Comfy Cabin💫

Parable of the Polygons - an interactive experiment that shows how tiny individual biases can collectively cause segregation on a massive scale.

To Build a Better Ballot - an interactive experiment that shows the alternatives to the voting systems we currently use and how they can be more representative and democratic, along with their faults.

Coming Out Simulator - a short interactive story/novel about coming out, based off of Case’s own experiences. Not one I’ve played myself but still one I can recommend.

Loopy - a very simple but useful tool to show how systems interact with each other and how things can self-propagate.

Now that we made a recap for the overall story, let's look at little details here and there, shall we?

1 ) Despite this being one of the most famous and reprinted fairytales of d'Aulnoy, The White Doe/The Hind in the Woods is one of the more dated of these stories. Not just because of the problematic racist elements of "princess Black of Ethiopia", but also because this story was clearly written in honor and reference to the king of the tme, Louis 14. When the fairies create a palace for princess Desired to live into until her fifteenth birthday, and have inside of it the whole history of the world depicted by art pieces, d'Aulnoy breaks her narration to describe in a poem form the "greatest and most brilliant warrior king of History", who is not named but is very clearly Louis XIV. Earlier, when the queen visited the six fairies' palace, the fairies told her that to build it they hired "the architect of the Sun", who basically recreated "the Sun's palace" but in smaller proportions. This is an obvious reference to Versailles, the wonderful castle of the "Sun-King", Louis 14. And if this wasn't enough, there are also several explicit comparisons to an actual historical event contemporary to the story: a royal wedding. Several times throughout the narration, d'Aulnoy says that the beautiful clothes or gorgeous outfits of Desired are identical with or "right behind in term of beauty" to the outfits and jewels worn at a "certain princess" wedding. These are all comparisons made to a certain woman named Marie-Adélaïde de Savoie, who had just married the duke of Bourgogne, aka... Louis XIV's grandchild.

All of this makes the story feel very NOT "intemporal" since, if you don't have the historical context, all those moments seem a bit weird and mysterious. And yet, this fairytale stayed one of d'Aulnoy's most popular ones... My guess is that what seduced people in this story was the imagery it brought rather than the story or writing itself. People's mind and imagination were struck by the supernatural white doe a prince cannot capture, by the visual of this monstrous crayfish terrorizing a queen and fairies by cursing a baby, by the idea of a beautiful girl doomed to live in the dark until her fifteenth birthday...

In fact, the way madame d'Aulnoy writes this tale to celebrate the royal wedding might explain why the main protagonist here, Desired, has such a young age - barely fifteen. Because Marie-Adélaïde de Savoie, upon being wed to Louis XIV's grandchild, was only twelve... [Note however that madame d'Aulnoy did not condone or enjoyed at all child-weddings of this sort - she herself had suffered from an atrocious arranged wedding in her very early life, and this ended up in a complicated business of manipulations, false accusations, exiles and murders - but when you live in 17th century France, you better be a propagandist of the king, especially if you are a woman who tries to write fiction.]

2 ) The beginning of the fairytale is obviously to put in parallel with Perrault's Sleeping Beauty. Same "gift-giving christening by the fairies" scene, the same way the older and more powerful of the fairies arrives to curse the babe only to have her curse "eased" by the others, the list of gifts offered by the fairies being quite similar to the one of the Sleeping Beauty fairies - more explicitely, in the beginning of Sleeping Beauty it was explicitely said the queen visited/tried several miraculous/healing waters to try to have a baby - which is what the queen does in the beginning of this tale, except here it becomes the start of the plot.

3 ) While there is still the manichean divide typical of French literary fairytales of "good fairy and wicked fairy", here d'Aulnoy plays deliberately on the fairies ambiguity, to show that despite acting by a binary pattern, fairies stay a "gray" set of beings. For example, the Fairy of the Fountain or Crayfish Fairy, despite being one of the main antagonists, starts out in the story as a helper and a benevolent force - and in a twist, still does fulfill her role of "good fairy godmother"... but she does so to the princess Black, who is an unwilling/accidental antagonist to the hero of the tale. (A similar process, where the antagonistic fairy is just the fairy godmother of someone other than the hero, was already used by d'Aulnoy in several of her previous fairytales, including The Blue Bird). As for the six benevolent fairies, while they are all good and nice throughout the story, the narration still highlights that they have two sets of chariots, and that when angered they drive the dragons, snakes and panther-driven chariots, hinting that while they are here helpers they can become antagonists in other stories.

4 ) While there is all the racism I talked about before, it is quite interesting to see here that we have two "anti-portraits" of ugly women, meant to oppose Desired's supreme beauty, two anti-portraits that actually help us understand the beauty criteria at work in this end of the 17th century of France. For Princess Black, we see that her ugliness comes from a "dark skin", "big lips" and a "crushed, large nose" - which are, beyond traits typically "African connoted", the opposite of the French ideal of women with very pale skin, very small noses, very thin lips. But in contrast, we also have Long-Thorn who presents another set of flaws. Just like princess Black there is the nose - here too red and too hooked - but beyond that we also have added poor teeth hygiene (Long-Thorn has black and unaligned teeth), and more interestingly a body too tall and too skinny. In general, when it comes to ugliness d'Aulnoy typically invokes smallness/dwarfism or fatness/obesity, but from time to time she also insists that when a character is too tall or too skinny, they also are ugly. Because in this time era, while they wanted women tall, they still didn't want them as tall as men, and there was still a certain "interest in the curve" as without being very large or big, women needed to be plump and fleshy enough to have a body to appreciate (a bony and skinny body was not a beautiful one at the time). Of course, no need to remind you that this was a set of aristocratic ideals - because only the noble and the rich could afford to be chalk-white and "pleasantly plump".

