Conclusion

Now that I've written a handful of posts about fairytale retellings and YA literature, I feel like I'm only beginning to delve into the answers to the question that I posed in my introduction: Who benefits from all of these versions of a story?

I hope I've laid out a few of the ways that we can benefit from telling an old story in new ways. I chose to do this project as a blog because there isn't just one answer to this question. Different ideas and different theories are helpful, but they aren't conclusive. Writing a sequence of blog posts that could each focus on a specific theory seemed like a better approach than making a singular argument in a critical essay. This blog format has allowed me to talk about a handful of ideas since the scholarly answer to this central question isn't straightforward.

Folklore theory itself isn't straightforward. The field of folklore theory is so complicated because, in some ways, it's asking what a story is and why we as humans make them. This question delves into the philosophical nature of humanity, which in turn is even more complicated. We know that these stories matter because we keep telling them over and over. The reasons why we keep telling them are harder to pin down.



Although the scholarly answer to this central question is complicated, my personal answer is not. I am the one who benefits from all these versions of a story. I was fascinated by fairytale retellings for most of my teenage years and I've collected them on purpose through college. Fairytale retellings present a unique challenge for a writer, and so I've started writing them as well as reading them. I chose this subgenre of YA fiction for my project because I like it.

The reason why I like it is a little more complicated. I enjoy perspectives. The moment when I'm given an insight that clarifies the things I know about the world is exhilarating. Each new fairytale retelling that I come across is a new perspective that I can inspect, comparing it to the original version and the other versions I've read and rolling it around in my head until I can make all sorts of new and interesting connections. Fairytale retellings hold up well to this type of inspection because they're designed to connect to the original tale. They're begging for their readers to make comparisons and connections.

The fact that fairytale retellings are designed to stimulate this sort of reading process makes them powerful learning tools. Readers who have difficulty making connections between texts will have an easier time with these retellings. In addition, fairytale retellings can easily be taken apart. A classroom of students can investigate what a retelling changes and then talk about how those changes affect the story. This kind of deconstruction is useful for learning the parts of storytelling like plot, character, and setting from an actual story instead of from a textbook.

The true value I see in retold fairytales is the connections that they make. Once I learned to find connections between stories, it was easier for me to make connections between the stories and the real world. Sure, fairytales aren't real, but they contain truth about human nature that is real. Even villains long for a happily ever after.