Back from the Dead: The Fairy Tale Lives On

by

Andi Miller

I am a tried and true friend of the fairy tale retelling, and I honestly do not know when or where the fascination began. As a child I rarely read “true” fairy tales—those grizzly stories of murder and mayhem by the likes of the Brothers Grimm, Charles Perrault, and Madame d’Aulnoy. No, dear reader, I was a child of the Disney era, subjected to The Little Mermaid and Aladdin in the movie theater, and I certainly saw older films like Cinderella and Snow White that filtered down on rainy school days near the end of the year when teachers and students were too tired to tango any longer.

At the delicate age of six, my crazy uncle—the one with long hair who lived in the mountains—gave me a copy of the complete works of the Brothers Grimm. Luckily, I did not so much as open the lengthy collection until I was in my teens. And thank God for that, or I might have been damaged emotionally for the duration of my time on this earth. No, I would not have been able to stomach those dark tales at such an early age, but once I hit high school I was fair game for the twisted and macabre.

I have come to consider classic fairy tales those that were recorded on paper to maintain or uphold an oral tradition. The Brothers Grimm, for instance, claimed they were interested in maintaining the oral tradition of Germany by recording as many folk tales as they could in their books. Through the years, they continually revised their tales—now called fairy tales—in an effort to make them more child-friendly and to reflect a Christian message. Other classic authors like Charles Perrault and Madame d’Aulnoy told their versions of folk tales in salons, also tweaking plots and changing meanings to fit their respective agendas. They wrote their tales down, passed them along, and generation after generation would thereafter enjoy them and write their own versions.

The years since my teens—more than I care to reflect on without a hanky and a bowl of popcorn nearby—have been filled to the brim with fairy tale retellings. For it is in my advancing age that I continue to seek out unique and increasingly odd tales. Given the sheer amount of retellings I have ingested over the years, it is pretty darn hard to impress me these days. As a result, I often feel the urge to revisit some of my favorite storytellers for the charge of enchantment and delight that I find in a skillfully executed retelling.

For anyone craving literature with a fairy tale bent, try some of my favorites. I consider these books the most original, challenging, or downright clever fairy tale take-offs I have read.

The Bloody Chamber by British fantasy writer Angela Carter is a fairy tale staple. This particular collection is not so much unique in the tales it tackles—“Bluebeard,” “Beauty and the Beast,” and “Little Red Riding Hood” to name a few—but in the way that Carter creates unique and affecting tales with a feminist twist. In a number of her interpretations she subverts the normal power structure at work in fairy tales by having a woman take an active role in deciding her own fate or by having a female character rescue another. In addition, the women in her tales are fairly sexualized whereas traditional fairy tales may allude to sexuality on a woman’s part but shy away from any type of sexual enjoyment.

In the case of the title story, “The Bloody Chamber,” the heroine relies largely on her mother’s support in her decision to marry, and it is this feminine bond that ultimately saves the girl from a murderous husband. Her mother’s instinct tells her that something is wrong in her newlywed daughter’s situation, and the former warrior charges to her daughter’s rescue to kill her captor. Fans of traditional versions of “Bluebeard” might remember that it was originally the new bride’s brothers that came roaring to her aid, but Carter gives her reader hints from the very beginning of the story that the mother, adept at the arts of war, will be her daughter’s savior.

The Bloody Chamber is also especially interesting because it includes multiple versions of the same tale. Carter tells the “Beauty and the Beast” story more than once, but each version was so superbly distinctive I didn’t mind the repetition.

Fables, written by Bill Willingham, is an ongoing comic book series published by Vertigo imprint of DC Comics. Collected into ten graphic novels to date, classic fairy tale and nursery rhyme characters are cast as modern day New Yorkers living as a secret society. The brilliance in Willingham’s interpretation of traditional fairy tale characters is his ability to sprinkle bits of the Grimms, Perrault, and other classic renditions into contemporary characters. The result is a weird, wonderful mixture of old plots and new twists that always makes me smile and nod my head in awe and ask, “How on earth did he come up with that?” Willingham creates such a complete and thoroughly intertwined mythology among the characters that it seems as if they should have always existed this way.

In the case of Prince Charming, the reader learns early on in the Fables series that he is a womanizer and a cad. In traditional fairy tales, princes were often nameless and largely without identity, only sent in to save the girl at the last minute. Bill Willingham cleverly plays on this traditional void by having his prince marry three fairy tale heroines: Snow White, Cinderella, and Sleeping Beauty. All three relationships end in divorce when Charming moves on to his next romantic endeavor.

For poetry lovers, Anne Sexton’s classic Transformations collection is a must-own book. In the hands of the sardonic poet, thirteen of the Grimm Brothers’ tales are reworked to reflect Sexton’s confessional style and her disillusionment in regards to aging. In the opening pages, she characterizes herself as a bitter witch and goes on to poke fun at Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and most notably at Snow White comparing her ivory skin to cigarette papers and her blue eyes to those of a lolling, grotesque doll. While a number of the poems are quite funny, they begin to morph into disturbing tales of loss, coming to a climax with the story of “Hansel and Gretel.”

Finally, picture books offer fertile ground for peculiar and magnificent fairy tale retellings for children and adults. The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales, written by Jon Scieszka and illustrated by Lane Smith, is a postmodern fairy tale retelling that breaks all the rules of fairy tale tradition, a reader’s expectations of picture books, and linear storytelling. The Stinky Cheese Man runs through the pages of wacky fairy tale take-offs disturbing characters and generally turning their lives upside down. Characters address the reader directly, written text disintegrates as it runs toward the bottom of a page, and classic fairy tales are jumbled, combined and reorganized into madcap reincarnations. Children love The Stinky Cheese Man for its beautiful illustrations and childlike humor, while adults love it chiefly for its ability to surprise them and fly in the face of what one might expect from classic fairy tales.

A number of scholars through the years have claimed fairy tales to be “dead.” That is, they assume that because what were once oral tales are now written on the page—metaphorically frozen in time—they have ceased to change. However, the regular reader of fairy tale retellings knows the truth. These classics continue to run rampant in the pages of both children’s and adult books for all ages to enjoy.


Andi is a recovering university academic employed by the North Carolina community college system as an English instructor. While she decided to forego a Ph.D. and career as a professor, she fills in all the free time her current position affords her with editing literary publications, reviewing, freelancing, and blogging at Tripping Toward Lucidity: Estella’s Revenge. Her work can also be found in the journal, Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS), and Altar magazine as well as online in various venues such as PopMatters.com. She is a member of the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC), and writes fiction. Her turn-ons include new books and gelato, while her turn-offs are reality television and washing dishes. Contact Andi.