5 ) People have noted that, funnily, the way prince Warrior falls asleep in the woods after eating apples he found there looks like a "male Snow-White". It is quite interesting because, while there probably wasn't a Snow-White reference (since it is not a typically French tale), madame d'Aulnoy had the very Christian background and culture of the apple as the "forbidden fruit" with the whole Garden of Eden story. Which leads to an interesting point...

6 ) This fairytale is a sexy tale. It is not an overtly erotic fairytale, no, but there is an obvious VERY romantic if not sexy if not erotic connotation. This however only appears in the second half of the story, when Desired becomes the White Doe. Desired, turned into a prey, and Warrior, improvising himself a hunter, those two lovers, find themselves reunited deep into the woods (the uncivilized, savage, wild world) after purposefully leaving or fleeing their respective courts (the forest is noted to be filled with dangerous predatory animals, such as bears or lions). Warrior hunts down the White Doe, not knowing that she is the girl he is in love with and obsessed over - though he also grows a fondness, familiarity and love for this white doe. And all the while, the White Doe recognizes her hunter as the one she is in love with, and having to flee from him for her life is said to be just as painful as if she was actually hit by his arrows... Madame d'Aulnoy clearly plays here on metaphors and allegories to weave a whole "game of love" or "love as the hunt", "hunt as the love" section. Warrior hunting for the White Doe, the White Doe making sure she can be hunted while never letting herself be caught, it all evokes a bizarre game of seduction. Warrior clearly treats the Doe as more than a simple pet, claiming he "loves" it and wants it to follow him everywhere and to live with him. When the Doe tricks Warrior to escape him, and Warrior complains to his friend, Becafigue jokes about the situation being like an unfaithful woman cheating on her lover - but the prince answers his joke absolutely seriously. And of course, it is after the prince and the princess spend the night together, sharing their love, in human form, that the spell is broken... [Note: In my previous recap I might have written things backward, saying the spell is broken when "night comes and nothing happens". It is the reverse - they talk all ight long together, and as the morning comes she doesn't transform. Sorry about that.]

Beyond the general image, if things weren't clear eough d'Aulnoy keeps addng little details that make the story even more erotic - almost scandalous. The apple section I mentionned - prince Warrior eating apples in the woods before falling deeply asleep reminds of the first human consuming the "forbidden fruit", and it is when the White Doe dares sleep near him for the first time. When the prince catches the Doe or tries to "woo" it with gifts, it is said he keeps petting it, hugging it, caressing it, kissing it - as a pet, as an animal of course, but we reader know that there is a human woman underneath this doe skin, and so the erotic content cannot be escaped. ESPECIALLY when it is said that, after running from each other all day long, both return to their respective bedrooms "sweating and panting, exhausted by the time they spent together". And don't even get me started on how the prince ends up, to conquer and tie up the doe, hitting her with a single arrow in the leg, making her bleed... This is not a fairytale safe for kids.

7 ) Speaking of love, I did not mention it in my recap, but this fairytale is one of the rare ones of d'Aulnoy to have a moral in the end. To summarize it, d'Aulnoy explains that "With the story of this princess that wanted to leave too soon the dark place a wise fairy placed her in to hide her from the sun's light - and the metamorphosis and misfortunes that resulted from it - you will find an illustration of the dangers to which a young beauty exposes herself when she enters too young, too unprepared in the world. If you were gifted with all the traits and qualities that attract love to you, you better know how to hide them, because beauty can be deadly. If you think that by making others fall in love with you, you will shield yourself from love, well know that by giving too much, you always end up taking." So yes, long story short, this is meant to be more than just a fairy love story, but a warning for girls that too young, too beautiful, too unprepared, throw themselves in the world of love, adult and serious romance, and have to be confronted with the many dangers in it.

8 ) On a more "traditional love story" side, this fairytale accumulates ALL the story devices typical of romances of the type to avoid having the two lovers meet each other. In fact, this is the entire point of this story, the apex and climax and culmination: when princess Desired and prince Warrior can finally see each other in person, and talk to each other. At first you had the exchange of portraits and the sending of ambassadors, then you had the fake princess Long-Thorn hijacking the planned meeting, then the two lovers finally got under the same roof, but not only ignored each other's existence, even when meeting each other they didn't recognize themselves thanks t the doe curse... So when they finally see themselves as humans and touch each other as humans and talk a full dialogue, the story is complete and the curse is broken

9 ) Note however that despite the seemingly virtuous and chaste moral added at the end, madame d'Aulnoy does write the character of a more proactive and manipulative princess that "plays" her male lover. It is she that is happy with his caresses and petting and allows herself to be "touched" of the sort, and it is she that sneaks up by her lover's asleep body, and again the terms of the curse are clear - by day she is forced to become a beast, and to do as beasts do, aka to wander in the woods, aka to return to the world of savagery, primal desire and bestial behavior. On the other side, something that might escape a reader at first glance is that prince Warrior is not supposed to be a "prince Charmng" of the traditional genre. As I said, we are inside d'Aulnoy's second book of fairy tales, and so she reached a point where she plays with the conventions of the genre. In the whole hunt story, we have a brutal lover who tries to kill, seriously wounds though he heals it afterward) and ties up with knots his lover, treating her like a prey and a beast (well, because she IS, but you know) - and there is also the use of the peep-hole by Becafigue that solves the whole problem indeed, but by the undignified way of spying into women's bedrooms (Becafigue had already a not so good behavior when he acted as Warrior's ambassador, encouraging Desired's parents to ignore the "powerless" and "silly fairies" and disobey Tulip's warnings - and in the world of fairy tales one should NEVER underestimate the power of fairies)

