old, maybe even older than we know them to
be.
And they're sort of related to lots of other stories that are very similar, that are a
lot like them.
And in fact, they echo a larger and higher story that is above and behind them all.
They also are kind of open to interpretation and lots of people take them different ways
and some people don't particularly like them.
We might look at Hamlet, for example.
It's essentially, oh, it's The Lion King.
The Lion King is really Hamlet with animals.
That's what it is.
A little less murder, though not none.
There is some murder.
But it's a comedy, not a tragedy.
And Beauty and the Beast is essentially Stockholm Syndrome.
It's a tale as old as time.
You lock them up long enough and they'll start to like you.
You also might take the wrong lesson from it.
Just keep lying and stealing and eventually the girl will love you.
Thanks, Aladdin.
And Nice Guys Will Finish Last, Quasimodo.
Don't get any ideas.
You're not going to get the girl.
And Cinderella is essentially just get a makeover.
It'll be fine.
Everything is solved with an easy makeover.
And just take care of your animals, please.
We don't need to be overrun.
There's always a message in there for somebody.
But the messages we'll focus on today have to do with kind of the larger themes, the
bigger ideas, and ones that really, again, seem quite old but are actually pretty current.
I mean, it's not as though we've gotten to the point today where people don't objectify
women.
It's not as though we've gotten to the point today where people kind of sit and passively
allow things to happen to them without taking steps to solve problems and do something positive
and good and helpful for their own lives.
And it's not as though today people don't struggle with their identity and their sense
of self.
We'll look at these curses and these evil spells, and I think we'll realize that in
many ways those curses still abound, and those spells still need to be broken.
If you look at the story that's quite familiar to us, Sleeping Beauty, it's been told and
retold, maybe adapted or re-envisioned, and maybe even retold as a horror story.
But at the heart of this tale, we have someone who's been sleeping an unnatural sleep for
a long time, a hundred years, and is awakened.
And in the classic story from Disney, she's awakened by a prince who's driven primarily
by infatuation and perfect timing.
He shows up, essentially breaking in his ring, not really asking permission, and somehow
it all works out.
But in Maleficent, they rework that a bit and give us instead a mother figure whose
sacrificial love is presented as greater than any infatuated prince.
But there is an awakening that occurs and a curse that is broken.
That idea is explored further in Frozen, for example.
It's an act of true love.
It's true love's kiss, and it's not going to come from Hans.
It can't even come from Kristoff.
It's an act of true love from a sister who's willing to sacrifice herself to save the other,
and one who realizes her true devotion to her loving sister, and that's enough to break
the spell of a frozen heart.
We also have the fairest of them all, Snow White.
We have the poisoned apple, which again may seem familiar, someone taking an apple that
they're not supposed to take, and it results in a curse that lasts for hundreds and hundreds
of years, for example.
Or stories like this ask us to use our imagination, maybe re-envision this story in another setting.
And they ask us to imagine lots of things, like for example, in Snow White and the Huntsman,
we're meant to imagine that somehow Kristen Stewart is more beautiful than Charlize Theron.
But use your imagination.
It's also a curse that abounds when you just keep looking in the mirror, and you keep asking
yourself who is more beautiful?
Am I the most beautiful?
And that sort of obsession is deteriorating to the human soul, and it convinces the queen
that she's not as beautiful as Snow White.
This story though is not a new one, and it's certainly not an old one either.
Look at Hollywood.
What are they doing?
One more injection, one more tuck, and all of a sudden we don't even know who you are.
You don't look like yourself, and you're really not as beautiful as you were when you just
left well enough alone.
And no one is aging naturally anymore, and it's not just the women.
What happened to the chin cleft?
It's gone.
They don't look natural, they don't look normal, they look pasty.
Somehow, they look in the mirror over and over again, and they don't see the same thing
everybody else sees.
It's a good thing we've gotten past that, and we don't look at ourselves every day in
something like a mirror, and obsess over what we look like, and what people think of us.
Again, it's a spell that's not been fully broken, has it?
If we look at the most traditional stories, we know that those from Grimm often have grim
endings, but usually a happily ever after.
They have to negotiate violence, and they usually do so by means of the virtue of the
protagonist.
