Three Fairy Tales on Goodness and Beauty

When I decided to write a second, expanded edition of Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child’s Moral Imagination, my thoughts went through many iterations of the stories I might discuss in three new chapters. I could not include all the stories that came to mind. But I found room to briefly discuss several of them in the Bibliographical Essay at the end of the book. Here below are my thoughts about three of those stories, two concerning beauty and a third about goodness.

Snow White

In “Snow White,” the Grimms’ interest in beauty is in its relation to morality and the distinction we draw between good and evil. The Grimms describe the stepmother as “beautiful” with the qualifier that she also is “proud and haughty.” Her arrogance, cruelty, and wickedness contrast with Snow White’s innocence, humility, and goodness. The stepmother’s competition with Snow White over who is the more beautiful is hard to forget. The repetition of the stepmother’s question “Who is the fairest of all?” has become a kind of signature of the story.

Yet the envy and rage of the stepmother when at last the mirror declares Snow White to be “a thousand times more fair” than her is not the end of it. We must ask ourselves the question: How is Snow White a thousand times more fair than the stepmother? The answer is that her beauty is pure, without pride or envy of anyone else. The evil queen will not rest until she has done away with Snow White. She will not allow Snow White to thrive no matter how far removed the younger woman is from her presence. And thus we come to the symbolical three temptations that the stepmother queen contrives in order to snuff out Snow White’s life. Famously, the queen succeeds in her third try with the offer of an apple, reminiscent of the biblical story of the temptation to which Adam and Eve succumbed.

The temptations that the queen stepmother contrives are conceived to make Snow White more like herself. This is ironical and makes her attempts to destroy Snow White’s innocence and unaffected beauty more complex than they may seem at first. The first of the wares that the disguised queen offers to Snow White are colorful stay laces. When these laces fail to press the breath out of Snow White, the queen returns with a poisoned comb. Both of these items, the stay laces and the comb, are women’s accessories for beautification. The queen counts on the lure of a superficial, false beauty to corrupt and kill Snow White. The queen initially had ordered the huntsman to kill Snow White and bring the young girl’s innocent heart to her in order that she might consume it. Now she seeks to corrupt that heart. Snow White falls for the queen’s first two tricks, accepting the gift of the stay laces and then the comb. It is only by chance that the dwarfs twice find Snow White early enough to save her.

The third gift, an apple, is a subtler subterfuge, though it too is centered in beauty. It is made in the image of Snow White herself, whose skin is white as snow and whose cheeks are red as blood. The poison apple the queen concocts is “beautiful-white with red cheeks.” She intends that it draw out of Snow White a latent narcissism. And indeed, the apple catches Snow White’s eye: “Snow White was eager to eat the beautiful apple.” The queen gives the red poisonous portion of the apple to Snow White and consumes the harmless white half herself. This ruse also works.

Snow White feels “a craving for the beautiful apple.” This is not just a hunger of the stomach. It reaches to the heart and can corrupt it. As we know, all ends well: Snow White is protected not just by the dwarfs but by forces of goodness stronger than the evil of the queen.

The Bell

I want also to mention a lovely story in Hans Christian Andersen’s corpus, titled simply “The Bell.” In it Andersen approaches beauty from another perspective. This story concerns a bell that is very far away yet whose sound reaches even the ears of the busy denizens of the city. The bell itself and where it might be, however, remain a mystery. Curiously, the farther one gets from the city the more distinct the beautiful sound of the bell is. The question is whether physical distance alone explains the phenomenon or whether the bell’s increased audibility should be credited to the reduction in distractions that removal from urban life allows. “On the outskirts of the city, where the houses were farther away from each other and had gardens around them … the sunset was much more beautiful and the sound of the bell much louder.” The romantic aversion to cluttered and hurried urban life is clear. So too is the romantic belief that the urban shuts out natural beauty.

But the lesson of the story is deeper, more profound, and more spiritual than that. When the city dwellers are drawn out of their surroundings to search for the bell, though most do not get very far, they become either discouraged or seize the opportunity for commercial profit. Rich and poor come upon some weeping willows at the edge of the woods and mistake them for the woods itself. Two bakers set up shop and the business is good. One baker even hangs a bell in his tent, but it is “tarred on the outside to protect it from the rain” and has “no tongue.” This bell is an emblem of how commercialism and consumerism can quell the love of true beauty.

On a beautiful Sunday a group of children, who have just been confirmed, set out from church to find the bell. Only two, however, go so far as the point at which the forest becomes a garden where beautiful things grow. We follow the course of just one of these boys, however. He is the son of a king. He reaches the sea when the sun is setting, like a shining red altar standing “where sea and sky meet.” The other boy is a poor youth. He takes a different, more difficult path than the son of a king, going through “the densest part of the forest, where brambles and thorns” grow that tear and scratch. Yet he too reaches the same clifftop overlooking the ocean and the setting sun. On this spot the “great invisible holy bell” sounds “in loud hosanna”; all of nature is “a great cathedral.” The flowers form its “mosaic floors, the tall trees and the swaying clouds … its pillars and heaven itself … the dome.” Though nature exhibits a native beauty, even this beauty points to, participates in, a transcendent beauty. One important lesson of the story is that beauty avails itself to rich and poor alike. Though for the poor the way may be more difficult, the reward is no less great.

The Little Lame Prince and His Travelling-Cloak

This story by Dinah Maria Mulock Craik is about the son of a king who in infancy is dropped by his nurse and injured so severely that his legs grow malformed and he cannot stand or walk. His mother dies soon after his birth, and when his father not long afterward also passes away, Prince Dolor’s uncle, the Prince Regent, declares that the child has died and makes himself king. But this is a lie. Prince Dolor is sent secretly into a lonely exile far away in a desolate region named Nomansland. There he lives, captive in a high tower with just a nurse to care for him.

Prince Dolor has a magical godmother, however, who gives him the gift of a magic cloak that will fly him wherever he wishes to go. The boy does not know he is a captive or that he is the rightful heir to the throne, and learns to live a solitary existence without complaint, books his only companions.

For a long time, Prince Dolor does not make use of his fairy godmother’s magic cloak. When, however, he reads about places beyond his tower-top prison, he begins to wonder how it would be to live in those places, and he sets off to see them. He discovers a wide, wondrous world beyond his imaginings. Aware that he is a prince, he begins to wonder whether he mightn’t also be a king one day. Eventually he asks his nurse about this, and she informs him of his rightful claim to the royal throne.

When his uncle dies the realm descends into revolution and tumult. Prince Dolor’s nurse boldly takes the initiative and with the help of others spreads the word that the prince is alive. “The country, weary perhaps of the late King’s harsh rule, and yet glad to save itself from the horrors” that have come upon it, embraces Prince Dolor. And so he rules for many years, both temperately and justly, and is loved by all of his subjects.

Prince Dolor was loved, “first because, accepting his affliction as inevitable, he took it patiently; secondly because, being a brave man, he bore it bravely, trying to forget himself, and live out of himself, and in and for the other people.” This is a description of a saint. And that is why I believe the story is so powerful. Today our children need exemplars such as this, heroes of humility forged in the furnace of personal affliction and suffering.

Dr. Vigen Guroian is Emeritus Professor of Religious Studies in Orthodox Christianity at the University of Virginia. This article is excerpted from Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child’s Moral Imagination, Second Edition by Vigen Guroian. Copyright © 2023 by Vigen Guroian and published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.