But that's just for the second part of the story. In the first part, prince Warrior's behavior is also to be criticized. In fact, it is quite ironic that he is called "Warrior" and introduced as the winner of "three battles", because the first part of his character act has him acting as un-warrior, if not un-manly as possible. He becomes a love-stricken mess, he locks himself in his room talking to a portrait, he despairs of not being able to be with his love, he spends his day dreaming, and doing nothing, and wasting away, with no appetite for anything, making himself sick over lethargy and depression - and so fragile that he can't even wait three months for his loved one to come without fearing he would die. And even worse, when his hopes and dreams of love are crushed, he acts as a selfish coward by simply abandoning his parents, his throne, his court and duties, leaving secretly at night with just one letter behind to explain everything to his parents, and isolating himself from the world in desire to just cry on his own fate forever in some isolated place... We've got some emo teen in love vbes here.

10 ) This fairytale is very "medieval" like in tone. Beyond the "fairy christening" scene that is reused everywhere ever since Perrault and inherits from similar medieval scenes, a la Perceforest, the entire topic of the hunter going after a supernatural, white animal he cannot capture is an iconic topos of medieval literature. Typically this doubles or is tied to the hunter meeting some mysterious woman in the woods, preferably near a fountain, who might take him to a wonderful palace - but this happens rather to Desired's mother, who meets a fairy at a fountain, and is then taken to the six fairies' magical castle.

I stumbled upon a take that was utterly surprising to me about how fairy tales validate women through submissive beauty while the men are portrayed as active and violent and how fairy tales are tools to reinforce gender roles and patriarchy.

And I wonder how did we end up here? I seem to remember you talking about how a lot of fairy tales authors were women, but even in the Grimm brothers fairy tales the women are active, it's not only the men who go through trials.

Anyway I was wondering if you had any thoughts on this?

A most interesting, complex and yet simple question!

Do not be surprised by this take: it has been THE dominating take on fairytales until very recently. It was the big 20th century idea about fairytales - and in fact, it was one of the ideas heralded and massively shared by Jack Zipes in his famous book. This is also partially thanks to him that most Americans share this exact same view. Now we know, thanks to today's research, that this is not as true as people like to think and that this only applies to some fairytales - but the idea that fairytales can actually be subversive, can actually challenge an established society's codes, structure or hierarchy, is in truth fairly recent - or rather has only been accepted fairly recently.

A part of this is definitively Disney. There is no denying that the "Disney fairytale" marked forever popular culture's view of fairytales AND that as a result it inclined a lot of people to look at traditional fairytales under a certain angle. Remember - to make a Disney princess an active character, with the likes or their Rapunzel or Tiana, was seen during the movies' releases as a MASSIVE breakthrough for Disney.

That being said, to well answer this, I think a look at the French literary fairytales can be interesting. (Especially since... it is much more of my domain than the Grimm fairytales for example Xp)

Now Jack Zipes expressed this very theory by talking of Charles Perrault fairytales. In his book he clearly said that, through his stories, Perrault taught girls to be passive damsels waiting to be saved ; and boys to be active heroes. The typical "prince saving the damsel in distress ; knight rescuing the princess in the tower". And on a first, superficial, quick glance... Zipes is right - and many, MANY people read Perrault's fairytales as such.

Indeed, female protagonists of Perrault share a distinct passiveness and earn their happy ending through patience, pleasing people and looking good. Cinderella endures abuse without talking back, only has to look pretty for a prince thanks to an outside interference, and her marriage is what saves her - before she even forgives her wicked stepsisters! Sleeping Beauty spends half of her story sleeping before being saved by the arrival of a prince ; and then the second half she is the helpess victim of the ogress and only is helped by either the butler or the prince. The wife of Bluebeard cannot save herself, it is her brothers that save the day, while in Diamond and Toads the good girl is rewarded for just being nice and helping a poor woman, and it is again through a wedding she gains happiness. Many people also like to invoke the semi-fairytale Griselidis which is... a whole another topic to go into.

Meanwhile the male protagonists are "active", industrious heroes and vanquishers of evil. Puss in Boots is a trickster who hunts animals, actively runs around, and devours an ogre. Little Thumbling also puts together all sorts of plans, actively changes the crowns and nightcaps, steals away the ogre's boots, and once again runs around... The brothers of Bluebeard's protagonists are the big heroes that come in the end to murder the persecutor.

So far, it all seems right... And somewhat, yes, it is true. Because of the context, because of the society, culture and time these stories were written into. In 17th century upper-class France, women were only valuable if they were pretty, if they didn't cause trouble, if they could be good wives or good mothers ; men on the contrary were expected to be sportsmen, warriors, active members of their community or of the government... But as usual with Perrault, nothing is as simple as it is, since there is joke and satire hidden in his texts that many fail to see, and when we look a bit closer at all this, we see hidden behind the apparent dichotomy the traces of a more nuanced take.

Yes, Puss in Boots is an active male character... But the marquis de Carabas is just as passive as another Cinderella or Donkeyskin, as he literaly does NOTHING but look good, obey the cat and follow everybody around. "Puss in Boots" is Cinderella told through the eyes of the supernatural helper - the talking cat is the fairy godmother, who is the one that brings beautiful clothes and meeting with the royals and the seeds of a romance to his passive, useless master. In fact, the "morals" of both stories are eerily similar: Perrault jokes at the end of Cinderella that anything is possible as long as you have a powerful or well-placed godparent ; and Puss in Boots moral is also about how "If you can find the way, you can trick the system, and become a prince when you shouldn't AT ALL". Both stories aren't in the end about someone being rewarded for being pretty or enduring suffering - but simply about having enough hidden resources and trickery to use the very flaws of the system used upon you.

