Why Fairytales Are Darker Than We Think

I’ve seen some posts lately criticising the spread of the original dark fairytales and folk stories. It’s true that if you take almost any fairytale and trace it back to its original source, that it is far darker than you could ever imagine.

Many people have the same question; why would these tales be written in this way? Is it that the past was a dark place to be? Is it to scare the reader into moral submission? Or is it more than that?

What you need to realise about fairytales

Many people don’t realise that fairytales are formatted in a very specific way. The formatting, the way the story is told, and how the characters overcome issues was first seen by a Jungian analyst, Marie Louise von Franz.

There are many classification systems, like the Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index that separate different folk tales according to their main themes. This helps folklorists find common ground between different tales and trace their broader meaning. Joseph Campbell also did a lot of work finding the overarching plot points that comprise The Hero’s Journey to find commonalities between all cultures — but I digress.

Fairytales and folk stories are essentially maps of our mind. They can show us how our mind may be deceiving us, what we need to work on, and the common pitfalls of humanity.

Fairytales are a map of the mind

It’s no secret that fairytales are an attempt to understand the human condition. Fairytales and folk stories contain symbolic references that our mind uses to understand the various struggles of our existence. It’s a way for us to understand our lives from a broader, more distant perspective.

Taking it a step deeper, we can look into how these darker themes of abuse play into our psyche. According to Jungian Psychology, fairytales contain different symbols which he calls ‘archetypes‘. In a tale, the archetype is stripped down it its purest form which give us clues about how these symbols interact with society at large. That’s a lot, I know. Think of it like this: in Snow White, the dwarves warn Snow White about the Queen. That puts the dwarves in the position of the caregiver archetype, especially since they allow Snow White to stay with them in the cottage. The caregiver offers a service to the protagonist, providing the hero with structure to their life.

So what about the dark symbols of folk stories? What use could they possibly have?

The darkness of the mind and the shadow self

In 1974 Marie Louise von Franz published Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales to share how fairytales expose the shadow self. In Jungian psychology, the psyche is comprised of many parts, with the main ones being; the ego, the self, the conscious mind, the unconscious mind and the shadow.

The shadow self is essentially the parts of ourselves that we have rejected. It can also symbolise certain acts that society itself has rejected, i.e. incest or sexual assault. She noted that fairytales mirror the bones of the psyche and therefore, the darkness of the mind is also mirrored.

Also, by using darkness in tales often the light of the tale is emphasised. For instance in Marlinchen, the negative and positive aspects of sibling rivalry are exposed. In Hansel & Gretel, the issue of abandonment is exposed. This is a fear shared by many children and adults, but in the end justice prevails.

So we learn from fairytales that goodness and badness in life go hand in hand. Like the yin and the yang, there is a bit of bad and good in everything in life.

Darkness in tales is necessary because it exists within us and life

In our modern day, it’s so easy to want to reject the darkness of life. We want to turn our eyes away from it and pretend that it cannot exist in a world that brings us such joy. The truth is though, darkness exists in our world at some level because it exists within all of us.

The good news is, darkness doesn’t have to be scary. Fairytales, no matter how dark they are, show the hero on some level overcoming darkness. It may scare us, and it may taunt us, but it doesn’t define us. We always have the choice whether to slip into darkness or fight for the light. To me, that’s what I see in these tales.

I don’t think it’s right to condemn them and think that they should never have been written like that. At the end of the day, fairytales are tools to help us understand our own minds, and our society, better. They don’t deserve our judgements, they’re simply a mirror of our mind.

Read more about fairytales and folklore