They're better than the evil people in the story, and they win, and the evil people lose,
and the winners get married.
That's how these stories tend to go.
And if you look at Snow White, for example, the traditional story, it's not really always
the stuff of childhood dreams.
There's murder, for example, attempted murder, multiple times, and eventually she's trapped
in a glass coffin.
But virtue wins out, the beautiful and thoughtful and hardworking child.
We know that those virtues and values are more admirable than anything we get from the
vain and violent queen.
We know that justice does triumph, and she dies a horrible and kind of ridiculous death,
but she's dead, and not a threat to anyone anymore.
Ultimately, there's marriage, there's a royal castle, there's love, there's what the story
describes as tender feelings, and a wedding feast, happily ever after.
All the evil has been dealt with, and all that remains is good and happy and loving
marriage.
Cinderella is the other classic tale, and it's not quite as violent.
It's just slavery, not murder, kept hidden away.
And it's virtue, though, still that wins out.
She's good and faithful, and she's described as amazing to everyone there.
And there are cruel and selfish sisters and a stepmother that we know cannot win, and
they don't win.
When in the end, justice prevails and the doves alight on Cinderella, they leave her
shoulder and go pluck out the eyes of those mean sisters, just yank them right out of
their skull.
And the bloody sisters are left there to suffer.
We don't even know what happens next.
Do they have a doctor?
We don't know.
They can't even see the wedding, but they can't appreciate just how dazzling the clothes
are that their sister now wears.
It's a prince's castle and a church wedding in the end.
But the other story that many of us are familiar with, Beauty and the Beast, there is an older
version, and then there's the one that we're probably more familiar with.
I think we'll find, though, that even though you look at the modern version, and even it's
more modern retelling that we've seen, not all of these virtues that they're presenting
are totally new.
In fact, we might imagine that, oh, they tried to kind of ramp this up for modern-day audiences
and make Belle a little more interesting and self-assured and intelligent and powerful
and have more agency.
But there's some of that in the old story.
So as we compare these two, I think you'll find that they're not altogether that different.
If you look at the older story, we know that there was a young daughter, and she was more
beautiful and more good than her sisters.
The older two really weren't nice.
They were proud.
They didn't really hang around with anybody of a lower station.
They were conceited, and their sister was better than them and more beautiful than them.
And what did they make fun of her for?
Reading too many books.
That was in the original.
It's not just Disney's Belle that is mocked for that.
But if you look at Disney's Belle, you see her as an only child, though.
We don't have evil sisters.
We just have Gaston.
He embodies all that is evil.
Then you have Belle reading her books and enjoying her library on her own, and one of
the books she reads, if you look closely and freeze it, she's actually reading.
And if you hear the lyrics of her song, she's describing the story she's in.
Very meta.
It's Beauty and the Beast is the story she's describing in that song.
And if you zoom in, it actually captions the photo of this prince crawling around like
an animal as the Beaumont's prince.
It's also a story where you have Beauty, who is visited by this fairy godmother type figure
in a dream, and she tells her, "Your heart, your tenderness, your compassion is valuable
and valued, and it will be rewarded."
Beauty though, sits down to cry, but it says she trusted herself to God.
She didn't just bemoan her fate.
She had courage, and that's what's described in the original story.
She had courage and she had faith.
In Disney's version, she has kind of pluck and determination, and she stands up to the
beast when no one else will.
And in this story, she is presented with her own room.
In the original, it's described as Beauty's room, and it's filled with music and musical
books and with books of all kinds.
And she's told, "You reign here.
Your wish is our command."
And it's basically the old version of the song that they sing in the Disney version,
Be Our Guest.
And it's also the wonderful library that she gets to enjoy there.
These things are from the original.
And when you look back at the original also, there's a moment when they're falling for
each other, at least he's falling for her, and she's rethinking her feelings about him.
And she admits, "You know, you're so kind and tenderhearted.
You're so good that when I think about that, I don't think about how ugly you are.
So take notes, guys.
Be nice.
Be nice, and they just might not notice."
But he confesses, "No, I know I have a tender heart, but I'm still a monster.
I know that."
And she actually corrects him and pushes back and says, "No, no, no.
You have this outward form.
What's worse than you having the outward form of monstrosity is the true monstrosity of
men who hide their corrupt hearts beneath charming manners.
