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.