A FAIRY TALE FOR MODERN MINDS AND TIMES

We live in an age when we have access to more information than previous generations by an enormous margin. Yet we remain vulnerable to the spinning of fairy tales when you might think we had all grown far too cynical to believe in such things.

The particular fairy tale I would like to relate concerns a land that most of us were hardly aware of until recently. A land shrouded in a mystery few of us were interested in investigating, let alone revealing in all its reality.

Most of us remain of this frame of mind except for a few exceptional areas of revelation that have become the subject of great interest. The fairy tale concerning this non-fabled land lost to our communal attention has been related to us by the most influential storyteller of our time.

Interrupting a common ignorance regarding this land and events there the storyteller I talk of has painted a tale in glowing colours with the usual backdrop of every fairy tale that went before it, that of good and evil, of a monstrous devil and a virtuous female.

The virtuous, long-lost daughter requires little analysis. That she is pure, virtuous and without a single stain on her character is all we need know. She did nothing wrong that would merit the foul attentions of the monster that now inflicts her young person with such sorrow.

The monster however is provided to us in every possible detail. His characteristics are utterly negative and reprehensible with no redeeming qualities about them. He has a sick and terrifyingly violent mentality. His breath stinks and everywhere he goes there is pestilence, death and destruction.

In all previous fairy tales the reader must associate completely with the fair maiden and loath with every iota of mind and heart the villain. This is essential for the story to work its magic and deliver the most profound experience possible in order to deliver the message and moral of the story.

We must feel zero sympathy for the villain. He must be seen as completely lost to reason and heaven forfend, compassion. He is a brute with a mind cold as ice and a heart that feels nothing for anyone but himself. His motives are vile, his actions brutal and his intentions totally evil. The emotion the storyteller wishes to engender within us toward this brute is an overwhelming desire to see him hurt, crippled and eliminated at the soonest possible moment to save the poor, helpless maiden.

The monster has no backstory you see. There are no previous incidents that might explain the events with which the story begins. In such tales creating some sympathy for the villainous creature is completely out of the question. There can be no possible excuse for what he does. No attempt to find any ameliorating circumstance is sought, indeed it would be detrimental to the required stirring up of disgust, hatred and revulsion for the brute.

At each twist and turn of the story we are told of the hapless plight of our innocent, we can almost hear her cries and screams as those people and things she loves are killed and destroyed. “How can such evil exist!” we ask ourselves, gripped as we are by the horrendous actions of this vile creature who seems to have been born in Hell and destined to return there if we can help effect this outcome.

As readers now thoroughly gripped by the repeated barbarism of the fiend we are now totally committed to the outcome. Every sinew of our being strains to see the thing slain or at least badly beaten and driven off. We hear how this lovely victim, frail and naive has been sorely abused time and time again by this abominable monster. We grip tight onto imagined weapons and cry tears of both anguish and rage.

We wish to help. We would do anything to help, even risk our own lives to battle the giant ogre of a hellhound beast we conceive the abominable monster to be. But the storyteller hasn’t quite arrived at the point in the story where a happy ending comes into view. Instead, the motifs are simply repeated in scenario after scenario to reinforce the building of tension within us leading up to that final joyous climax.

But wait. What is this?

The monster has begun to break through the narrative being woven by the storyteller. A few of us have ears to hear what he is saying even when the majority, lost in their belief in the story as told, cannot bear to hear it. Slowly, very slowly, we begin to realise that the monster does indeed have a backstory. Bit by bit we hear him relate how the maiden’s father used a vicious whip upon him when he was young, how he was abused again and again after the virtuous one’s father used every aggressive act against his own father wishing to take and divide up his land. 

Those who understand the backstory as told by the monster who seems not to be quite the monster we were told, begin to look in suspicion toward the storyteller with new eyes. There was more to this tale than we were being told! Our emotions were being played with. We were being manipulated. The story we were being told is false. There is another side to this story entirely.

Finally, reluctantly in some cases, eyes turn to the virtuous young lady who has suffered all these apparently unprovoked attacks. Suddenly we become aware of a hardness in her eyes we hadn’t seen before. Those white raiments that looked so pristine before now presented a more stained appearance and, most shockingly of all here and there upon them could be seen spots of blood. We had been unaware of these things that now seemed to emerge like a photographic negative developing before us.

And no, was that a snarl she now had on her previously beautiful untainted lips?

And what was that in her right hand, clenched so hard the knuckles were white? A whip???