David Quinn
The cast of Snow White & The Adventures of Sammy Sausages Christmas panto is unveiled at The Tivoli Theatre. 
Today’s PC versions of fairy tales may date very quickly, writes David Quinn
It’s Christmas and so that means its panto season. Thousands of parents up and down the country will bring their children to a version of timeless, classical fairy tales like Snow White at the Tivoli Theatre.
But wait, are they timeless and are they classical, or are they really deeply harmful stories which for generations have been brainwashing girls into seeing themselves as passive victims of circumstance waiting for some Prince Charming to rescue them, marry them and ‘live happily ever after’?
This view of fairy tales is now taking hold and that is why we are now seeing a reworking of them in a more feminist image. Therefore, in the version of Snow White at the Tivoli, it is Snow White who proposes to the handsome prince, not the other way around.
The Sunday Times reports that in Aladdin at the Cork Opera House, Jasmine laughs at Aladdin when he first proposes to her and says she can rescue herself.
At the Helix, Will Scarlett is no longer part of Robin Hood’s band of merry men. He has been replaced by the warrior woman, Scarlett.
Meanwhile, the Gaiety is showing the Snow Queen and the unicorn is neither male nor female, but ‘gender-fluid’.
Defending the new version of Jasmine, Siobhan Howe of the Cork Opera House told the Sunday Times: “We are quite aware of the responsibilities we have, with 60,000 people coming to see our panto, and how we can influence young children. This year we have decided to go more feminist than frills when casting our female lead Jasmine.”
Well, that’s great, but doesn’t Siobhan think parents are already aware of the responsibilities they have when bringing their children to see a classic like Aladdin, or for that matter Snow White or Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty?
Haven’t they already thought about the elements of these stories and know perfectly well what they are getting themselves into?
Central character
When you think about it, the central character in many fairy tales is female. The male characters are often peripheral and undeveloped. In Cinderella, her father is dead and the prince she eventually marries appears only fleetingly.
In Snow White, the two main characters are female – Snow White herself and the witch – and the prince does not appear until the end.
In Sleeping Beauty, again the prince does not appear until the end.
In each case admittedly, the prince plays a rescue role but in a way the men are marginal characters in many of the classical fairy tales. Without the rescue role they would often have no role at all, not even as villains.
In other words, fairy-tales are dominated either by female characters or by children. Think of the more minor ones (in the sense of being shorter and simpler) like Goldilocks and the Three Bears or Little Red Riding Hood or Hansel and Gretel; these involve children, and three out of the four main characters in the stories just mentioned are girls.
What fairy tales deal with to some extent is the vulnerability of women and children compared with men because men are physically stronger than either women or children. Children need protecting from danger in fairy tales, and so do women. The world is full of evil things that wish you harm. The evil forces at work in fairy tales are often very great. In Sleeping Beauty, the evil queen transforms into a dragon that the prince must risk his life to defeat.
Feminists argue that the role of the heroine in in fairy tales is passive, but the role of the men is simply to rescue the damsel in distress. The men, to some extent, are the servants of the women. They risk all for them and then they complete each other in marriage.
If you remove these core elements from fairy tales have you actually made them unrecognisable? What is the role of the man in these new versions? He is not the central character in many of the original versions, and if he has no role in dealing with physical danger in the new versions, or a greatly reduced one, he is rendered obsolete in almost every way. What does that tell boys?
The producers of these new, feminist pantos need to ask themselves why these fairy tales are popular in the first place. Why have they appealed to generation upon generation of children (and adults)? What deep well of human nature do they tap into?
Remember, a story will never be enduring unless it does this. It must appeal to something deep inside of us. Feminists find it extremely troubling that stories consisting of women being targeted by evil and ultimately being rescued by a man of action who appears at the last moment are so popular.
Fairy tales seem to appeal especially to little girls and the same kind of fairy tales appear again and again across cultures and time. Little girls love the idea of being princesses which is why, incidentally, royal weddings are so popular and almost all public attention is focussed on the bride, not the groom.
Feminists may wish this was not true, but it is. As people like the psychoanalyst Carl Jung made clear, fairy tales are archetypal, meaning they conform in a deep, sub-conscious way to human nature.
Will modern versions of fairy tales still be told in 100 years-time, 200 years? Doubtful. But what might happen is that no fairy tales at all get told because the revised ones will have ripped the heart and soul out of the existing ones, negating them and consigning them to a memory hole, and perhaps that is exactly what some of their critics seek.
