“We’re All Stories in the End”: The Fairy Tale as a Lexicon of Popular Culture

Abstract

As fairy-tale scholar Jack Zipes writes in the introduction to Why Fairy Tales Stick: The Evolution and Relevance of a Genre (2006), fairy tales have over the course of generations been “reprinted and reproduced in multiple forms and entered into cultural discursive practices in diverse ways so that they became almost ‘mythicized’ as natural stories, as second nature” (1). During the twentieth century there was an increase in this reproducing of the fairy tale that Zipes describes, in the form of numerous fairy-tale adaptations not only in text but in film. In fact, screen adaptations of fairy tales have proven highly influential in popular culture, with Disney’s animated musicals in particular popularizing fairy tales both to children and adults. This Disneyfication of the genre contributed to the creation of a homogenized, sanitized comprehension of fairy tales, but it has also ensured the expansion of a phenomenon defined by Karin Kukkonen as fairy-tale “popular cultural memory,” a “repository of conventions and imagery that are continually reconstructed in contemporary popular culture” and shared among “a community of media readers” (1). While the expansion of fairy-tale popular cultural memory in the twentieth century has increased scholarly interest in fairy-tale studies, leading to a more complex understanding of the fairy-tale genre, it has also resulted in the fairy tale becoming a part of the lexicon of popular culture and, by extension, storytelling.