With my lecture series on fairy tales and psychology coming up soon, I had a bit of a chuckle yesterday when an article popped up in my newsfeed about Disney’s plans for massive renovations and expansions to its theme park. The Magic Kingdom is about to get a bit darker as villains will soon have their own home in the Magic Kingdom! The expansion of Walt Disney World in Florida includes creating Villain Land. Watch out, Sleeping Beauty and other fairy tale damsels in distress!
Fairy tales do have their dark side. In fact, there has long
been concern that fairy tales are generally too scary and gruesome for young
children. [Of course, they didn’t
originate as children’s stories; they
were stories told by adults to other adults.
But that changed by the mid-1800s after the Brothers Grimm realized that
promoting their academic work on folktales as stories for children could ease
their financial worries.] In 1900, L.
Frank Baum wrote in the introduction to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz:
… the old time fairy tale, having served for generation,
may now be classed as “historical” in the children’s library; for the time has
come for a series of newer “wonder tales” in which the stereotyped genie, dwarf
and fairy are eliminated together with all the horrible and blood-curdling
incidents devised by their authors to point a fearsome moral to each tale.
… Having this thought in mind, the story of
“The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” was written solely to please children of
today. It aspires to being a modern
fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heartaches and
nightmares are left out.
The villains eliminated together with all the horrible and
blood-curdling incidents? Nightmares left
out? Baum appears not to have thought
that it might be a bit nightmarish to tell a story about a young girl being
hunted down by a wicked witch who sends an army of flying monkeys after the
girl and her friends—that is, after attacking them three previous times with an
army of wolves, an army of crows and an army of killer bees—and then enslaves
her.
The struggle between the hero/heroine and the villain—between
good and evil—is often at the center of the fairy tale. The hero/heroine and
the villain are at odds with each other. They each want a different outcome, producing
conflict and competition which drives the action in the story. What would fairy tales be without their
villains?