Again, let us take Cinderella. She endures her suffering, according to people, she does nothing for herself, the fairy godmother does everything, and her salvation comes from a prince marrying her... She is pointed out to be so naive she chats with her stepsisters as if everything was normal when she is at the ball. She proves to be the ultimate goody-two-shoes when she forgives her persecutors at the end... And yet, what does the moral point out? That openly forgiving your enemies is the best way to put them in your pocket... because as such they'll be indebted to you, and you forced them into depending on your kindness. The idea of a sly and more cunning Cinderella is also highlighted by the ambiguity of when Cinderella loses her shoe. Perrault writes it so that it is unclear if she loses the shoe by accident... or if she deliberatly drops it. Same cunning with Donkeyskin - she does have on her own the idea of dropping a ring into the cake for the prince, ensuring her marriage with him...

So while the female protagonists of Perrault are definitively NOT active, it does not mean they are dumb or just pretty faces or that they are just rewarded for being "nice". They are intelligent, they know how to go around, there is a certain celebration of the "feminine cunning" if you will. Diamonds and Toads' moral isn't about actually being nice ; it is about learning when to be polite and when to do flattery when needed. Perrault's fairytales truly are about glorifying inventivity, intelligence and tricks. And the "passive character only good at being beautiful and married" does not exclusively apply to women. The marquis de Carabas is a good example, but what about the prince of Sleeping Beauty? All he does is literally... come in. Arrive. And that's it. How does he save Sleeping Beauty from her sleep? He just enters the castle, and suddenly she wakes up, not even a kiss. How does he save his wife from the ogress? He comes in and asks what's going, and everything is solved immediately. The actual heroic force of the tale is the butler, who is the one that saves the day - but again, not by using power, but by using tricks, deceiving the ogress that he cannot possibly fight (ogres embodying brutality and violence). In fact you have no monster-killer or dragon-slayers in Perrault's fairytales - the closest of a monster killer is Puss in Boots, but only because he tricks the ogre into turning into a mouse. Little Thumbling does not defeat the ogre by strength or violence - again it is all tricks and deception... and theft.

Because this is the other side of the "active male character". Yes, male heroes in Perrault's tale are more active than their female counterpart. But are they moral or "deserving" because of it? Certainly not. Puss in Boots lies to a king, threatens poor peasants so they say lies, usurps the castle of its legitimate lord and deceives the king into marrying the princess well under her rank. Similarly, Little Thumbling tricks an ogre into committing an infanticide, steals his boots from him (but so far it is all excused because the victims are the worst kind of ogres) - and then he scams a grieving mother into giving away all her fortune, before becoming a personal messenger for adulterers... And the narrator himself points out the immorality of those actions. Once again, it isn't because the male characters are more active that they are supposed to be praised for it... Perrault's tales are ultimately, deep down, hidden under a fake veneer of politeness and romance and galant things, trickster tales.

But to get that, you need to read carefully the stories and place them back into their proper context, and many people failed to do it in the 19th century, wrote a lot of misinformed texts that influence the people of the 20th century, and Disney was yet another relay of this misconception, and from generation to generation it all piled up... Claiming that Perrault was SUBVERSIVE in the second half of the 20th century was something seen as a genius and fresh take - when in fact it is just... just a truth people had failed to see.

However we can't reduce everything to Perrault. I mean the 19th and 20th centuries did reduce everything to Perrault, but let's see at the mother of the French fairytale, madame d'Aulnoy. Each of the female authors of fairytales had their own take and twist on gender norms and gender stereotypes, but given the scope and influence of madame d'Aulnoy (still felt in the 19th century), we will focus on her.

Madame d'Aulnoy's fairytales ARE the ones from which the idea that a fairytale is a "knight saving a damsel in a tower from a dragon" comes from. And, again, from a quick glance, madame d'Aulnoy seems to perfectly embody the dichotomy of "A heroine has to be patient and pretty and saved and pleasant and passive ; a hero has to be an active, vigorous, strong savior and monster-slayer". Graceful and Percinet? (Also known as Graciosa and Percinet). It is Psyche's myth told all over again. The Yellow Dwarf? A king keeps searching for his missing fiancee trapped away, and confronts all sorts of obstacles in-between. The Benevolent Frog? A prince kills the dragon that wants to eat his future wife, who literaly does nothing throughout the tale. The Doe in the Woods? The princess spends her time locked away, turned into an animal or fleeing, while the prince is a warrior and hunter who actively keeps going around.

And yet, once again, this just a watered-down, simplified, 19th century-glasses on vision of madame d'Aulnoy's fairytales. She had a wild, WILD life that led her to understand being an obedient good girl and passive meant NOTHING (in fact I do plan on making a series of posts about the craziness of these female French fairytale authors) - she conspired to have her abusive husband killed, she had to flee the country to escape authorities, she knew more than anyone that women had to be active to save their skin in life. And all throughout her stories, she kept having strong, active, female characters that broke the "passive mold", and on the contrary men that failed to be the "active ideal". All of it wrapped into the craziness, madness and exhuberant firework of animalistic fairies, enormous giants, multi-headed dragons and other clownish looking wizards, so that it looked less obvious at first glance. The princess of the Yellow Dwarf spends her time attacked by the titular dwarf and locked within his domain waiting for a rescue, but the story begins when she decides on her own to undergo a dangerous and perillous travel to find out what her mother suffers from, while the prince is shown to be quite helpless against the magic of the Fairy of the Desert and needs the magic of the mermaid to escape. In the Benevolent Frog, the prince kills the dragon... But at the very end, after being given all sorts of magical artefacts and an impossible horse, and they do the trick instead of him (similar to the prince's so-called "victory" against Maleficent in Disey's Sleeping Beauty, where it was truly the fairies that did the work) ; meanwhile the princess' father, the king, also proved utterly useless at saving his wife and daughter spending several years just... sitting by the side of a lake ; all the while his wife and daughter had to become amazonian huntresses, and the fairy-frog is shown doing all the behind-the-scenes work of saving everybody, using a lot of resources, and performing hard feats such as going at the top of a long staricase made for giants WITH THE BODY OF A TINY FROG, which is why she spends years doing so.

