Prompt Week Day Five: Fractured Fairytales
Added 2024-09-21 08:09:07 +0000 UTCFeminism has pushed back on the Brothers Grimm fairy tales ever since the Sixties. The movement insisted Cinderella didn’t need a prince. Sleeping Beauty could wake up all on her own. Happy endings didn’t always include marriage, so writers all over the world set to work satirising and revising the Grimms’ stories to make points about the patriarchy. The trend became so widespread it earned a name: Fractured fairytales. Here’s the end of one such poem, Snow White:
And thus Snow White became the prince's bride.
The wicked queen was invited to the wedding feast
and when she arrived there were
red-hot iron shoes,
in the manner of red-hot roller skates,
clamped upon her feet.
First your toes will smoke
and then your heels will turn black
and you will fry upward like a frog,
she was told.
And so she danced until she was dead,
a subterranean figure,
her tongue flicking in and out
like a gas jet.
Meanwhile Snow White held court,
rolling her china-blue doll eyes open and shut
and sometimes referring to her mirror
as women do.
A new dog recently arrived at Tears. He’s terrified of humans, but if you turn your back to him, he will approach, give you a good sniff, and allow you to touch him. From that moment, you are friends forever more. Satire is like that. It doesn’t approach us headlong. It turns its back and allows us to assess an idea that we’d usually reject.
Not all fractured fairytales have the depth of Anne Sexton’s. Some exist for entertainment alone. In the Eighties, this kind of Grimm satire took feminism’s place, and in the Noughties, those tales came to the big screen in the form of movies like Shrek.
Today’s prompt is to write your own fractured fairytale. Any fairytale will do.
