Fairy Tales

Fairy tales are magic mirrors: they show you what you wish to see. Fairy tales were composed to express eternal joys, sorrows, hopes, and dreams of human kind. These folk tales reflect the values, assumptions, and concerns of our cultural traditions. They always stated one moral - obedience, good manners, beauty, and hard work lead to rewards, while opposing characteristics are consistently punished.

Children have many questions that may be difficult to answer or discuss. The fairy tale provides the child with information about death, aging, and poverty and many other issues that the typical "safe" story would never even attempt to conquer. Fairy tales provide the child with a balance of morals and values that hopefully will help them to mature and solve problems of their own. The fairy tale simplifies the situation making everything either white or black, so that all of the elements and figures are clear. Three fairy-tales that provide good examples of these attributes are "Hansel and Gretel", "Little Brian Rose" and "The Juniper Tree".

I was fascinated by reading fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm. By analyzing them according to the characters, settings, themes, and occurrences I have noticed many similarities in those tales. All three stories follow a similar pattern. The stories begin with phrases such as "Once upon a time" or "Long, long ago". Next, one (the princess in the "Little Brian-Rose and the little boy in "The Juniper Tree") or two (Hansel and Gretel) main characters with apparently impossible problems are introduced. Usually, the main characters must complete one or more difficult assignments to make the magic work and solve the problem. Then the problem is solved, good wins over evil and the story ends "happily ever after".

In all three fairy tales there are straightforward, good and bad characters. In the story "The Juniper Tree" the stepmother is wicked and therefore can only perform evil deeds, harming her stepson and having it wreak havoc on the heart of the daughter. In the tale of "Hansel and Gretel", the authors go into great detail describing the full extent of the stepmother's bad nature. She exploits her husband in every way possible and tries to get rid of anything and anyone that stands between her and what she wants. Hansel's and Gretel's stepmother fits perfectly the definition of a sadistic, evil one. "I'll tell you what, husband," answered the woman, "early to-morrow morning we will take the children out into the forest to where it is the thickest, and then we will go to our work and leave them alone. They will not find the way home again, and we shall be rid of them" (Grimm, 163). The thirteen Wise Woman from the "Little Briar-Rose" "wished to avenge herself for not having been invited" (161) by promising the princess to "fall down dead" (161) when she will be fifteen years old. Clearly, there has been a tradition of portraying women in a negative fashion.

Likewise, children in all three stories have only positive characteristics. They are obedient, gentle, kind, loving, sweet, quiet and, in the same time, clever. Child abuse in the society is one of the main ideas in all three tales. In "The Juniper Tree" the stepmother "was quite wroth with the little boy and she pushed him from one corner to the other and slapped him here and cuffed him there, until the poor child was in continual terror" (169). In "Hansel and Gretel", as well, the old woman "seized Hansel with her shriveled hand, carried him into