The Dark Side of Fairy Tales and Other Stories

I grew up a reader in a family that read a lot in a house lined with overflowing bookcases. I always looked forward to sharing my love of literature with my children. When I first got pregnant, we read Hand, Hand, Fingers, Thumb to our in utero child. I can still recite that and many other “board books” by heart, even though my youngest now has his driver’s license.

We clearly started early with simple books, but I looked forward to the day when my (first born) daughter had the attention span for fairy tales. I still had some of my books from when I was a child, and we had received new books with beautiful pictures from friends. 

When I finally sat down to read Hansel & Gretel to my daughter, I was horrified. After spending so many years making her feel loved and safe, how could I read about children getting lost in the woods and kidnapped by a witch who wants to eat them for dinner? And then escape by locking her in a stove? Fairy tales are dark and scary. Children are lost, mothers are dead, fathers are distant, stepmothers are evil, the woods is full of wolves and witches. Oh, my!

I wonder, then, why I have such fond memories of reading fairy tales as a child? Maybe the pretty pictures captured my attention more than the dark story line. Maybe the happy ending made the scary parts bearable, or even worthwhile. Maybe I just enjoyed the escapism of empathizing with someone whose life was much more adventurous and exciting than my own.

Still, I found myself reluctant to read fairy tales to my children. I hope my squeamishness didn’t deprive them too much, but I was worried by too many uncertainties in the real world to find much pleasure in scary children’s stories.

Today in church I was struck by another story that we have sanitized for our children, that we depict with cheerful colorful pictures, when the real story has very grim beginnings: Noah and the Ark.

A picture of Noah’s Ark is standard nursery decor. We had a beautiful framed print that I was sad to take down and put away when my children graduated to band posters and sports montages. Noah’s Ark is usually shown as a big wooden ship filled with pairs of animals crowding the deck and peeking out of port holes. Somewhere between the giraffes and elephants, Noah may be standing with his wife. Flying in from above is a dove with an olive branch in its beak. A rainbow runs from the top corner. Nice, right?

But today in church we read the beginning of the story from Genesis, and it was very dark:

The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the Lord said, “I will blot out man whom I have created . . . . for I am sorry that I have made them.”

Wow. I don’t know if I’ve ever heard those words. God sorry that he made us? When I was at my wits’ end as a parent, I never said (or even thought!) “I wish I’d never had you,” or “I wish you’d never been born.” But here is God saying that about all of humankind. And we memorialize this with cheerful pictures hung on nursery walls, appliqued on quilts, decorating gift wrapping paper?

Of course, this is just the start of the story. In the very next sentence, the Bible tells us that “Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord.” That leads to the rest of the story that we know well: God tells Noah to build an ark, Noah follows God’s instructions to a “T,” Noah fills the ark with his family and pairs of animals, the flood comes, the flood goes, the dove finds an olive branch, and God makes a rainbow appear as a sign of His covenant that He will never again send a flood to destroy the earth.

All’s well that end’s well, right? But it is still hard to reconcile the ubiquitous cheerful depiction of Noah’s Ark with the Bible telling us that God regretted that He ever made us.

Today, as part of our Advent Lessons and Carols service, we read the start of the Noah and the Ark story in parallel with this passage from John 3:16:

For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life. For God sent the Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through Him.

Our readings took us from a God begrudging our very existence and ready to destroy us all to a God willing to sacrifice His only Son for the sake of the rest of us. And that was the point (I think). Jesus fulfilled God’s promise to never destroy humankind again, and took that promise one step further, to become our Savior. But this happy ending came after a very grim event too: Jesus was tortured and crucified, and died a slow, agonizing death on a cross. Of course, He overcame death with His resurrection, but the fact remains the He died a horrible death to fulfill God’s plan.

So, what is the point? That life is messy? That there is a dark side? That we need to hear the scary stories to appreciate the happy endings? Or is it that we need to hear the scary stories and their happy endings so we can have hope that our own dark times will have happy endings, or at least will get better, even if right now we find ourselves trapped in a cottage with a witch who wants to eat us?