Evil In Fairy Tales

Red Riding Hood Meets the Wolf - Illustration by Walter Crane

Whether it is state terror or the individual evil of a misogynist serial killer, most of us are in denial. It couldn’t happen to us. The man we pass on the street cannot be a murderer.  Our country would never slip into tyranny. Worse still, we see the danger in the wrong places, fearing those who are different (the stranger), rather than people who seem to be like us.

And if we do see evil, how can we speak of it? But speak of it we must. To deny evil is to be complicit and yet denial is a way of self-preservation. 

The evil in fairy tales is not hidden, far from it: evil stepmothers, wicked witches, big bad wolves, ogres who grind our bones to make their bread. Look closer and you will find other evils. These are the stories we tell our children and they love them.

Is it because the fairytales are set “once upon a time” and end “happy ever after” that we feel able to talk about evil so overtly? It creates a distance, a fictional one but a psychological distance all the same. It gives us a light to shine into the dark.

That is why when I started to write Something In Nothing I chose to use fairy tales and fairytale characters to speak about the unspeakable.