And many more are the tales breaking the mold! Cunning Cinders? The girl literaly CHOPS OFF an ogress' head with an axe, right after pushing an ogre into the oven - and it was no small feat given the ogre was also a giant. In the Pigeon and the Dove, the first time the giant imprisons the princess, putting her in his bag, she gets out by herself, without anybody's help. The Orange-Tree and the Bee? The princess does all the work - saves the prince, hides him, feeds him, nurse him, takes him away ; while also doing all the heroic and clever feats, tricking the ogres, stealing their magic wand, performing magical transformations. No wonder the final transformation is passive for the prince (the orange-tree) and active for the princess (the bee that stings anybody getting too close to the tree). In fact, the fairytale "La princesse Printanière", (Princess Mayblossom in English), seems to be an explicit and literal deconstruction of the passive-active model: the titular princess acts like a typical "good princess" (following her heart's impulses without thinking about it too much ; giving kindly all her food to her lover on a deserted island), only to be met by the harshest of realities (following an unknown pretty boy around is not good, and her lover is a selfish and brutal jerk). She only can escape the bad situation she created for herself by STABBING HER EVIL LOVER IN THE EYE, and then she is greeted by the positive sight of her fairy godmother in a war attire, beating the crap out of the wicked fairy of the story in a celestial duel. In fact, this tale contains a double message about women being active to change their life, because before her "passive episode" on the Island of Squirrels that gives her all sorts of misery, she is active, oh yes. She forces the random boy she just met to follow him, and she plans a whole escape at night - because, like an active character, she wants to determine her life, she wants to just do as she pleases, she show who's in charge... But this is proven bad because as it turns out acting impulsively and harshly without prudence or thought - taking away the hand of the first pretty boy that passes, fleeing rashly at night on a whim without preparing any substantial thing - only leads to disaster and misery (being stuck on a deserted island with an abusive companion). And this is opposed to the good "activity" in the end, one thought about and that is a just reaction to the situation, or well-equiped for handling its problem - the princess killing her would-be-murderer ; the good fairy getting a chariot, weapons and an armor to destroy the old, wicked, rusty Carabosse.

This all comes very clearly and strongly in d'Aulnoy's fairytales - if Perrault wasn't so much about gender as he was about tricks, cunning and cheating the system with well-placed connections ; madame d'Aulnoy clearly had some ideas of how women should learn to be active queens, great warriors, trained travellers, well-equiped survivors and, if need there is, monster slayers. Is it then a wonder that when the authorities and minds of the 19th century took a good look at fairytales, they decided that madame d'Aulnoy should be erased in favor of Perrault, where the ideal female models are a girl sleeping a thousand year, another girl that gets hit without answering back, a princess that becomes a cleaning-girl and a cook good ; or even a nice girl with big diamonds?

Well, I am not using the theory “It was a dream all along!”. Don’t misunderstand me - but there is something that is quite obvious when you read the fairytales of Charles Perrault. And it is the use of the “dream-logic” inside fairytales themselves, to make them feel… well, like dreams. 

This is something quite unique to Perrault. If you look at the fairytales of madame d’Aulnoy, we are closer to the fantasy novel, since everything is explained, the characters given depths, there are socio-political relationships everywhere, a worldbuilding, a (most of the time) coherent succession of events… It is a true “fairy novel”. But Perrault’s tales were unusual in that they tried to stick to their folkloric roots: short, simplified, and overall oniric in nature, with the same dream-logic I talked above applied.

In “Little Thumbling” (what people know by the wrong title Hop O’Thumb), the house of the ogre happens to have a second bed in their daughter’s bedroom - an empty, unused bed, the perfect size to host the seven brothers. Why? It is never explained, but it fits the nightmare feeling of the “at the house of the ogre” episode, where everything seems ready to welcome you and kill you… 

In Bluebeard, the house where the climax takes place is a very weird and strange place. It is a countryside house, the size of a big, rich house - and yet as the tension rises, new elements (such as the tower) appears, that make the house look more like a castle (and in fact many illustrators depict Bluebeard as having a castle, when he doesn’t have any into the original story). It is a typical nightmare-logic where the place gets bigger and more frightening as the tension and horror unfolds. Similarly, the presence of the “sister Anne” is extremely strange - as she kind of appears out of nowhere, or rather is mentioned, but only seems to exist as a way to relay information to her sister, as she is left outside of the rest of the action, not interacting with Bluebeard, not talking with her sister about her discovery. She is briefly mentioned at the beginning and the end of the story, she plays the key role of answering her sister’s pleas for help, but she is such a distant, inactive character, cut off from the rest of the narrative (she isn’t even mentioned to have moved in with her sister in Bluebeard’s house) that it led to many people reading “sister Anne” as actually a double, a sort of hallucinated twin or split of personality of the unnamed wife, who might be all alone and just talking to herself…

Speaking of sudden apparitions: take “Cinderella”. The fairy godmother randomly appears out of nowhere, with no introduction, as if she had always been here and we are supposed to know her from the start. The wicked step-family leaves for the ball, Cinderella starts crying - and suddenly the fairy godmother comforts her. She hasn’t been introduced to the reader, the other members of Cinderella family do not seem to be aware of her presence, but at the same time Cinderella is not at all surprised to see her - and yet the fairy godmother seems also unaware of the events leading to Cinderella crying… This is literaly a dream-logic scene, where a character pops out of nowhere, and yet it is as if you knew them all along and they were already there.

