Fairy Tale & Allegory

“Tell me a story...”
Much of what we learn about the world in the first years of our lives is from stories told to us. There is a lot of power in a simple story, especially when we are the age in which we believe whatever we are told. When we are older, we are still ready to listen to a story and enjoy it even if we do not really believe it. That is why a story is such a powerful medium for ideas, and some of the most powerful stories are also some of the simplest—such as fairy tales and allegories.
An allegory is a fictional story that presents a spiritual truth. To outward view it is simply a story, but when properly understood, it is a careful picture of something that is difficult to draw. It is a story that takes truths that are hard for the oldest people to understand and shows them to us through the eyes of a child. You might call it a small story about a very big thing.
Allegories often use make-believe elements such as spells and magic and mythical creatures; but this is not true of all allegories. Some seem only an ordinary everyday story until you discover the hidden meanings underneath the characters and storyline. Some very familiar allegories are the parables in the New Testament. They are simple stories that can be enjoyed on their own, but when they are explained in a spiritual sense their meaning suddenly becomes much deeper.
An allegory employs techniques such as symbolism, which is using objects to represent ideas like love, honour, or envy; and personification, meaning that ideas are represented by people or animals with personalities and appearances. It is like a miniature theatre where the ideas are the roles and the characters are the actors who play the roles. An allegory is often much simpler than an ordinary story. The plot usually has only one main goal, and the characters have one major characteristic that defines them, such as fear or fury or faithfulness.
But what is the importance of an allegory, and why have so many authors, including John Bunyan, Edmund Spenser, and George MacDonald, written them?
Some people simply prefer allegory to other genres. But I think some writers used it because it was the only way they knew of to tell the world something important. They knew of something that was too big to understand on its own and so they wrote a story about it instead. Great thinkers such as Nietsche or Freud or Marx or Voltaire came across immense ideas which they were so intrigued by that they tried all their lives to get their heads around them. They had very big heads, it is true, but the ideas were so much bigger that it was the heads that succumbed and cracked: the ideas stared munificently on at the wreckage and altered not. Afterwards clever men have come along and read the books the great thinkers wrote and tried to get their heads around the same ideas and said ideas cracked said heads as they had cracked many a better one.
But nobody ever cracked his head by reading The Pilgrim’s Progress, or The Chronicles of Narnia, or At the Back of the North Wind; and though some heads (my own being one of them) may have been nearly cracked by The Faerie Queene, or Moby Dick, I do not think one ever actually was. These sorts of books can fit inside the circumference of a head without cracking it because they are only stories.
That is the power of a story. That is why allegories are so much stronger than books of philosophy or metaphysics. Anyone can understand a story and almost anyone can write one, which is why an allegory is such a useful tool. Many authors have used allegorical elements in their stories, even when they were not writing an actual allegory.
Then, authors sometimes write allegories without intending to at all. Edgar Allan Poe did not believe in allegories, but his Mask of the Red Death is considered one all the same. J. R. R. Tolkien firmly insisted that The Lord of the Rings was not an allegory but many people insist just as firmly that it is. So many stories are considered allegorical that it makes one wonder whether any story is not allegorical. Perhaps every story ever written with a larger idea in mind could be called allegorical because the author embodied in it something which he could not get his mind around otherwise.
And this brings me to the fairy tale. If I told you that Hans Christian Anderson was a writer of allegory, you would probably think at first that I was mistaken because Hans Christian Anderson wrote fairy tales. But The Ugly Duckling and The Nightingale are undeniably allegories. A fairy tale and an allegory are so very similar that it is often difficult to tell one from the other, and generally the only distinction is that an allegory may have been written only for grown-ups while a fairy tale is always written for children.
A fairy tale’s purpose is the same as an allegory. It is a simple story that everyone knows is not true but which everyone has read and—what is more—remembers anyway because of the truths it contains. We are often fooled by the simplistic child-like story and characters of a fairy tale and think literature has progressed beyond such primitive stuff. Actually, the whole reason children love fairy tales as much now as children did a hundred years ago is because they are good literature—just as they love nursery rhymes because they are good poetry.
Some people never outgrow fairy tales. Those who don’t are usually either a little ashamed or a little proud of the fact and the reason is the same: they are either rather sorry or rather pleased that there is some childish part of them that still enjoys a fairy tale. Fairy tales have a great influence on us, first when we are children and later, although we may not like to admit it, when we have grown up and begun to understand what the world is really like.
When we are children we take certain things for granted. For instance, we expect a story to have a happy ending. We also accept that a hero can always overcome his obstacles simply because he is the hero. We know that the impossible can happen. And we are always frightened of the bad guy. First impressions die hard, it is said, and perhaps that is the reason why all the rest of our lives we subconsciously expect villains to be ugly and poison to be green or red. Maybe that is why even after we have outgrown fairy tales we still take for granted certain things about the world.
We know that Jack never really climbed the beanstalk but we feel all the same that there is something high above us that would better our lives if we only could get it and that to get it requires great perseverance and marvellous courage—not to mention slaying a giant. We are certain that Cinderella never went to the ball, lost her slipper, or married a prince, but we are just as certain that true worth is always discovered in the end—even by the means of something so insignificant as a slipper. We find it hard to take literally most of the story of Beauty and the Beast, but we do not find it hard at all to take literally the part that says Beauty loved something ugly and made it beautiful by love. These are truisms.
The great minds that I mentioned before and that came to such an untimely and fractured end, scoffed at the Bible by calling it a book of fairy tales. I don’t think they could have given a better compliment to its verity, or to its eternal appeal. Certainly the Bible is historically accurate, just as Saint George probably really did slay a dragon. But the Bible is a great deal more than a history book, just as it is a great deal more than an allegory or a poem. It fits each of these categories and can be exclusively classified in none of them. It tells the great reason behind every story that was ever written or really happened and it couches it in the form of one of the simplest stories ever told.
That is perhaps why the best fairy tales and allegories have survived for so long. People love simple stories. They also love happy endings. And they are rather partial to a character coming out on the stage dressed as a simple peasant and turning out in the end to be a prince in disguise—and this is very like what an allegory does.
-A. P.