The Happily Ever After Alternative

Over the years it might have been prudent to at least include other fairy tale narratives such as The Ugly Duckling which tackles issues such as self-esteem, appearances and acceptance, and what many have assumed is a narrative regarding homosexuality, given that Hans Christen Anderson was by most accounts bisexual. Another one to take up instead of riding the princess train, would have been Snow Queen - which is about frozen emotion and cold, hard intellect without any harmonious link to the universe and everything in it. Or even The Little Mermaid, in its original narrative, where the mermaid dies. She dies for a man, so this certainly doesn’t make it any more feminist but she dies, so it isn’t by any stretch a happy ending and this might have kept all the “Once Upon a Times” and those who lived through them in check a little. Hans Christen Anderson didn’t really do happy endings in the same way as Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. There aren’t really many Disney attempts at  Anderson’s tales and the one that remains, The Little Mermaid, only worked with a Brothers’ Grimm-esque ending.

There is a reason why Grimm versions sell, they sell because they perpetuate a potent brand of delusion and hope. Hope is great when it’s attainable but not so much when it either presumes or presupposes a distinct lack of individuality.  Eugene O’ Neil said “Obsessed by a fairy tale, we spend our lives searching for a magic door and a lost kingdom of peace”. And that is what fairy tales essentially do — they emphasize one story, one kind of happily ever after and they plant the seed that everyone should shoot for that pumpkin-turned carriage rather than defer to their own stories and make their own narratives.

And so,

Once Upon A Time, there lived a little girl in a big, empty, lonely, cruel house. All this girl had to escape shadows and monsters, were stories and she held them to her chest every night when she fell asleep. She played with the Lost Boys in Neverland and she sprinkled pixie dust in all the dark corners of her mind. She lived for a happy ending and a magic kiss. When she grew up, she was taken to a Kingdom far, far away where she met a Handsome, Charming prince who fell in love with her and gave her, her first toe-popping kiss in front of the sea, with her hero The Little Mermaid looking on. The prince bowed down and asked her to marry him and she said yes and her fairy tale wedding was a quiet room with happy people in every corner. She lived happily, until Ever After came, and she realized that the ‘after’ really meant putting aside the magic and living for each day. It meant marriage and marriage meant loving a person not a prince. She discovered that the magic and myths would be the downfall of Love, if they were allowed to take over and swallow the every days, the grocery lists and the long walks. She learned that holding hands was more passionate than kissing in the rain and bear hugs were more powerful than diamond rings. She realized that Happily Ever Afters never came with soft lighting and Elton John soundtracks. And that that was okay.

CS Lewis once said that ‘someday we would be old enough to believe in fairy tales again’ and I now know what he meant. For the present, I am content being just ‘Happy’, ‘Ever Afters’ are just way too much pressure.

This piece first appeared in our seventh issue, published in October 2012. The author is Features Editor for the magazine.