Good And Evil In Fairytales

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If children were always read stories of good verses good and where nothing bad happens, wouldn’t that present to children a false sense of reality? In reading stories about good versus evil and stories where bad comes to those who are otherwise good, we build a sense of reality for children. We create a real world environment and show children that we do not live in a perfect world. In classic fairytales, consequences do not only fall upon those who are evil, but consequences and evil also falls upon those who are good.
In the story The Young Slave by Giambattista Basile, Lilla, the sister of the Baron, was playing a game with the other girls her age in the garden trying to jump over a rose without touching it. All the girls failed except …show more content…

Lilla became pregnant after eating the rose-leaf in dishonesty. This is an example of evil falling upon those who are generally good. Lilla kept the pregnancy a secret and after giving birth to the child- who Lilla named Lisa- she sent Lisa to live with the fairies. One of the fairies cast a curse upon the child, that when the child was seven years old she would die from a comb stuck in her head. The child had just been born and had not done any evil to anyone. This is another example of evil falling upon those who are good. When Lisa was seven years old the curse actually transpired, her mother “encased the body in seven caskets of crystal, one within the other, and placed her in a distant room of the palace, keeping the key in her pocket” (p.80). Upon her death, Lilla left all her belongings to the Baron including …show more content…

A year later the king remarried. One day when Snow White was seven years old, because she had become more beautiful than the queen, the Queen had a huntsman take the child into the forest to kill her and bring back “her lungs and liver as proof” (p.84). This is an example of evil falling upon those that are good. Instead of killing the girl, the huntsman told her to “Just run away, you poor child” (p.84). The huntsman killed a boar and took back the boar’s lungs and liver as proof instead. The queen tried several times throughout the story to kill Snow White because of her beauty; first by lacing her too tightly, then by leaving a poisoned comb in her hair, and finally by tricking her into eating a poisoned apple. These are all examples of evil falling upon those who a

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