THE LAND OF THE DRAGON
But why are the princesses all beautiful? Why are the young princes all handsome and strong? There’s no justice there, but fairy tales never even bother to argue that beauty is the outward sign of virtue–why would they? We wouldn’t believe them if they did. It’s simply a fact that youth and beauty are rewarded in the world of fantasy; age and ugliness are punished (by the oven, the ax, the sudden fall through a pit straight to hell). That still seems a wrongheaded lesson to repeat to ourselves in the tales we cherish.
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Or maybe not. One of our best interpreters of fairy tales has a persuasive reply to the beauty question. Here’s Bruno Bettelheim on “Snow White,” from his book The Uses of Enchantment:
It’s a fine setup, but one that requires an ungodly amount of exposition. And Madge Miller’s script, first produced in the 1940s, seems to have no ambitions beyond communicating the plot. It succeeds on that level: my five-year-old companion followed the story more clearly than I would have expected. But there just wasn’t enough action to hold his attention–or mine.
You can’t ask for much more than that.
