I Don’t Care For Your Fairytales

Empowering the damsel in distress

By Ghausia Rashid Salam

Once upon a time, there was a damsel in distress being attacked by an evil troll. A handsome prince came riding in to rescue her, sword in hand, but tripped over the dragon’s tail and passed out. Luckily for the damsel, this distraction gave her the chance to draw her concealed weapon and shoot the dragon. Then she quickly took hold of the handsome prince and fled, rescuing him. He didn’t feel emasculated, and she didn’t really feel anything other than an adrenaline rush, because she was used to taking care of herself, instead of waiting for a proverbial knight in shining armour. And they lived happily ever after. The end.

But wait! You exclaim. That’s not how stories go! Perhaps not, but it’s how the TV show Once Upon a Time goes, and it’s certainly better than the ancient, centuries-old stories it is very loosely based on.

Even now, in today’s globalized, culturally diverse world, the fairytales of the Brothers Grimm and their more sanitized offshoots are widely read by both children and adults. The former category is perhaps amusing, considering that the oft gruesome tales were never meant for children in the first place.

The infamous Grimm brothers lived in 18^th century Germany – a collection of varying constituencies, provinces and cities rather than one united country. For the brothers, their collection of folk tales was a way of uniting these provinces under a common heritage: the ultimate nationalism project, so to speak. The brothers were also devout Christians, so the stories they collected were often modified to reflect this. There is an emphasis on family relations as an allegory for nationalism; the Grimms wanted people to understand that their own blood, their own people would always be on their side, but step-siblings or step-parents—the “Others” so to speak—would often be the enemy. Ironically, in many stories, the brothers had to change evil mothers to evil stepmothers to emphasize this point, since stories with evil parents and siblings were hardly encouraging from a nationalist perspective, and only strengthened the idea of dependence on foreign powers for a people’s success and progress.

Certainly, other storytellers have not operated under the “blood is thicker” illusion; in Charles Perrault’s version of ‘Sleeping Beauty’ for example, the story doesn’t end with the princess’s rescue, as the princess and her children are in danger from the prince’s ogre mother, who has to be killed in the end. This version of the classic goes beyond the happily ever after, and is less of a cautionary tale and more of a story. Moreover, Perrault’s stories are less morbid; his Cinderella forgives her sisters in the end, and marries both siblings off to grand lords in the castle. On the other hand, Perrault’s ‘Donkeyskin’ is a tale of incest, where a king seeks to marry his own daughter, because no one else matches his late wife’s wit or beauty. For the Grimms, such a story would have been a travesty, since for them biological connections were almost sacrilegious.

This tendency towards emphasizing biological relations may be harmless enough, but the Brothers Grimm also changed the female protagonists of their stories to match their ideal of how a Christian woman should be: beautiful, kind, submissive, waiting to be rescued but unable to take charge of her own destiny. Powerful women on the other hand, were not blessed with beauty, talents, or good traits like kindness or gentleness; they were just evil. And while the good male characters were stereotypically male, strong, aggressive, rich, powerful, etc. the good females were only “good” so long as they remained helpless and lacked agency.

This is where Once Upon a Time is different. It isn’t an adaptation, but a modern-day and more socially relevant retelling of classical fairytales. Classic stories have been modified and linked to give the female characters more agency and, crucially, more depth. Evil female characters have real motivations beyond their genetic predisposition.

The one aspect of the Grimms’ tales that Once Upon a Time has retained is the emphasis on the role of mothers. While the brothers portrayed all stepmothers and step-siblings as evil, many stories center the entire plot on the mother alone, such as ‘The Goose-Girl’, ‘The Wolf and the Seven Goslings’, and ‘The Brother and Sister’. The stark contrast between the two sources, however, cannot be ignored. Whereas mothers exist quietly in the background for the Grimms, in Once Upon a Time, they are dominant, aggressive women who simply could not be anything but the main focus of the story. The plot of Once Upon a Time, too, initially centers around three mothers: the morally ambiguous but devoted stepmother, the mother torn from her infant daughter, and the mother who once gave her son up for adoption.

For much of the first season, the battle between good and evil is represented by the sparring of two of these mothers: The Evil Queen Regina (charismatically portrayed by Lana Parrilla) who has adopted Henry and placed the town of Storybrooke under an amnesiac fog—the result of a longstanding conflict between Regina and her stepdaughter Snow (Ginnifer Goodwin)—and Emma, Henry’s biological mother, who is drawn to Storybrooke by her son and is destined to save the town. The current battle though, is not about Regina maintaining her hold on the townspeople and ensuring her spell does not break, but rather, one to keep her son. Her love for Henry is pure, and she is driven solely by the desire to protect him, and by the jealous, irrational fear that she will lose him to his biological mother. Meanwhile, though the motherhood Emma spent years denying was initially forced upon her by Henry, she accepted it first out of a sense of responsibility but slowly, out of love for her son. Despite being a feminist’s dream come true, Emma, like the mothers of yore, is the key to Henry’s survival in the end, when he lies, dying from a poisoned apple. It’s Emma’s motherly “True Love’s Kiss” however, which cures Henry, and brings magic back to the town, and along with it, everyone’s memories of the fairytale characters that they really are.

Then there is Emma’s biological mother and Regina’s stepdaughter, Snow White. Despite Regina’s amnesiac spell, she feels an instant connection to Emma, long before she recognizes her as her daughter. From the very beginning, she positions herself as Emma’s protector, her advisor, her friend and confidante Mary Margaret. She gives Emma a home to live in, and the intuition and guidance only a mother can give.

