Moral or No Moral

In the introduction of our book we find that the principal difference amongst fairy tales is that there either is or isn't a moral. This reminds me of two things. I discovered in my 300 Lit Crit class that, according to Phillip Sydney in his Apology for Poetry, "Poesy therefor is an art of imitation, for so Aristotle termeth it in his word mimeses, that is to say, a representing...a speaking picture; with this end, to teach and delight." Well, the same could be said for fairy tales, I think. Their aim is to both teach and delight, or maybe just one or the other, but these are its basic aims. Furthermore, fairy tales, to a more eccentric degree than poetry I would think, are a representation, but of what I might ask? Are they representations of the soul, or caricatures of reality, or of an idea? But once the idea or conception or what have you is represented through the art and language of the fairy tale, we see representations of it, and thusly its displacement. Its displacement becomes representation of a representation. This is Plato's idea of the three beds, each one being further from the truth (the idea, the actual, and the representation), but, in the case of a fairy tale, there may never have been a basic, conceptual truth to begin with, only an abstraction. How near or far it is from any truth or aspect of reality seems arbitrary in a fairy tale, as it might be in any sort of literature and poetry, as long as its intentions are to teach and delight.

On the other hand, let me suggest of fairy tales without morals. I was scrolling through my Mythologies blog from a previous class and I had written about how Nathaniel Hawthorne displaced certain stories from Ovid's Metamorphosis into two children's book with apparent morals. They were called the Wonderbook for Girls and Boys and Tanglewood Tales, respectively. Their intention was to teach a moral through the fantastic images and narrative style (a story within a story) of the fairy tales adopted from Ovid's stories. But as we learned from Dr. Sexson about The Metamorphosis, "There is no moral!", or, "The moral of the story is the story". It is not necessarily a life lesson or broad societal impacts that makes a fairy tale or story great, but it is the story itself, in and of its own beauty. And just the same, it's damn near impossible to extract an inkling of righteousness or morality from the story of Tereus, Procne, and Philomela as it is from the Juniper Tree (in both stories someone is chopped up and fed to a loved one). But both are great stories, beautifully imaginative and originally oral.