Fairy Tales for Not So Happy People by Karina C.

The cover of “The Happy Prince”, from the digital archive.

While I did not get the chance to see the physical book, just by looking at the cover of “The Happy Prince”, one can guess at the inner contents being on the whimsical, imaginative side. The gold border on a deep red background would not look out of place in a young child’s bedroom, perhaps a book they would pick out for a bedtime story. But also, the simple aesthetic of the cover points to a possible connection with an older, more mature audience. Atypical of most fairytale books, this work contains no illustrations, instead, it is entirely composed of text. This backed up my conclusion that this collection of short stories is not entirely aimed at children, but is in a sense, a collection of fairytales for adults.

Like other fairy tales, the short stories in this collection centered around the common theme of love. In “The Happy Prince,” the Swallow and the Prince fall in love; in “The Nightingale and the Rose,” the Nightingale dies for the sake of love; and in “The Star Child,” the boy is redeemed when he shows his parents that he is capable of feeling love. Read alone, I found “The Nightingale and the Rose” to be depressing and cynical of the notion of love; that love was unappreciated, thrown aside in favor of riches and logic. This reading of the fairy tale didn’t fall in line with what I have always considered a fairy tale – a story that ends happily once the characters learn a valuable lesson about the society around them. Instead, the ones who learn a lesson are the readers, and I felt that I was being told to open my eyes to the blatant dismissal of love and sentimental emotions that society advocates so as to praise the logic of science.

By reading “The Nightingale and the Rose” amongst other works in the collection, I found that the other stories were also urging me as a reader to take into account the ugliness of society. One of my favorite lines in the collection is from “The Happy Prince,” when the Prince says “more marvelous than anything is the suffering of men and of women. There is no Mystery so great as Misery.” Perhaps a child would overlook the meaning of this line, but adults reading this, equipped with age and experience, could understand the implications. The fact is, the misery the poor townspeople feel is not unique to this fictional town in this short story, but a common experience all over the world. And yet, despite both the Swallow and the Prince dying, there is a hopeful ending, with God acknowledging the pure love the two characters felt. Likewise, despite being an ugly and ungrateful child, the Star Child is able to eventually feel pity for others and accepts love for others and for himself (even if he does die soon after).

So, while these stories may not be fairy tales in the traditional sense, they still have that touch of fantasy that characterizes the Disney stories and movies I enjoyed growing up. It makes sense that as I grow older, I’d enjoy reading fairy tales that don’t necessarily have a happy ending but leave things up for the imagination to fill in. However, after working with “The Happy Prince,” thinking about fairy tales brings up the question of what a fairy tale can and can’t be. What is different about fairy tales is that they are written works that are constanly changed as if they were oral stories. A lot of the popular fairy tales in the West have taken the Disney version as fact, but before Disney, they existed as oral stories that children would learn and later pass on to future generations. For example, in the Grimms verison of Cinderella, the evil stepsisters cut off parts of their foot to fit into the glass slipper, a detail notebly missing from the family friendly 1950 Disney movie. Also, different cultures can adapt fairy tales to set place amongst their own people and add details that make the story unique, even if the framework is the same.  The stories in “The Happy Prince” are newer than the stories the Brothers Grimm collected all those years ago, but perhaps they too will be changed one day when they are revisted and retold to new generations.