And “Little Red Riding Hood”? When you summarize it, it is like a nightmare. You dream of a little girl sent by her mother in the forest, the little girl talks to a wolf (and is not at all surprised to hear a wolf talk - talking animals were not always the norm in fairytales, since many characters of d’Aulnoy tales are shocked upon hearing animals speak), and then she arrives at her grandmother’s house, but it isn’t her grandmother, but the wolf disguised - the girl gets eaten, and that’s the end. Summarize it like that, and try to think of it as one of those weird nightmares people get and try to recap while making sense.

This all isn’t just “some oversight” or Perrault “badly writing” as some nasty people might try to say - because we have manuscripts of Perrault’s fairytales dating back to two years before the actual publishing of the tales, so we know he has been spending quite some times working on them - and in those manuscripts, sometimes thing are explicitely spelled out to make them seem more logical, but in the finished version some of those explanations are removed to make it seems more mysterious… and apparently, more “dream-like”. 

This is also why I do think that “The Company of Wolves”, the movie, is perhaps one of the Red Riding Hood movie closest to Perrault’s “Little Red Riding Hood”. It might be a twist, deconstruction and reconstruction of Perrault’s original tale, with numerous additions and expansions, but it keeps the fever-dream feeling of Perrault’s fairytales by making it all LITERALY a dream. This is aspect can also be found in the old Disney movies that adapts Perrault’s stories: Disney’s “Cinderella”, and in a lesser extent “Sleeping Beauty”, all have dream-sequences or rather scenes and moments with strong-dream feelings, manifesting again this subtext in Perrault’s original style…

Obviously, "Wishful thinking" and "careful what you wish for" are important tropes of the fairy tale genre, but I never considered them to be genre defining or that much important for the narratives.

But the upcoming Disney film Wish made me rethink some things.

While the film itself is meant to celebrate Disney animation and their history of "quest for a dream" and "dreams come true" tropes, I wonder how much of these tropes have any basis on the original folk tales or the literary tales inspired by them.

Disney made the connection between fairy tales and "wishing", but they seem not to be the first or the only ones.

On the most famous example besides Disney, Sondheim's Into the Woods seamed to think there was a link between the Grimm and English fairy tales and the concept of wishing, to the point it's a foundational plot point to the story.

The Frog King or the Frog Prince, a tale that is known to always open the Grimm's fairy tale collection across several editions, literally starts as:

"IN the old times, when it was still of some use to wish for the thing one wanted, [...]"

or depending on the translation

"IN the olden time, when wishing was having, [...]"

Well wishes DEFINITIVELY are a key part of fairytales, but maybe not in the sense we understand today...

As in the idea of "wishes coming true" all on their own is something purely Disney like. I can't say anything about the Grimm stories, but when it comes to French fairytales the idea of wishing is definitively present... But as a "desire".

For example, good fairies and fairy godmothers keep granting people's wishes in French literary fairytales. But they just do not pop up whenever someone makes a wish. For example take Cinderella, in Perrault's version, the fairy godmother asks Cinderella if she wishes (aka wants) to go to the ball, and since she says yes, the fairy godmother agrees to grant her the wish - but she does mention "and since you have been so good". This is a recurring topic in these French fairytales - wishes are granted as rewards for a good action or a good behavior, just wishing in itself does nothing (as Perrault evokes in some of his fairytales morals "Sometimes all you need to be rewarded in life... is to have a fairy godmother because else you're stuck in your misery.") There is also very often the topic of a fairy asking a person they want to reward to choose between various gifts and select precisely which "wish" they want more than another. For example there was this story by madame de Murat called "Anguillette" where a fairy saved by a princess offers her three possible gifts: wealth, beauty or intelligence, and she tells her to carefully make her "wish". (Though this fairytale is actually a twist on the trope of the choice since, unlike other fairies in this situation, this fairy ends up giving the princess all three gifts at once just because she is that good - but that's an exception)

In folk-fairytales the topic of wish is also present, but more in the "be careful what you wish for". Just recently I read a folkloric tale about the wife of a man who was friend with a local magical dwarf - and to obtain a horse (or a cow I can't remember exactly), the magical dwarf told the wife to go to a nearby village of dwarfs. But he warned her to be very precise in how she formulates her "wish" - for example she has to precise that the beast must have ears, eyes, legs... And ultimately she does get the animal, but forgets one thing in her specifications: the tail.

So I am speaking here only for the French branch of fairytales - but given Disney was as much inspired by them as by the Grimms I think it is a fair standing point. Wishes, the concept of granted wishes is definitively present in fairytales, for sure... But not the "power of wishes". Wishes in fairytales as a symbol of hope, wishes coming true all on their own because you "believe", wishes as just a power and force in itself, is something that is definitively part of Disney's specific brand and topic. Because in French fairytales, a wish is either a request/desire made to a supernatural being, or a reward for a good behavior. Wish is not "hope" but "desire" ; and yes wishes are granted, but as in "what you desire the most will be granted" ; and they are not granted randomly just because you believe. They are granted because you were a good person in the eyes of a supernatural power - a supernatural power which might force you to choose between specific options what you "wish" or "desire" more. And sometimes, fairies don't even grant the wishes, but go against them. I am not even speaking of wicked fairies, but good fairies too!

