From Robert Herrick's fairies who reward good servants with a handsome tip, to the moral fairies of the Victorian schoolroom, eager to teach us grammar or botany, fairies, like the fairy story, have been hijacked for the causes of manners and morals. More ancient fairies, too, could enforce simple norms. Tales of lakeside fairies discouraged children from playing on the shore, for instance. Fairies' moral authority and also their anarchy stem from their role as the active dead. For the mediaeval world, fairies are dead, but dead that can offer benefits, dead with whom one can, so to speak, do business.
Fairies therefore become a way to manage the fear of death itself.
Finally, fairies represent initiations, perhaps particularly sexual initiations. From ancient Greek Lamia or Persian Lamashtu, she-demons who engulf their male victims, to the English Queen of Fairies who longs for juicy young male lovers, fairies are associated with female desire and male initiation. It is a short step from languorous Titania to the gorgeous fairy chorines of the Victorian stage, luscious in tights and filmy skirts, who excited the passions of their own male votaries in the second and third rows. And fairies' modern descendants, aliens, often offer abductees sexual rapture in exchange for their body parts or seeds. And in doing so they show that even our sophisticated postmodern age needs such creatures to allow us to talk about things that cannot be said otherwise.