Fat is not a Fairy Tale
Jane Yolen
I am thinking of a fairy tale,
Cinder Elephant,
Sleeping Tubby,
Snow Weight,
Where the princess is not
anorexic, wasp-waisted;
flinging herself down the stairs.
I am thinking of a fairy tale,
Hansel and Great,
Repoundzel,
Bounty and the Beast,
where the beauty
has a pillowed breast,
and fingers plump as sausage.
I am thinking of fairy tale
that is not yet written,
for a teller not yet born,
for a listener not yet conceived,
for a world not yet won,
where everything round is good:
the sun wheels, cookies, and the princess.
If there must be princesses, then let them be real -- not in that long past-tense illusory sense of 'them' ('royals') having different blood from 'us' (a sense that would vanish vast enough if one of the purported 'them' needed a transfusion), but real. Paper-bound princesses should have pimples and fears and be 'too fat' or 'too thin' (whatever those terms mean, wherever they mean them and however mean they are meant to be).
The glorious The Paper Bag Princess, product of the equally remarkable Robert Munsch, started life as breath. It was a told tale before it was a printed one. In The Paper Bag Princess, the princess is the hero of her own story. (Whether or not we like it, we are all the protagonists of our life's stories. Whether we are the heroes, the antiheroes, interferences or something else is a matter of personal choice.) At some point, I hope to insert an audio file of Munsch telling his Princess. For now, all I can do is suggest you read it -- or get somebody to read it to you.
This is not a gender-specific rant. Heroes and heroines come in all forms, shapes, sizes, ages, and and and, with arrays of flaws and strengths. They are not lacking in fear. Bravery is not a tribute of the fearless. Dorothy Bernard said, 'Courage is fear that said its prayers.' Therefore, let us celebrate cowards who do it anyway, who do it despite, who do it because the good thing must be done, regardless of all the 'isms' with which we and others might tattoo us.
We cannot dream in flawless skins. For our sakes, for the reading dreamers, let the person in the story be as the person hearing or reading the tale, not the norm, not a porcelain ideal, not the unattainable doing the impossible, but someone we can hope to be achieving the things we would like to be able to do.
The glorious The Paper Bag Princess, product of the equally remarkable Robert Munsch, started life as breath. It was a told tale before it was a printed one. In The Paper Bag Princess, the princess is the hero of her own story. (Whether or not we like it, we are all the protagonists of our life's stories. Whether we are the heroes, the antiheroes, interferences or something else is a matter of personal choice.) At some point, I hope to insert an audio file of Munsch telling his Princess. For now, all I can do is suggest you read it -- or get somebody to read it to you.
This is not a gender-specific rant. Heroes and heroines come in all forms, shapes, sizes, ages, and and and, with arrays of flaws and strengths. They are not lacking in fear. Bravery is not a tribute of the fearless. Dorothy Bernard said, 'Courage is fear that said its prayers.' Therefore, let us celebrate cowards who do it anyway, who do it despite, who do it because the good thing must be done, regardless of all the 'isms' with which we and others might tattoo us.
We cannot dream in flawless skins. For our sakes, for the reading dreamers, let the person in the story be as the person hearing or reading the tale, not the norm, not a porcelain ideal, not the unattainable doing the impossible, but someone we can hope to be achieving the things we would like to be able to do.
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