Gertrud Mueller Nelson

“Because fairy tales contain powerful truths about the human condition, many of them, with tenacity and uncanny persistence, turn up, theme and variation, in vastly different cultures. The stories seem to say that certain truths are everyone's reality, no matter where you live...
So we crack open our stories and enter 'a fairy tale world' but quickly discover that this world offers no 'retreat from reality,' nor does it invite us to a world of shining bliss. Rather, anguish and darkness are the fairy tale's prevailing tone--the anguish of a lost paradisiacal happiness and the inevitable darkness that enters every life. In darkness and anguish we stumble upon the fevers of the soul or the fevers of the culture. More often than not, there is an enchantment which is not a positive transformation--not enchanting at all, as we like to use that word--but a stunting or maiming of the hero or the culture.
In the darkness and pain of the story we engage our own 'stuck' places, the blocks, the wounds, the fears, the passions, the possibilities. We learn that only anguish and disenchantment can transform us... Only in disenchantment and in lowliness will the hero become real...”
― Gertrud Mueller Nelson, Here All Dwell Free: Stories to Heal the Wounded Feminine