The short story, “There Was Once,” by Margaret Atwood, shows that fairy tales are not at all like reality and that people need to realize this when reading them. Modernized fairy tales depict an oversimplified world. The story starts with someone beginning to read the story, “Cinderella,” to another person. The reader had just read the first sentence of the story before being stopped by the listener. The listener disagreed with the setting of this story. It took place in a forest, much like many other fairy tales. She wanted to hear a story in a more realistic, updated setting. The reader then changed the sentence to accommodate the listener’s request. However even after changing it, the listener was unhappy with other parts of that one sentence. She then wanted to change the status of wealth, the labels of good and evil, the importance of the physical attractiveness and that it was a stepmother in the story. She even disliked that fact that the sentence mentions the protagonist is a young “girl” even though she marries in the end, and that the story is set in the past, not the present.
The listener tore that sentence apart word by word. Though we are accustomed to seeing this kind of writing in fairy tales, maybe it is right to not accept them blindly. Especially when children hear these stories, they are deceived into believing in them. The listener thought about the falsities she would have to listen to in this story and she decided it needed to be more believable. She is trying to teach us that we should rid this literature of all its clichés and eternal happy endings and hear more truth.
