Your Custom Text Here
Issue X Be Careful What You Wish For
ISSUE X BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR
INTRODUCED BY EDITOR-IN-CHIEF MARIANNE JANACK
Wishing, hoping, and being optimistic
Steven Sondheim’s play Into the Woods begins with a litany of wishes: a young man named Jack wishes that his cow gave more milk; a baker and his wife wish for a child; a young woman named Cinderella wishes to go to the ball that the prince is hosting; a girl in a red cape wishes for a loaf of bread to give her hungry and ill grandmother who lives in the woods.
Fairy tale characters wish for things, and we all know how it goes—often, it goes badly, or doesn’t quite go as the wishers expect. They often get their wishes, but also regret the form this wish fulfillment takes. But it’s not only fairytales that use this storytelling trope: we find it in horror stories like The Monkey’s Paw, where the paw allows the wishers to make three wishes and they use the third wish to undo the second wish, which they undo before they actually see its results.
In It’s a Wonderful Life, however, George Bailey is given the gift of seeing what the world would be like if his wish that he’d never been born were granted (at least, his guardian angel tells him it’s a gift). But he is also given the gift of seeing the full series of consequences of that wish—and the ability to reverse it. For the most part, characters don’t get that lucky.
Wishes are desires thrown out into the world, made real—they may only be whispered in secret, or in prayer, or told to a confidante, but in many stories, the wishes become real, and they affect the way the world is. The moral of the fairytale is that one shouldn’t wish for things to be different—they are as they are, and a change upsets the natural order of things. Our desires shouldn’t affect how the world is—that would be a violation of the difference between what is true and what we want to be true. And besides, human wishes are often ill-considered and irrational, seen from an objective perspective.
Wishful thinking is generally taken to be an epistemic vice—an enemy of realism, and of good epistemic hygiene. And yet, Kant famously said that one of the most important questions that philosophy should address is “What may I hope?” In the story of Pandora’s Box, the last thing in the box, after all the troubles have escaped, is hope—so, hope can sustain humans against the onslaught of awfulness. And it might even be a good thing.
Is hope the same as wish fulfillment? Not necessarily: one might think that hopes should be tied to what’s possible, while wishes are not necessarily so. And wishes, unlike hopes, sometimes seem frivolous: when I was a little girl, I wished for white patent leather “fashion” boots, a chemistry set, and to be named Valerie (which seemed like a glamorous name to me, unlike my real name, which always brought to my mind the nice and boring girl on Gilligan’s Island). Hope seems to be somewhat grander—wishes seem a bit grubby and trivial in comparison. And in many fairytales, wishes are a function of unbridled want or simple greed and a failure to appreciate what one already has.
“Be careful what you wish for” is often completed with this reason: “you just might get it.” That adage points to the ways in which human desires can take the form, in their fulfillment, of nightmares or bring unanticipated consequences. Our stories in this issue are inspired by “be careful what you wish for.” Children have genies and fairy godmothers to instruct them about desire and happiness; writers have stories.