A version of this appears in The Bald Princess and Other Tales.
After I graduated high school, I spent a year at Monroe Community College in Rochester, NY. I was taking nineteen credit hours and still a bit bored, so for fun, I would help my roommates with their homework. Yes, I fully admit to being a complete nerd.
At any rate, one day, my roommate Ashley brought me one of her assignments. She had to write a paper for her psychology class, and was stumped. I don’t remember the prompt, but after a brief discussion, I suggested she write a comparative Freudian analysis of Little Red Riding Hood and The Three Little Pigs. After I pointed out a few of the more obvious Freudian themes, she dove into the project with gusto and ended up with an A.
Freudian analyses, in my opinion, are really easy. Every “that’s what she said” joke is a Freudian analysis in disguise. Much more difficult is looking at fairy tales through a particular historical or philosophical lens. But as of late, I’ve been looking at fairy tales through the lens of a storyteller. And it always starts with this question: Why fairy tales?
Why do fairy tales speak to us? What is it about them that resonates with so many people in so many cultures? How did they garner so much staying power across centuries?
Is it the themes? The story structure? The characters? The plots? The tension? The morals?
Over and over and over, we tell and retell fairy tales. There are written and oral traditions, musicals, video games, movies, and TV shows; when I was a kid, the library even had a book of fairy tales with embroidered illustrations!
Of course, there are a thousand answers to the question of why. Fairy tales are short. They’re easy to remember. They’re weird and funny and peculiar and memorable.
But I have another hypothesis. In the writing community, we like to talk about emotional resonance. T. Taylor named the element of story that causes emotional resonance “universal fantasies” in her book, 7 Figure Fiction, but for the sake of clarity, I’m going to rename it “universal longings.”
The idea is that intrinsic human desires are buried within every story. These longings speak to us on a subconscious level, and while different ones hit different people in different ways, they almost always create an emotional response in the reader. Think about a scene like when Cinderella, for example, is magically made beautiful by her fairy godmother. On one hand, you could argue this is just a common trope frequently used in service to the plot. It is a thing that happens which enables Cinderella to go to the ball to meet the prince.
But underneath this common trope is a universal longing: of beauty coming easily. There’s no sitting in front of a mirror curling hair and putting on makeup. No spending money on expensive dresses and shoes. No going to salons or gyms or wherever else to achieve some external beauty standard. Instead, with the flick of a wand, Cinderella is simply beautiful.
This same or similar longing can be found in many works: The Princess Diaries (done in montage format—she becomes beautiful once and is beautiful thereafter); Hermione’s transformation in The Goblet of Fire; in the Beauty and the Beast movie when she is transformed by the cursed servants (and there’s one in many Disney films); there are even transformation scenes in Person of Interest, Captain America, and Dumb and Dumber. (And of course, many others.)
Or look at Jack Reacher by Lee Child, the books or the (new) TV series (I haven’t seen the old one): six feet tall and super strong, who can eat whatever he wants and still be attractive, who makes an impression on anyone he encounters, always knows the difference between right and wrong, commits violence whenever he wants but is always justified in doing so—these are universal longings, deep desires felt by many people across cultures.
As an aside: in the same way a person might not want to actually engage in a sexual fantasy in real life, these universal longings may not be things we want to experience in reality. But they create an emotional connection point between the creator of a story and the consumer of a story in the form of emotional resonance—they make the reader feel something.
Fairytales are chock full of universal longings: longing to find family (Hansel and Gretel); longing to know for sure if someone else’s love is true (Beauty and the Beast and every true love story); longing to experience danger and come through unscathed (Little Red Riding Hood); longing to find true friendship (Snow White); longing to be recognized for who you truly are (Goose Girl); longing to be proven right (Boy Who Cried Wolf); longing to be special (Princess and the Pea); longing to be accepted into a group or to live forever (Peter Pan); and plenty more.
These longings speak to us on a subconscious level. They allow us the opportunity to live out desires we might not even know we have through the story. Stories with more universal longings in them tend to resonate with readers more, and the more widespread the longing is, the longer the story will last in culture.
The first fairytale retelling I ever loved was Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine. As a 13-year-old voracious reader, I certainly wasn’t thinking about emotional resonance and the craft of storytelling when I read the book. But I read the book over and over and over through high school, college, and young adulthood—I’d guess around twenty-five times.
Ella Enchanted is a Cinderella retelling that spans several years of El’s life. We see her mother die, her father remarry, and her meeting and getting to know the prince. The premise, however, is that she is not a slave to her stepfamily by choice—she was cursed when she was born to always be obedient. Her godmother is her close friend and mentor, but bound by rules of magic and unable to undo the curse placed on her.
In the climactic moment of the book (spoilers ahead), El is in love with the prince. She has thus far successfully hidden her curse from him through cleverness and a bit of luck. He asks her to marry him, phrasing it, unbeknownst to him, as a command: “Say you’ll marry me, Ella.” She knows that if she says yes, anyone could find out about the curse and use her to control the prince, or even to murder him. And so, she finds the strength within herself to say no, to refuse his command, and in doing so, breaks the curse.
So, what is it about this story that resonated emotionally with teenager me?
There were lots of universal longings throughout the book—feeling a lack of connection with family, to missing people who were gone, having a few close friendships built over time, finding someone who loved and cared about you for who you were, being motivated and inspired to learn. But in the final moment of the book, the main universal longing that resonated with me was finding the power within oneself to choose.
It’s a simple enough concept. It’s a longing you can find in many, many books across genres and languages and eras. The shedding of societal, familial, and cultural restraints that bind our thoughts and actions, and then having the power, strength, and courage to make the right choice for us. At thirteen, the idea of having the strength to choose held great emotional weight for me, and that same universal longing still resonates with me today.
I believe that stories have power. I believe that fairy tales have power. And I believe that that power comes from universal longings—from the ability of narrative to connect with a reader’s deepest, subconscious desires. Our desires shape our choices, and our choices shape who we are, and when stories validate or shine the light on our deepest longings, we can better understand why we are who we are, and decide who we want to become.