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Book Box: Fairy tales were never about children, but about you
From Andersen to modern life, fairy tales reveal desire, loss and survival—stories that speak less to children and more to the human condition.
Dear Reader,
“I wanted to speak at length about / the happiness of my body and the / delight of my mind, for it was / April, a night, a / full moon and — ” says Mary Oliver.
And then she stops. She pauses to pay attention, to listen to the frogs.
And so it has been with me, this first week of April.
In Manali, there are cherry blossoms, spring showers, and limpid light. I find myself slowing down, spending the week looking and listening.
I have been thinking about Hans Christian Andersen, born this month, whose fairy tales I first read as a child and have never quite left behind.
These are not the feel-good, redemptive Cinderella, Snow White, or Red Riding Hood fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm — where the good wins, the stepmother is banished, the evil wolf is killed, and the handsome prince comes to the rescue.
Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales are dark and existential. They read like modern psychological fiction.
The Ugly Duckling feels body shame and self-loathing. The Little Mermaid goes further; she denies her body, drinking a potion to cast away her beautiful fish tail to gain the love of the prince. When she walks on land, each step feels like knives cutting into her. And even with this terrible sacrifice, she fails. The prince does not see her.
And then Andersen does something extraordinary. He gives the little mermaid a choice: to get her life back, she must kill the prince. The girl who gave up everything — her voice, her tail, her world — is now asked to give up her conscience too. She refuses. She dissolves into sea foam instead. There is no rescue.
In The Little Match Girl, a poor girl wanders barefoot on New Year’s Eve. She doesn’t dare go home because she hasn’t sold any matches. It is freezing, and she starts to light matches one by one to keep herself warm. In the first flame, she sees a table of food, a Christmas tree. In the second, a shooting star. And then her grandmother. Each of the visions is so ordinary: warmth, a meal, a loved one. And yet for the little match girl, they are everything. The next morning, she is found dead in the cold, ‘smiling’ from the visions she has seen.
I didn’t know it consciously then, when I first read it, but here was my first lesson: that a story can feel like warmth even when there is none. If you have books and stories, you can smile, your spirit can survive — and this is not a small thing. It may be the only thing.
Almost darker than The Match Girl is The Red Shoes, a moral-psychological warning wrapped in a fairy tale.
Karen, a poor girl, becomes obsessed with a pair of red shoes. She dares to wear them to church, choosing pleasure over conformity. Of course, she must be punished. The shoes begin to control her, and she can’t stop dancing until she is finally freed — by having her feet cut off.
The Red Shoes is a story I want my MBA students to read. They need to read it as adults to realize how deeply societies fear female desire and what extremes they still go to, to curtail it. Your clitoris is mutilated, your feet are broken and bound up. Sometimes you are simply taught, very young, to stop wanting to dance.
If The Red Shoes warns of the price of outward passion, The Snow Queen explores the quiet chill of inward withdrawal. It’s the story of Gerda, who journeys across an icy, enchanted world to rescue her friend Kay, whose heart has been frozen by the Snow Queen.
Today, I realize what a modern parable this fairy tale is. When one person retreats into the digital frost of screens and routines, they become a Kay — physically present but emotionally absent. The other becomes a Gerda, trekking across the silence to melt the ice. It is, in many ways, modern therapy — a story of the pull and push of family, friendships, and marriage. A story that says maybe your tears will melt shards of ice into feelings, and maybe they won’t.
Sometimes there is no thaw, and the mermaid dissolves into foam. And that’s the truth Andersen knew, and Mary Oliver knew: sometimes the fairy tale and the full moon don’t get a perfect resolution. But in the pause, in the moment we stop to listen to the frogs or to hold a story close, there is a whole different kind of meaning.
(Sonya Dutta Choudhury is a Mumbai-based journalist and the founder of Sonya’s Book Box, a bespoke book service. Each week, she brings you specially curated books to give you an immersive understanding of people and places. If you have any reading recommendations or reading dilemmas, write to her at sonyasbookbox@gmail.com. The views expressed are personal)
