Le fiabe non raccontano favole. Una difesa dell’esperienza

Although today they are commonly considered children’s stories, fairy tales for centuries have been a tool for adult entertainment and education. Like great literature more generally, they give shape and voice to some fundamental junctures of human experience. They thus let the deepest experience speak, with all its errors and terrors, its anxieties and fears, without bothering to build around it a universe as perfect as it is illusory. This is discussed in Silvano Petrosino’s evocative analysis and interpretation here of three well-known fairy tales: Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White and Cinderella. Inspiring his reading is the conviction that at the bottom of these three fairy tales, underneath a seemingly peaceful and appeasing surface, the dramatic issue of the journey to become a woman is stirring, a process that is by no means a foregone conclusion, since it is always accompanied by the need to overcome dangers, sustain trials, and make decisions. This is what Petrosino calls the \’law of double birth’: one comes to life without deciding it, but one does not become an authentic man/woman without deciding it. One is not born a man/woman, but one becomes one, and to that end one must be reborn to full humanity after being born a first time to life. The stories of Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White and Cinderella confirm this with unquestionable certainty: becoming a woman is never just a walk in the woods.