“The point about fairy-stories is that they are written not merely without a moral but without a morality. They take place in a world beyond good and evil, where people (or animals) suffer or prosper for reasons unconnected with ethical merit--for being ugly or beautiful respectively, for instance, or for even more unsatisfactory reasons. A little girl sets out to do a good deed for her grandmother and gets gobbled up by a wolf. For all this is related by the fairy-story tellers without approval or disapproval, without a glimmer of subjective feeling, as though their pens were dipped in surgical spirit to sterilize the microbes of emotion. They never seek to criticize or moralize, to protest or plead or persuade; and if they have an emotional impact on the reader, as the greatest of them do, that is not intrinsic to the stories. They would indeed only weaken that impact to achieve it. They move by not seeking to move; almost, it seems, by seeking not to move."
C. M. Woodhouse wrote in the Times Literary Supplement.
Now the real question here is, doesn’t that make life a fairytale? Doesn’t the juxtaposition prove redundant if they’re the closest thing to life yet the farthest in definition?
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