“He huffed and he puffed, and he ... signed the eviction notice,” cry the three little pigs in Shrek, the Academy Award-winning first episode of what has now become one of the most sensational trilogies ever to hit movie theaters. DreamWorks Animation has announced that Shrek IV and V are in the offing. Meanwhile, in the world of live theater, a musical called Wicked, a radical revision of The Wizard of Oz, is sweeping the country off its feet. The novel on which Wicked is based has over one million copies in print — and counting. Aside from their witty, sometimes brilliant dialogue, hysterically funny parodying of the old regime, and the insistence on certain good messages that you don’t hear every day, these new fairy tales have something else in common: the roles of the villains are reversed. In Shrek it is an ogre who is the protagonist, and in Wicked it is the Wicked Witch of the West whom the audience is rooting for.

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Disney has jumped in on this trend, producing a new series of children’s books that retell age-old fairy tales from the viewpoints of the villains. In its new “My Side of the Story” lineup, children can read (or have Mommy and Daddy read to them) the traditional Disney renditions of “Snow White,” “Cinderella,” the “Little Mermaid,” and other fairy tale classics by holding the book one way. But when the Disney book is flipped over and turned upside down, your little tykes can be treated to versions of these old-time favorites in which the entire story (and, more importantly, its message) has been turned upside down as well. Thus, Peter Pan is retold from the viewpoint of Captain Hook, 101 Dalmations from the perspective of Cruella de Vil, and The Little Mermaid from the point of view of Ursula, the evil sea witch.

Many other books, movies and fantasy games — for adults as well as children — are picking up on this trend of reversing the classical roles of good and evil characters. As might be expected, there are plenty of reviewers applauding this development of “unfairy tales,” for being “creative,” “refreshing,” and “provocative.” But no one, it seems, is asking if there might be serious negative consequences to tampering with this age-old imagery. Is this merely harmless fun and entertainment? Or is presenting stories approvingly from the villain’s side blurring distinctions between good and evil, and reversing the traditional roles of heroes and villains contributing to the moral ambiguity and confusion that afflicts our society? Should we not, perhaps, at least be asking whether the new unfairy tales are healthy for children, who are in crucial stages of developing an understanding of right and wrong?

Celebrating Wickedness

“Are the wicked born wicked or do they have wickedness thrust upon them?” asks Glinda (the Good) in Wicked, the musical. This line from a song entitled “No One Mourns the Wicked” is a clever play on one of Shakespeare’s most famous quotes: “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, some have greatness thrust upon ’em,” Twelfth Night (Act II scene V). However, one key element of Shakespeare’s line is missing in Stephen Schwartz’s song. The concept of “achieving” wickedness is omitted, and the audience is left with the notion that wickedness has nothing to do with one’s own volition, with acts of the will. More frightening though, is how this message is given without words by changing the Wicked Witch of the West into the heroine. By changing villains of fairy tales to heroes, and making the audience see from their perspective in shows like Wicked, the entertainment world seeks not only to redefine an important genre of American entertainment but to redefine good and evil and the moral foundation on which America stands.

Samuel Adams, signer of the Declaration of Independence and major player in the War for Independence, said: “ Neither the wisest constitution nor its wisest laws will secure the liberty and happiness of a people whose manners are universally corrupt. He therefore is the truest friend of liberty of his country who tries most to promote its virtue.” Similarly, George Washington noted in his farewell address: “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens.”

No one who makes even the most cursory survey of our popular culture — literature, movies, music, television, newspapers, magazines, Internet — can doubt that the forces promoting the universal corruption of which Adams warned are having a heyday. Until recently, however, one genre remained pure in its essence — no one dared touch the fairy tale.

This beloved literature type has its origins in deepest antiquity. For millennia, as far back as man can remember, he has performed an important duty, a ritual as old as the hills and as important to the growth of civilization as the bricks with which its buildings were built. He has gotten in front of the fire and told stories. Before the invention of the written word, he handed down by word of mouth, from generation to generation, important knowledge, history, and lessons in a skillful and enjoyable fashion. More important than the entertainment value of the fireside drama was the imparting of truth and the teaching of virtue. Creativity blossomed and inspiration took place through these ceremonies. They became one of the main ways that cultures grew and civilizations formed.

