The Fairest Beauty

The thing about fairy tales is that while they are complete stories from once upon a time to happily ever after, they are very simple. There is usually not too much detail or intriguing and brilliant plot twists. They are more outlines, really; the skeletons of stories, inviting the rest of us creative types to fill in the flesh and come up with truly wonderful stories.

I have always had a little bit of disdain for Disney for taking classic fairy tales and changing them so much. Cinderella, Snow White, Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid, Peter Pan, Hercules— all these great movies have been vastly altered from their original version to become the fairy tales we all know and love. (I will admit, despite the pocket of scholarly disdain, at least half of the movies just mentioned make my own personal all time favorite movies list.)

However, I have recently come to understand, with more extensive research into the story of Belle especially, that Disney was merely taking these story outlines and fleshing them out until they could be beautiful tales with enough music, magic, and drama to capture the hearts of America and become instant classics. The truth is, it’s a little bit brilliant how Disney re-appropriated the rose from the original tale, and how the plot point of Gaston was added in. He took inspiration from timeless tales and then made them his own, which is not something to be scorned or looked down on, but rather, a feat to be praised.

With her book Beauty, Robin McKinley has taken less creative liberties, but the result is no less creative and brilliant. She took the outline of the original tale and built it up with rich wonderful detail and plot. Her descriptions of the castle and grounds are marvelous and truly enchanting. Instead of merely stating that Beauty gradually came to care for the Beast, she spends the time to describe and explain the events in this tale as old as time. She does so so well that the reader, in turn, also comes to care for the Beast- perhaps even a bit before Beauty herself does. She also adds the unexpected detail that Beauty's name is ironic. Compared to her sisters she is comely and unattractive. But the Beast sees the true beauty in her as much as she learns to see the beauty in him.

All the while, McKinley stays true to the original story. instead of changing things, she merely builds on them. She uses the original tale as a solid foundation on which to build her magical enchanted castle. Obviously, I would recommend this book to anyone with an interest in fairy tales, Belle, or wonderful magic. The extensive and wonderful descriptions and rich details make this old story come alive. It is a must read for fairy tale enthusiasts.

Fairest, by Gail Carson Levine, is another must-read, but for entirely different reasons. Similar to Disney, Levine is taking the outline tale and filling it in richly with her own story. She took plot points like a magic mirror, a queen obsessed with beauty, and a poisoned apple and wove them into her own tale.

The queen's guard is instructed to take Aza (an orphaned maiden with pale skin, black hair, ruby lips, and he fairest voice in all he land) away from the castle and kill her. Instead he allows her to live and helps her to safety. The queen finds out and takes matters into her own hands, disguising herself and presenting Aza with a poisoned apple. She is only rescued by the prince, who loves her, and they marry and live happily ever after. Sounds pretty familiar, right?

However, instead of finding solace with happy, sleepy, and grumpy dwarves and cleaning for her keep, Aza finds not only a place to stay, but a home, with the gnomes who live underground and turn out to be her distant relatives. She sings on commission in exchange for precious gems, and stays with her old friend, who is a gnomic judge. When the apple poisons her, her spirit is sent into the mirror, where she discovers the real evil mastermind of the whole plot, Skulni, and ultimately defeats him.

The general outline is very similar to the outline of the beloved tale of snow white, but the beauty of this tale is in Levine's very original details. Along with a kingdom devoted to singing, there are gnomes, ogres, and wonderfully exotic names and languages. The foolish fairy of Levine's creation, Lucinda, makes a star appearance in the plot, and at the end it is mentioned that Aza's sister, Areida, is friends with Ella of Frell, the protagonist in Levine's most well-known work, Ella Enchanted.

While the comparison between Fairest and the classic tale of Snow White are lovely, there is also a wonderful and intelligent contrast. In Snow White, the queen is obsessed with being "the fairest of them all" and only wants to rid the kingdom of anyone who threatens that title, which unfortunate Snow White does. However, Skulni is the real villian of Aza's drama, and he twists the queen to do his bidding. Granted, the queen still strives to be the most beautiful, but she is helped along by the magic of the mirror.

Fairest is different in that the protagonist and Snow White character, is neither the Queen's stepdaughter, nor the fairest or most beautiful in the land. In fact, due to her gnomic blood, the humans through the kingdom find her to be alarmingly unattractive, which they say is a shame because her voice is so beautiful. Only the gnomes and the Prince ever find her beautiful. And in fact, Aza's own obsession with becoming more beautiful to the general population is what leads to her imprisonment and near death.

Levine not only flips the story of Snow White on its head, she flips our expectations of beauty as well. By subverting opinions on beauty, she offers a reevaluation that is all too valuable in our current society, which is as obsessed with beauty as the dreadful queen. Aza learns that popular opinion is not what really matters, that there are different types of beauty, and that everyone has their own beauty. We need only to find it. Hopefully, reading Levine's book and making these realizations for ourselves can be a good first step.

This lesson calls to mind a famous quote from the brilliant Dr. Seuss. "Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who matter don't mind, and those who mind don't matter." In the end, both Aza and the ironically nicknamed Beauty's stories teach us this lesson: true beauty is unique, and generally does not coincide with what is on the outside. 

Flying through Ella Enchanted

When I left home for college and moved my already ridiculous collection of books out of my moms house, I purged the stacks of good young adult books that I nonetheless knew I was never going to read again. While they were good, enjoyable, well written books, I knew then that I had outgrown them. Ella Enchanted, by Gail Carson Levine, however, made the cut. Along with The Two Princesses Of Bamarre, also by Levine,  I simply could not part with it.

The characters and story had enchanted me as a 6th grader, and years later I still knew that stories of this sort were far too important to set aside. Through my high school and college years, Levine's stories were my guilty pleasure. They were lighthearted, innocent, and genuinely fun good reads.

Years later I picked the book up again and was exceedingly amused to discover that my middle school self had written  my name along with the name of my then crush and some stereotypical hearts on the inside cover of the book. I read almost all of the book in a single day, mostly in airports and on planes as I flew to California for my cousin's graduation, and I found it as enchanting this time as all the times before.

While my younger self merely liked the book and had no need to ask why, my (hopefully) somewhat more mature and intelligent mind now recognizes the greatness in Levine's writing and art. She masterfully weaves together a story very much of her own original creation with a tale as old as time.

Somehow she manages to take typical fairy tale tropes like fairy godmothers and magic and flip them on their heads, while simultaneously staying completely true to the story of Cinderella. With the expected evil stepsisters, greedy and cruel stepmother, pumpkin coach, and midnight expiration of spells come  dangerously persuasive ogres, gnomes that can see the future, princes that slide down royal banisters, and fairy godmothers that cook in this wonderful tale of a cursed girl with just the right amount of spunk.

Levine even stays true to the original tale's three balls instead of one. And the touch of naming the prince Charmont (Char for short) and the heroine Eleanor (Ella) is as charming as the prince.