In Margaret Atwood’s poem “There Was Once”, Atwood uses irony to point out the societal problems within the genre of fairy tales. Charles Perrault, the author of the short story “The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood”, writes about fantastic creatures, magic, and love, following the generic conventions of fairy tales. When compared to Perrault’s short story “The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood”, Atwood’s poem both compliments and contrasts Perrault’s. These two texts, although similar, offer different views on the genre of fairy tales. Margaret Atwood’s satirical poem, “There Was Once”, aims to disrupt the generic conventions of a traditional fairy tale. Atwood begins with the traditional opening of a fairy tale by writing, “there once was a poor girl, …show more content…
Perrault’s fairy tale follows the generic conventions of a traditional fairy tale which is what Atwood had been condemning. The tale begins with the sentence, “there were formerly a king and a queen, who were sorry they had no children”, which is the normally the beginning of most fairy tales (Perrault 398). The most notable characteristic of a fairy tale begins with the phrase “once upon a time” or a variation of it such as Perrault’s “there were” (398). Unlike Atwood, Perrault mentions that the princess was “the most beautiful person in the world” (399), focusing on more of a materialistic aspect of the princess instead of Atwood’s more realistic view of her. Perrault’s fairy tale includes other generic conventions like a handsome prince saving the day and marrying the princess, a happy ending, and an evil queen. The reader’s understanding of the fairy tale genre changes when reading this story and reading Atwood’s. Perrault follows all of the generic conventions of a fairy tale while Atwood challenges them. The reader would have a new perspective on Perrault’s story after reading Atwood’s because it allows them to recall how all fairy tales are very similar and stick to their generic conventions. This allows people to think about the way society sees women as homemakers and men as breadwinners, …show more content…
Perrault, a 17th century French author, wrote about women as damsels in distress in his fairy tales, while Atwood, a 20th and 21st century Canadian author, offers a more realistic and modern approach in her writing. Sharon Wilson, author of the essay “Margaret Atwood and the Fairy Tale: Postmodern Revisioning In Recent Texts”, calls Atwood’s use of fairy tales to talk about current issues in society as “meta-fairy tales”. Atwood’s “meta-fairy tales” offer insight on gender politics in a current patriarchal society. Instead of using generic conventions to tell her story, like Perrault does, Atwood uses them and then dismantles them in order to show the reader the problems within the genre like she does in her poem. Atwood began the story as the female lead being beautiful, but changed her to being average looking, and changes the stereotypical evil stepmother to an evil stepfather. On the contrary, Perrault follows the basic generic conventions of fairy tales by having the prince marry the beautiful princess and writes the main antagonists as two older women. Perrault uses his story to frame the prince as the hero who saves the sleeping princess and her kingdom, and later saves his family from his evil cannibalistic mother. Perrault’s story has more of a magical aspect than Atwood’s since he includes fairies and curses in his story. Perrault’s story offers an escape from the trials and
In “Cinderella”, by the Grimm Brothers, the authors utilize a multitude of fairy tale genre conventions such as frequent usage of rhetorical devices, magical creatures, and the classic “Happy Ever After” fairy tale ending, to emphasize the importance of genuineness and the dangers of pursuing superficiality. The authors use several rhetorical devices such as symbolism and juxtaposition
Most of the children read about many fairy tales, especially Snow Whites, Sleeping beauty, and Cinderella when they grew up. It is a surprising fact that to discover a hidden, unexpected political intention in the simple plot of fairy tales. That is a feminization of woman. The fairy tale world suggests a male-centered patriarchy as an ideal basic society and impliedly imply that man and woman need to have a proper attitude toward this opinion. However, Jewett’s A White Heron describes a new perspective of fairy tale’s plot.
I’d also like to demystify the idea that fairy tales are of use only to writers of fantasy or fabulism. I’d like to celebrate their lucid form. And I’d like to reveal how specific techniques in fairy tales cross stylistic boundaries. For while the interpretation of fairy tales is a well-traveled path among writers, fairy-tale techniques remain little identified and appreciated.
The art of storytelling is at the heart of fairy tales. Since the beginning, fairy tales have captivated readers with its magical worlds and enchanted characters. Quintessential to fairy tales are destined happy endings and the clear division between good and evil. The nature of these stories creates distorted perceptions that do not align with reality, making it difficult to distinguish between reality and illusion. This is portrayed in Terry Pratchett’s Witches Abroad, in which Lilith Weatherwax struggles to free herself from the fictitious world she has fabricated.
The Authors, a student and a Professor of history at Rutgers University Nancy Hewitt, uses data from modern western fairytales to define gender roles created within these stories. She takes a four step approach to defining gender roles within fairytales first by defining what makes up a modern day fairy tale. She defines the classic heroine fairy tale as an introduction to every contemporary fairy tale that she dissects within the essay. The Heroine theme is a base for all contemporary fairy tales and this theme shows many monolithic gender stereotypes within it. A classic stereotype of women within the Heroine theme is how they are left helpless waiting for their savor.
It revolves around the flight of the princess to escape the awful marriage to his father (Perrault, 1977). Charles Perrault uses the princess’ character to reveal the major themes of overcoming evil, child abuse and incest in the story. Perrault also brings out the moral that it is better to encounter awful challenges in life than to fail in one’s duty. He shows that although the virtue may seem unrealistic, it can always triumph. The author uses various literary devices to reveal the various morals of the story.
