Fairy Tales - The Keys to World's Secrets

     I'm pretty sure I'm the only college student on this campus who would write an argumentative essay on fairy tales.
     I'm pretty sure Works Cited pages don't generally include works of Dr. Seuss or The Princess Bride.
     I'm fairly positive that not many students give their end-of-year PowerPoint presentations on "The Art of Making Peanut Butter Sandwiches."
     And I know I'm the only person on campus that carries a little keychain Snoopy on his backpack.

     But, anyway, these are all things that have been done recently. My proof-readers all seemed to like this paper, which was good. But would my Comp II teacher like it? Would I have it written in the right MLA style?
     Well...apparently so; I got it back this afternoon after earning a 96, the highest-scoring paper in class this round. I might decide expand some points later on, just because I love the topic, but we'll see. Anyway, here is how it went, if anybody's curious.

    

We don’t understand this world we live in. We try to figure out what makes it work, why things in nature happen the way they do. We try to explain our own actions and reasonings. And we know more than we did in the Dark Ages. For as Dr. Seuss wrote, “The more that you read, the more you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go” (I Can Read). But we still don’t completely understand everything, and we probably never will. As we grow older, we lose track of the keys to get glimpses of this unforeseen knowledge. These keys are found in fairy tales, and we need, we must, hang on to them as grownups, in order to have a proper understanding of how the world works and our roles in it.

            Where do we start, then, to find these keys and whatever adventures stem from them? It would be a good idea to have a basic philosophy of life to keep in mind while on the journey. According to Martin Cothran in his article “The Rhetoric of Amazement”, this world is enchanted. He states that writers of imaginative literature, like Dr. Seuss, take things apart and creatively reassemble them, allowing us to gain a clearer picture of the world. Cothran elaborates in a different article entitled “Is Fiction False?”; pointing out that novels, short stories, etc. do not teach us truths by directly going from our questions to some abstraction. Instead, we learn the truths of concrete realities by experiencing what its’ strengths and weaknesses are, how the truth plays out in practical reality.

           

In his book Orthodoxy, 20^th century English jack-of-all-trades journalist/mystery author/apologist/philosopher G.K. Chesterton wrote an essay entitled “The Ethics of Elfland”. He opens by describing that the classical idea of democracy is really the same thing as tradition, as tradition is merely the democracy of the dead. In fact, he spends two pages outlining that point. Since, therefore, they really are the same thing; we ought to not discredit tradition merely because it is tradition. Chesterton says that “Fairy tales are the entirely reasonable things. They are not fantasies, for compared with them other things are fantastic. For Fairyland is nothing but the sunny country of common sense.”  There are some developments which are purely logical and reasonable, for example, the fact that if the Ugly Stepsisters are older than Cinderella, then Cinderella is younger than the Ugly Stepsisters. However, the true test of fairyland is of the imagination; which separates the rational from the irrational. We simply cannot fathom two plus three not equaling five, so that is a rational fact. But we can picture the grass one day growing blue; or a dog driving a motorcycle. These are irrational ideas. And Chesterton argues that most of the world we live in is, by that test, an extremely irrational place.

            For such an obscure character of history, G.K. Chesterton had a very large impact on the twentieth century, influencing those such as apologist C.S. Lewis, authors Dorothy Sayers and J.K. Rowling, and filmmakers Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock. Ralph C. Wood reviewed Chesterton’s essay collection in his article “Orthodoxy at a Hundred”, Wood said that while Chesterton was often cantankerous, and quite a character, he sought to amend the wrongs of his times “by means of a feisty and witty, punning and alliterative kind of journalism” (Wood). In the course of doing so, “Chesterton treats the most serious things in the lightest manner, probing depths when he appears to be skating on surfaces” (Wood).

            For all the apparent pointlessness of activities such as ice skating, there are some real uses and benefits, too. We may forget the particulars of a tale we hear as children, but that doesn’t mean that we’ve forgotten about the story. Nancy Willard explains this in a piece for Horn Book Magazine.  She says that while the story one forgets about disappears forever, the story one forgets only leaves for a short time. It will come back when needed; the stories don’t do long goodbyes very well. They are a shelter to keep us safe, as well as a station, sending us out into the world (Willard).

            As they send us out into the world, like any good guardian, they leave us pieces of advice to guide us in our travels. For all the wonderful satire of William Goldman’s cult classic The Princess Bride, he makes very clear to drive one point home: Life isn’t fair. Beauty and the Beast shows us that a thing must be loved before it is lovable in itself; that change can occur by showing kindness to those who are undeserving of it. The Three Little Pigs teaches us that in addition to work-ethic, we also need the proper knowledge and materials to succeed. Spider-Man and The Sword of Damocles both prove poignantly that when given great power, we must be careful to exercise it in a manner fitting such a great responsibility. Charlotte’s Web shocks us by depicting how far the bonds of friendship can stretch us.

            Fairy tales have many depths and layers, almost like an onion, Willard notes. As we grow, our depth of understanding increases, and much like Narnia’s Aslan, the stories grow bigger the older we become. Chesterton outlined that when we are very young children, we merely need tales, not necessarily fairy tales. Life itself is so interesting, we simply cannot conceive that we ever might need more depths than what we see. “A child of seven is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door and saw a dragon. But a child of three is excited that Tommy opened a door” (Chesterton).

            Stories and fairy tales teach us about life. They show us how the world works, set an example of how we should act. This sometimes means showing the other side of that coin, the consequences of what happens when we fail or disobey. This is why Jesus taught in parables, and the Greeks created their wonderful mythology, because we are wired to retain the things we hear through story, and then think about the tales we hear, and in doing so learn from them. Great ideas can be passed on, traits of virtue live immortally in legends. We get our morals and values from the stories we absorb and drink in, which makes the art of storytelling the most effective teaching tool there is.

This subject could easily take up whole volumes, as well as branching into other fields such as psychology or theology. There is too much information to be bottled up and left alone. However, I will sum up: This world is a mysterious place. We are all on a long journey, and the keys to fulfill the quests we must face are found in the stories we learn as children. Like Chesterton, these too are my attitudes towards life; which I also felt before I could think, and which I too thought before I could write.