As the father of a six year-old girl, I am obliged to take a position on fairies.
Just the other day, as I cajoled her into her school uniform, my daughter looked up from a half-hearted and deliberately inept attempt at putting on a sock, and said: “Fairies are real. Aren’t they, Daddy?”
It’s been coming on strong for some time now, the fairy thing. God knows the 'Frozen' era was a drawn-out and harrowing ordeal, but then, almost overnight, it was over.
Do you remember that film 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers'? It was a 50s sci-fi about an alien take-over in which humans are systematically replaced by emotionless duplicates, grown in creepy “pods” (the best of the remakes starring Donald Sutherland, coolest actor ever).
Well, it was a bit like 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers', our daughter’s sudden transformation from ardent Elsa-wannabe to wide-eyed fairy-fanatic. (Though, unlike the body-snatched, she’s still as emotional as ever, which is highly emotional.)
She draws and paints fairies, reads about fairies and plays fairy games with her fairy-fixated friends
Since the metamorphosis, she spends much of her time crafting little gardens and houses for her ethereal playmates, out of whatever comes to hand - pebbles, petals, twigs, orange peel and old Christmas decorations have all featured. These she leaves in her wake wherever she goes. We are on the verge of being barred from several local cafes as a consequence.
When she’s not busy with one of her fairyland infrastructure projects, she flutters about the place, communing with invisible sprites and exercising magical powers, mostly aimed at making her little brother’s life a misery.
She draws and paints fairies, reads about fairies and plays fairy games with her fairy-fixated friends, who have fairy birthday parties at which various fairy-themed activities quickly descend into full-blooded fracases over who knows most about fairy lore, and whether the so-called birthday girl is all that simpatico with all things fairy, anyway, or just one more try-hard arriviste on the scene...
Some may blame Disney for this collective obsession. Its Fairies franchise was launched in 2005 to appeal to those girls who were just about ready to shake off the pink chiffon Princess phase.
Being a slack, sometime stay-at-home dad, I have, of course, resorted to those Tinker Bell straight-to-DVD movies in my perpetual quest for an hour’s peace and quiet. And our daughter is certainly taken with the franchise, already able to name three or four of Tink’s Pixie Hollow cronies (those fiends in marketing sure know what they’re doing). But this fairyphilia that’s taken hold of her comes from deep inside, deeper even than Disney.
People have been chasing fairies forever. The folklore from which their mythology originate goes way back, to long before Christianity. Elizabethan literature is full of playful sprites squirting love-potions at people while they sleep, sparking side-splittingly hilarious romantic misadventure and the like. The Victorians were bananas about fairies, too.
Then there were the Cottingley Fairy photographs - shots of two cousins, ten and thirteen year-old girls, apparently mucking about with a bunch of fairies in an English country garden in 1917, which were declared “genuine” by the Spiritualist movement at the time. Luminaries as bright as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle were taken in by the images. In this case Sherlock Holmes’ creator was let down by poor powers of deduction - the truth finally emerged in the late seventies that the “fairies” were simple paper cut-outs.
The , in England again, who had managed to photograph fairies in his garden only last year. It currently has 2.9 million “likes” on Facebook. Clearly, there is something about the notion of tiny little people hovering among us that really floats our boat, and has done for millennia.
It’s definitively innocent; the innocence of believing that the world is a place of magic, and play
And that’s what our daughter is tapping into right now. It’s all very Carl Jung and the collective unconscious. At least that’s what I’m guessing, never having read that book. (Though I give it an impressively prominent position on the shelf.)
Of course, it’s a delight to witness, the fairy thing. It’s definitively innocent; the innocence of believing that the world is a place of magic, and play. If we’re outside at dusk, she’ll run around in a frenzy of fairy-chasing, turning around to me with wild-eyed intensity in the fading light to check if I can see them, too.
I nod and smile, tell her to come inside and get ready for bed, before she gets bitten by mosquitoes.
Collusion in the delicate, fleeting fictions of childhood goes with the parenting territory, of course. And I’ll happily contribute to fairy facility-design, deftly replace the tooth under the pillow with a gold coin, take her to the post office to mail Santa’s letter to the north pole.
Soon enough she’ll wise-up and see the game is rigged, maybe catch me in the dark fumbling after a dropped premolar. If she hasn’t worked it out by the time she reaches high school, maybe I should have a word.
Right now I look her in the eye and give her my answer. “I’m not sure if fairies are real, but I think they might be. What do you think?”
My daughter looks down at her hands for a moment and purses her lips, then llifts her eyes to mine with a radiant smile. “Fairies are real,” she tells me, beaming.
“Of course fairies are real,” I agree. “Now, for pity’s sake, will you please put on your sock?”
Ian Rose is a Melbourne-based writer.
