Fairy Tales Are Actually Scary…

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Fairy tales: Scarier than you think

The original versions of tales like Sleeping Beauty were never meant for children.

By Mary, Quite Contrary

Unless your childhood was devoid of cartoons and storybooks, you should be quite familiar with tales featuring the likes of Cinderella, Snow White and Sleeping Beauty. They’re all saccharine sweet and full of happily ever after, which masks the fact that they are based on gruesome, bloody tales that were never meant for children. Sleeping Beauty, for instance gets more than a kiss from her Prince Charming in the original story, written by Giambattista Basile in 1636. Instead, she gets raped and subsequently gives birth to twins.

Fairy tales originated as women’s stories passed down orally as a means of rebelling against oppression, political censorship and the literary establishment at that time. Usually violent and with a moral to boot, they became more palatable when Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm started collecting these tales from German peasants and Charles Perrault started retelling them in neighbouring France. These eventually evolved to become the well-loved stories we know today. Here’s a look at three fairy tales popularised by Disney.

Cinderella – mutilation

Both Perrault and the Grimm Brothers wrote versions of this tale, which differ vastly in plot and characterisation. In the Perrault version, for instance, Cinderella actively sources for transportation to the ball, suggesting that the rat trap might be a good place to find a coachman, instead of standing around looking bewildered as she does in the Disney version. She is also as scheming as her stepsisters, pretending to have been woken from sleep by their return and feigning surprise when they tell her about the mysterious princess at the ball.

All this pales in comparison to the Grimms’ account. In it, as in Perrault’s version, the ball is not a one-off affair but a two-day festival. On her first night out dancing with the prince, Cinderella manages to disappear when the clock strikes 12. On the second, night, however, the prince shows himself to be far from charming and gallant. He orders that the stairs be tarred with pitch. Cinderella’s left slipper gets stuck. Happily, she sustains nary a sprain and sprints off into the night.

The obsessed prince hunts her down, but the evil stepmother insists that her two daughters force their feet into the tiny shoe so either one of them can marry him. To expedite things, one cuts off her toe; the other, her heel which really, is no less than what some women would do for a pair of Louboutins. It doesn’t work and the prince eventually finds and marries Cinderella, who receives her stepsisters’ eyeballs as a wedding present from the birds (the ornithological version of the fairy godmother). An eye for an eye, as they say. Or four.

Snow White – cannibalism

Old Walt cut his animation teeth on this fairy tale, which became the first full-length animated feature to be produced by Disney. One stark difference between this version and the original telling is the Queen’s motive for asking the huntsman to kill Snow White and bring back the heart. In the cartoon, all the Queen wants the heart for is proof that Snow White is dead, completely omitting the Queen’s intent to have the heart for dinner. The huntsman, however, doesn’t have the gumption to do it and brings back a pig’s heart for the cook to salt, after which we imagine the queen had a grand time smacking her lips over a good stew.

In some versions, the Queen doesn’t stop at the heart. She must have been on a high-protein diet, because she asks for Snow White’s liver, lungs, intestines and even a bottle of her blood stoppered with a toe. Wonder if she ate the toenail too?

The Little Mermaid – murder and suicide

Of the three cartoons we’ve covered here, The Little Mermaid deviates most from Hans Christian Andersen’s account. In the Disney version, Ariel goes to Ursula the sea witch to trade her voice for a pair of legs so that she can become human and pursue the Prince. Ursula, however, uses Ariel’s voice to bewitch the Prince and nearly succeeds in marrying him before she is overthrown and Ariel struts down the aisle in a poufy dress, keeps her gams and gets her voice back. Joy.

In Andersen’s version, however, the witch warns the mermaid before cutting off her tongue and turning her tail into legs that she will die and turn into sea foam if she fails to hook the prince. The mermaid gets to shore and moves in with the prince who, sadly, treats her like a sister. He soon falls in love with a princess and they get hitched.

Desperate to save the mermaid, her sisters swim to shore sporting 10-dollar haircuts. Their hair has bought time from the witch – if the mermaid kills the prince, she will get her tail back and live another 300 years before she dies and turns to sea foam. If she doesn’t, she will die at sunrise. The mermaid can’t do it, and in a fit of depression, kills herself by jumping off the ship. And you thought Korean celebrity suicides were dramatic.

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If you’d like a different take on the above by Arthur Nonimus Click Here