Why the Fairy Tale Is Fractured

L. Jagi Lamplighter, wife to great sci-fi author John C. Wright and a talented editor in her own right, has written a series of blog posts describing her fascination with fairy tales — and lamenting their subversion in the modern day.

Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four

However, when I thought about it, I realized that the problem Jagi identified with fairy tales in modern times is exactly the same problem horror has in modern times: scientific materialism has eroded what makes it special.

The materialist worldview posits that the Earth, humanity, and everything else was born not by deliberate design, but by cosmic accident. Blind physical and evolutionary forces shaped our planet and all the life on it. But in spite of all that, Earth is just one planet out of many in a great big universe, and were it to be destroyed, that universe would go on as before, not even noticing our destruction. Thus Earth, humanity, and life itself have no special role to play and are ultimately inconsequential in the grand scheme of things.

Furthermore, in the materialist worldview, everything has a “rational” explanation. Love is just hormones, heroism is just conditioned behavior, villainy is just brain-atoms misfiring, will-o-wisps are just ignited methane, and so on. Only that which can be measured exists; you can’t measure the soul with a ruler, a scale, or a Geiger counter, so therefore the soul cannot exist. The supernatural is mere “woo,” magical thinking for children and simpletons; we live in a scientific age, so we must be smarter than that, goes the idea.

In such a mindset, morality doesn’t matter. Bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people, because the outcome is random, stemming from blind forces that do not care about pure hearts or base sins. Everything has a rational explanation, so that dragon or troll or wendigo is just another animal — and the same is true of humanity. Likewise, demons and vampires aren’t creatures born of evil, they’re intelligent species, diabolus sapiens and sanguis sapiens or some such, and as a result are little different from humanity (which, as we established, is just another animal anyway.)

And as for the stock characters of fairy tales? The prince is a thug with a title. The princess is a spoiled girl with a lot of money (and should be saving herself anyway.) You call the witch “wicked” because you’re jealous of her power — or frightened of it. All these supposedly demonic creatures are misunderstood victims of human propaganda campaigns. “Right” and “wrong” are purely questions of who holds the power.

In such an environment, there is no room for wonder.

Thus, the classic fairy tale disappears and the fractured fairy tale dominates. The fractured fairy tale is said to be more “realistic” and “up-to-date” than the classic versions, which inculcate children with false hope and retrograde values. Yet I can’t help but notice something curious: the fractured fairy tale is a creature of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

In the eras where a lot of fairy tales originated, there was plenty of harsh reality to go around: a time where you have to kill or grow your own food, plagues ravaged the land every now and then, and young women frequently died in childbirth was not an age of comfort and ease. Fairy stories should have been utterly free of any kind of morality — after all, bad things were happening to good people.

But paradoxically, in an age of relative prosperity, where food can be had at the push of a button and light can be had all day and night, we get tales of dread and woe, of “harsh realities” where everything is reduced to material forces and all people are greedy, power-hungry bastards?

It is because scientific materialism did not produce its promised utopia.

A common theme after the devastation of the Second World War was the idea of the scientific utopia: a world where advanced technology solved all of the problems plaguing humanity. Once those problems were solved, we would take to the stars and create a civilization more glorious, more powerful, more wealthy than any which came before. God, demons, faerie — none of that primitive superstition mattered. Humanity was going to raise itself out of the cradle called Earth with its own two hands.

Over seven decades later, none of that happened.

Television shows such as Star Trek, films such as Star Wars, and even children’s cartoons like the Ruby-Spears Mega Man program portrayed a scientifically advanced future with hope and optimism. Even when villains threatened society — even when villains ruled outright — there was always a promise that good would triumph and everything would be set right, for society had come too far to give up now. It reinforced the general idea that science and technology would make things better and better. The end of the Cold War only accelerated this belief — we were at the End of History, and now nothing remained to hold us back from a shiny, chrome-plated future.

Then 9/11 happened. And the 2003 invasion of Iraq. And multiple terrorist attacks throughout the Western world. And so many other things besides. All while technology continued to advance.

That shiny future was only a mirage.

By this point, we had jettisoned religion in favor of materialism. Scientific materialism was supposed to bring us an age of unending plenty, a post-scarcity society, a technological singularity. We conditioned everyone to think in terms of it, to the point where even nominal believers became materialists. It was the truth, the way reality worked, the only source of knowledge you’d ever need.

So when it failed to produce utopia, there was no snapback to religious belief; instead, nihilism took its place. Science and technology would not produce utopia, but unending misery as we found neat new ways to hurt and kill each other. Settling space was not cost-effective, nor was it practical. Any planets outside our solar system were too far away. New technology wouldn’t create ease and comfort, but joblessness and destabilization as humans are put out of work. We are at the mercy of the universe’s blind forces, and nothing we do will make the slightest impact.

This bleak worldview finds its expression in post-apocalyptic stories, in splattery horror films…and in fractured fairy tales. We thought we could do without God, but we were wrong.

Why fracture the traditional fairy tale? Because the shiny scientific utopia — the biggest fairy tale of all — was fractured before our very eyes.