Fairy tale parody

To parody a fairy tale for children has some differences than in doing so for adults. For children, tales are retold to make them more comprehensive, to teach simple moral lessons suitable for the contemporary audience or to rouse greater senses of wonder and imagination through alternative endings. When parodying a fairy tale for children, in the form of a fictional picture book, authors often preserve the ‘happy ending’ convention, as a practise governed by a motivation “to enculturate children in societal codes”.[10] For adults, the parodied tale acts as a means for carrying social and political dialogue regarding issues of the time – often with a heavy focus on feminism - a widely acknowledge and important approach to modern tales that allows authors to alter oppressive social representations.[11]

Fairy tales have always been hybrid in their nature, borrowing from multiple simple genres – with a key focus on, fables, fantasy, romance, and magical realism - to form their own.[12] Fairy tale parodies further this hybridity, disrupting and defying the traditional form of the tale through the following distinctive characteristics:

1. Chronotope[11] – The chronotope of a fairy tale parody– which refers to “how configurations of time and space are represented in language and discourse” (Bakhtin, 1937) – shifts the fairy tale to a more contemporary setting relevant for a modern audience, making it acceptable for diffusion into the public sphere.[4]
2. Attribute to the supernatural – Authors of fairy tale parodies often “renegotiate the boundary between magic and realism” to coincide with a modern, secular society. When magic is utilised in these retellings, it is often described through the perspective of an unreliable narrator, leaving the audience to question whether magic really occurs, or materialises only through the mind of the protagonist[11] – fitting for a modern society with a greater focus on psychological health.
3. Optimism[11] – as previously stated, many authors of fairy tale parodies for children conform to providing a traditional happy ending, however, writers of parodies with an adult audience, often unmask this illusion, providing a pessimistic ending much more consistent with the harsh realities of society.
4. Intertextuality – When parodying a traditional fairy tale, authors will retain markers of their intertextual relationship with the original text such as numeric symbolism[11] that favoured a patriarchal narrative focus – ‘Damsel in Distress’, ‘Evil Queen’, ‘Knight in Shining Armour’. Through refabricating, rather than removing a character, authors encourage the audience to make a comparison between the traditional and contemporary story and highlight the possibilities of empowering characters that have previously been disparaged or misrepresented.[13]

A good fairy tale parody will maintain recognisable traits of the traditional fairy tale, whilst reimagining certain traits of the genre.

Fairy tale parodies are an adaption of their original text, and adaptions “keep their pre-text in play but also reaccentuate or destabilise them, and some relocate them”.[15] Since the 1970’s, contemporary understandings and social uses of the Fairy tale genre have undergone significant change, with feminists debating the “value of fairy tales in shaping of gendered attitudes about self, romance, marriage, family and social power”.[15] Traditional fairy tales have been criticised for their one-dimensional gendered character types that reinforce the societal oppression of women.[17] It has been suggested that “the fairy tale characterisations are more powerful than the acts committed by the character”[17] with their characterisations essentially trapping characters into their one-dimensional roles.[17] Female protagonists, often Princesses, are characterised by their beauty, innocence and female passivity, all of which are depicted as valued womanly attributes, whilst the female antagonist - the Villain, the Witch, the Evil Step Mother - is often portrayed as “evil from within, ugly and scheming”, reiterating the traditional association between beauty and goodness, and ugly and evil.

Those traditional tales typically depicted female characters through a patriarchal lens, with a happy ending and fulfilment being closely related to “domestic satisfaction” through a heterosexual marriage. The female protagonist receives a happy ending, albeit within the patriarchal constraints of their world and female antagonists, that dared to exercise their power and thus place themselves on par with men, where outcast and condemned.

In a modern world, many fairy tales have been parodied in favour of a feminist viewpoint, with feminist retellings being used as agents to elicit social change[18] or provide critical commentary. Feminist authors that have taken to writing their fairy tale parodies through a “woman-centric lens”, give voices to heroines and allow the female character to narrate their own story.[19] Through providing female characters with agency, authors are creating three-dimensional beings, fully realised as their own character rather extensions of men.[19]

When parodying a Fairy Tale for a feminist audience, or through a feminist lens, authors have subverted the stereotypical depictions through role reversal, liberation of characters or mockery/ridicule of past texts. However, literary critics have found that despite ridicule being included in the definitions of parody, the most transformative tales are grounded more deeply in feminism than mockery.[18] Fairy tales are meant to evoke wonder, and therefore if a parodied tale still wants to be considered a ‘fairy tale’ need to maintain that sense of awe and wonder that traditional tales hold. A feminist parody will not ridicule past depictions but instead focus on “what women can be and are, not about how women have been constructed in the past”[18] (Altmann, 2008), empowering modern women, rather than mocking those preceding.

There are, of course, influential feminist fairy tale parodies that are written through satire and exaggeration, such as Anne Sexton's 1971 poetry collection Transformations, that parodies the Grimm's Fairy Tales, however modern tales do not tend to merely focus on satirisation or sarcasm as their main technique for parody.

Author Robert Coover writes “The future of postmodern feminist fairy tales lies in stories that can rewrite the genre without totally unmaking” and thus when parodying Fairy tales, Coover subverted the stereotyped negative ramifications of ‘The Stepmother’, through the use of first-person narration that encourages readers to identify and sympathise with the character, as the distance between reader and character is diminished.[17] The narration humanises the villain and allows the audience to understand the context and motivation behind her actions,[17] provoking the audience to question whether her actions render names such as “wicked” or “evil”, and reducing the ability of audiences to categorise characters into their traditionally recognised stereotypes.

Fairy tales offer a way of both "explaining the world around us and offering a method of imagining a world possible".[20] Traditional fairy tales often featured a transformation or reveal - Cinderella's infamous fairy god-mother makeover, Ariel gaining human legs, and so on[20] - where the character, often female, transforms themselves to fit with societal expectations of beauty, femininity and marital appeal. It is always the character conforming to society, rather than society expanding its definitions of classifications such as 'normal' and 'beautiful'.[20]

In a modern society where fairy tale parodies have grown prominent and have expanded the representation many ill-represented groups in the past, particularly females, the next step for representation regards expanding representation of topics such as masculinity[21] and disability.[20]

Whilst female characters have been provided with more agency in modern fairy tale parodies, the representation of the male protagonist often remains the same - a 2-dimensional, handsome, idyllic husband that in some way, saves the day or a unexpected, dopey outsider who happens to get the girl.[21] Traditional tales have been constrained by the necessity to conform to the definitions of 'masculinity', however with the definition expanding in the contemporary world, there is a greater focus on gender subverting fairy tale parodies that allow for a broader depiction and characterisation of male characters.[21]

Disability is a lesser explored topic in fairy-tale parodies, however it is a significant topic needing to be explored in further depth.[20] Critics understand that envisioning a fairy tale retelling where a protagonist is not able-bodied, and yet the world is not hostile, or expecting them to adjust to fit into societal norms should be a crucial focus point for future parodies,[20] to assist society in shaping and informing the true ideas of disability, not the stereotyped and negative versions.[20]