When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.
C.S. Lewis
Happily Ever Afterthoughts
I’m sure that the current hullabaloo over Disney’s remake of Snow White has not passed unnoticed by you, dear reader. Much has been made of the changes Disney has made to its 1937 offering; beloved by many and one of the most watched films of all time. I recall with joy, for example, the young Director being taken along to see it not long after its release and having a thoroughly memorable afternoon. But memory is a curious thing, as we have discussed; it can fix a moment in time, lending it the illusion of permanence, even as the stories themselves are ever-changing.
Now, I shall not be seeking to dwell on the criticism meted out to 2025’s Snow White. Suffice to say that I believe it has to do with something called ‘Woke Nonsense’; a phrase which I hear more and more in these increasingly interesting times. I know not what the term means but it certainly has the power to rile people. However, if your Director were to venture out on the limb of conjecture, I think people are angered not simply over the mystical Wokeness of Disney’s choices but for their tampering with what many see as a fixed, definitive version of the story. And this I think is a topic which I might safely devote today’s paltry words to addressing.
The idea that there is one true version of a fairy tale is a very modern construct. Traditionally, these stories were fluid, passed down orally, shifting in response to cultural and psychological needs. Charles Perrault’s Sleeping Beauty differs from the Grimm version, which in turn diverges from earlier renditions where the heroine wakes after giving birth to twins. Such transformations were not distortions but the very essence of storytelling. To insist on a singular interpretation is to misunderstand the nature of these tales. Fairy tales are, by their nature, shape-shifters much like our feathered friend, the yellow-bellied sapsucker, a bird that as you know, artfully drills into trees, creating holes that serve multiple purposes. This bird’s behaviour is emblematic of adaptability; its drilling not only extracts nourishment but also creates nesting sites for other creatures. In the same vein, fairy tales carve out spaces for reinterpretation and growth, offering nourishment for the imagination while allowing new narratives to flourish.
Maria Tatar’s The Fairest of Them All: Snow White and 21 Tales of Mothers and Daughters reminds us that the Snow White story is not singular but manifold, told across cultures and centuries with shifting details and altered moral emphases. The Brothers Grimm version, which became the basis for Disney’s animation, sanitised earlier renditions, replacing the biological mother with a stepmother to preserve the sanctity of motherhood. Yet, as Tatar notes, there are countless variations of the story, from a South African tale where the mother’s jealousy manifests in poisoned slippers to a Swiss version where Snow White herself is the one cast in a morally ambiguous light.
In one version of the story, the Queen tries to kill Snow White three times, not just the once. The first time with a corset, the second time with a comb and then the third time with the familiar apple. In this version, the Queen’s deception is not just focused on plain and simple murder; it is about the corruption of beauty. Snow White is already “the fairest of them all,” yet the Queen tempts her with supplements promising to enhance what is already beautiful. She does not simply strike Snow White down; she makes her aware of her beauty, putting her into a self-consciousness she previously lacked. The Queen’s toxic jealousy and Snow White’s innocence of course reflect deeper anxieties about identity, self-worth, and maturity but I think there’s something else going on too. The story speaks of the kind of self-consciousness which forces you to want to add to yourself and to protect yourself. The profound trick at play here is the same that was played on our friends Adam and Eve there in the Garden.
In Eden, the serpent does not introduce something wholly new; rather, it convinces Eve to grasp what she already possesses. “You will be like God,” it suggests, subtly glossing over the sense that she is made in God’s image. The tragic notes here are heard in the sounds of the premature grasping, echoing in the belief that one must take rather than simply be. In Snow White, beauty is innocent until it knows itself. Once it does, it becomes fragile, something that must be protected, adorned, and reinforced. This is the Queen’s real poison: not just the apple, but the idea that beauty is not enough on its own. Bruno Bettelheim, in The Uses of Enchantment, develops this idea further, seeing fairy tales functioning as psychological tools, helping children process fears and desires. He argues that they present symbolic resolutions to inner conflicts, allowing young minds to grapple with ideas of identity, transformation, and loss. Snow White becomes, in this light, not only a tale about vanity or jealousy but a deeply human exploration of innocence, experience, and the dangers of premature knowledge. One wonders if Eve read fairy tales to her children. I imagine she did.