In What’s Wrong With Cinderella? by Peggy Orenstein, she argues the stereotypical views on the female population and the unfavorable aspect of princess fairytales. As a feminist, Orenstein feels the need to defy against the negative outlook on girls and protect her own daughter from the hostility of these false feminine beliefs. She embraces the idea that the princess culture is showing that beauty and perfection is the importance in young girl’s lives. While Orenstein recognizes how princess culture affects the female population in a negative way, she fails to acknowledge a more positive outlook on women.
In “Donkeyskin,” Charles Perrault tells the story of a princess whose mother passed away wishing the king to only marry someone who is smarter and more beautiful than she is. The king wish to marry his own daughter so she ran away with the lavish gowns and donkey skin he had given her. In Jack Zipes “Breaking The Disney Spell,” he argues that Disney appropriates the fairy tales and injects his “all-American” morals and values into them. By putting his idealistic vision into films for everyone, Zipe claims that Disney insults the historical integrity of the folklore tradition, deceiving audiences with an illusion of happy fairy tales. Like Zipes, who argues that fairy tales validates the social norms and power structures, Charles Perrault’s Donkeyskin shows that the value of women is their beauty and for them wait for the male to make the first move.
Perrault’s version of Cinderella’s ending is happier and includes forgiveness. Although the step sisters were cruel and treated Cinderella horribly she forgave them in the end and even found good husbands for them, and they all lived happily ever after. You can see from this that this story is intended to teach a moral lesson of forgiveness and kindness like I explained above. In Perrault’s version you can be terrible and unpleasant but you will be forgiven because that’s part of life. The Grimm brothers however have a different point of view on that matter.
When Angela Carter died in 1992, Salman Rushdie said that “English literature has lost its high sorceress, its benevolent witch-queen,” Margaret Atwood called her “the Fairy Godmother,” BBC Late Show presenter “white witch of English literature,” and J.G. Ballard a “friendly witch.” Thus, due to her interest in fairy tales and folklore, the praises and compliments she received were mainly about her rewriting of fairy tales. As Stephen Benson suggests, “the facet of Carter’s work that seems to have made the transition into the mainstream is its association with the fairy tale,” since “[t]he majority of her work as editor and translator revolved around the fairy tale.” In fact, she is preoccupied with fairy tales in most of her fiction works,
Justyna Deszcz wrote an article based on Zipes’ political and socio-historical approach and added a variety of facts she had collected from many other authors and articles. Deszcz believes that the reason we have shifted into the submissive and “family-friendly” theme of fairy tales is because “the fairytale has been reduced to a mass-produced commodity, to be purchased and owned, and to bring in considerable profit. What is more, the fairytale is being used as a source and a vehicle of powerful self-mirroring images affirming the existing value system, and thus lulling audiences into passivity and compliance.” This point proves that the original thought of harsh realities needing to be exposed in story telling has converted to just being a profitable way to tell simple-minded children’s
Abstract – The paper is an attempt to revisit a typical children 's narrative, the fairy tale that has transfigured the romantic imagination of generations of young readers. It will be an attempt to see how a bed time story has been cast into a text of female bonding and women empowerment, how the revisionist agenda is to rework these short stories into the current dialectics of feminist ideology. The paper will also look at how recent reinterpretations of this iconic text has been implanted with the attributes of post-modernist socio cultural polemics. Jack Zipes (1979) in revisiting fairy tales had declared that, "our lives are framed by folk and fairy tales ', (xi). They have been stuff that has made the repositories of the dreams, hopes
His assertion that scholars have to pay more attention to forgotten tales by women authors is useful, for it also explains the fact that most of the readers are acquainted with the solid version of a fairy tale and do not know other versions where women are independent and active characters. Fairy tales and the precise ideas about gender inequality they give to the audience seem to make a viable topic but the first difficulty I thought I would deal with was in finding the sources. I had accessibility to many sources, but I struggled to find variety of academic sources of these last ten years. Many other sources seemed to be useful and had many valid points but were not coherent.
The topic of Fairy tales and boiling them down to their original essences to prove that they satirize reality is a peculiar topic due to the fact that fairy tales are praised in our society. They provide us humans with dreams and unrealistic views on everyday life. What if this so called “tale” is satirizing our everyday life because our society put those “tales” on a high pedestal, high enough for them to look down on us. In Rags and Bones: New Twist on Timeless Tales, does Melissa Marr and Tim Pratt succeed to reveal the true nature of tales by “boiling down the stories to rags and bones, and make something new from their fundamental essences” thus speaking to contemporary
Similarly, the difference between myth and fairy tale may be a result of historical evolution that changes people’s beliefs: ’Specifically, sacred myth has to be discredited and to become, literally, a lie in order to acquire a poetic quality and re-structured as fairytale narrative’ (Somoff 281). These two notions both share the assumption that it is a lack of belief that differentiates the fairy tale as an independent narrative genre from myth, based on either geography or historic evolution (Somoff 279-280). The contextual differentiation between myth and fairy tale is therefore based on whether there is an element of belief or disbelief connected with the contents of the tale in question; thus, it predetermines the comprehension of the tale (Somoff 281).