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Lecture 7: Fairy Tales. 10/23/13. Social Function of Fairy Tales. Fairy tales as a means to express desires or wishes Fairy tales as a way to suggest alternatives to the social order or to uphold the social order
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Lecture 7: Fairy Tales 10/23/13
Social Function of Fairy Tales • Fairy tales as a means to express desires or wishes • Fairy tales as a way to suggest alternatives to the social order or to uphold the social order • Reading a series of fairy tale variants can help us to understand how the cultural anxieties have shifted over time.
“Cinderella” • A young noblewoman is denied her rightful place in society by a manipulative stepmother who tries to put forward her own daughters’ interests. • Either through her own volition and/or through supernatural assistance, the noblewoman vies for the hand of a prince. • The noblewoman appears at a regal gala in disguise and wins the heart of the prince. • Later, the noblewoman’s true identity is discovered, and her rightful place in the social order is restored.
Comparing Variants • A variant is a version of fairy tale that includes the basic structure and elements of the original story, but includes some differences in terms of plot, setting, characters, and/or outcome. • Folklore scholars identify differences among variants and speculate as to the origin of these differences.
Basile, “The Cat Cinderella” • "Well, then," answered her governess, "listen carefully; keep your ears open and you shall always enjoy the whitest bread from the finest flour.When your father leaves the house, tell your step-mother that you would like one of those old dresses that are kept in the big chest in the closet, to save the one you now have on. As she always wants to see you in rags and tatters, she will open the chest and say, 'Hold the lid.' You must hold it while she is rummaging inside and then suddenly let it fall so that it breaks her neck. After that, you know well that your father would even coin false money to please you, so when he fondles you, beg him to take me for his wife, and then you shall be happy and the mistress even of my life.” When Zezolla had heard the plan, every hour seemed a thousand years until she had carried out her governess's advice in every particular. When the period of mourning for her step-mother was over, she began to sound her father about marrying her governess.
Grimms’ “Ashenputtel” • “The bridal couple was going to the church, the elder sister walked on the right, the younger on the left. Then the pigeons pecked out one of each of their eyes. Later, when they walked out of the church, the eider was on the left and the younger on the right. Then the pigeons pecked out the other of their two eyes. Thus for their malice and treachery, they were punished with blindness for the rest of their lives.”
Disney Variants “If you keep on believing…your dreams will come true.” “…you’re going to have to do it yourself”
The Postmodern Fairy Tale • Postmodernism refers to changes that have occurred over the last fifty years in art, architecture, literature, film, and other cultural productions. • In the Introduction to their edited text Postmodern Picturebooks, Lawrence Sipe and Sylvia Pantaleo list a series of characteristics that we can use as we look at contemporary texts.
Postmodern texts blur the distinctions between high culture and popular culture and between genres. A good example would be the award-winning Karen Hesse’s historical novel Out of the Dust, which is written entirely in poetic verse. Blurring Distinctions
Subverting Traditions Postmodern texts call into question literary traditions regarding form and language. They also undermine “the distinction between the story and the ‘outside’ real world” (3).
Using Intertextuality Although every text refers to texts that have come before it, texts that are postmodern draw explicit attention to intertextuality, as when Wiesner not only mentions previous fairytales, but creates a narrative in which characters from the different source texts interact with each other.
Featuring Playfulness Postmodern texts invite the reader to view the text as a place where they can experiment with different words, meanings, and concepts. This sense of playfulness can often take the form of irony, as in the statement, “So you want to be a sardine?”
Emphasizing Self-Referentiality • As Sipe and Pantaleo note, postmodern texts are self-referential, refusing “to allow readers to have a vicarious, lived-through experience, offering instead a metafictive stance by drawing attention to the text as a text rather than as a secondary world” (3). • (The secondary world refers to a fictional location – we’ll learn more about this when we study fantasy.)
Homework • 1. Begin reading the excerpts on the course blog from Molly Bang’s Picture This • 2. Begin reading Hintz and Tribunella, Chapter Five: Picturebooks, Visual Media, and Digital Texts in Reading Children’s Literature: A Critical Introduction
