They (fairy tales) have a powerful effect on how young and old behave and relate to their daily activities. Though seemingly universal, fairy tales serve a specific function in communicating the values and the various preoccupations of different nations.
Almost all fairy tale involve a quest. Therefore, their focus, whether the tale be oral, written or cinematic, has always been on the struggle to find magical instruments, extraordinary technologies, or helpful people and animals that will enable protagonists to transform themselves and their environment and make the world more suitable for living in peace and contentment.
Fairy tales, often called wonder or magic tales in oral cultures, were means of communication that afforded storytellers and listeners the opportunity to imagine and contemplate worlds more just and ideal than their realities
Once print became an effective means of communication and was followed by audio-visual modes of communication up though the present-day internet, the fairy tale was transformed and formed into paintings, moving pictures, cartoons, advertisements, plays, musicals, operas, toys, dolls, household artifacts, soap operas, and so on. In most western societies the fairy tale also had to be changed to make it more suitable or appropriate for children, for the fairy tales told in the oral tradition had never been explicitly told for children.
If we speak and use language to know the world and ourselves though metaphor, as George Lakoff and Mark Johnson maintain in Metaphors We Live By, the art of the fairy tale provides a means for understanding the real world though standard metaphorical clichés as well as through highly innovative articulations and inferences.
Fairy tales are not real; they tell us metaphorically that “life is hard,” or that “life is a dream,” and their symbolical narrative patterns that assume the form of quests indicate possible alternative choices that we can make to fulfill our utopian disposition to transform ourselves and the world.
Fairy tales test the correlation between real social practices and imaginative possibilities that can be realized but are thwarted in our everyday imaginations.
We must always ask that if the protagonists succeed in finding love, wealth, and contentment in fairy-tale melodramas, what is preventing us in reality from having the same success?
To have a fairy tale published is like a symbolic public announcement, an intercession on behalf of oneself, of children, of civilization.
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