Today we share a post by Ernie Durr, a student in our Winter 2025 Introduction to the Fairy Tale course.
Hi, My name is Ernie Durr. I am a student of Santa Monica College, hoping to become a writer and an artist someday. I grew up with very dark tales and romanticized stories such as H. C. Andersen's "The Little Match Girl." I recognized the suffering contained in these tales, and it matched my own.
I share with you an image called “Swan Maiden” by artist Keshi-Shiro which beautifully captures a woman in the midst of transformation, caught between human and swan forms. Her delicate wings unfold as her human features remain—vulnerable yet strong, her gaze distant, heavy with the weight of sacrifice and grace. The figure of the Swan Maiden derives from traditional fairy tales, and Keshi-Shiro’s depiction mirrors this essay’s exploration of female suffering in these tales, where transformation and beauty are often born from pain. Much like H.C. Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid,” the Swan Maiden’s metamorphosis represents the price of love and purity, showing how suffering is intertwined with worth. Yet in her moment of change, there’s a quiet reclamation of agency, a subtle suggestion that transformation, while rooted in sacrifice, can also be a path to power, echoing modern retellings that redefine suffering as choice, not destiny.
Fairy tales have long been the vessels through which culture whispers to women about who they are, what they must endure, and how they may—or may not—be rewarded. Beneath their lace-lined morals and sugar-dusted promises of happily-ever-afters lies a darker, more insidious truth: the eroticization of female suffering. Again and again, fairy-tale heroines are thrust into anguish, their agony not only inevitable but necessary, their pain woven into the very fabric of their desirability. From traditional tales to modern creations, suffering is the crucible through which a woman is deemed worthy of love. But what is it that makes this suffering so tantalizing? Why must beauty and pain be intertwined? And what does it mean that even now, in modern retellings, we find ourselves tangled in this same web?
Pain as Transformation, Pain as Proof
The fairy-tale woman does not simply suffer—she suffers beautifully. Her pain is delicate, refined, and aestheticized, as if anguish were a prerequisite to divinity. In “The Little Mermaid,” Hans Christian Andersen strips his heroine of her voice and forces her to walk on knives so that she may attain love. The physical agony she endures is an extension of her internal longing, a torment that mirrors the desire eating her alive. Her suffering is not incidental—it is the proof of her devotion, a measure of the depth of her love. Without it, she is unworthy. The more she suffers, the more ethereal she becomes, dissolving into sea foam in the ultimate act of martyrdom, purified by pain.
This dynamic reappears in Angela Carter’s more contemporary “The Bloody Chamber,” a retelling of the Bluebeard tale that lays bare the erotic undertones of suffering. The heroine’s vulnerability is fetishized, her innocence intoxicating, her body—much like the bodies of Bluebeard’s previous wives—offered up as a sacrifice to male desire. But Carter, unlike Andersen, does not allow her protagonist to be devoured by this fate. Instead, she upends the narrative, granting the mother—not a prince—the role of savior. The traditional structure fractures, and in its place, Carter forces us to interrogate the fantasy: Why have we, for so long, mistaken suffering for passion?
The Erotic as the Divine: Woman as Sacrificial Lamb
At the heart of this entanglement is a paradox: the feminine is seen as divine, yet that divinity is only fully realized through suffering. Women in fairy tales are not merely loved—they are worshiped. They are ethereal creatures, too delicate for the mortal world, and yet, their value is proven only through trials of anguish. In Charles Perrault’s “Donkeyskin,” the princess must flee the incestuous desires of her father, disguising herself in filth to evade violation. But it is only when she sheds her rags and emerges in all her splendor that the prince deems her worthy. Her suffering is the cost of her sanctity, as if purity cannot exist without degradation first.
This theme recurs in Katherine Arden’s contemporary novel The Bear and the Nightingale, where Vasya is simultaneously feared and revered, her power both a threat and a thing of beauty. She, like so many fairy-tale heroines before her, is caught in the balance between danger and desire, between the mortal and the mystical. She is untamed, yet her suffering is a rite of passage, a necessary step toward becoming something more than a mere girl.
Beauty, the Beast, and the Brutality of Love
Perhaps no story encapsulates this eroticized suffering more clearly than the tale of “Beauty and the Beast.” Beauty’s love is not given to her in kindness but forged through endurance. She must learn to love the monstrous, to see beyond the grotesque exterior, to suffer before she can be rewarded. This theme echoes in modern literature in Naomi Novik’s Uprooted, where Agnieszka is taken by the Dragon, a powerful and seemingly cruel figure, her body and mind reshaped by his dominance. And yet, it is this struggle, this submission to the transformation, that allows her to come into her own power. Love is not gentle in these tales—it is an act of destruction and recreation, a consuming fire that leaves the woman changed, purified by pain.
Breaking the Cycle: Retellings as Reclamation
In many modern retellings, we see attempts to unravel this toxic cycle, to reclaim suffering without fetishizing it. Rikki Ducornet’s “Green Air” reimagines “The Little Mermaid” not as a tragedy of self-sacrifice but as a reclamation of agency, a rejection of the idea that love must be earned through suffering. Similarly, in Naomi Novik’s Spinning Silver, Miryem does not wait for salvation—she takes power into her own hands, rewriting the rules that would have once condemned her to pain in the name of passion.
And yet, even in these subversions, the echoes remain. We cannot seem to extricate suffering from desire, nor can we fully divorce pain from transformation. Perhaps it is because we recognize, on some primal level, that life itself is a series of metamorphoses—birth, growth, love, loss—all of them marked by some form of suffering. But where fairy tales once demanded that women suffer for love, modern retellings allow them to suffer for themselves. The suffering is no longer currency; it is choice. It is power reclaimed.
The Price of Passion, The Cost of Change
Fairy tales have always been both mirrors and maps, reflecting the truths of the world while guiding us toward what could be. The eroticization of female suffering is not merely a relic of the past—it lingers, deeply embedded in our narratives, our fantasies, our cultural DNA. But as we continue to retell these stories, to rework their endings, we carve out new possibilities. Perhaps love does not have to be earned in blood. Perhaps desire does not have to be bound to pain. Perhaps the divine can exist without sacrifice. And perhaps, finally, women can step out of their glass coffins, their castles, their endless suffering, and into something wholly their own.
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