Tales

Snow White

“This maiden sleeps, not in a tower covered with thorny roses, but in a coffin made of jewels and glass. Snow White, with her red lips, black hair, and white skin, has captivated our cultural imagination for centuries (though her cursed sleep didn’t last nearly as long as that other gal’s). Equally memorable is the evil queen’s mirror, which has enchanted writers into countless reinterpretations: imagine a mirror that can answer all of your questions (bonus points if you can put them in the form of a rhyme!). The relationship between these two women is, I think, the most interesting part of this tale. The father fades into the background, the prince is little more than a footnote. There are too many dwarves for us to get to know them all well. But the two women at the heart of “Snow White” reveal much about our cultural obsession with youth and beauty and the constricting and stereotyped gender roles forced upon women through history, right up into the present day.”

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Peter Pan

“A classic story from the First Golden Age of children’s literature Peter Pan has a place in literary history similar to the Alice stories. It’s the tale of a group of children whisked away from their everyday lives to explore magical land, where normal rules don’t apply. It’s remained a beloved story since it was first published (or, in the case of Peter Pan, first performed, since the story began its life as a stage play), and has inspired multiple Peter Pan retellings and reinterpretations over the decades. Like the Alice stories, Peter Pan has had the Disney treatment, both in cartoon and live-action form, as well as being a basis for multiple authors’ original stories that draw on this magical, memorable, and often dark story.”

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The Six Swans

“A King gets lost in a forest, and an old witch helps him, on the condition that he marry her beautiful daughter. The King suspects the mysterious maiden to be wicked, but agrees to marry her. He has six sons and a daughter from his first marriage, however, and fears that the children will be abused by his new wife; so, he sends them away to a hidden castle and visits them in secret.

The new queen, who has learned witchcraft from her mother, finds out about her stepchildren and decides to get rid of them. She sews six magical white shirts, goes to the hidden castle, and tosses the shirts over the boys, transforming them into swans.

The princes’ still human sister runs away, finding her brothers in a hunter’s hut. The princes can only take their human forms for fifteen minutes every evening. They tell their sister that they have heard of a way to lift the curse: for six years, she must not speak while making six shirts out of star-flowers for her brothers. On the other hand, if she speaks before the end of the sixth year, the spell will never be broken. The Princess agrees to do this and, taking shelter in a tree, dedicates herself solely to gathering the star-flowers and sewing in silence. […]”

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