Watch out for the guys who seem to be just fine, in fact, seem great, when really inside,
they're corrupt.
They're the ones who are monstrous from the inside out."
And that's what she's able to see and know.
And she describes someone essentially like Gaston.
Then in the story, she goes back and is with those sisters, and those sisters are unhappy.
One sister married a man who was handsome, but he was vain and always thought about himself,
no one else.
The other married a man who was intelligent, but he used his wit to only make fun of her
and mock her.
They were completely unhappy.
The beast's curse is that he cannot convince anyone to marry him or love him with the gifts
of intelligence or attractiveness.
Those are withheld from him.
That's his monstrous form and his dulled wit.
Beauty is able to love him without those things.
And it's that kind of compassion and understanding and ability to see through to the heart that
beauty is rewarded with.
Meanwhile, of course, in the Disney version, he's languishing because he has no one to
love him and the last petal is about to fall.
In the original story, she is afraid that she has caused his death.
And she wants to go back to him, and when she does, she falls upon him and confesses
her love for him, wants to give him her heart.
And when she does this, she pledges to marry him and be faithful to him because she cannot
live without him.
In the Disney version, we get to watch Gaston die.
And when he does, we know it's nothing terrible.
He just slipped and fell and it's probably a puddle of mush at the bottom of the castle.
That's fine.
But our beast is being restored by her love.
And when he's restored, you might think, "Oh, all those fireworks, that's a Disney thing.
They always do that."
In the original, it says that there were fireworks in great celebration.
And when he is revived, he is handsome, he has his wit.
Everything that she didn't see before is truly there.
It was just hidden behind that outward form.
And again, the story is about watch out for the outward form that pleases and fools you.
Don't be fooled by appearances.
And ultimately, he is restored and they are happy together.
All these things are united in a single person.
She is then with the prince and happy in the Disney version.
In the original story though, those mean sisters, they get turned into statues and they're made
to witness the happiness of beauty every day she walks in and out of her palace.
They're stationed right there on her front porch to see her happiness, what they will
never have.
That's not featured in the Disney version because you didn't have any siblings in the
Disney version.
But they're going to stay that way until they acknowledge their faults.
And so they're told, you probably never change.
Hard to change a heart like yours.
But the beast is transformed.
What are these stories keep giving us?
The contexts are usually pretty similar.
A broken world, broken families, lots of people who are missing out on some relationship that
should be meaningful to them.
Maybe it's a widow or an orphan.
We have adults, but many of them are manipulative and selfish and tyrannical.
You also have very vulnerable children, many perilous journeys.
You have oppressive systems in the culture and society in which they live.
Women stuck in marriages and relationships can be quite dangerous.
It's sometimes a doom, sometimes a promise.
These are the contexts.
And what happens?
Evil and good collide.
When they do, the powerful curses, they cause sleep and imprisonment and suffering, but
the powerful cures promise awakening and freedom and healing.
And there's great disfigurement, but there's also transformation.
There's separation and death, but there's also reunion and life.
And these stories, these are the plots.
These are the conflicts.
This is what the whole story is about.
And ultimately, good wins.
Justice prevails.
Evil is punished.
Kingdoms are restored and enchantments get broken and lives get redeemed.
That's ultimately what these stories about.
And when we look at them and we see kind of weird, they are how strange they are, how
broken they seem.
They are, they're human.
They're all too human.
But what they speak to is something divine.
What they speak to is something larger and greater and higher and nobler and truer to
who we really are.
Deep down, somehow, for centuries, we keep telling ourselves and our children stories
about worlds that are darker than you can imagine, but that will be transformed.
Kingdoms that are completely ruined until they're saved.
People who have an unnatural sleep for way too long.
It looks like death, but it will be changed and they will come to life.
And the brokenness and the loneliness and the pain and the hurt can be restored because
love can overcome any curse.
Even the ones where thorns infest the ground and death affects us all.
Any curse can be broken, especially when it's the son of the king, the true prince who's
come to redeem his bride and take her to be with him forever and happily ever after.
We hope you enjoy the Riding Carnival this week.
The 24-hour reading marathon starts now with Dr. Jesse Long.
You are dismissed.
: [APPLAUSE]