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What do fairy tales bring to their readers? Eternal happy endings where the prince and princes live happily ever after. Trolls. Even wicked witches. The Fantasy and Fairy Tales Exhibition will tell you something different!

 “Fairy tales, as we know them, in America now, have been cleaned up with happy endings,” said Carl Schafer, the Associate Director of the Museum of Art. “These works deal with the subconscious and dark side of how the fairy stories have been brought to us.” This is the basis for many fairy tales that are written through the 19^th and the early 20^th centuries.

Carl said, though Disney made a lot of happy–ending tales without conflicts, the feminist artists are taking the original versions back. In the image Glass Slipper by Peregrine Honig, a girl is wearing a glass slipper on her foot with the other foot bleeding. In the story, the glass slipper was the object which Cinderella had lost in the dance party. Many women cut their toes and shaved the backs of their ankles off in order to fit the slipper on their feet.

“What Peregrine Honig has noticed is, women are completed dependent on men for their identities, they have no ability on their own to create an identity by themselves,” Carl said.

This exhibition of prints is free to the public. It has been in the Museum of Art at Ball State University since January 16 and runs through March 22.