In Armando Maggi’s Preserving the Spell – Fairy Tales and the Future of Story Telling, he starts out the gathering by showing the beginning of Disney’s Snow White. Maggi then goes onto say that the story is “unchangeable”. He brings up the point that there are two different mirrors in shown in this story, the queens mirror, and the wishing well that shows Snow White’s reflection. In both reflections there are male figured, the man in the mirror that tells the queen that she is not the most beautiful woman anymore, and the prince in the wishing well. We are in the same position today as Snow White and the Queen. In our society today, we still need the confirmation of our beauty by others. A very interesting point, is that although these stories were written or told centuries ago, they are still very much still true today. The problems in these stories are very much like problems that people have today. The best example being, Snow White and the Queen’s need for confirmation of her beauty and her jealousy when she finds out that she is no longer the “fairest in all the land”.
On the other hand, we also still have a very strong fixation with memoirs. Our society needs reality in order to keep us entertained. He believes that, “Fairy tales that are written in the past are not entertaining enough for us anymore”. People in our society have a longing for reality, something that we can all relate to when we are reading stories. Our culture is in need for a new mythology in order to keep us interested in its stories. It “must be formed from the deepest depth of our spirit. It must be the most artificial of all artworks”.
Although all fairy tales have left such an impact on our lives because they have been around for such a long time and everyone has always read them when they were younger, they are beginning to go out of style for adults. These tales used to cater to everyone and even keep adults entertained. Sometimes, they do for example how people can relate to the Queen in Snow White always wanting confirmation of her beauty. But we also need something new and relatable to our society. Disney has already tried doing this for awhile, they’ve been taking old fairy tales and rewriting them to be more modernized. Even though I do believe that people will get bored of these stories once they grow up, I believe that it is still important for children to read these stories. Not only because of tradition, but also because these stories teach the very basic morals of life as well.
Skylar Nerone 