It’s interesting to note that, while the Brothers Grimm emphasized biological connections, this is not the case in Once Upon a Time. Regina for example, had a wicked and literally heartless mother, and Regina struggles for redemption to escape becoming what she’s despised. There’s a moral ambivalence to her pursuit of love and the “happily ever after” which spares neither biological connections, nor forged relationships. For Regina, the eternal struggle between good and evil is an internal battle, not an external one against the “Others”. And though Regina is the core “evil character”, she is not the only ambivalent one; even the “good” characters have moments of darkness. Emma has a past as a thief, and Snow murders to save her family. There’s no blacks and whites here; the complexities of relationships are explored in depth, rather than being confined to concrete definitions of good and evil.

Is this emphasis on biological family as driven by nationalism just as important to the story of Once Upon a Time? It would seem that the answer to that is established from the very first episode, when Emma immediately takes it upon herself to fight Regina for her biological son’s sake. But perhaps Regina’s fear of losing her child is justified. After all, she raised the son that Emma had previously abandoned, and thus has a greater legal right over Henry. Similarly, Snow gave up her daughter in order to secure Emma’s future as well as the rest of Storybrooke; Emma’s resentment is clear when she reminds her parents that they gave her up and left her to face the world on her own.It’s not a simple matter of embracing your lost parents and living “happily ever after;” blood does not, and cannot always ensure loyalty and love. Indeed, blood can also corrupt, as evidenced by Regina’s mother Cora, “the miller’s daughter” from ‘Rumpelstiltskin. In the show, she is a powerful, controlling witch, and kills Snow’s mother as revenge for old slights, and to ensure that Regina marries Snow’s father, the king, and thus can never be just “the miller’s daughter” like Cora was. She’s a bully using power to keep her innocent, “good” daughter captive under her tyrannical upbringing, and why? Because she wants to use her own daughter in her power-hungry games; obsessed with escaping her past as a poor miller’s daughter, Cora’s primary concern is remaining wealthy and powerful, and if Regina’s welfare is connected to Cora’s revenge on Snow’s mother, it is only coincidence, and not a mother’s love.

But how then, did Regina turn “evil” despite her apparently gentle disposition as a young woman? The nature versus nurture debate continues. The anger and jealousy that drove Cora to use magic lies in Regina’s blood as well; though she makes the effort to be a better mother to Henry and redeem herself, for all her attempts to be “good”, she lapses back into the darker part of her soul. Her darkest moment emerges only when Cora comes to Storybrooke. This is why mothers are central to Once Upon a Time; they define the moral compass of these characters. With Cora’s encouragement, Regina becomes more twisted and evil, whereas Emma is stronger with her mother around, and even seeks her own “happily ever after” when Henry’s father re-enters their lives.

Indeed, the elusive happily ever after is a concept popularized by Disney cartoons, uncommon in the traditional children’s tales they were based on. In Hans Christian Anderson’s ‘The Story of a Mother’, even though the mother’s love spurs her on to “rescue” her son from death, she eventually lets go of her child, seeing it as God’s will. In contemporary times, we see this narrative challenged more and more. Singer-songwriter Sara Bareilles stands out for her song “Fairytale”, in which she describes what happened after the credits rolled; Cinderella and her prince were cheating on each other, Sleeping Beauty tires of her husband’s vociferous sexual appetite, and Rapunzel seeks a tower without windows. Elsewhere, artist and photographer Dina Goldstein recently put together a series of photographs portraying the “Disney Princesses” in more realistic, lifelike situations; Snow White and her prince have an unhappy home life, Belle has an addiction to cosmetic surgery, Cinderella spends her time in a bar, and Pocahontas becomes the stereotypical “cat lady”. Only Jasmine foregoes the frivolities of love to follow her fierce and independent nature, becoming  a Middle-Eastern warrior.  One cannot deny the validity of anti-Disney criticism, which targets Disney Princesses as a source of hyper-sexualisation of young girls while pursuing the understandable claim of needing to water down these fables for children. Be that as it may, feeding the happily ever after illusion to little girls is still problematic, and earning millions in revenue with a franchise that does immense harm to young girls is hardly laudable, and no less problematic than the original tales, which sought to reinforce the antiquated concept of feminine morality as the driving force of society. In fact, the oldest version of ‘Sleeping Beauty’ has a king raping the princess, impregnating her in the process, but when she wakes up and finds out what happened, knowledge of her rape only makes her love the king more.

It’s difficult to categorize Once Upon a Time completely. Does it position itself in the battle of good versus evil? Yes, of course, but is there any merit in that? As much as I love the show, I can’t help but resent how it is skewed towards Emma, the “good” character who abandoned her son, and that the “evil” character is helpless and struggles to regain her son’s affection simply because she has the misfortune of being cast as the “Evil Queen.” The fact that biological connections are emphasized despite biological parents being the abandoners is a difficult concept to swallow, no matter how much you love the show. And while Regina attempts to seek redemption and reform, it seems that the gods (read: writers) of Once Upon a Time are not willing to allow her to break too far out of the “bad” mould. But while Once Upon a Time might be slightly problematic in terms of basic storytelling clichés, one must remember that, at the end of the day, it is a show revolving around mothers, with a Sleeping Beauty who’s in the process of rescuing her prince from his eternal sleep, and it does a good job of reclaiming the extremely sexist fairytale genre and its essentialist views of women.

Ghausia Rashid Salam is Assistant to the Editor-in-Chief and newly appointed Junior Articles Editor for the magazine. She resides on the Internet.