Fairy Tales Analysis

Storytelling has been changing rapidly in recent years. Stories have been told orally, through books, and most recently movies. These stories provide an escape from reality for children and adults alike. Many fairy tales were originally thought to be enchanting and were meant to please a child’s endless imaginations and presents different teachings and morals (Moore 175). In the society seen today, many aspects of life are changing and fairytales have not been adapting consistently to these changes. The biggest contributor to fairy tales today, is Disney. Disney utilizes their popularity by shaping and dominating the world and creating notions of happiness and utopia (Zipes 17). While children find joy in these tales, Disney inserts their

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.

In his evaluation of Little Red Riding Hood, Bill Delaney states, “In analyzing a story . . . it is often the most incongruous element that can be the most revealing.” To Delaney, the most revealing element in Little Red Riding Hood is the protagonist’s scarlet cloak. Delaney wonders how a peasant girl could own such a luxurious item. First, he speculates that a “Lady Bountiful” gave her the cloak, which had belonged to her daughter. Later, however, Delaney suggests that the cloak is merely symbolic, perhaps representing a fantasy world in which she lives.

The fairytale canon is chock full of beautiful princesses, fairies, mermaids, and its fair share of witches. Even though there is a collected presence of what seem like leading women, fairytales are anything but feminist stories. The only individuals who make decisions and actively encourage plot development are the male characters. Females are solely valued for their inferiority, passivity and beauty. Fairytales brutally strip female main characters of their voices and use love as an excuse for women to become submissive to their male counterparts.

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

"Once upon a time," the most used introduction phrase in common fairy tales used to start an adventure. These adventures have been around for years. The importance of some tales might be more significant than others, also based on culture. My goal for this paper is to educate my readers with the importance of fairy tales, especially for younger children. Fairy tales have been around for centuries from generations to generations. Different cultures, such as the Japanese and Western, have also expressed them differently. All these fairly tales teach children different aspects of life, which make these tales so important.

Fairy tales change over time because of race back then there wasn’t any african american or latinos characters in the fairy tales like little snow white and rapunzel all of them were white like snow white the dwarfs the prince the evil queen all of them were white.

Originally, fairy tales were used to teach children social norms or cultural beliefs within a society, instead of primarily being used as entrainment. Fairy tales are also known to guide children to accept the traditional stereotypes of being female and male, as they typically reinforce the idea that women would be more desirable if they are not only obedient, but pure and beautiful as well. The view of women as a ‘lessor sex’ is also a common belief in a patriarchal society, which is commonly found in most fairy tales. The ideas which fairy tales reinforce needs to be challenged. Written by the Grimm brothers, the two fairy tales Little Snow White {1819} and Little Briar Rose {1812} will be analysed, along with Hans Christian Andersen’s

Archetypical Fairy Tales begin with “Once Upon A Time”, and there’s no doubt that this one begins the like any other. Bewildering Buttercup, beautiful and fearless, who finds love when she least expects it. Catching the eye of a farm boy, love has struck him, Westley knew things would never be the same. Determination, even though you can’t see it, it’s there, Westley knew he had to be with her, he needed to make his love known and when he least expects it Buttercup reciprocates the feelings. Everything comes to an end at some point, Westley left to seek his fortune and left Buttercup to be alone as she once was before. Fantasy it was as Buttercup knew love doesn’t last forever. Guilder, he is led to Buttercup by his confidante, Count Rugen,

The genre of the story would be a fairy tale. The reason I say this is a fairytale is because in the story it talks about if the soldier was to put on a cloak he would disappear. Another genre for this story would be a folk tale.

Beauty’s role in beauty and the beast glorifies her as a sweet girl who can find light in any darkness. She prefers to move forward in life rather than sulk in misery. Being such a positive female character allows her to fall in love with a man who is not of the society standards of handsome, name Beast. She was more intent on focusing on what he had to offer as a person. Karen Rowe states in “Feminism and Fairy Tales” “such alluring fantasies gloss the heroine's inability to act self-assertively, total reliance on external rescues, willing bondage to father and prince, and her restriction to hearth and nursery” (Rowe). The heroine being beauty in this case, doesn't have opinions or rights because her character wasn't created to. Rowe believes that fairytales have paved the way for our expectations towards what women and men should be doing and what romance is. Rowe argues that “These "domestic fictions" reduce fairy tales to sentimental clichés, while they continue to glamorize a heroine's traditional yearning for romantic love which culminates in marriage” (Rowe). Beauty’s character found herself in these “sentimental cliches” with her

First of all, a rather sexist view of women has emerged from the evolution of a variety fairy tales. In older versions of many fairy tales, on can see the female dominant, matriarchal societies through the strong female protagonists. For example, as Yolen reminds, “Cinderella until lately has never been a passive dreamer….The forerunners of the Ash-girl have been hardy, active heroines” (33). One of the earlier Cinderellas belonged to a hunting community where “most important is the function of a female. She was at the center of this society and maintained a nurturing element” (194). As time went by Zipes concludes, women lost their supremacy and “fairy tales…reinforced the patriarchal symbolic order based on rigid notions of sexuality and gender” (qtd. in Tatar 338). As Zipes explains, “the heroines in these fairy tales remain pathetic , passive, and pale in comparison to the more active characters”, usually the men, when compared to those of the first generation of fairy

“Grim Variations: From Fairy Tales to Modern Anti-Fairy Tales” by Wolfgang Mieder presents the idea of adults in modern day society not being able to see the positive aspects of fairy tales as they are overly concerned with their real life problems. The popularity of fairy tales has only grown over the past few decades, the interest in the origin, dissemination, nature and function of fairy tales has only increased, in modern day different versions of fairy tales can be found virtually anywhere (Mieder 90). Lessons and morals taught in fairy tales remain relevant to the children of modern day, through reading fairy tales children can learn to become “independent and socially responsible citizens” (Mieder 90). The “realistic problems and concerns

1. What is the genre of this story? Are there any other possible genres this story could fall into?

Some fairy tales end with a happy marriage to a wealthy person and living a life on a bed full of roses. An example can be found in Beauty and the Beast. There is a young girl and her father is a merchant. She ends up marrying the Beast, who ends up being a handsome prince, and live happily ever after. But there are two fairy tales that are a little different. The first one is Thumbelina. She goes through all of these obstacles to end up marrying a prince. She is gifted wings and ends up living happily ever after. There are some fairy tales that really don’t have that “happy” ending. The Little Mermaid gets her heart broken due to her living in almost a completely different world than her true love. She ends up committing suicide because