The fairy tale is the distilled and embroidered essence of the great ancient stories meant to instruct the young (and remind the old) of the importance of moral virtues. As G.K. Chesterton said regarding fairytales, “Fairyland is nothing but the sunny country of common sense [the spirit of whose rules, such as humility] I learnt before I could speak and shall retain when I cannot write.”

“Fairy Tales are more than true,” observed Chesterton, “not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.” But in today’s unfairy tales, dragons, witches, vampires, gargoyles (as in Disney’s dark Gargoyles animated series), monsters, demons, and ogres are the good guys.

Case in point: Shrek (from the German word “schreck,” meaning terror) and its sequels are likely the most popular fairy tales today. Clever, hysterically funny, wonderfully illustrated, and conveying certain commendable messages, they are hard to resist. A major difference they have from traditional fairytales is that the protagonist, Shrek, is a huge, ugly, green ogre. Shrek laments: “People take one look at me and go ‘Agh! Help! A big stupid ugly Ogre! They judge me before they even know me.’” The message, of course, of learning to not judge a book by its cover is praiseworthy indeed. But it is the underlying message of using an ogre to tell the moral that should give one pause.

Ogre comes from the Latin word “Orcus,” who in Roman legends was bound up with the god Saturn who would eat his children. In certain myths, Orcus was lord of the underworld and was characterized by eating little children. As J.C. Cooper writes in his book of symbols regarding this horrible creature, “Then the Ogre seems to be a personification of the ‘Terrible Father’ ... and serve(s) the cathartic function of issuing a warning.” From the classical Roman tales to the Middle Ages the ogre retained its shape. In the classic French and later English tales such as Hop ’o my thumb, in which the ogre eats his seven daughters mistaking them for seven sleeping boys, and “Jack and the Beanstalk,” in which the ogre not only wants to eat Jack but can smell his blood (“Fee, Fi, Fo, Fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman”), the ogre was a symbol of all that was base and inhumane. As powerful as they were dumb, these cannibalistic creatures personified the clumsiness of greed and ugliness of avarice and could be outwitted by their smarter but weaker prey, helping those who read the tale learn that strength and power are not everything. This symbol took on such meaning as to become part of the English vocabulary, becoming a synonym for men who were cruel or beastly. “Oh, he’s an ogre,” we say when someone continually treats others inhumanely or shamefully. They have even been associated with Nazis for obvious reasons.

Am I suggesting that the millions of children who watch Shrek will be transformed by this experience into ogreish, cannibalistic brutes? Obviously not. Considered in the context of a strong, vibrant Christian civilization, productions like Shrek might be relatively innocuous. But considered in the context of our post-Christian order and today’s trend in popular entertainment (for both children and adults), where the heroic archetypes and the standards of right and wrong are under full-scale assault, perhaps we should not so blithely accept such permutation as innocent and inconsequential. Today children are being hit from every side with morally confusing, equivocal, and downright evil images and messages.

I do not mean to pick inordinately on Shrek; it is far from being the worst example, and as we have noted, it does indeed affirm some important moral virtues. However, even though it is one of the milder cases, it is also the most popular case illustrating the unfairy tale trend. It may be worthwhile to consider it in comparison to another well-loved fairy tale: “Beauty and the Beast.” This story also conveys the message of the importance of seeing the inner beauty (or potential inner beauty) of the person, without the ambiguity and confusion of Shrek. The Beast is a prince who has been imprisoned inside a truly hideous form because of his unchristian act of refusing a fairy refuge in his castle during a fierce storm. The Beast’s ugliness, of course, is a metaphor for the haughtiness of his character and ugliness of his soul. His only hope for release from this curse is to find true love. But how will this be possible for one so ugly? Enter Belle, the winsome and virtuous Beauty. Unlike her two beautiful but vain and selfish sisters, Belle is kind, compassionate, and selfless. She sacrifices herself to replace her father as the Beast’s hostage. By her goodness, she first transforms the Beast interiorly, so that he overcomes his beastly character flaws and, finally, is also restored to his external human form. By contrast, Shrek ends in a great reversal of the traditional fairy tale, with the beautiful Princess Fiona being transformed into an ogress, to marry Shrek, the untransformed ogre.

