"We Have Always Lived in the Woods: On Fairy Tales and the Monsters You Know"

"I’ve always taken issue with the idiom “life is no fairy tale,” as in: Life isn’t always a happy story. Not only is this a naive read of fairy tales themselves, it also ignores the fact that the most monstrous acts in these tales are not perpetrated by witches, fairies, or ghosts, but by people both familiar and familial. The threats contained in so many fairy tales are frighteningly realistic, which is precisely why they can so easily skew into the genre of horror. The wicked witch who captures Hansel and Gretel in her iconic gingerbread house is scary, sure, but compare that with the dreadful realization at the beginning of the tale that the children’s own mother proposes that she and her husband abandon the children in the woods to starve. The reason that the Brothers Grimm changed several biological mothers to stepmothers while editing their collected tales for publication is the same reason that makes the story of the Turpin household so horrifying: We don’t want to imagine that a child’s tormentors are none other than their own parents... 

In From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers, Marina Warner explains why tales like “Donkeyskin” are often adapted with the incestuous father written out, or excised from the canon completely: “[The proposed marriage] is only too hard to accept precisely because it belongs to a different order of reality/fantasy from the donkeyskin disguise or the gold excrement or the other magical motifs: because it is not impossible, because it could actually happen and is known to have done so. It is when fairy tales coincide with experience that they begin to suffer from censoring.” 

https://catapult.co/stories/we-have-always-lived-in-the-woods-fairy-tales-and-the-monsters-you-know

FB: "How much stronger must you be, in every way, when the wolf is your own father, and no malicious, cannibalistic witch is as monstrous as your own mother? When home is the place you must escape, you have to be immensely strong and unfathomably brave to imagine another life and to run toward it full-tilt."