We may wonder how fairy tales reflect an altered worldview ?

Introduction

Have you ever heard of Sleeping Beauty, Snow-White or Cinderella ? These kinds of stories are fairy tales that have existed for six thousand years. Nowadays, everyone knows at least one of them because they rocked the childhood of our society, especially since their distribution with the book’s spreading but also with the cinema which played an important role in its development. A fairy tale is defined by an imaginary and unreal story often with a moral at the end but since they were written, the view of the world in general has changed a lot.

We may wonder how fairy tales reflect an altered worldview ?

To illustrate my ideas, I will use a press article from The Guardian newspaper written by Alison Flood about different versions of fairy tales, the famous film Sleeping Beauty originally written by Charles Perrault but distributed by Disney, two photos taken by Dina Goldstein to show the “real life” of princesses and a personal article from a psychology website.

So, at first, we will see what fairy tales represent. Then, in a second step, the difference between them and society..

First of all, we know that a fairy tale is most of the time composed of a problematic, a good side, an evil side and a moral. The tales are, firstly, made to dream, but they also represent a perfect society, flawless and where there is always a happy ending. They show a world where everything is perfect and they fuel the imagination and reassure people about their fears. As we can see in document C, they also have an educational aspect: they help to develop children's vocabulary but also their ability to put things into words, describe and communicate about the environment around us. Tales make children aware of the power of words while entertaining them.

From their beginning, tales convey cultural lessons. These stories come early in the child's life; they are the first way of transmitting the values ​​of their culture to the younger generation and reflect the mentalities, codes and established social relationships. It reveals the image of a society to itself, the values ​​which are dear to it and which constitute its moral foundation.

As we can see in document A, since the first distribution of Sleeping Beauty in 1697, we can observe an opposition between a good side on the top with a princess with her prince in a castle and an evil side with a dragon and darkness.

If you know some fairy tales, you also know that good always wins and bad always loses. This is almost a rule and this is how tales help children to face their fears.It also shows that even if there are some difficulties in life, everything will be fine in the end.

The problems the hero has to face often come from the ambivalence between the pleasure principle and the reality principle. That is to say that the character will have the choice between work and play. On the one hand, the pleasure principle doesn’t take into account the potentially harmful consequences and favors immediate pleasure. On the other hand, the reality principle favors long-term thinking and awareness of consequences.

If we grew up with stories of princesses to be saved, good fairy godmothers

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