Shrek, like Wicked, the Harry Potter series of books and movies, and other would-be fairytales, reverse the classical imagery making what were once symbols of horror and wickedness characters to like and emulate. This trend loses all innocence (or pretense of innocence) when taken to the extreme, as in the case of Philip Pullman’s books, the first of which, The Golden Compass, has now been made into a major children’s epic fantasy film. Pullman, an avowed militant atheist, has openly declared his contempt for Christianity and his intention of writing his unfairy tales to attack and undermine Christian faith and morals. (To see The New American’s review of Pullman’s books and the film The Golden Compass, click here. Also, for a comparison of the fantasy works of J.R.R. Tolkien vs. J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, click here.)

“So what, exactly, is so wrong with taking a classical image and changing it to mean the opposite?” one might ask. Can’t we take traditional symbols of evil and ignore their meaning in order to teach another lesson? Perhaps, but the potential for subverting the moral order may be more profound than we realize. Symbols are the shapes within the culture reflecting on the outside the immaterial in a simplistic way. They bring to the exterior the meaning of the interior. They are pictures of the unseen parts of reality. “Symbolism is an instrument of knowledge and the most ancient and fundamental method of expression, one which reveals aspects of reality which escape other modes of expression,” J. C. Cooper says in his illustrated encyclopedia of symbols. They tell us something no other method of expression can. Hence they are a fundamental instrument of part of communicating and defining a culture, its principles, and its art. St. Paul first formulated in words its definition “through things seen to things unseen.” Hence they play a central role in culture and story, and in conveying messages of right and wrong. “We cannot arbitrarily rearrange them [symbols] like so much furniture in the living room of our psyche,” says Michael O’Brian author of A Landscape With Dragons, an incisive analysis of modern children’s literature. “To tamper with the fundamental types,” he notes, “is spiritually and psychologically dangerous because they are keystones in the very structure of the mind. They are messages about the nature of good and evil; furthermore they point out contacts between the two realities.”

Ogres and monsters classically represent danger and evil. To change them around is to risk “tampering with the fundamental types” as Michael O’Brian pointed out ... and could destroy the messages about good and the evil they represent. Also, by examining things from the evil character’s point of view, the perspective of evil is made to seem equally valid, making these symbols and their meanings seem interchangeable. By switching roles of symbols, the meaning of the symbols becomes interchangeable. Good and evil, however, are not interchangeable. They are judged based on an eternal, divine standard. Remove that standard and you have moral relativity, the dangerous belief that each man must conclude for himself what is right and wrong.

Under this concept no nation can stand, as without definite limits that are set for each individual, the moral, social, political order cannot be maintained. If it is acceptable for one man to commit murder but not another, then there can be no justice under which all men can live safely from murderers.

As previously noted, our nation’s forefathers saw the necessity of a constant morality. George Washington himself said, “The propitious smiles of heaven can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right which heaven itself has ordained.”

The traditional symbols of fairy tales serve to reinforce the moral order in society. When stories are told with right order to them they reinforce the right order man sees and tries to keep around him. Fortunately, the fairy tale is still alive and well today — in both book and celluloid form — in stories that do not promote equivocal or upside-down morality. Fantasy epics such as the C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series are prime examples of masterpieces of imagination that offer a vivid glimpse into the unreal while reaffirming right moral order. Even the wildly successful Spiderman movies with their keen discrimination in symbols and words between right and wrong offer audiences a great way to escape into the land of the fantastic without contradicting the moral code. With the good new elements of the culture and past elements, Americans have a lot from which to choose and by choosing it, help something wholesome this way to come.

Catherine Mullins is a college student who has had a lifetime love for fairy tales.

(For a related article about “Peter and the Wolf” going PC, click here.)

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