Fairy Tale Analysis

Alicia Elsbeth Stallings, an American poet and translator, constructed an Italian Sonnet poem by the title of Fairy-tale Logic. In this poem, Stallings works towards portraying life through the use of common fairy-tales. Stallings presents life as a whole by describing in the first stanza that life is not always going to be easy. She begins her poem by reminding her readers that every individual is going to continuously be faced with everyday dilemmas that sometimes may seem impossible to surmount. Eventually upon arrival at the second stanza, Stallings shifts gears to present the reader with a motivation for overcoming life’s obstacles. She describes that only one’s self can overcome the obstacles that are present in everyday life through believing in themselves, for only one’s true self has the ability to face obstacles with the confidence of overcoming them. Fairy-tale Logic, thoughtfully constructed by A.E. Stallings, seeks to portray a message that life is not alway easy, but it is not impossible though the shifting of tone as the poem progresses, the use of parallelism, as well as the use of literary allusions.

Triumphant reward in spite of unjust punishment is a universal sentiment that transcends languages and cultures. There are thousands of folktales and fairy tales that are firmly rooted in individual cultures, yet the tale of Cinderella has been told through many centuries and throughout the far corners of the world. With thousands of versions of this classic tale in print worldwide, the tale is believed to have originated with the story of Rhodopis, a Greek slave girl who is married to an Egyptian King. The story of Rhodopis, which means rosy-cheeks, dates back to 7 BC and is attributed to a Greek geographer named Strabo. The Chinese variation of this fairy tale is named Yeh-hsien. The Chinese version is traceable to the year 860 and appears in Miscellaneous Morsels from Youyang by Duan Chengshi. Yeh-hsien is a young girl, motherless and in the control of her stepmother, who befriends a treasured fish. The jealous step-mother kills the fish, but it’s bones provide Yeh-hsien with magical powers, eventually enabling Yeh-hsien to escape the control of her step-mother for a royal life. The Story of the Black Cow which is found within the pages of Folk Tales from the Himalayas by John Murray, published in 1906, the child who is mistreated by a stepmother is a male and the role of savior is portrayed by a snake, with a cow serving as the moral of the story, faithfulness. These two versions of Cinderella carry many common threads that are

Fairy Tales are not just stories that parents tell to their children, but stories with hidden valuable messages which are mostly left on a side. In the article “An Introduction to Fairy Tales,” Maria Tatar clearly explains how people need fairy tales in their lives. Tatar also states how fairy tales have the ability to take the listener, especially children’s, into a journey in which they can play with their imagination so that they can discover their deepest fears and wishes. Personally I agree with the author, because of the fact that in an individual’s lives as they get older, they will try to define themselves, sometimes comparing their own life with a character from their favorite story or Fairy Tale.

As a child, I was told fairytales such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs every night before I went to sleep. Fairytales are an adventurous way to expand a child’s imagination and open their eyes to experience a new perspective. Modernizations of fairytales typically relate to a specific audience, such as adolescence, and put a contemporary spin on the old-aged tale. Instead of using whimsical themes heavily centered in nature, the contemporary poems connect with the reader in a more realistic everyday scenario. Also, many modernizations are written in poetic form to help reconstruct a flow in the piece and to develop or sometimes completely change the meaning from that of the original fairytale. Comparing Grimm’s Fairytale Snow White

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines a fairytale as being marked by seemingly unreal beauty, perfection, luck,or happiness. It also states that these stories tend to involve fantastic forces and beings and improbable events that lead to happy endings. This has been proven to be true. From Cinderella to Princess in the Frog new and old fairy tales have been sweeping the nation, all of which containing beautiful princesses, handsome princesses, magic, and happily-ever-afters. However, as time progresses and the tales are retold alternative story lines have been derived. The tales of Snow White and Enchanted depict how overtime fairy tales have been modernized to fit present day entertainment preferences.

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, as beautiful as she was good, who lived with her wicked stepmother in a house in the forest” (Atwood 406). Atwood begins to dissect the aspects of a fairy tale by first calling out the normal backdrop, which is a forest. Then, she points out that the girl in the story was never poor to begin with since she lived in a house. Atwood questions why the protagonist must always be beautiful, pointing out the current problems surrounding women and body image. Atwood also complains about the fact that all of the female leads in fairy tales are white, possibly alluding to Hollywood’s constant whitewashing of films. She attacks the idea that the “evil stepmother” must always be evil and be a female, pointing out that if the stepmother had to be

An example of this would be Alice in Wonderland. This tale illustrated the importance of fantasy as well as adventure. Suval also uses Cinderella as a great example, which signifies personal growth and transformation. In conclusion of Lauren Suval, she states that fairy tales all have a meaning behind them that represents us if is fantasy or even a growth that isn't physical.