Take Donkeyskin. This is something that was very highlighted and focused on by the musical movie adaptation, but that was already present as a one-line joke in the original text: the princess, before fleeing the castle, ends up not wanting to fight her father's incestuous desire. She doesn't particularly wish to escape or to not be loved by her father - it is the fairy godmother that has to point out to her that no, this is not a good situation, and it is her that will force her to do all sorts of things she did not ask for. Similarly in these literary fairytales, a lot of the time good fairies are actually here to warn people that what they wish is dangerous, or that what they desire will be self-destructive or cause everybody harm. So overall, while wishes are present in French fairytales, they are not very prominent or important in themselves - rather, the logic of these fairytales is one of reward and punishment, and one of desire both good and bad - desire granted or desire denied, desire encouraged or desire fought off.

And in fact.... A lot of the time these supernatural rewards are not even based on wishes. Very often supernatural beings just decide on their own what would be the most fitting reward. For example take "Diamonds and toads" - the girl never wished for the riches given to her by the fairy, but that's her reward. Or rather, an example more telling would be a VERY famous fairytale of France. Its most famous version is from Bretagne, but it exists in numerous regions of France and was even found in northern Africa - it is the story of "The two hunchbacks and the (insert your local supernatural being here)". In France it is a lutin, or a variation of the lutin/dwarf (in Bretagne, the korrigan). The principle is always the same: there are two brothers who are hunchbacks, one is good one is bad. The good brother ends up stumbling one night upon a party of dancing and singing magical little beings, and he makes the party even merrier/plays well some music instrument/completes an unfinished songs of the lutins. The lutins decide to reward them - and without asking him what he want, or without the good brother asking anything, they remove his hunch, making him a normal man. When the bad brother, envious of the good brother's fate, goes to the same lutin party but acts poorly there, he demands a reward - and this reward is the hump of his brother, added onto his own.

This is something very prominent in these folk-tales: do not ask for a reward out of the blue. Only ask for a reward if you are offered a voice, only wish for something if the supernatural being encourages you to wish for something or allows you to. To ask for something, to enforce your wish upon a supernatural being, always turns up badly. A variation of the two brothers tale is even more revealing of this theme: in this story, the good brother is offered to choose between lot of gold, or having his hump removed. And when the bad brother arrives, he demands "what my brother left behind", meaning the gold - but the lutins/dwarfs/korrigans/fairies decide to understand it as "the hunched-back my brother left behind".

Because this is something that is very prominently said in literary fairytales of France: fairies (and other assorted supernatural beings) are not low-beings or powerless creatures. They are not to be commanded, they are very high on the social AND cosmic hierarchy. Fairies for examples, in French fairytales, are repeatedly said to be either equal to kings and queens - or SUPERIOR to any kind of human royalty that exists. This is notably why so many of them end up being godmothers of princes and princesses, or marrying kings, or making ennemies out of royalty. Again, fairies and other enchanters of French classical-literary fairytales are inheritors of the gods and goddesses of the Greco-Roman mythology, crossed with some folk-Christianity of saints and Virgin Mary, so there's still this idea that the human is naturally inferior to the supernatural, and should always treat it with respect. Just like how you do not ask a king to gift you something, you do not ask a fairy to grant you a wish - else you want it interpreted in a bad way. You rather do good things in hope of gaining the king's favor so he rewards you.

Anyway, after twisted digressions, to return to your original post: as you said, the topic of "wishes" is not as genre-defining as it might seem today. Disney really took this element and expanded it and focused the light on it and insisted upon it, to the point that we can say definitively today that the topic of the "power of wishes" IS a defining genre of the Disney fairytale. But it does not mean wishes and their importance wasn't in fairytales before... But the wishes themselves did not have the power - the supernatural beings had the power and granted the wishes. Hope in these traditional fairytales isn't about wishing something or believing in something. In these fairytales manifesting "hope" means staying kind and true and good-working and gentle to everybody and everyone and enduring all your pain and all your hardships and miseries, because doing so might earn you the favor or pity of a powerful cosmic royalty who will decide to reward you by granting you what you desire the most or what is the best for you. If someone simply wishes something, it probably won't come true in a fairytale - the best way to make sure your wish comes true is to go feed old hungry women and save frogs from being eaten by birds ; but if you just "wish upon a star", you'll probably get nothing. However if you cry out your heart upon some given plants or in front of some given birds, they might help you by bringing you good counsel or some food - but no wish granting.

And as I said, even then, your personal wish and desire ultimately might not be what is actually good for you, and many warning tales of the literary fairytale era were about "Here's how you will die when your wish is granted". Typical Psyche and Cupid tale: the wife wants to see her husband, and this wish leads her to lose everything. Typical Beauty and the Beast tale: the girl wishes to go to her family, and it almost kills the beast. And of course, the wishes and demands and desires of bad people ultimately become their undoing... Unless you are one of those fairytale antagonists with a fairy godmother on your side, in which case your wish and demands become the main reason the protagonists are suffering (madame d'Aulnoy's The Blue Bird is the most revealing case, as it is the first French literary fairytale where the evil step-sisters gets a fairy godmother who ends up cursing the princess' beloved into the titular blue-bird, simply because she does everything she can to please and grant the wishes of the person she is the godmother of).

As for the Grimm fairytales... I honestly do not think wishing is an important part of them? Wishing does get its fair share in French fairytales in a very nuance and complex take ; but the Grimms? Beyond the line you evoked in the Frog Prince, where are the wishes in Hansel and Gretel, The Wolf and the Seven Goats, The Robber Bridegroom? There is Rapunzel but the mother's desire is not a wish, rather a craving. There's Snow-White, where indeed the wish comes true - but it backfires massively since in the original version the mother ends up hating her own daughter, and in the later version the mother dies soon after giving birth. But beyond that? I don't see many wish-stories. Oh yes, except the Fisherman and his Wife - a very traditional "wish" story, but even then... Wishes are depicted as ultimately negative, since the wife is driven by greed and ambition that augments with every wish.

