We Have Always Lived in the Woods: On Fairy Tales and the Monsters You Know

On the thin line between fairy tales and real-life horror stories, and how we survive.

This is Tales for Willful Readers, a monthly column by Cate Fricke on the lasting power of folk and fairy tales, how they have influenced us individually and collectively, and the lessons they offer for modern life.

The woodcutter sighed and said to his wife, ‘‘What’s to become of us? How can we feed our poor children when we don’t even have enough for ourselves?”

“I’ll tell you what,” answered his wife. “Early tomorrow morning we’ll take the children out into the forest where it’s most dense. We’ll build a fire and give them each a piece of bread. Then we’ll go about our work and leave them alone. They won’t find their way back home, and we’ll be rid of them.”
—“Hansel and Gretel”

A little brother took his little sister by the hand and said, “Since our mother died, we’ve had not one moment of happiness. Our stepmother beats us every day, and when we come near her, she kicks us away with her foot. We get nothing but hard crusts of bread, just leftovers for food, and the dog under the table is better off. At least he gets a good chunk of meat to eat every now and then. Lord have mercy on us, if our mother only knew! Come, let’s go off together into the wide world.”
—“Brother and Sister”

The parents would buy food for themselves but prohibit the children from having any, with the exception of the 2-year-old, who was getting enough to eat. Sometimes, authorities said, the parents would buy apple or pumpkin pies, leave them on the counter and let them go uneaten, prohibiting the children from tasting them . . . Police also recovered two female Maltese-mix dogs, who appeared to be healthy, friendly and trained.
—“A look at the lives of 13 siblings held captive in a house full of chains—and what comes next,” Washington Post, January 19, 2018

In the quiet minutes before dawn on Sunday, January 14, a seventeen-year-old girl left her suburban California home through a window with an old cell phone, a handful of photographs, and one of her little sisters. The sister, afraid of being caught, turned back, but the seventeen-year-old ran. She used the phone to call the police and report that she and her siblings were being chained and starved inside their home by their parents, David and Louise Turpin. She showed the authorities the photos—of what, we don’t know—to convince them to go to the house, where they found the other twelve children, ranging in age from two to twenty-nine, in conditions that the deputy described as being close to “torture.”

I can’t stop thinking about this story. Browsing cookware at my local Homegoods one weekend after the news broke, I considered that a cast-iron trivet I was admiring was heavy enough to kill someone with one blow if necessary. In the store, a song came on: “I still believe in fairy tales,” the singer squeaked, the first in a list of wholesome, whimsical interests like flower-picking and hand-holding that she presumably holds fast to, despite the harsh world’s cruel derision.

I believe in fairy tales, too, I thought, carefully putting the trivet back on its shelf. I definitely do.

I’ve always taken issue with the idiom “life is no fairy tale,” as in: Life isn’t always a happy story. Not only is this a naive read of fairy tales themselves, it also ignores the fact that the most monstrous acts in these tales are not perpetrated by witches, fairies, or ghosts, but by people both familiar and familial. The threats contained in so many fairy tales are frighteningly realistic, which is precisely why they can so easily skew into the genre of horror. The wicked witch who captures Hansel and Gretel in her iconic gingerbread house is scary, sure, but compare that with the dreadful realization at the beginning of the tale that the children’s own mother proposes that she and her husband abandon the children in the woods to starve. The reason that the Brothers Grimm changed several biological mothers to stepmothers while editing their collected tales for publication is the same reason that makes the story of the Turpin household so horrifying: We don’t want to imagine that a child’s tormentors are none other than their own parents.

A young man who went to school with one of the older Turpin girls posted on Facebook that the revelations about the abuse made him regret how he and others had made fun of her in the past. “It is nothing but sobering to know that the person who sat across from you at the lunch table went home to squalor and filth while you went home to a warm meal and a bedtime story,” he wrote. His mention of bedtime stories struck me because there’s a hint of the grimmest children’s literature tinging the edges of this whole sordid tale. The choice detail of the parents buying pies only to deny them to the kids especially sticks out to me as something a villain in a children’s book might do. I can imagine what the illustration would look like: an apple pie with its glistening crust sitting on the smooth counter; the longing faces of the children clustered around the margins of page, maybe a pair or two of wringing, pleading hands; the mother, with her arms crossed and her nose in the air; and finally, for good measure, one of the dogs in the corner, licking its lips.