After customizing and adding some difficulties and the challenges of that time, fairy tale reflects the problem of real life and society. For example, in the 17th century, Charles Perrault collected some oral traditional tales, customized these stories, and added the subtle sexual innuendo expected among aristocrats in Parisian literary salons(Wikipedia). Like “Donkey Skin” represents incest. As Bettina Knapp mentioned in An Adolescent’s Struggle Against Incest and for Independence, “The sexual anomalies Perrault had either witnessed or heard about among the countries and the nobility of his day may have been a source of inspiration for Donkey Skin’s theme of incest.” (Bettina Knapp, P152)

A fairytale is a story that has folkloric characters and magic. They originated from oral storytelling and have since been written down to be preserved. Fairytales with similar plots, characters, and motifs are found in many different cultures. For example, the story of Cinderella. This classic fairytale has been around for a very long time and is constantly being remade. Even though there are different versions of this story, they all follow the same basic idea or motif. In this essay I will be discussing fairytale motifs as seen in Grimms’ Household Tales and “Cupid and Psyche” using the information I learned in class. Typically, when you think of a fairytale you think of them being for children. But, if you really pay attention to the

Sagas about princes and princesses, beauty, magic, and love, fairy tales like Snow White and Cinderella among others have become children’s favorite bedtime stories. However, as parents tuck their sons and daughters in, they fail to realize that there is a much more daunting purpose to these stories. American writer and poet, Jane Yolen suggests that fairy tales indicate life values. Furthermore, Yolen insists that these tales are “thumbprints of history” (Yolen 27). Studying fairy tales in depth, she proves that the “functions of myths” consist of “creating a landscape of allusion [and] enabling us to understand our own and out culture from inside out” (Yolen 18). Yolen confirms that these stories comment on, “the abstract truths of our

Fairy tales, like any other medium, must be updated and revised in order to remain appealing to its audience as time goes on. Some fairy tale revisions are heavily criticized for deviating from the original text so much that they no longer “feel” the same or offer the same messages. Whether or not a revision is successful is entirely a matter of personal opinion. In my opinion, a revision does not have to follow the same plot as the original text as long as it is able to keep the moral intact. For me, a revision is successful when it modernizes the tale to be more relatable to people in modern day society, and/or sheds new light back on the original text. It is unsuccessful when the overall message is changed to something that may be

Fairytales are an imaginary and adventurous way to open children’s eyes to a make-believe land and use their imaginations. Fairy tales have also changed drastically throughout the years. One fairy tale that is very well known and has been around for a while now is Snow White. Modernizations of fairytales usually are aimed at a specific audience, such as children, with a little more of a modern spin on the old tale. Rather than having the story of Snow White take place in and with nature, the contemporary poems are more of a real everyday scenario. Many modernizations of fairy tales or stories happen to be written in poem form to help develop more of a flow in the story and to change somewhat or all of the meaning

Did you know that your favorite fairytales were once violent? Originally, Grimm’s Fairy Tales were intended for children to read. However, because they contained remarkably dark elements, parents soon believed these stories were too violent for their children. Eventually, only adults read the tales. In the 1950s, Walt Disney created a non-violent version of the classic Grimm fairytale, Cinderella. Walt Disney’s cinematic version is more accessible to a wider audience than the Grimm tale because Disney removed most of the violence and simplified the tale while maintaining the original story.

Fairy tales are something that everyone has read or seen, they all seem to have important lessons at the end of each one to teach young children some of the lessons they need for life. These fairy tales when we were younger all seemed innocent and something we all hoped that would happen to us. Little did we know as we got older that the fairy tales we all knew and loved when we were younger, weren't as innocent as they seemed.

Fairy tales are full of tropes and stereotypes that exist from story to story, one of the main ones being the “happily ever after” ending. Most fairy tales, especially the traditional Perrault or Grimm versions, fall prey to this trope where the main goal is for the princess to find her prince, get married, and live happily ever after. Many critics, particularly feminist critics, find this trope to be problematic because of the extreme emphasis placed on marriage as women’s main, if not only, objective in life. Karen Rowe, for example, states in her essay “Feminism and Fairy Tales”, that “fairy tales perpetuate the patriarchal status quo by making female subordination seem a romantically desirable, indeed an inescapable fate” (342). In other words, Rowe relates the “romanticizations of marriage” portrayed in fairy tales with promotions of “passivity, dependency, and self-sacrifice” expected of women in their everyday lives (342). However, it can be dangerous to assume that every fairy tale conforms to the singular promotion of marriage as women’s only option. While early fairy tales such as “Cinderella” and “Sleeping Beauty” tend to glorify the romantic ideal of marriage, and in turn female subordination, contemporary tales and adaptations such as Brave and Frozen, are working to give women a more powerful position.