Le fiabe non raccontano favole. Una difesa dell'esperienza

[Autom. eng. transl.] Although today they are commonly considered children's stories, fairy tales have been a tool for entertainment and education for adults for centuries. Like great literature in general, they give shape and voice to some fundamental turning points in human experience. They therefore let the deepest experience speak, with all its errors and terrors, with its anguish and fears, without worrying about building a perfect and illusory universe around it. This is what Silvano Petrosino discusses in the evocative analysis and interpretation that he offers here of three very well-known fairy tales: Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White and Cinderella. His reading is inspired by the belief that at the bottom of these three fairy tales, beneath an apparently calm and reassuring surface, there is in truth the dramatic question of becoming a woman or, more precisely, of the journey to become a woman, a process that is by no means a foregone conclusion, given that it is always accompanied by the need to overcome dangers, endure trials, make decisions. This is what Petrosino calls the "law of double birth": one comes into life without deciding it, but one does not become an authentic man/woman without deciding it. One is not born a man/woman, but one becomes one, and for this purpose one must be reborn to full humanity after being born a first time into life. The stories of Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White and Cinderella confirm this with indubitable certainty: becoming a woman is never a simple walk in the woods.