Fairy tales tell the truth

Fairy tales tell the truth, in Cal’s account, by giving lasting form to fears that people struggle to answer directly. In the principal’s office, she connects Rapunzel to the question of how children can be protected: parents may fail to guard them, or try to shield them from everything, yet the world still finds a way in. The tale offers no easy solution. Its truth lies in making that unresolved danger speakable across generations.

From Adult Stories to Children’s Morals

Cal challenges Apollo Kagwa’s assumption that fairy tales are primarily for children. She describes them as stories adults once told one another around a fire after a day’s work, then traces their change to the rise of the merchant class in parts of Europe during the eighteenth century. As merchants sought a higher standard of living and new rules of behavior took hold, Cal argues, tales were reshaped to teach children those rules. In her telling, the change narrowed what the stories could do: a tale organized around a simple moral trains its audience, while a great one tells the truth about a harder human problem.

This history matters to Cal’s argument because it distinguishes a story’s truth from its usefulness as instruction. She does not present Rapunzel as a lesson with a tidy answer. Instead, she treats it as a vessel for a question that remains unsettled. The historical shift from adult storytelling to moral instruction therefore sets up her reading of the tale: its enduring value is not that it tells children how to behave, but that it makes a difficult fear available for adults to examine together.

Rapunzel and the Limits of Protection

Cal identifies the central question of Rapunzel as “How do we protect our children?” Her account makes the story’s danger emerge from opposing failures of care. The old man and woman have a child but do nothing to protect her; the baby is taken. The enchantress then hides the girl in a tower and prevents her from doing anything in the world. Cal calls this extreme control helicopter parenting, but it cannot keep danger out: the prince still finds a way inside. Neglect and confinement seem like opposites, yet neither provides reliable safety.

The question gains force because the tale does not resolve the tension by choosing one parental strategy over the other. Cal emphasizes that the outside world penetrates even the tower. Protection is necessary, but complete control is impossible; a child left entirely unguarded is vulnerable, while a child held back from all experience cannot be made invulnerable. The fairy tale embodies this conflict rather than converting it into a rule. Its truth is the persistence of the problem, not a prescription that makes the problem disappear.

A Present Fear with Ancient Roots

Cal explicitly carries Rapunzel’s question into the present. She says that people asked it hundreds of years ago and that, in 2015, they were still trying to find an answer. Her claim that new fears are old fears, and old fears ancient, does not mean that every period faces identical circumstances. Rather, the tale’s continuing relevance rests on a repeated predicament: adults remain responsible for children in a world they cannot fully control. The distance between the story’s historical setting and the present becomes a measure of how little the underlying fear has changed.

The scene gives this interpretation a physical form. Cal is still in the principal’s office, with a Rapunzel puppet on her hand; while speaking, she makes another puppet from a gray sock, cotton balls, googly eyes, glue, and red felt. The soft shape of cotton briefly appears to Apollo Kagwa like a cloud. These materials make the work of retelling visible: an old concern is not simply preserved as an abstract idea but fashioned into something that can be seen and spoken to. Cal remarks that children at her forthcoming show will treat the puppet as real, even more real than her. The handmade figure thus becomes a means through which a frightening question can enter a child’s imaginative world.

Storytelling as a Shared Act

Cal’s understanding of fairy tales is enacted in the exchange, not merely explained. Apollo Kagwa and Cal remain absorbed in the telling; even the guards, who had been standing in the corners, lower their hands and listen. The scene recalls Cal’s account of adults gathering around a fire: people are drawn together by a story that gives shape to what is difficult to discuss directly. When Apollo asks whether Cal will tell the story to little children, she answers by distinguishing children’s instruction from the older, adult work of storytelling.

That distinction does not exclude children from the tale. Cal is preparing a puppet show for them, and she expects them to respond to the puppet as if it were alive. Instead, she resists treating the story as a simple moral delivered from adult to child. Rapunzel becomes a way for generations to encounter the same unsettled question, even when they cannot provide the same answer—or any answer at all. In Cal’s formulation, fairy tales tell the truth precisely because they keep that question alive.