Days of Fairy Tales

Mary Jane Loves Stories

I couldn't watch the Disney production of The Little Mermaid because I'd heard how different it was from the original tale by Hans Christian Anderson. Mary Jane wouldn't permit it. She can still remember the opening lines from the story that she wanted read every night of her childhood. "Far out in the ocean, where the water is as blue as the prettiest cornflower, and as clear as crystal, it is very, very deep; so deep, indeed, that no cable could fathom it..." When she first heard this story she had never seen the sea. She didn't see it, it fact, until I was in my early thirties and flew to San Francisco, so for all those years she imagined that cornflower blue, while I taught Emily Dickinson to English students:

I never saw a moor,
I never saw the sea;
Yet know I how the heather looks,
And what a wave must be.

Each night, and I remember this particularly from the years at Lake of the Woods, Mary Jane's mother would stand her up in the center of the bed to check for wood ticks before the pajamas went on and the pillows were plumped and the child climbed between the sheets with Klimek's Lodge embroidered on the seam in red thread. How many nights her mother actually read The Little Mermaid, I can't say for sure. It seemed like Mary Jane wanted it every night.

A large part of my life was spent working with children at a Catholic Charities children's home. During that time I read Bruno Bettelheim's work on the importance of fairy tales in the development of children.(Uses of Enchantment) His research turned out to correspond with my own experience, using a storytelling technique to access a child's emotional experience. The child would ask for the same fairy tale over and over until the dilemma it addressed was resolved. A lot of the children I worked with wanted to hear "Hansel and Gretel" which made sense to me because they had wandered away from what was often an abusive home and found themselves in a treatment center, (the witch's Gingerbread House?) where life seemed safe but where they soon found themselves virtually locked in and feeling anxious over what new dangers might befall them there. The fairy tale became their bible for finding a way to a transformed family and home.

Mary Jane's fairy tale was The Little Mermaid. She reacted to the story just as Bettelheim would later speculate then prove that children do. The tale enchanted her. In that enchantment she became the mermaid, learned the mermaid's every desire, every choice, every movement. It was her bible.

The mermaid would do anything for love. She would sacrifice her family, her identity, even finally her life and her hope for an immortal soul: all for love.

Maybe this kind of sacrifice would keep the mother safe from the danger of the fire.

Did Mary Jane think that way? No. She was a very small child. She didn't do much by way of thinking. But she loved the tale. From the tale she learned how to live, how to be who she became. Riding the waves of this story she eventually came to believe that the best way to love was to leave her family, sacrifice her relationship to her high school sweetheart, enter a convent, give up her name, her home, her culture, her place in the flow of time. Honestly, when people asked her why, she really didn't know. She only knew she had to go.

So, I ask you this: Is it possible to bring her back this late in the game?

The mermaid, after refusing to kill the prince to save herself, casts herself into the sea, knowing that she will become foam that disappears, knowing that she will never have an immortal soul. But the daughters of the air take pity on her. They lift her onto the currents of air. She floats above the earth in the winds and clouds where for three hundred years she will whisper encouragement to wounded human souls. After all that time which is shortened if she witnesses goodness in children, and is lengthened if children are bad, she will be released from this ghostly state. And then, only then, because of her compassion for the peoples of earth, she will discover in herself the immortal soul for which she longed.

The tale is written in Mary Jane's every cell. Will she be required to act it out right to the end and beyond? And if she is, is that such an awful thing?