THE RHETORICAL SITUATION

Purpose Traditionally, authors write fairy tales to entertain their readers and to teach morals or lessons to young audiences. Authors achieve these purposes, in part, through characters (often stock characters such as imperiled princesses and dangerous wolves) that are easily identifiable and generic enough that a wide audience can relate to them. Authors of fairy tales entertain by keeping their stories brief and their pacing brisk, and instruct by using every detail, sentence, and line of dialogue so it leads to the moral or lesson.

Audience Authors of fairy tales create stories for children and, secondarily, for the adults who read to them at home or at school. Authors bring in fantasy elements, such as magic and talking animals, because these elements captivate children. The stories are written so that they’re easy for young readers to understand and remember; authors tend to focus on universal human themes (curiosity, fear, coming of age, etc.), to connect with as many readers as possible.

Rhetorical appeals Authors of fairy tales most often rely on appeals based on pathos. Because their purpose is to teach a lesson to a young audience, writers rely on emotion to move the reader. In “Little Red Riding Hood,” the reader needs to feel the inherent danger of wolves in order to heed the warning of the tale. Authors also establish their credibility (ethos) by using the conventions of the genre, such as the stock opening of “Once upon a time” and a voice that sounds very assured.

Modes & media Most often, we encounter fairy tales in anthologies such as Grimm’s and Mother Goose. These print-based collections of tales are usually illustrated; sometimes individual tales are translated into film, such as Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Sleeping Beauty, or recorded as audiobooks.

THE GENRE’S CONVENTIONS

Elements of the genre

Typical elements of fiction. Fairy tales are works of fiction, and like other works of fiction, they are typically structured around a few main elements: a plot—an arrangement of incidents that shape the action of a story. Authors also employ characters (the people involved in the story), a setting (the time, place, and atmosphere in which the story takes place), symbolism (the use of a person, object, image, word, or action that has a range of meaning beyond the literal), a point of view (who tells the story and how), and a theme (the story’s central meaning or main idea).

Magical or fantasy elements. Unlike most other types of fiction, fairy tales, as the genre’s name implies, also feature fairies and magical creatures, such as the fairy godmother in “Cinderella”; magical elements, such as the decades-long naps in “Sleeping Beauty” and “Rip Van Winkle” and/or magical objects, such as the talking mirror in “Snow White.”

Stock characters. Fairy-tale characters are usually one-dimensional, defined by only a few exaggerated details, such as greed, intelligence, or beauty. In “The Three Little Pigs,” each pig is defined by one particular trait: One builds a house of straw, one a house of sticks, and one a house of bricks. Fairy-tale characters are usually completely good or completely evil (such as the “big bad” wolf in “Little Red Riding Hood”). They are often animals that the author has anthropomorphized—that is, the animals have human capabilities, such as being able to speak and wear clothing.

Conflict. In most fairy tales, main characters have a task to fulfill or a journey to complete; often they are in danger.

Moral/lesson. Conveying a moral or lesson—which is usually direct and obvious—is the main purpose of most fairy tales (don’t go into the woods alone, etc.).

Style

Conversational but often didactic tone. Authors often use an informal tone (e.g., “Grandma, what big teeth you have”), but because they are writing to teach children a lesson, the tone can also be preachy (e.g., “There is no believing a liar, even when he speaks the truth,” the final lines of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf”). Traditional fairy tales do not feature irony or humor, though some modern versions do.

Simple prose. Most authors of fairy tales use very straightforward language and sentence structure (e.g., “Once upon a time”).

Repetition and rhythm. Like poems or songs, fairy tales often include specific patterns of language and refrains (e.g., “I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down.”)

Sparse detail. Authors tend to rely on just a few details, for example, describing a castle simply as “gloomy” or a forest as “dark.” Details such as how large or old the castle is, or what kinds of trees grow in the forest, are usually not revealed.

Design Although the details in the fairy tales themselves are usually spare, many are lavishly illustrated. Some are illustrated with realistic images, such as the Gustave Doré engravings that accompany some editions of Charles Perrault’s version of “Little Red Riding Hood.” In more modern books of fairy tales, illustrations are often colorful and fanciful looking; in The Random House Book of Fairy Tales, for example, each tale includes full-color images that illustrate key moments.

Sources Fairy tales do not include footnotes or Works Cited pages, although most modern day fairy tales are based on older stories that have been circulating in either oral or written form for generations. “Little Red Riding Hood,” for instance, is connected to many European peasant tales that go back as far as the 1300s.