As you might know (since I have been telling it for quite some times), I had a class at university which was about fairy tales, their history and evolution. But from a literary point of view - I am doing literary studies at university, it was a class of “Literature and Human sciences”, and this year’s topic was fairy tales, or rather “contes” as we call them in France. It was twelve seances, and I decided, why not share the things I learned and noted down here? (The titles of the different parts of this post are actually from me. The original notes are just a non-stop stream, so I broke them down for an easier read)

I) Book lists

The class relied on a main corpus which consisted of the various fairytales we studied - texts published up to the “first modernity” and through which the literary genre of the fairytale established itself. In chronological order they were: The Metamorphoses of Apuleius, Lo cunto de li cunti by Giambattista Basile, Le Piacevoli Notti by Giovan Francesco Straparola, the various fairytales of Charles Perrault, the fairytales of Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, and finally the Kinder-und Hausmärchen of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. There is also a minor mention for the fables of Faerno, not because they played an important historical role like the others, but due to them being used in comparison to Perrault’s fairytales ; there is also a mention of the fairytales of Leprince de Beaumont if I remember well. 

After giving us this main corpus, we were given a second bibliography containing the most famous and the most noteworthy theorical tools when it came to fairytales - the key books that served to theorize the genre itself. The teacher who did this class deliberatly gave us a “mixed list”, with works that went in completely opposite directions when it came to fairytale, to better undersant the various differences among “fairytale critics” - said differences making all the vitality of the genre of the fairytale, and of the thoughts on fairytales. Fairytales are a very complex matter. 

For example, to list the English-written works we were given, you find, in chronological order: Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment ; Jack David Zipes’ Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion ; Robert Bly’s Iron John: A Book about Men ; Marie-Louise von Franz, Interpretation of Fairy Tales ; Lewis C. Seifert, Fairy Tales, Sexuality and Gender in France (1670-1715) ; and Cristina Bacchilega’s Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies. If you know the French language, there are two books here: Jacques Barchilon’s Le conte merveilleux français de 1690 à 1790 ; and Jean-Michel Adam and Ute Heidmann’s Textualité et intertextualité des contes. We were also given quite a few German works, such as Märchenforschung und Tiefenpsychologie by Wilhelm Laiblin, Nachwort zu Deutsche Volksmärchen von arm und reich, by Waltraud Woeller ; or Märchen, Träume, Schicksale by Otto Graf Wittgenstein. And of course, the bibliography did not forget the most famous theory-tools for fairytales: Vladimir Propp’s Morfologija skazki + Poetika, Vremennik Otdela Slovesnykh Iskusstv ; as well as the famous Classification of Aarne Anti, Stith Thompson and Hans-Jörg Uther (the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Classification, aka the ATU). 

By compiling these works together, one will be able to identify the two main “families” that are rivals, if not enemies, in the world of the fairytale criticism. Today it is considered that, roughly, if we simplify things, there are two families of scholars who work and study the fairy tales. One family take back the thesis and the theories of folklorists - they follow the path of those who, starting in the 19th century, put forward the hypothesis that a “folklore” existed, that is to say a “poetry of the people”, an oral and popular literature. On the other side, you have those that consider that fairytales are inscribed in the history of literature, and that like other objects of literature (be it oral or written), they have intertextual relationships with other texts and other forms of stories. So they hold that fairytales are not “pure, spontaneous emanations”. (And given this is a literary class, given by a literary teacher, to literary students, the teacher did admit their bias for the “literary family” and this was the main focus of the class).

Which notably led us to a third bibliography, this time collecting works that massively changed or influenced the fairytale critics - but this time books that exclusively focused on the works of Perrault and Grimm, and here again we find the same divide folklore VS textuality and intertextuality. It is Marc Soriano’s Les contes de Perrault: culture savante et traditions populaires, it is Ernest Tonnelat’s Les Contes des frères Grimm: étude sur la composition et le style du recueil des Kinder-und-Hausmärchen ; it is Jérémie Benoit’s Les Origines mythologiques des contes de Grimm ; it is Wilhelm Solms’ Die Moral von Grimms Märchen ; it is Dominqiue Leborgne-Peyrache’s Vies et métamorphoses des contes de Grimm ; it is Jens E. Sennewald’ Das Buch, das wir sind: zur Poetik der Kinder und-Hausmärchen ; it is Heinz Rölleke’s Die Märchen der Brüder Grimm: eine Einführung. No English book this time, sorry.

II) The Germans were French, and the French Italians

The actual main topic of this class was to consider the “fairytale” in relationship to the notions of “intertextuality” and “rewrites”. Most notably there was an opening at the very end towards modern rewrites of fairytales, such as Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, “Le petit chaperon vert” (Little Green Riding Hood) or “La princesse qui n’aimait pas les princes” (The princess who didn’t like princes). But the main subject of the class was to see how the “main corpus” of classic fairytales, the Perrault, the Grimm, the Basile and Straparola fairytales, were actually entirely created out of rewrites. Each text was rewriting, or taking back, or answering previous texts - the history of fairytales is one of constant rewrite and intertextuality. 

Know the difference between a retelling and inspired by

Make sure it's public domain

Only draw from the original (eg. if it has a Disney retelling do not draw from that. Disney is not public domain and you'll breach copyright)

You can sprinkle references or go fully into it

Retellings are more than just the events of the story. Look at the themes, the messages behind it