Flipping through the musty, yellowing pages, I read stories I’ve read dozens of times, and the one thing I keep taking away is how straightforward they are. There’s not a whole lot of gray area. There’s “right” and “wrong” woven into the magical tales in slightly fantastical but mostly historical settings that don’t really map onto the world that exists today yet somehow still act as moral guideposts.
I don’t know how long I’ve been reading when Jack comes up behind me carrying an eco-friendly bag filled with stuff.
“That was quick. What’d you get?”
“Quick? We’ve been here an hour already,” Jack says, and my eyes widen. “You looked really deeply involved in that book, so I didn’t want to interrupt you.” He tips up the cover of the book. “Fairy tales, huh? That makes sense.”
“What does that mean?”
He shrugs. “You strike me as the fairy tale type. And not just because of your Beauty and the Beast shirt.” He smirks.
My face heats thinking about that shirt with Prince Adam half-naked on Grindr and how I was wearing it the first time I met him. And that he noticed it. And he knew it was a Beauty and the Beast reference.
“I take it you’re not a fan?”
He offers me a very “meh” face. “I love them as story blueprints. We’ve been reading a bunch in creative writing to prep for this Hero’s Journey assignment. And I think they’re succinct, and I love how they’ve become these modes of storytelling for contemporary writers to imprint their own stories upon. Like the ones that really dig into the characters and twist them around and expand them into full-length novels.”
“But?”
“I’m not really into abrupt, forced endings that sugarcoat,” he explains.
“What do you mean?”
“The focus on the ‘and they lived happily ever after’ is super damaging. I mean, look.”
He moves in closer to me, his shoulder brushing against mine, and static electricity passes between the hairs on our arms. He flips the pages until he lands on “Rapunzel.”
“Obviously, all these fairy tales are translations, and the exact wording varies from publication to publication. Some have it, but the most well-known fairy tales don’t. Yet that’s the thing we take away: ‘And they lived happily ever after.’ And we stop there. As if that’s all there is to it. But look at this. This one is my favorite.” Together, we flip past the ends of “Snow White,” “Rapunzel,” and “Cinderella,” which all end the same way: And they lived happily ever after. Then Jack directs us to the ending of “Hansel and Gretel”:
Then all anxiety was at an end, and they lived together in perfect happiness. My tale is done, there runs a mouse; whosoever catches it may make himself a big fur cap out of it.
“The ‘happily ever after’ stuff is a construct,” he continues. “Hansel, Gretel, Cindy, Snow? These characters never really deal with the trauma they endured. I mean, these are dark-ass stories. It’s all so messed up. But Disney said, ‘Every fairy tale must be this linear story and end with a tidy heteronormative bow,’ and we bought into it! That’s become what we’re supposed to want, but it’s so marginalizing and restrictive! What gets me is that ‘happily ever after’ is not even the important part of that line. The important part is ignored.”