Happy Ever After or Happy Never After?

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Ever After is one of the fairy tales that I grew up with; it was my mother’s favorite movie and slowly became one of mine. I love how in the alter tale Danielle does not rely on a man of higher status, even royal status to come to her rescue. She has always had self-respect and continues to independently save herself from harmful situations and make herself happy, the prince is just a bonus.  I am in the grey with Bruno Bettelheim’s statement, I feel like the age group watching should also be factored in to determine how “sanitized” the characters are but the again this defeats the entire purpose of a fairy tale. Fairy tales are or were originally folk tales and serve to teach the listeners or readers an important moral/life lesson.  The “Cinderella” story has been around for hundreds of years, originally a story for all age groups that showed the harsh realities of becoming an orphan, being a woman in an era where women basically had no rights, and depended on a man to be her “savior”. As the story became more modernized personal values adjusted to match the time period and the crowed. Fairy Tales are more commonly seen as “children’s” stories or movies so characters are sanitized to make it a happy hopeful story even though it is as a whole unrealistic. The traditional tales included gruesome grim details that could relate back to reality. One common childhood fear that Cinderella explores is the fact that both of Cinderella’s parents die, leaving her to serve as a slave to her awful step mother and bratty stepsisters Honestly, when my parents divorced I was terrified of losing them and being forced to live with a cruel step parent because of this story when in reality not all step parents or siblings are evil and you can actually love them and be a whole equal family. Other fairy tales that explore everyday fears are Snow White, where another evil stepmother is also involved, Beauty and the Beast where Belle exchanges her life for her only remaining parent, her fathers and falls in love with her capture, which is alarming because it is extremely similar to Stockholm syndrome.