'Normalized Magic In The New Mother'

As with any genre or form, fairy tales provoke a certain kind of thought when approached. The ideas of magic and adventure, marriage and loss, and more jump to mind. One technique in particular relies on a fairy tale’s established environment: “normalized magic” (Bernheimer). The fairy tale itself exists in a uniform world, one with rules and laws different from reality. Magic exists in varying forms, sometimes grandiose and sometimes subtle. But its existence in typically preserved throughout stories of this form. Kate Bernheimer’s “Fairy Tale is Form, Form is Fairy Tale” describes normalized magic as “not astounding… normal.” This key concept in fairy tales acts passively; the reader understands and internalizes magic’s presence in the story. This is the core of the technique’s effect. For example, Neil Gaiman’s Coraline features a door to another world in an ordinary doorway. The doorway, bricked up in the past, opens again to allow Coraline to stumble into a mysterious realm that looks suspiciously off from her natural home. The reader does not question this doorway. The reader instead worries further on, suspicious …show more content…
Clifford introduces (towards the end of her short story) the New Mother, a creature of wood, glass, and bone. Naturally, the reader must accept the ability of this organism to survive on an unrealistic force: magic. In this same way, Skyrim introduces atronachs and spriggons, elemental beings procured by nature through magic. Normalizing magic enables the creation of these characters to fully develop a story; in fact, Clifford’s story is titled after such a character! Another example is Ariel, the mermaid, in Walt Disney’s The Little Mermaid. Without the added dimension of magic, these concepts may seem more appropriate in satire or comedy. Normalized magic allows these ideas to remain serious, romantic, dramatic, or any other tone in literature and