Jennifer Blake | Realism And Fairy Tales

I saw it again this week: “Romance novels, like fairy tales, lack realism; they make young women believe a handsome prince is going to rescue them with promises of happy-ever-after.”

Oh, please.

I loved fairy tales as a girl, but spent not a single second staring down the road for my prince. It’s my considered opinion that those who use this analogy know fairy tales only from Disney movies, particularly “Cinderella” with its dreamy-eyed heroine singing “Some Day My Prince Will Come.” They are seriously misinformed. (And don’t get me started on the premise that women can’t tell fiction from real life while men apparently have no problem distinguishing between James Bond’s 007 stunts and their daily grind.) In fact the basic theme in “Cinderella”, as in most enduring fiction, is the battle between good and evil. Gentle, down-trodden Cinderella gains the love of her prince in spite of unreliable miracles and the machinations of her wicked stepmother and stepsisters. “Sleeping Beauty” uses the same premise with the addition of a warning against trusting schemers and strangers. “Rumpelstilskin,” with its twisted little man who forces a young woman to spin straw into gold, has an industrious heroine who triumphs—and also a caveat about males who profit from female labor. “Beauty and the Beast,” far from encouraging the redemption of violent, abusive men as some claim, is about compassion and seeing beneath surface appearances. And its secondary message, as with “The Princess and the Frog,” is that all princes need not be handsome. “Rapunzel” illustrates the essential truth that women can change what happens to them since the prince-hero could never have reached the eponymous heroine in her lonely tower if she hadn’t decided to let down her long hair as a rope. And the list goes on.

My point here is that neither fairy tales nor romance novels lack core realism. Both address serious issues beneath their feel-good surfaces, both reward the good and punish the wicked as they hold out the gift of hope. Romance authors and readers should ignore critics who use slanted comparisons to belittle the genre—or suggest they take a closer look at fairy tales.