The wonderful thing of course is that all stories of falls are also stories of redemption; of the journey from unselfconscious grace to the knowledge of beauty, and, perhaps, back again. You never know. Well, maybe you do. Drop me a line.
While we’re on the subject of the profundity of fairy tales and dropping lines, let us look at another one of my favourites: Sleeping Beauty. Here we meet similar themes of protection and the consequences of ignorance. Essentially it is the story of how parents’ overprotection of their child shields her from the very realities that shape life. Their decision to exclude Maleficent from the christening represents this refusal to confront the darker but absolutely necessary for growth, aspects of existence, effectively limiting their daughter’s ability to cope and grow and leaving her naïve and unprepared for adulthood.
As the story unfolds, Sleeping Beauty, raised by three fairy guardians devoid of true power but catchy songs in Disney’s version, encounters a superficial love which triggers a psychological crisis when her prince departs. Her choice to seek unconsciousness symbolises a longing to escape from the harsh truths of life. The prince who comes to Beauty’s rescue in this story is no mere lazy patriarchal stereotype of the manly man saviour; rather, he embodies an awakening of the consciousness necessary for the heroine to thrive. The narrative suggests that both men (the prince has to slay his own dragon after all) and women need to confront their fears and insecurities to grow, advocating for a shared journey of self-discovery and mutual awakening in relationships.
In The Bloody Chamber, Angela Carter has lots of fun with reworking well-known fairy tales, to lay bare their psychological and symbolic depths. Carter was never interested in the literal reading of these stories. Instead, she revelled in their subtext, peeling back the layers to expose the hidden anxieties and desires at work beneath their familiar surfaces. Her Bluebeard becomes a meditation on female agency; her take on Little Red Riding Hood explores the complexity of sexual awakening. The danger, in Carter’s view, was not in reinterpreting fairy tales but in failing to do so.
Perhaps another important lesson to be learned from Snow White, or rather, the many Snow Whites, including Disney’s 2025 version, is not about beauty or villainy, but about the perils of a world that insists on singular truths. The fairest tale of all is the one that allows for multiplicity, for reinvention, for seeing beyond the glass. This is a reminder that, like Sleeping Beauty, we must confront the uncomfortable truths of our existence to awaken to our full potential. It is only by facing the dragons that we can hope to grow into our truest selves. It’s almost too obvious to point out that fairy tales deal with enchantment and the supernatural but the supernatural is there to help us hope. Another feature that we ought to note is that the end of the fairy story invariably holds out consolation that whatever horrors have been described, they are going to come to an end.
And so fairy tales continue their battle with literalism; the growing tendency amongst some of us to believe that everything worth existing exists at the explicit, direct, or surface level. Such people often struggle to understand or engage with anything that requires interpretation, nuance, or subtlety. I invite you to a Key Stage 4 poetry lesson for further illustration on this particular matter.
Literalism is a persistent force. It is the impulse that resists new interpretations of classic stories, mistaking the version one grew up with as the authoritative original. Worse still, it seeps into broader discourse, flattening literature, religion, and history into simplistic, one-dimensional readings. The fairy tale is a space where contradictions coexist; where horror and wonder, cruelty and kindness, terror and transformation all intermingle. To read it literally would be to strip it of its power. As Tatar argues, fairy tales have long served as a means of navigating the fears, anxieties, and complexities of real life. They do not provide neat, moralistic answers; they offer symbols, archetypes, and questions. They teach us, not what to think, but how to think. As I claim, to insist on their fixity is to misunderstand their essence. While being literal can help in certain contexts (like legal language or technical instructions), when applied broadly to life, it can make navigating the complexities of human experience more challenging and limiting.
Walter Benjamin observed that fairy tales transmit one great lesson: you need wits and courage to confront the monsters in the woods. But the tales also hold out consolation. However dark the path, however perilous the journey, their endings speak of the possibility of renewal. This is the true enchantment of fairy tales, not their rigid adherence to one version, but their endless capacity to illuminate new truths.
The rigidity with which we cling to a single interpretation of Snow White betrays a failure to appreciate the very purpose of fairy tales: to open up possibilities in the tree barks of imagination, not to close them down. Our ancestors used these stories to talk with one another about survival, about transformation, about what it means to be human. We could do worse than to listen to what they are telling us.
Until next time, Happy Reading/Pecking away!
The Director’s mailbag was empty once again this week and so the silence continues – may it be filled with great things!