Why Read Old Stories?

 When I first began thinking about fairytale retellings as an academic question rather than an personal hobby, I quickly realized that the underlying reasons why this subgenre is so popular were going to be difficult to pin down. As with any cultural movement, YA fairytale retellings are a confluence of many different factors, and they are successful because of publishers and marketing as much as they are successful because of inherent fascination. I'd like to ignore the economic factors in this blog. I'm much more interested in thinking about the function that a fairytale retelling holds in the literary world.

To begin to explore this concept, I'd like to pose a question. Why do we read old stories? We already know what happens. Why do we love these old stories enough that we retell them over and over?

Plenty of psychologists have explained that children respond so well to familiar stories because that familiarity is comforting. I'm not looking at fairytale retellings for children, however. One of the most distinct trends in this YA subgenre is to make the retelling even darker and more disturbing than the original fairytale (I'm looking at you, Dorothy Must Die). These retellings are pretty far from comforting. 

So if comfort isn't the reason, what is? Joseph Bruchac believes that the original tales themselves hold the answer. He is a well-respected Native American author of novels, poetry, and short stories. Most of his work centers around Native American stories and oral storytelling. He says,

 "'Old stories that are always new.' I suppose you could use that as one definition of folk literature... Old tales last because they teach so much— without hitting you over the head that you're learning something worthwhile... there are always additional levels of meaning. What seems simple is like water so clear that you cannot judge the depth until you dive in. The more you know, the more you'll understand."

 For Bruchac, familiarity is only one side of the coin. The other side involves the complexity of the story itself. He thinks that this complexity is what we keep coming back for, because these stories have enough layers of meaning that each time we hear them, we walk away with something different.

If Bruchac is right, then we should be able to see the complexity of the original stories reflected in the variety of stories that retells them. YA fairytale retellings should be reading different meanings into the original texts. While it's true that some of these retellings are simply re-skinned versions of a fairytale and don't try to comment much on their source material, most retellings are invested in saying something new about the old story. This urge is responsible for making so many retellings darker. It's also responsible for the variety of flavors that come out of one simple fairytale. 

Although I'll be talking in depth about the way this concept works in YA fiction next week, I think it is valuable to take a quick look at an example. Let's briefly compare two Cinderella retellings from vastly different ends of the subgenre.

Prom by Laurie Hale Anderson

Throne of Glass by Sarah J. Maas

These two books couldn't be more different, both in quality and in the way that they interpret the story of Cinderella. In Throne of Glass, the only connections to the original fairytale are some references to it in a chapter about a ball, some glass symbolism, and the aforementioned ball where the protagonist goes to kill someone instead of dance with the prince. My dislike for Throne of Glass is because I found it deeply disappointing when I read it, and not because I think it fails as a retelling. In fact, it's successful as a retelling. This fantasy story describes the rise of the main character from rags to riches in a straightforward arc.

Prom, on the other hand, is a much more complicated retelling that subverts the traditional rags-to-riches arc. In this contemporary story the protagonist ends up at prom even though she doesn't want to go. This Cinderella is no magic-fueled, beautiful assassin with a tragic past. She's just a normal girl who is sick of hearing about prom. Although this protagonist ends up with a fancy dress like all the other Cinderellas, her story is about family and friends more than finding her true love.

These two books make two separate and distinct readings into the Cinderella story. According to Bruchac, this kind of flexibility is possible because of the layers present in the original tale. Prom looks into what wisdom the fairytale might offer in family matters. Throne of Glass is interested in the power dynamic of the fairytale. As Bruchac says, we can make these old stories new, and I expect we'll keep telling them as long as we can think of ways to do it.

Works Cited:

Anderson, Laurie Hale. Prom. Speak, 2006.

Bruchac, Joseph. “Old Tales Forever New.” The Reading Teacher, vol. 57, no. 8, May 2004, p. 783. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/20205435.

Maas, Sarah J. Throne of Glass. Bloomsbury, 2012.