Perspective and Fairy Tales

So while I was googling various topics that we discussed in class, I stumbled upon the “Proppian Fairy Tale Generator v1.0.” This tool allows you to select the different Proppian functions, click generate, and voila! You have a fairy tale! If you keep the same functions selected and click generate again, the story changes a little bit, or you can change the functions up and get a totally different story. You can even select some preset fairy tale story lines on the side of the page, such as “Cinderella” or “Hansel and Gretel” and the generator will automatically select the correct functions for you. As I read some of these different stories, something seemed wrong (I mean aside from the huge story gaps). At first I couldn’t quite figure out what it was…but the stories generated definitely did not seem like fairy tales to me as I read them.

I finally realized that all of the fairy tales we have read so far in class are written from the 3rd person perspective whereas the stories created by the “Proppian Fairy Tale Generator v1.0” are all from the 1st person perspective. So my question is, why did this different narrative voice make these fairy tales feel so wrong? Previously I was not consciously aware of this aspect of the fairy tales we have read so what is the big deal? I think that this perhaps has to do with the common “Once Upon a Time” feeling of fairy tales; the sense that they occurred at some indeterminate time in the past and in a magical place. Putting fairy tales in the 1st person definitely diminishes this effect and makes the stories seem less surreal.

Even though this is not an instance of differing cultures, I think that this also demonstrates what we were talking about in class in terms of understanding things better by looking at “the other.” I'm not sure it would have occurred to me that the 3rd person narrative was such an important aspect of the fairy tales we have read so far if I had not read these “other” fairy tales that the “Proppian Fairy Tale Generator v1.0” came up with.