It’s more painful to visualize, much less illustrate, other elements of the abuse the Turpins are said to have suffered: the chains on the bed, the isolation, and the abuse, both physical and sexual. Yet these things, too, have their echoes in fairy tales. In stories like “Maid Maleen” from the Brothers Grimm, or “The Bear” in Andrew Lang’s Grey Fairy Book, a father locks his child away in a tower or cave to “protect” her from the world and the daughter eventually escapes, like the teenage Turpin girl. In perhaps the most shocking group of fairy tales, which contains Charles Perrault’s “Donkeyskin” (“Peau d’Âne”), Giambattista Basile’s “The She-Bear,” the Grimms’ “Thousand-Furs” (“Allerleirauh”), “The Princess in the Suit of Leather” in Egypt, and “Little Cat-Skin” in Kentucky, a father vows never to remarry after the death of his wife—unless he can find someone who, depending on the tale, is as beautiful as his deceased bride or who can fit perfectly into an item of her clothing. The only woman who fits the bill is his own daughter, and the king does not hesitate to make nuptial arrangements. Horrified by his intentions, the princess escapes in a disguise and sets out to make her own fortune in the world.

In From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers, Marina Warner explains why tales like “Donkeyskin” are often adapted with the incestuous father written out, or excised from the canon completely: “[The proposed marriage] is only too hard to accept precisely because it belongs to a different order of reality/fantasy from the donkeyskin disguise or the gold excrement or the other magical motifs: because it is not impossible, because it could actually happen and is known to have done so. It is when fairy tales coincide with experience that they begin to suffer from censoring.”

But these horrific and unsavory parts—what scholar Maria Tatar calls the “hard facts” of fairy tales—are precisely what make fairy tales so profound, and so important. Life really is too often like a fairy tale, for far too many people. Neglect, abuse, poverty, incest, infanticide—these are all too real and common.

One of the most haunting fairy tale references I’ve read in the past several years came from a Swedish doctor quoted in a New Yorker article about “Uppgivenhetssyndrom,” or resignation syndrome, which had at the time befallen a large number of refugee children who faced deportation from Sweden. Upon learning that they would have to leave their homes, the children stopped eating and talking, and fell into a deep sleep from which they refused to wake. “They are like Snow White,” said Dr. Hultcrantz. “They just fall away from the world.” Despite this magical description, what we’re really talking about is trauma—the trauma of realizing that the place you’ve considered home is the least safe place of all. The doctor used the story of Snow White as a touchstone, to help others better understand the children’s ordeal.

The Turpin children were rescued from their home because one of them summoned the strength to leave. Rebecca Bailey, a psychologist who helps trauma victims, told the Washington Post that the seventeen-year-old’s escape was “exceptional,” since children in similar situations can often be frozen by the fear of punishment. “We don’t know if she hatched the escape all by herself,” Bailey said. “But it is certainly remarkable that she was able to find the energy to find a way out and then actually go.”

Sometimes I still lie awake at night thinking of those young people and their daring sister, and all that waits for them in the world beyond their parents’ house. But if fairy tales teach us anything, it is that no matter what dangers await, help is waiting also.

How much stronger must you be, in every way, when the wolf is your own father, and no malicious, cannibalistic witch is as monstrous as your own mother? When home is the place you must escape, you have to be immensely strong and unfathomably brave to imagine another life and to run toward it full-tilt. Fairy tales reward those that thus strike out on their own to find refuge and help from strange lands and strange people. They offer us the assurance that while monstrosity can fester even in the most sacred of places, the strange new world outside may not be entirely filled with monsters.