Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales, Children, and the Culture Industry

ZIPES, J. (1997) Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales, Children, and the Culture Industry. New York: Routledge.


Filmmakers did not realize how rich and compelling fairy-tale material really was until the 1930s – coincidentally just as the great economic depression was shaking most of the world and causing widespread misery; just as fascism of all kinds was on the rise. Fairytale was to speak for happiness and utopia in the face of conditions that were devastating people’s lives all over the globe. Perhaps this utopian message was why Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was such a success in 1937.

(Fair tales) was never categorized as a “children’s” genre. Nor was it regarded as a genre for children.

The literary fairytales of Giovan Francesco Straparola, Giambattista Basile, Mme. D’Aulnoy, Charles Perrault, Mlle. L’Héritier, Mlle. De La Force, and other were complex symbolic social acts intended to reflect upon mores, norms and habits organized for the purpose of reinforcing a hierarchically arranged civilizing process in a particular society.

..literary fairy tales appropriated oral folk tales and created new ones to reflect upon rituals, customs, habits, and ethics and simultaneously serve as a civilizing agent. The fairytale demonstrated what it meant to be beautiful and heroic and how to achive “royal” status with the help of grace and good fortune.

To read a fairy tale was to follow the narrative path to happiness.

Not all fairy tales were the same at the time that Jacob and Wilheim Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, Andrew Lang, and others made the fairy tale a popular genre in the nineteenth century. But they were all structured similarly to promise happiness if one could “properly” read their plots and symbols, even when tragedy occurred.

At first, fairytales were regarded as dangerous because they lacked Christian teaching and their symbols were polymorphously meaningful and stimulating.

the Grimms purposely changed their fairy tales between 1819 and 1857 to make them more instructional and moral, and other writers worked to create tales more appropriate for children.

Anderson, Wilhelm Hauff, Ludwig Bechstein, George Cruikshank, and Mme. Ségur are among the writers who sought to sweeten tales to direct them at children in a wholesome fashion.

it (Fairy tales) has also been changed in innovative ways to instill hope in its youthful and mature audiences so that no matter how bad their lives are, they can still believe that they can live happily ever after.

Writers stake out their ideological positions through fairy tales. For instance, such best selling books as Robert Bly’s Iron John (1990), Clarissa Pinkola Estés’s Women Who Run With the Wolves (1993), and James Finn Garner’s Politically Correct Bedtime Stories (1994) use the fairy tale to raise highly significant questions about social and political conditions, which reach broad audiences throughout the world.

Even more appealing to children are fairy-tale film, which take precedence over literature.
Children are more readily exposed to fairy-tale films though television and movie theatres than through books.

Of course, storytelling though books and film is only one way that children can be induced to become their own decision makers and creators. Oral storytelling have never ceased, and it continues to play a significant role in our lives. Unfortunately, most university coursed and studies of literature seem to imply that oral storytelling ended with the rise of the printing press, or that if it did not end, it has become insignificant in our lives.

Given the fact that storytelling can be profitable, many story-tellers in the Western societies make use of fairy tales because they know that children respond well to this genre.